- Hardcover: 306 pages
- Publisher: FAB Press (27 April 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 1903254280
- ISBN-13: 978-1903254288
- Product Dimensions: 25 x 18.4 x 3 cm
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 260,890 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- See Complete Table of Contents
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Product Description
The Guardian, Saturday 27 May 2006
Cammell comes across as a unique, troubled and truly wild character who never saw a convention he couldn't break.
Book Description
First ever biography of the genius behind the cult classic British film Performance, starring Mick Jagger! Donald Cammell (1934-1996) is a man whose life is believed by many to be one of the most decadent of the 20th Century. Although Performance immediately launched Cammell into the international limelight, his career after this ground-breaking film proved elusive. He completed only three more feature films before his death by suicide in 1996. Yet it was this elusiveness that elevated Cammell to mythic proportions. In this provocative and comprehensive biography, Sam and Rebecca Umland explore Cammell's remarkable life and times, from his father's friendship with the notorious Aleister Crowley, to Donald's early career as a society portrait painter in Chelsea and the beginning of his film career in Paris during the 'Swinging Sixties', via numerous doomed collaborations with Marlon Brando, to his final years of frustration and ultimate tragedy in Hollywood. Illustrated with many examples of Cammell's work as an artist, plus rare and previously unpublished photographs, and 32 stunning pages of full colour poster reproductions and film stills, Donald Cammell: A Life on the Wild Side is the first biography of the legendary filmmaker and the first to discuss all of his creative work, including his early career as a portrait painter, the completed films, the many unrealized and uncompleted projects, and unpublished screenplays. In the process this book sheds startling new light on one of Great Britain's most fascinating filmmakers.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Review of Donald Cammell by Rebecca & Sam Umland.
I read this book in one weekend, so absorbed was I in trying to discover the motive for self destruction in such a talented person like Donald Cammell. This was not someone who came from an impoverished or underprivileged background, quite the opposite as the book delves into his Scottish ancestry and comfortable upbringing. The only adverse aspects of his early life seem to have been a lot of moving around which must have been somewhat disorientating, plus his father's association with all things `magick'...Aleister Crowley is mentioned but it would not appear that young Donald was unduly influenced. The one disturbing thing about Donald's early life is his thoughts of suicide around the age of 8. He quickly displayed a talent for both painting & sports but at the same time was prone to fits of temper. The book hints at untoward goings on at a school that he attended which may have formulated his later behaviour - infidelity, drug use, initial enthusiasm followed by loss of interest in activities & a fascination for circuses ! Like many of us he may have preferred a fantasy world rather than the real world - after all, his father disliked `modern times' from all accounts !
Basically remembered for the films Performance, Demon seed & White of the eye the book analyses unfinished projects ( 21 scripts) in which Donald was involved - the name of Marlon Brando recurs in terms of letting Donald down - but also completed films are detailed, after which we find how hard they are to track down - one film stands out & it's called Simona but you'd have to read the book to find out just why !
It seems that Donald drifted into film making, having relinquished painting, as a result of meeting the Rolling Stones - logical, then, that he should choose the inexperienced Mick Jagger to play the lead in Performance. The book then traces all the failed attempts at getting scripts accepted, the few films that actually got made & the self destructive traits of Donald - he left his first wife when she became pregnant, for example, & the number of times he renewed his association with Brando, only to be let down again...
The final analysis (chapter) goes into the reasons for suicide but now that I have read the book I can only say `what a waste'.
A painstakingly researched & refreshingly non eulogic book that reveals a wealth of new information about a truly troubled soul - read and learn.
I read this book in one weekend, so absorbed was I in trying to discover the motive for self destruction in such a talented person like Donald Cammell. This was not someone who came from an impoverished or underprivileged background, quite the opposite as the book delves into his Scottish ancestry and comfortable upbringing. The only adverse aspects of his early life seem to have been a lot of moving around which must have been somewhat disorientating, plus his father's association with all things `magick'...Aleister Crowley is mentioned but it would not appear that young Donald was unduly influenced. The one disturbing thing about Donald's early life is his thoughts of suicide around the age of 8. He quickly displayed a talent for both painting & sports but at the same time was prone to fits of temper. The book hints at untoward goings on at a school that he attended which may have formulated his later behaviour - infidelity, drug use, initial enthusiasm followed by loss of interest in activities & a fascination for circuses ! Like many of us he may have preferred a fantasy world rather than the real world - after all, his father disliked `modern times' from all accounts !
