Peter Watkins’ Privilege

A few words on Peter Watkins’ Privilege taking in: Paul Jones, Manfred Mann, Jean Shrimpton, Terence Stamp, Tom Jones, Patti Smith, Mike Leander, Eureka Entertainment’s Masters of Cinema series, Punishment Park and The War Game.

*Privilege* - Original Soundtrack Album (1967, UNI Records). Photograph by Paul McDermott.

“A film so bizarre, so controversial, it shall crucify your mind to the tree of conscience”

They don’t write taglines like that anymore.

The last post (The Smiths - Rarities) mentioned that the photograph of Yootha Joyce used for the cover of the singles ‘Ask’ and ‘Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others’ was a still from John Boorman’s directorial debut: Catch Us If You Can (1965). The film starred The Dave Clark Five and belongs in the group of mid-60s films in which pop bands play themselves. Obviously, the most famous of these films is Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964) (The Beatles) but other examples include: Hold On! (1966) (Herman’s Hernmits) directed by Arthur Lubin, and Head (1968) (The Monkees) directed by Bob Rafelson.

I’m a big fan of those promotional movies for pop bands but I also love a number of films where pop stars play dramatic roles. Favourites include: Diana Ross in The Lady Sings the Blues (1972), directed by Sidney J. Furie; Mick Jagger in Performance (1970), directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg; Dennis Wilson and James Taylor in Two-Lane Blacktop (1970), directed by Monte Hellman and of course Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) with David Bowie.

But, my absolute favourite film where a pop star takes the lead role is Peter Watkins’ Privilege (1967) starring Paul Jones, the former frontman of Manfred Mann.

I first came across Peter Watkins’ name when browsing through the movie section upstairs in Tower Records on Wicklow Street in Dublin sometime in 2005. Tower had a good selection in Eureka Entertainment’s Masters of Cinema series. This curated collection was seen as a UK equivalent of The Criterion Collection. The films were presented in “meticulous transfers created from recent restorations” and released with loads of extras - director commentaries, documentaries, features, extensive booklets with historical essays and more.

Punishment Park, Watkins’ 1971 pseudo-documentary drama, was #21 in the Masters of Cinema series and the hype sticker on the cover had a pull quote from a Daily Telegraph review by Sukhdev Sandhu: “It’s unlikely that any film released in 2005 will rival Punishment Park for its combination of political urgency, blazing moral ardour and formal guile.”

Punishment Park is an extraordinary prescient film, set in an American detention centre in the near future, it follows a British documentary crew as they film a group of students and political dissidents who chose three days in “Bear Mountain Punishment Park” over jail sentences for their “crimes”. It foreshadowed films such as The Running Man, Battle Royale, The Hunger Games and reality TV shows such as Squid Game and Survivor. When I first saw it in 2005, I couldn’t believe that it had been made in 1971. It is rightly regarded as one of the most radical films of the late 60s and early 70s.

Reviewing the DVD release for The Guardian in 2005, Peter Bradshaw wrote: “Watkins’s fierce and palpable outrage is very different from our postmodern world, which shrugs at extensively ironised reality TV and fails to be scandalised for very long at photos of giggling soldiers brutalising their prisoners at Abu Ghraib.”

The DVD box jacket mentioned that Punishment Park continued Watkins’, “subversive innovations with Culloden and The War Game.” Oh, so that’s who Peter Watkins was!

I had heard of The War Game, another pseudo-documentary depicting a nuclear attack on Kent and its aftermath, directed by Watkins and produced for the BBC.

The film was effectively banned by the BBC who withdrew a planned broadcast in 1965 explaining: “The effect of the film has been judged by the BBC to be too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting.” Despite this ban the film won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 1967. The War Game was eventually broadcast by the BBC in July 1985, to coincide with the fortieth anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. The War Game is available to view at the Internet Archive. Its power to shock has not diminished.

After The War Game Watkins directed Privilege, another prescient pseudo-documentary drama, released in 1967 but set in the near future where entertainment is controlled by a totalitarian government.

When The War Game was banned by the BBC Watkins quit the corporation in protest and was looking for another project. A proposed film with Albert Finney about the 1916 Rising collapsed at an early stage and then Watkins was asked to film a screenplay by Johnny Speight. Watkins rewrote Speight’s screenplay with the American novelist Norman Bogner and they retitled it Privilege.

Privilege tells the story of disillusioned pop star Steven Shorter (played by Jones) who is manipulated by the church and state, who seek to turn him into a symbol of national unity. Shorter’s music and image are then used to channel the impulses of rebellious youth.

