A while ago, we were
fortunate enough to borrow an outstanding book (full details at the
foot of this article) which the Pink Floyd put together when they were
trying to get backing for the movie of "The Wall". The book is one of a
mere handful that would have been produced. It is a large A3 size
format in thick glossy card, which sets out exactly what was to happen
in the film, alongside lyrics and Gerald Scarfe illustrations, most of
which have not appeared anywhere else. What follows is the original
film, as told by the book:
"The Wall" is a musical biography
of a character called Pink. Pink is a fictional character created to
represent a rock group like Pink Floyd. The Wall has already been
performed live in Los Angeles, New York and London with great success,
and some of the live performances are incorporated in the film script.
However, film is a more flexible medium than live theatre and using a
combination of narrative, live action and animation we are able to tell
Pink's story to even greater effect than was possible in concert.
A BRIEF SYNOPSIS OF THE STORY
Our hero is a war baby. His
father was killed in action before they met. His mother devoted herself
to him in a suffocating way. He attends a school that subjugates the
children rather than educating them. His response to these alienating
experiences is to start to build a defensive wall around his feeling to
shelter them from further hurt.
He
leaves school already feeling isolated from other people and joins a
rock band. Being in a band gives him a feeling of power which he
equates with invulnerability. As he is a fatherless child he needs a
woman to vest him with authority so he marries his childhood sweetheart
because she is conveniently available.
He
devotes himself to rock and roll, attracted by the "money and fame"
which insulate him against his nagging feelings of seperation, not only
from his wife and friends, but also from himself. This is a life of
diminishing returns. Like an addict with his junk, Pink needs bigger
fixes of applause. As the bands success grows, the tours get longer and
Pink is at home less and less. The shit hits the fan when, with Pink
away on his zillionth tour of the States, his wife falls in love with
another man.
Stripped
of his authority, Pink cracks up and incarcerates himself in a hotel
room with a handful of pills and a groupie. In a rage he smashes up the
room and frightens the girl away. Alone now and drugged with only the
TV for company, he starts to see himself as an unfeeling demagogue, for
whom all that is left is the exercise of power.
By
chance an old war movie comes on to the TV and in his deranged state,
Pink conjures up a chorus of service men and women with whom he sings
to help purge himself of his guilty feelings. His manager, concerned
with the forthcoming show brings a doctor to the hotel. Pink
incorporates the doctor into his hallucination. The doctor straightens
him out enough to get him downstairs and into the limousine which will
take him to the show.
Pink,
still hallucinating wildly, imagines himself the leader of an immense
neo-fascist rally. As the rally reaches its climax, Pink suddenly
realises he has become an ally to the very forces of tyranny which
killed his own father. This proves too much for the core of human
feeling within him and he rebels.
The
internal self-trial which follows, illustrated in animation, provides
the climax to the story and the film. The judgement that he makes is
that he must "tear down the wall" before his isolation leads him to the
moral decay of his recent vision.
The
presentation [below] is a visual aid to understanding both how the film
will be made, and how it will look when finished. Of the drawings that
follow, some are stills from animation already completed but the
majority are impressions of live action selected from the script.
Alongside the drawings are presented the lyrics of the songs which
carry the story line as the film is largely mute; and short extracts
from the script as clarification. This presentation should be read as
an adjunct to the script itself.
"OVERTURE"
The Anzio bridgehead in the
winter of 1944. In a sandy scrubland a few miles from the beach a
platoon of Royal Fusiliers is dug in, in a forward position. It is
dawn, and very cold - in a hollow a corporal is brewing tea over a
petrol fire. The platoon has been waiting all night... a bird sings.
The faint rumbling and squeaking of approaching armour is heard, the
bird stops singing, the corporal kills the fire with a handful of sand.
"IN THE FLESH"
A Stuka dive bomber appears in
the sky and approaches. At the end of its dive - just before the bomb
hits the ground - the platoon commander, a second lieutenant, hurls
himself towards the field telephone. His final movement is frozen and
we hear on the soundtrack a baby crying as the screen fades to black.
