Moving Pictures

A MOVIE NO ONE SAW STILL HAUNTS THE DIRECTOR OF 'The Ghost of Peter Sellers'

BY JOE NOLAN, FILM CRITIC

We all have our favorite films lists, and among those pictures are movies we’ve memorized dialog from, scenes we can describe frame-by-frame, and images and performances that have remained vivid and illuminated in our imaginations for years or even decades.

But what if the film you couldn’t forget was one that no one had a chance to see? That’s the paradox at the center of director Peter Medak’s new documentary, The Ghost of Peter Sellers. It’s a film-about-film that will engage Nashville cinephiles, and it’s also a loving look back at the late great comic genius Peter Sellers: his maniacal magnetism and his haunted dark side.

On a Saturday afternoon in May of 1972, Medak ran into Sellers at a trendy restaurant on fashionable King’s Road in west London. Sellers buttonholed Medak and immediately started selling him on directing a new film: a 17th century pirate comedy set on the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus. Sellers was the biggest comedy star in the world in the early 1970s, and Medak, of course, immediately agreed to direct Sellers in the new project called Ghost in the Noonday Sun.

In fact, all the principle players joining forces to make the film were on a roll: Sellers had already appeared in masterpieces like Lolita (1962), The Pink Panther (1963), and Doctor Strangelove (1964). Screenwriter, Spike Milligan was the main creator of The Goons — a BBC radio sketch comedy troupe Milligan formed with Sellers and Harry Secombe in the 1950s. The Beatles and Monty Python both name-checked The Goons as a major influence. Peter Medak had made a name for himself as an edgy young filmmaker helming controversial erotic thrillers (Negatives, 1968) as well as satires and black comedies (A Day in the Death of Joe Egg, 1972 and The Ruling Class, 1972). Peter O’Toole’s unhinged performance as a paranoid schizophrenic British nobleman in The Ruling Class garnered a gush of critical and popular praise for the actor as well as for Medak, and this new documentary suggests it’s one of the reasons Sellers was keen to work with the director.

This aligning of star talent quickly garnered plenty of funding despite the fact that the movie was barely more than a concept: Milligan’s script was still languishing in the incomprehensible stage, Sellers was distracted by a drama-packed extramarital affair with Liza Minnelli, and Medak saw red flags, but pushed ahead anyway with a need to provide for his growing family and fueled by the kind of foolish confidence found in a heady combination of money, fame, talent and youth. Ghost in the Noonday Sun was a disaster beset by wind, waves, shipwrecks, striking extras, and especially Peter Sellers who faked a heart attack in order to escape the set before nearly leading the crew in a mutiny against Medak. The movie was never theatrically released (it hit home video stores in the 1980s) and it nearly destroyed the director’s career.

That said, it’s Medak’s meticulous documenting of his experience that makes this new movie possible, and all of this film’s footage, production notes, calendars, script edits and literal receipts demonstrate the director to be a consummate pro who ultimately played the scapegoat for a movie that should’ve never been made. At its best The Ghost of Peter Sellers recalls documentaries like Werner Herzog’s My Best Fiend (1999) and Terry Gilliam’s Lost in La Mancha (2002), which remind us that it takes truly great filmmakers to organize truly disastrous movie productions.

Buy your ticket to stream The Ghost of Peter Sellers at www.belcourt.org beginning on Friday, May 29

Joe Nolan is a critic, columnist and performing singer/songwriter based in East Nashville. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com.