'84' - THE MOVIE!
'84' on film - TAKE 1
In her book 'Q's Legacy', Helene Hanff wrote:
On a January day in 1975, a cable arrived in my agent's office and she called to read it to me. "KEEN TO ACQUIRE 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD FOR BBC TELEVISION - MARK SHIVAS". Mark Shivas, she told me, was one of the BBC's best young producers. Being a fan of BBC television, I was very flattered. I phoned the news to all my friends and it was my friend Susan who said brightly: "You'll see your whole life pass before you and you won't have even have to drown."
In February Hugh Whitemore's script arrived. I'd wondered how on earth he was going to trun a book of letters into television dialogue. He hadn't tried to. You might say he scorned to try. He'd let the letters speak for themselves take the place of dialogue by doing the whole script in a television technique known as 'voice-over'.
'Voice-over' meant that the audience would hear a letter read by a disembodied voice while the owner of the voice performed pantomime action on the screen. To do an hour-long TV show this way from beginning to end required the kind of audacity known as 'chutzpah'.
Chutzpah or no, the production went ahead. Anne Jackson (an American actress, more usually known as Annie) played Helene, and Frank Finlay (a British actor) played Frank Doel. Promising an article about it all to the Reader's Digest in return for a plane ticket and some hotel money, Helene went to London to attend the three-day taping of the programme. After all, as she said, I had no work in the typewriter. I can only write about what happens to me and nothing much had happened to me lately. But it occured to me that sitting in a TV studio watching an actress pretend to be definitely classified as something-happening-to-me.
The production was a BBC 'Play for Today', lasting an hour and twenty minutes. As far as I can ascertain, it was shown just once on British television, and once on American television, and is sadly not available on general release on video.
Cast list:
TO BE ADDED SHORTLY!!!
'84' on film - TAKE 2
This is probably best explained in Anne Bancroft's own words, from her foreword to the 25th anniversary edition of the book '84 Charing Cross Road':
TO BE ADDED SHORTLY!!!
Cast list:
TO BE ADDED SHORTLY!!!