"THE THIN ICE"
Out of the blackness the Pink
Floyd stage set-up appears in wide wide shot to establish the scale of
the staging and the beginnings of the wall growing at the sides.
"ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL"
Young Pink now aged 4, has been
taken to a playground by his mother. She sits apart, seperated from him
by iron railings, knitting, while he ventures alone into the
playground. The playground contains swings, a roundabout and some
slides. There are other children, some of whom are playing with their
fathers, who are either still in uniform or ill-fitting demob suits,
obviously just out of the services. Young Pink is extremely jealous of
these other children whose fathers have come home and attempts to join
in the play between one particular father and his son. He starts asking
the father to lift him up onto the swings and help him up onto the
slides. He follows the father and son round the playground. After a
while this stranger becomes irritated by this invasion upon this
relationship with his own child, and makes it clear that little Pink is
not welcome. Pink goes off alone. He just manages to climb onto one of
the swings, but without help from an adult he can't make it go, and
rocks impotently backwards and forward. His mother, who has seen his
unsuccessful attempts to adopt the stranger, tries to help, but
brushing her aside angrily, he leaves the swing and goes to a
roundabout grabbing one of the bars and pushes it round, faster and
faster, the tears welling up in his eyes.
"THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF OUR LIVES"
Pink, now 7, and two other small
boys are throwing apple cores and stones from a bridge at a goods train
passing through a cutting. The cutting runs through a town and the
sides are overgrown banks retained by engineering brick walls,
blackened and grimed by the soot of passing steam engines. Egged on by
his friends, Pink descends the embankment to put a penny on the line
(the idea being the penny is dramatically squashed by the first passing
steam engine). A train approaches and passes over the penny. Pink has
to flatten himself against the side of the tunnel, where he has been
hiding whilst waiting for the train. The train passes in a great roar.
In the aftermath of swirling steam and smoke we hear the school teacher
shout "You - yes you - stand still laddie", and see the grotesque
figure of the school master puppet back lit at the other end of the
tunnel.
In the moment
Pink hears the dreaded voice and turns towards it, we glipse his face,
transformed into a round pink mask, his fear expressed by amorphous
black shapes representing the wide eye and slack jaw of terror.
"ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL PART 2"
The teacher puppet has now
arrived very close to Roger who sings the first few lines of "The
Happiest Days". After the line "hurt the children any way they could",
we use animation of the teacher forcing children into a mincing machine
built in the shape of a school. The children emerge as worms.
"MOTHER"
A phone rings incessantly on a
bedside table. There are some figures, out of focus, in the background
of this shot under a blanket, but they do not answer the phone. On the
bedside table, beside the phone, is a copy of "Time Out", an empty wine
glass and a gold ring. The song "Mother" will be shot simply as a stage
performance using to its full advantage the inflatable of the mother. A
new inflatable device, an extension of the mothers puppet arms, will
expand towards the end of the song, to completely wall Roger in by the
line, "Mother did it need to be so high".
"GOODBYE BLUE SKY" (Animation sequence)
A tree, which is also a human
forearm and hand, grows, in a decaying landscape. A skylark sings, a
dove flies out of the tree up into the clear blue sky, a vapour trail
creeps overhead. "Look mummy, there's an aeroplane up in the sky". The
sky darkens, we approach the tree, it's rotten inside. On "Did you see
the frightened ones" a Germanic eagle bursts bloodily from within the
dove and menaces the land. The eagle turns into a bomber, which makes a
kamikaze attack on the tree, killing it. The wreckage of the plane
metamorphoses into an animal skeleton, decays and bleaches in the
brightening light. The war is over. A new healthy tree springs up. It
unfurls and flexes its fingers, feeling the air. In the distance the
wall of post war, reindustrialisation, grows. It overshadows the tree
of human feelings and crushes it beneath the weight of its inexorable
cycle of production and consumption. Trapped within it human cogs climb
the walls of a high rise prison. There is an atmosphere of rancour and
despair. In the gloom beneath the wall, beyond the reach of the TV's
thin flicker, two flowers of repressed sexuality sink their roots into
the barren ground.
