Mr. Strangelove_ A Biography of Peter Sellers - Ed Sikov [180]
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Peter was full of plans in the spring of 1973. For the Boulting brothers, there was to be a six-role comedy set in France during the Occupation. He mentioned to the press that he hoped to adapt Richard Condon’s latest thriller, Arigato. (Condon wrote The Manchurian Candidate.) He was still hoping to make Being There, too, as well as a film called Absolute Zero, to be scripted by Ernest Tidyman (who had cowritten Shaft, 1971). Stanley Kubrick also had something in mind for him, he said, but Peter had to be secretive: “Stanley doesn’t want to mention what it’s going to be about.”
At the time, he was shooting yet another small and depressing film—The Optimists (1973)—in which he plays a decrepit busker. His character, Sam, at one time a successful and popular music hall star, now lives in a ratty flat with Bella, an elderly dog. Two children (Donna Mullane and John Chaffey), regularly vacating their unhappy home, enter his life, and Bella dies.
Directed by Anthony Simmons, The Optimists’ title is ironic, though a new dog shows up at the end. Peter, of course, fully immersed himself in his North Country character’s voice and mannerisms—so much so that when he filmed his scenes as a street performer in the West End, he seemed so authentic that passersby were oblivious to his identity and reportedly donated money into his hat. (The camera was hidden across the street.) There is even the tale of a real-life busker who became incensed that another performing vagrant was horning in on his turf and angrily shooed the movie star away. When filming was completed for the day, Peter simply rounded the corner in costume, got into his red Mercedes, and drove away.
Peter modeled Sam on several old North Country comics he recalled from his youth as well as the nineteenth-century variety clown Dan Leno, whom Peter had met during a séance. “We went back to his writings for some of the dialogue,” Peter said at the time. “Phrases like ‘this morning I was in such a state that I washed my breakfast and swallowed myself’ are lines Leno used in his act.” Peter had already revealed in the Esquire profile that he’d been receiving career guidance through the years from the dead Leno. To complete his characterization, Peter’s longtime makeup artist, Stuart Freeborn, applied a prosthetic nose and strange, subtly disfiguring teeth.
“Peter and I became friendly on that film,” recalls the cinematographer Larry Pizer. “He was a guy who played games with people for inexplicable reasons. He was a brilliant comedian, but not a happy one. Some people enjoy being funny. He didn’t.”
At what point does peculiar behavior become so consistent that it ceases to be erratic? For example, the cast and crew of The Optimists arrived on location one day to find Peter standing on his head in the snow. Pizer found it showy—private yogic devotion turned into a piece of public performance art. Another day the prosthetic teeth went missing, but as Pizer says, “It could have been a game.” Peter’s spur-of-the-moment inventions usually achieved their artistic aim—dialogue changes, new bits of actorly dexterity—but they did tend to disrupt the shooting schedule. For instance, there is a scene in which Sam returns to his flea-bitten home very drunk—so much so that he can barely make it up the stairs. According to Pizer, it was Peter who decided to add some small but important business: The staggering Sam methodically empties his coat pockets of drained liquor bottles every few steps. “It took forever to shoot,” Pizer reports. “Hours were ticking by.” Then again, this was Peter’s craft, and it worked on film, where it mattered.
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