Basically remembered for the films Performance, Demon seed & White of the eye the book analyses unfinished projects ( 21 scripts) in which Donald was involved - the name of Marlon Brando recurs in terms of letting Donald down - but also completed films are detailed, after which we find how hard they are to track down - one film stands out & it's called Simona but you'd have to read the book to find out just why !
It seems that Donald drifted into film making, having relinquished painting, as a result of meeting the Rolling Stones - logical, then, that he should choose the inexperienced Mick Jagger to play the lead in Performance. The book then traces all the failed attempts at getting scripts accepted, the few films that actually got made & the self destructive traits of Donald - he left his first wife when she became pregnant, for example, & the number of times he renewed his association with Brando, only to be let down again...
The final analysis (chapter) goes into the reasons for suicide but now that I have read the book I can only say `what a waste'.
A painstakingly researched & refreshingly non eulogic book that reveals a wealth of new information about a truly troubled soul - read and learn.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
3 reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
a fine book on an enigma
10 Aug 2006
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I've been waiting a long time for this book. Performance, the film Cammell wrote and co-directed with Nicolas Roeg, is an actual artistic act of magical transformation, and a masterpiece. But the last 25 years of Cammell's life have been a mystery overshadowed by his 1996 suicide. Here at last is a comprehensive, almost scholarly examination of the man and his career, in great detail and with a fine feel for the times (like Marianne Faithfull's comment that compared to Cammell the young Rolling Stones were "lightweights"). The book dispells the myths told about his suicide (which I won't spoil for you), but reveals tantalizing information about his forgotten projects -- man, do I want to see Tilt and Simona (even if I can't unfortunately see Donald's version) -- and I want to track down a copy of Duffy too.
A worthwhile study, beautifully designed and composed. Thanks to everyone who made this possible.
A worthwhile study, beautifully designed and composed. Thanks to everyone who made this possible.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Why, you all work for me !
15 Aug 2006
Format:Paperback
Overall one would have to say the Umlands' did an excellent job on a difficult subject though I'm not sure about " Anita Pallenberg & Michelle Breton " being world famous actresses -ever. Cammell died around the corner and up the street from me my first year in Los Angeles and having grown up on a lot of British Auteurism in Dublin in the late Seventies & Early Eighties it struck me as profoundly sad that he had somehow managed to come unstuck in the hills & canyons of Hollywood. That said, Donald comes across as a royal pain in the arse in spite of Rebecca Umland's sympathetic portrayal of the
" tortured " artist. One got the feeling by the end of the book that Donald Cammell would have been better served sticking with the Royal Academy and a career in illustration. Certainly the family background lent itself to something closer to the classics and less about the popular medium of Cinema and even less so the fusion of rock n' roll and cinema. He wanders through this Biography, lost or at the very least a bit of a bloody dilletante. I think very telling is the close friendship that was forged with Brian Jones and the complete and utter hatred he and Keith Richards had for each other. Telling because Brian Jones suffered the same malaise. Brian was in love with being in The Stones, Donald was in love with being a movie director but in both cases the sheer hard graft of it seemed to be lacking. Good read, finely illustrated, great fotos and they do a wonderful job of NOT scrubbing around in the scandalous.
" tortured " artist. One got the feeling by the end of the book that Donald Cammell would have been better served sticking with the Royal Academy and a career in illustration. Certainly the family background lent itself to something closer to the classics and less about the popular medium of Cinema and even less so the fusion of rock n' roll and cinema. He wanders through this Biography, lost or at the very least a bit of a bloody dilletante. I think very telling is the close friendship that was forged with Brian Jones and the complete and utter hatred he and Keith Richards had for each other. Telling because Brian Jones suffered the same malaise. Brian was in love with being in The Stones, Donald was in love with being a movie director but in both cases the sheer hard graft of it seemed to be lacking. Good read, finely illustrated, great fotos and they do a wonderful job of NOT scrubbing around in the scandalous.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Needle through the Cammell's Eye
28 Jan 2008
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Donald Cammell has intrigued me for many years, since first I read the item in VARIETY that told us that the British born writer/director who had helped to make PERFORMANCE was next going to be making ISHTAR with Dominique Sanda, Marlon Brando and William Burroughs. When ISHTAR failed to materialize that was the beginning of many years of Hollywood hardship for the increasingly difficult and willful Cammell, and the Uhlands spell it all out in a long slow drop to the very bottom of show business.