"EMPTY SPACES"
A rose and a lilly grow and
blossom, they are attracted to each other and caress. They make love,
but the force of their passion turns to violence. They fight, break
away and form themselves into an Art Nouveau picture frame. A wedding
photo of Pink and his wife appears in the frame, the figures
metamorphose, Pink turns into an ineffectual pink puppet and his wife
into the characature from the Trial scene. These two figures then
re-emerge as the rose and the lilly. The conflict continues, triggered
by the list of diversions, and finishes with the female flower
consuming the male one, she then turns into a pterodactyl which flies
away over the wall of consumption, prejudice and obsession.
"YOUNG LUST"
At the bottom of the ramp leading
to the back of the building two teenage girls, in heavy make up, stamp
their feet in the cold, outside steel roller shutters. A cadillac sways
down the ramp flashing its headlights, the girls smile into the glare.
They try to see who's in the car. It sweeps on into the lit backstage
area. There is a security guard in a booth just inside the doors, he
beckons the girls up to his booth, and starts to chat them up. One of
them goes into the booth, and the other one leans on the wall outside.
The first girl disappears below the sill of the guard's booth. He goes
a bit glassy eyed for a while, then he picks up a phone and grins into
it, winking at the girls. A roadie arrives, grinning. He peels two back
stage passes off a wad he carries, done up with an elastic band. He
gives them to the girls who follow him into the backstage area. The
roadie leads the girls through an area with several parked
tractor-trailers and piles of equipment up some steps, and drawing
aside a curtain gives them a brief glimpse of Pink Floyd performing
Young Lust on stage. The first roadie shrugging his apologies leads
them back the way they've come, to the backstage area and shows them up
the steps to the side door of one of the trailers. As they go in, a
bucket of ice and water, which has been set up as a booby trap over the
door, cascades down onto the first girl. There are several other
roadies in the trailer who crack up, and turn away in embarrasment,
this practical joke was not intended for the girls. The wet girls anger
is soon dissipated in the jolly atmosphere and she accepts a drink. The
interior of the trailer is a scaled down version of the room in which
the group entertain, it has a small bar and a TV, and several easy
chairs. The wet girl pulls at her soaking dress, the roadies slyly ogle
her. She responds by slowly stripping. As Young Lust nears it's end,
redressed she is smuggled by the giggling roadies into the back of one
of the limos, waiting in a line to take the band back to their hotel.
"ONE OF MY TURNS"
It is a lavish but phoney
American penthouse suite, bedroom, drawing room and bathroom. The door
opens; silhouetted against a glare of light from the corrider is the
girl from backstage. She enters and explores the suite making her
speech. Pink enters, unseen, behind her, and switches on the TV. As the
vocal of the song starts we switch from watching her to watching him.
He sits in a chair singing the song and the camera moves slowly round
him watching the performance from all sides in very stark lighting.
From the words "run to the bedroom" on, we see his violence expressed
in her fear and her reaction. The camera follows him manically
following her round the suite smashing things up. She is terrified.
Towards the end of the sequence there will be one shot of the pink mask
distorted into a hideous howling contortion of rage. The final shot
will be this image mixed with an exterior shot of the television set
flying out through the window, and in slow motion falling towards the
pavement, where it smashes.
"DON'T LEAVE ME NOW"
We cut back to the hotel room
with Pink still slumped in his chair and using the back projection
technique, mix from the final shot of his wife in orgasm and go to a
series of still drawings depicting painful areas of Pink's experience,
particularly the pain of his relationship with his wife. As this scene
continues we steadily pull back until Pink, slumped in his chair, is
tiny in the face of these ghastly images from his past.
"ANOTHER BRICK IN THE WALL PART 3"
"Don't think I need anything..." The wife and lover orgasm again and again.
"GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD"
The final brick is placed in the wall and Pink's isolation is now complete.
"HEY YOU"
Before the introduction of "Hey
You" starts we see the band, the promoter, the manager and all the
hangers-on backstage indulging themselves in a sumptuous buffet,
caviare, champagne et al. In an office backstage someone is counting
money, stuffing notes into a black briefcase with a combination lock.