A number of musicians including Marc Bolan and Eric Burdon did screen tests for the role of Shorter. Burden would tell the NME in 1970 that, “Watkins wanted someone tall, slim and handsome, not short, fat and ugly.” Enter Paul Jones, who got the part. Jones had left Manfred Mann in mid-66 after their huge hit single ‘Pretty Flamingo’ (three weeks at No. 1 in the UK Singles Chart in May 1966).

The part of Vanessa Ritchie, as an artist commissioned to paint a portrait of Shorter, went to the model Jean Shrimpton. Both Jones and Shrimpton’s acting was heavily criticised upon the film’s release. Terence Stamp, Shrimpton’s ex-boyfriend, was even quoted as saying that, “Jean trying to act is rather like me trying to perform complicated brain surgery tomorrow.” Ouch!

The NME asked Paul Jones in November 1966, “Are you entirely satisfied with the result of your first film Privilege?”

“I haven’t seen the completed film yet, but I’m happy with my bits - better than. I thought I’d be. But that’s due more to Peter Watkins’ directing experience than my acting ability,” replied Jones.

“The story is good because it was one I could get involved in. If it had been about a Borstal Boy who robbed a bank it would have been different because I haven’t been to a Borstal - nor robbed a bank. It was about a pop singer and for that reason I could associate myself with the character.”

When asked by the NME in May 1967 what Privilege was all about, Jones replied, “Basically, it’s about apathy and people’s shrinking ability to inspect ideas. More and more people are coming to accept things without question.”

He continued, and in the process had a glorious pop off Tom Jones: “Tom Jones was quoted recently as making these remarks, ‘I don’t think too much about politics, to be honest. People vote for a government and can’t grumble at what they do. It seems to me the Prime Minister is doing what he thinks best for the country, and that’s good enough for me. Anyway, we’re not starving, are we?’ I was terrified when I read this, particularly from an intelligent person like Tom Jones. This is what the film is all about - apathy. It’s getting worse each day.”

*Privilege* - Original Soundtrack Album (back sleeve) (1967, UNI Records). Photograph by Paul McDermott.

Two very different films proved inspirational to Watkins while he was making Privilege: Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Lonely Boy (1962) Wolf Koenig’s Canadian cinéma vérité documentary short about the teen singer Paul Anka.

The ticker tape scene when Shorter arrives in Birmingham for a concert and the evangelical concert in the football stadium are directly inspired by Riefenstahl’s film. Lonely Boy inspired a couple of scenes and a number of interviews in the film.

Privilege is extremely powerful, and its ultimate message, the power of the mass media to manipulate an audience, is as timely today as it was in 1967. One scene sums up the whole idea of the movie brilliantly: Shorter tries to stop the government control of his career but Andrew Butler, charirman of Steven Shorter Enterprises, takes him onto his balcony looking over a highrise urban landscape and explains that the millions of people below need to be harnessed and guided:

“You! You are our chance, Steven. They Identify with you - they love you! Steven, you can lead them into a better way of life - a fruitful conformity.”

Rave, the UK monthly magazine that covered the pop music scene and Mod subculture of the Swinging Sixties, put Paul Jones on the cover of their February 1967 issue and devoted six pages to the film.

“Privilege promises to be the most startling portrayal of the pop world ever shown,” wrote Rave. “Although Privilege may shock and surprise you, the astonishing thing is that - if you believed in The Beatles - then you have to believe that this could happen.” Rave even published extracts from John Burke’s novelisation of the film’s soundtrack.

The film’s opening in May 1967 was a big media event in London. “Pop stars attend Privilege premiere” wrote the NME and printed photographs of Paul Jones, Lulu, Graham Nash and Peter and Gordon arriving at the screening. “Queues for the controversial pop movie Privilege are the order of the day outside the Warner Theatre in London’s Leicester Square,” continued the NME report. “The box-office reports good business - and if the initial publicity is any guide Privilege will do equally well if and when it gets a circuit booking.”

Paul Jones - *Sings Songs From the Film Privilege* (7” EP, 1967 - EMI/HMV Records).

But the circuit booking - nationwide distribution - never materialised. British film critics hated the film. “Misanthropy is one thing, monotony another,” wrote Penelope Houston in The Spectator. “And watching Privilege is rather like watching a man repeatedly labouring to raise a heavy hammer, whirling it round his head, and bringing it crashing down on his own hand.”