His background is interesting, but I felt that the art work done by Cammell in the 1950s is on a generally far lower level than his biographers credit it with. It's an illustration style in which someone like Frank Frazetta excelled, but Cammell seems ashamed of his gestural style, as though he were slumming and that might work for some artists but it didn't work here. Happily the 60s were right around the corner and before you know it, Cammell is right up there partying with Keith Richards and Brian Jones, and making one of the most telling pictures of the 1960s (Warner Brothers doubts about the release of PERFORMANCE turned it technically into a 1970s film, for they kept it on the shelf for years until they had to put something out).
The Uhlands happily summarize the different reasons why PERFORMANCE became cult classic, mentioning Mr. Fox's adverse reaction to the film (he became a Christian to get away from its taint), and also the so-called "Performance Trims," a separate film shot by Anita van Pallenberg under the sheets in the famous menage a trois scene . . . We have long wondered at what Cammell did, what Nicolas Roeg did... Well according to the Uhlands, Roeg is just about nothing and Cammell just about everything. As a fellow biographer I must credit the couple with being on target every time they talk about the films themselves--I could read their observations all day--but about the man himself they are sometimes puzzlingly vague. They have him on a pedestal so high it's like we're looking at him from his ankles and what we see isn't so flattering, and so the book suffers from a certain split in focus.
To my taste they seem to depend overmuch on the unsupported testimony of one key figure, the estimable editor Frank Mazzola, who comes up with all sorts of assertions the Uhlands are more or less forced to swallow wholesale. Did or did not Vladimir Nabokov write Cammell a letter of praise regarding his PALE FIRE screenplay? Despite every lick of evidence that says "No he didn't," Frank Mazzola says he did, and so we're given that as a fact. Or a "fact."
And some curious lacunae--the Hollywood legend whom Cammell used to shoot new American footage for the Italian SIMONA--Frank calls him only "Samson" and it becomes obscured that this figure must actually be Samson De Brier, the key associate of Kenneth Anger. But all in all a marvelous biography of a man whom time played some tricks in the short run, but in the long run time will endow him with great fame.
His background is interesting, but I felt that the art work done by Cammell in the 1950s is on a generally far lower level than his biographers credit it with. It's an illustration style in which someone like Frank Frazetta excelled, but Cammell seems ashamed of his gestural style, as though he were slumming and that might work for some artists but it didn't work here. Happily the 60s were right around the corner and before you know it, Cammell is right up there partying with Keith Richards and Brian Jones, and making one of the most telling pictures of the 1960s (Warner Brothers doubts about the release of PERFORMANCE turned it technically into a 1970s film, for they kept it on the shelf for years until they had to put something out).
The Uhlands happily summarize the different reasons why PERFORMANCE became cult classic, mentioning Mr. Fox's adverse reaction to the film (he became a Christian to get away from its taint), and also the so-called "Performance Trims," a separate film shot by Anita van Pallenberg under the sheets in the famous menage a trois scene . . . We have long wondered at what Cammell did, what Nicolas Roeg did... Well according to the Uhlands, Roeg is just about nothing and Cammell just about everything. As a fellow biographer I must credit the couple with being on target every time they talk about the films themselves--I could read their observations all day--but about the man himself they are sometimes puzzlingly vague. They have him on a pedestal so high it's like we're looking at him from his ankles and what we see isn't so flattering, and so the book suffers from a certain split in focus.
To my taste they seem to depend overmuch on the unsupported testimony of one key figure, the estimable editor Frank Mazzola, who comes up with all sorts of assertions the Uhlands are more or less forced to swallow wholesale. Did or did not Vladimir Nabokov write Cammell a letter of praise regarding his PALE FIRE screenplay? Despite every lick of evidence that says "No he didn't," Frank Mazzola says he did, and so we're given that as a fact. Or a "fact."
And some curious lacunae--the Hollywood legend whom Cammell used to shoot new American footage for the Italian SIMONA--Frank calls him only "Samson" and it becomes obscured that this figure must actually be Samson De Brier, the key associate of Kenneth Anger. But all in all a marvelous biography of a man whom time played some tricks in the short run, but in the long run time will endow him with great fame.
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