What we wanted was to capture the excitement of our own rites-of-passage years. So, that afternoon, over a cup of tea, David and I invented a clever grammar-school boy who, breaking all the rules, spurns the chance to go to university, and pursues a rake's progress before he discovers his real path in life. 'Qualifications,' was probably every parent's mantra in the Fifties, but teenage rebellion was more romantic for a movie than qualifications could ever be. To both of us, fairgrounds had been the only place in our teens where we could hear rock music played LOUD, the way it was meant to be heard.Īt the same time, fairs suggested a dangerous glamour that was at odds with the ambitious lives our parents wanted for us. 'But what if our boy runs off to join a fair?' David suggested. When the boy reaches his teens, he runs off to join a circus. It tells the story of a boy of our war-baby generation, whose father had abandoned his wife and son. He had an idea that had been triggered by the Harry Nilsson song, 1941. We did, and, after handing me the book that I needed, David, out of nowhere, asked me to write a film for him and his business partner, Sandy Lieberson. I'd got to know him thanks to Mike McCartney, the brother of Paul, who reckoned that the two of us would get on very well. The friend was David Puttnam, who, after a career in advertising had recently become a film producer. Then one Saturday in 1972, I went to a friend's house to borrow a book. I'd always been a film fan, but, although I'd reviewed some movies for the London Evening Standard, where I mainly interviewed rock stars and other cultural heroes, I'd never actually seen a screenplay. Perhaps that's the way with lots of success stories. Looking back, I can see that the success of That'll Be The Day - released 50 years ago in April - was largely due to a series of random and lucky connections. I watched it go from being a story about a sixth-form boy who drops out of school to work at a fairground - culminating in a sweet romance on a roller-skating rink - to a blockbuster movie packing cinemas, a number one album, a gold record and a bestselling paperback. But I did, by accident, when, in 1972, I wrote a film called That'll Be The Day. No one sets out to write a film that half a century later is considered a cult movie.
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