Between mouthfulls of caviare, Roger looks at his watch, nods to the
doorway to a waiter who is quivering with anticipation. The waiter
approaches carrying a remote control button on a silver tray.
"IN THERE ANYBODY OUT THERE"
The hotel room in the wall at the
concert slowly opens. Strapped to a chair, watching the TV is the dummy
of Pink. The camera will at first only see his back view, but slowly we
shall travel around to the front of the figure, where the dummy face of
Pink slowly decays with intercuts of the audience looking on, its hands
swell to enormous proportions.
"NOBODY HOME"
Roger now sits in the chair in
which we previously saw the decaying figure of Pink. He sings "Nobody
Home" with the light of the same television flickering on his face. He
begins the song in the very tight close-up, but as the camera pulls
back we see that the chair he is sitting in, and his standard lamp, are
in a desolate waste land. This waste land contains stunted trees,
twisted metal and barbed wire. The back of the set will be used to
project Gerry Scarfe's drawings, expressing Pink's alienation. Towards
the end of this song we will back project a TV screening part of "The
Battle Of Britain" movie. There will be swirling smoke and mists, to
give us the opportunity of cutting to our next scene.
"VERA"
Young Pink looks through the
railings giving onto the railway platform. A train arrives and squeals
to a stop with clouds of steam and smoke. Doors are flung open and men
in uniform descend. They are greeted by their families. Pink is looking
for his father. He runs up to one man, who has his back towards him,
the man turns around. It is not his father. The men have gone, young
Pink is alone on the platform. There is a poster advertising Vera Lynn
on the station wall.
"BRING THE BOYS BACK HOME"
The camera moves to the beat of
the drum, past service men and women in World War 2 dress. As we pan
along the rows and pull out we see that we are in a similar landscape
to the one described in "Nobody Home". The swirling mists, twisted
metal and barbed wire.
"COMFORTABLY NUMB"
As the car doors lock
automatically, the dummy, Pink feels trapped, and starts to react. His
hands swell to enormous proportions filling the rear of the car. He
twists and turns from one window to another, seeking the way out, but
is confronted on all sides by nightmare spectres from his past. Bits of
his massive pink exterior begin to peel away. His mother grabs his
hand, and the surface of the arm comes away in one piece, like a ladies
evening glove, to reveal a black shirt and armband underneath. In
flashback, the dummy is subjected to violence - cuffed by the
schoolmaster, scratched and spat upon by the wife, kneed in the balls
by anonymous people on tube trains.
"THE SHOW MUST GO ON"
Preceded by security guards, Pink
strides purposely through the stark corridors and tunnels towards the
stage, his ankle-length coat billowing, cloak like, behind him. Guards
stand to attention as the entourage passes them. Through an open door
we see the room with the buffet we have seen before. Finally they reach
double doors, at the end of a corridor, which are flung open.
"IN THE FLESH"
We see a stage, set like a
political rally. Arranged on rising terraces behind a central podium,
of chorus of robed figures chant the last line of "The Show Must Go
On"; they are dressed in long robes. The set should look like an unholy
marriage between Nurenburg in 1936, Red Square on May Day, and a Ku
Klux Klan meeting. The stage is festooned with "crossed hammer banners".
"RUN LIKE HELL"
Between "In The Flesh" and "Run
Like Hell" the audience shout "Pink Floyd - Pink Floyd!" in unison,
whilst clapping their hands over their heads. As "Run Like Hell"
starts, the audience and the chorus on stage go into a disco routine.
They are now all wearing identical masks. Occasionally a mask slips,
revealing a hippy or a black who is taken away. Some are removed for
simply having different masks.
"WAITING FOR THE WORMS"
Columns of guards march into the
arena and line the aisles. The audience now chant "Hammer - Hammer!" A
row of torches burst into flame along the top of the wall on the first
note of the song.
"STOP"
"THE TRIAL"
The prosecuting council delivers
his indictment in the manner of a music hall fop, but behind his
foppish manner his teeth are sharp. He performs on the stage of worms,
behind footlights. As he finishes his gown turns into vampire wings,
and he flies up, alighting the top of the wall, to call his first
witness the schoolmaster. The schoolmaster, portrayed as a marionette,
is dropped over the wall by his gross wife. He gives his evidence, and
at the finish metamorphoses into a hammer. Appearing, snakelike, from a
crevice in the wall, the wife spits out her attack on the passive Pink.