Over in America the film fared much better with the critics. Bosley Crowther in The New York Times wrote: “Much the same sort of apprehension that the young Briton, Peter Watkins, expressed in his controversial, quasi-documentary, antinuclear bomb film, The War Game, is pictured by him with brilliance and startling satiric bite in his new quasi-documentary, Privilege.” In December 1967 Crowther gave Privilege an honourable mention in his roundup of the films of the year.

On his website Watkins explains what he was trying to achieve with Privilege: “American novelist Norman Bognor and I adapted the script, which we retitled ‘Privilege’, to emphasize the significance of Steven Shorter as an allegory for the manner in which national states, working via religion, the mass media, sports, Popular Culture, etc., divert a potential political challenge by young people.

“In case this theme appears exaggerated, it is important to keep in mind that it was set in the ‘swinging Britain’ of the 1960s, and was prescient of the way that Popular Culture and the media in the US commercialized the anti-war and counter-culture movement in that country as well. ‘Privilege’ also ominously predicted what was to happen in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s - especially during the period of the Falkland Islands War.”

Privilege was released on DVD in 2008 and received very positive reviews. “Peter Watkins’ stunning Privilege, which, for 1967, was ludicrously ahead of its time in predicting how packaged and cynical pop music was to become,” wrote Phelim O’Neill in The Guardian.

“Privilege was released during a period of intense fiscal turmoil under Harold Wilson. Having inherited a deficit from Harold Macmillan and Alec Douglas-Home, Wilson’s Labour government battled against a series of financial crises and was eventually forced to devalue the pound in 1967,” wrote Craig Ian Mann in his 2019 BFI feature British Dystopian Films.

He continued: “Closely in step with its times, Privilege - another Peter Watkins film shot with an effective documentary aesthetic - imagines a future in which a corrupt future government uses a beloved pop singer as a political tool to placate the masses, prevent political protest and encourage consumption to keep the country afloat.”

I found the Privilege soundtrack in the mid-00s in a secondhand record shop. It was still in its shrinkwrap and only cost a few Euros. To most it’s an average collection of songs to a long forgotten film, an adjunct to the story of Paul Jones’ time with Manfred Mann. But to me it’s pure gold.

I bought the album a few years before the 2008 DVD release of Privilege. So, when I finally got to see the film I already knew all the music. In a way it heightened my immediate response to seeing Watkins’ film - I loved it.

The soundtrack is great. The score was composed by Mike Leander, the legendary British songwriter, arranger and record producer. Famously Leander arranged ‘She’s Leaving Home’ - the first time a Beatles’s song was not arranged by George Martin. Leander and Mark London co-wrote the soundtrack’s songs. London, a hugely successful songwriter, producer and composer is best known for his work with Lulu.

Paul Jones - ‘I’ve Been a Bad Bad Boy’ (7” - 1967, EMI Records).

The three songs sung by Jones are over the top tracks - that’s the point. The brilliant ‘I’ve Been a Bad Bad Boy’ was released as a single from the soundtrack and reached No. 5 in the UK Singles Chart in February 1967.

‘Free Me’ another song performed by Paul Jones is fantastic and a cover of the track was recorded by Patti Smith in 1978, retitled ‘Privilege (Set Me Free)’ it made No. 13 in the Irish charts.

As mentioned earlier, Peter Watkins’ next film was the astonishing Punishment Park in 1971.

In an article for the BFI celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Privilege, the writer and filmmaker Adam Scovell draws parallels between the evangelical rally depicted in Privilege and Trump’s political rallies. “Unnervingly, Watkins also shows the end point of this power-play in his later 1971 film, Punishment Park,” writes Scovell. “Here all political dissent and questioning is banned and now punished through a violent survival challenge. It is for this reason, this highlighting of the method in Privilege and the eventual result in Punishment Park, that Watkins is the most disturbingly prescient filmmaker of the 1960s.”

Anyone interested in the work of Watkins or his views on what he calls the Mass Audio Visual Media (MAVM) should read his statement Notes on the Media Crisis.

Paul Jones - ‘Free Me’

Patti Smith - ‘Privilege (Set Me Free)’

“the title track from the john hayman-peter watkins production of the film privilege. a movie that merged the rock martyr (paul jones) with all the sacristal images of the sixties...the cross…the christ…the whip and the lashes that served to veil velvet weeping balls-the eyes of jean shrimpton” - taken from the sleevenotes of Easter by the Patti Smith Group.

Privilege (1967) - Trailer

Peter Watkins’ Privilege

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© Paul McDermott 2024