She turns into a scorpion, and stings him, and then adopting a more
human form she picks him up and wears him like a stole. He slips to the
ground as she, her hair bursting into flame in her fury, asks the judge
to give him to her to punish. The Mother erupts from the wall, like a
bursting boil. She flies, dive bomber like, to Pink's rescue.
Metamorphosing into a pair of giant lips, she sucks him up, and via the
form of a large cushion, turns into herself, cuddling him in her arms.
As she finishes her plea, her arms turn into a hug wall. The worm judge
rears up over Pink and rants at him. We see that he is a huge asshole
on legs wearing a judges wig. Walking ponderously backwards, he
approaches Pink, who is now walled in so tightly that he lies at the
bottom of a cylinder formed by the wall, which completely surrounds
him. But there is no escape from his own conclusions about himself. The
judge squats on the cylinder and shits images of his past life on him,
whilst screaming at him to tear down the wall. The chanting of "Tear
down the wall!" reaches a crescendo, and the walls start to fall. The
wall of cardboard bricks in the real gig falls, the stadium in the
animation falls, the masks of the followers crack and crumble. The
stage in the rally cracks and breaks up. There is a lot of dust and
smoke.
"OUTSIDE THE WALL"
Above, we detail the original concept of the film of The Wall, as told by an
extremely rare book. The following article, by Stamford Thompson, gives
some background relating to the book, and is a fascinating look at the
genesis of the project...
It was during a visit to London
in 1983 whilst trying to buy concert posters for my fledgling poster
business that I found myself rummaging around in a dusty East End
warehouse, the fifth floor of which was being rented for storage by a
local printer. I had been taken there to, hopefully, find some unused
concert posters from live rock events staged in England’s capital city
for which I had a ready market in my home area some 250 miles north of
London. But what I found was something completely unexpected and much
more exciting to a teenage Pink Floyd fanatic.
In a dark and dusty corner of
this crumbling Victorian pile, I almost literally stumbled over some
Gerald Scarfe prints of his artwork for the movie "The Wall". On closer
investigation they turned out to be the pages of some sort of book. The
pages were in piles, just as they had come off the press. They had not
even been collated yet. I asked what they were all about and was told
the outline of the following story. You can imagine that I could hardly
believe my ears and eyes.
Back in 1971, Pink Floyd first
approached Gerald Scarfe (one of England’s most celebrated cartoon
artists) to produce some animated films for their live concerts but it
took nearly four years of talks and persuasion before he finally agreed
to the idea sometime in 1974. He did some work on "Wish You Were Here"
for the tour program as well as an animated film to accompany their
live performances of "Welcome To the Machine" in 1975.
The album "The Wall", released in
1979 was followed by the hugely successful tour in 1980 and became the
best selling double album of the decade before that year was out. From
its inception, Roger Waters had seen this work being produced in all
forms of media: album, concert, movie and musical theatre. All Earls
Court concerts in 1980 and 1981 were filmed, but more notably the 1981
UK shows - from which clips of the band were going to be included in
the evolving movie.
Roger's concept had already been
turned down by EMI in November 1980 who said, in light of all the rock
operas which, when converted to the big screen from the West End
theatres, had flopped as overblown, egotistical disasters, "This is
something we can’t do right now". He then hooked up with director Alan
Parker who, although very busy with "Shoot the Moon", agreed to help
out where he could in finding another backer.
In February 1981 Scarfe produced
a storyboard book which included stills from his animation, live band
shots from the June 1981 London shows, accompanying lyrics and excerpts
from his script that would be used to illustrate the film concept and
storyline to potential investors.
In the meantime, Alan Parker made
a few unsuccessful calls to his contacts in the film industry looking
for support, and was already suggesting a change in cast. Roger had
obviously seen himself as the big star of the film, but Parker rejected
all the live band footage as "a total disaster - five chances all
muffed" and broke it to Waters that as an actor he was completely
inept. Roger also had to reluctantly agree that any live footage of the
band would be too confusing when mixed with the animation sequences and
the live action.
Thus the whole band were squeezed
out of the film. It was shortly after this, and with Bob Geldof cast in
the leading roll of "Pink", that MGM Studios stepped in to back the
project.
MGM's surprise move made the
storyboard book, over which Scarfe, Parker and Waters had sweated and
battled for weeks on end in Cheyne Walk, completely redundant. The
storyboard had been printed and twenty or so sets of pages were
distributed to the band members, Harvey Goldsmith, Steve O’Rourke and
other interested parties with a view to a meeting at which they would
have selected which pages were to be included in the final presentation
to potential investors. But, because MGM stepped in with the money
(albeit underwritten by the band) this meeting never took place and the
pages of this work lay gathering dust on the floor of the printer's
warehouse.
The last minute frenzy by Waters
and Scarfe to see, in person, the pages coming off the press were
evidenced by some signed tour books and a poster which had been
lovingly framed by the proud printer and had been hung on the humble
walls of the old warehouse - the sight of which had seemed so strange
to me at the time.
The books, which are complete,
but not spiral bound, start with two alternative title pages, a listing
of the stars (Pink Floyd), the producers (Waters and Parker) and the
directors Scarfe and Serensin (Serensin later dropped out of the
project). The next page is an introduction to the character "Pink", a
brief synopsis of the story and this note:
"This presentation is
a visual aid to understanding both how the film will be made and how it
will look when finished. Of the drawings that follow some are stills
from animation already completed but the majority are impressions of
live action selected from the script. Alongside the drawings are
presented the lyrics of the song which carry the story line as the film
is largely mute; and short extracts from the script as clarification.
This presentation should be read as an adjunct to the script itself."
To follow are around seventy
pages which include 17 live band shots, complete lyrics to all the
songs, and 29 excerpts from the script. The storyboard is illustrated
by 50 of Gerald Scarfe’s drawings. The final page shows the demolished
wall at a live concert as the milling crowd disperse from the stadium.
What is so unique about this
volume is that it shows the band starring in the film, which was, of
course, not the final outcome. It also includes some previously unseen
artwork by Gerald Scarfe which was never included in the film nor in
any subsequent publication. There are also some duplicate pages which
offer alternatives for certain scenes or simply offer alternative
presentations of the same image.
In one sketch, Harvey Goldsmith
(England’s premier concert promoter) and Steve O’Rourke (the band
manager) are illustrated as characters in the story, but Goldsmith was
thought to have found his caricatured features too unflattering and
asked for them to be removed. The following page shows precisely the
same scene with the two of them airbrushed out.
The previously unseen artwork
incudes a sketch done by Scarfe at the February 1981 Dortmund concert
of the bomber flying down across the stadium towards the stage; a
banquet scene which was never included in the movie; a menacing sketch
of "Pink" as the dictator, his exaggerated coat ballooning into wings
(this sketch clearly has Roger’s facial features); and a double spread
of the rally at which "Pink", the great orator, indoctrinates the
adoring masses. One of the most sensitive sketches is one of the weary
soldiers and airmen dragging their tired feet away from the
battlefield. There are also two alternative animation sketches for the
railway station sequence which was eventually filmed as live action.
It was not a publication for
commercial release. It was produced as a selling tool to potential
investors and was not for public view. Just under one hundred were
printed and, as stated before, were never even circulated. They were
produced in full colour on A3 (16"x 12") card stock and the surviving
copies, of which there are only about sixty, are all that remain of the
early struggle to get this historic work off the ground.
As a piece of Pink Floyd and
movie memorabilia, this presentation is a unique snapshot of a project
in progress. It recaptures all those endless weeks of creative
wranglings at the premises in Cheyne Walk in London when all the
drawings and the writing of the 39 page script resulted in the
production of a lavish, oversized full colour storyboard. I can almost
place myself there as a fly on the wall to the proceedings.
In leafing through the
mesmerizing pages of this storyboard, I get a sense of all those
struggles, and the characters of the three huge egos which formed this
masterpiece is reflected in each powerful image.
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