True story. The names have been hidden to protect my neck.

Several years ago I made a feature film. My second. I had written and produced the first so when this director, who lived in the same small town as me, asked if I knew any producers for a project that had been put into turn-around by Film Four, I suggested myself.

The script was good. The story was the director’s autobiographical account of how he conned his way into British aristocracy and ended up in prison for fraud.

I got the job. Deferred payment.

Now, I have to say, I was very naive at the time. Straight out of film school. And very keen to make movies. Also, having been a squatter and an anarchist, years before, I had no respect for banks or credit cards, and considered ripping them off fair game.

When I asked the director where the funding was coming from he handed me a credit card and told me to use it. The name on the card was that of his sugar daddy. Looking back now, I was almost certainly complicit to fraudulent activities.

We shot the film.

There were plenty of incidents during the production, which I’ll tell you another time.

The project ended for me when the director attacked me. I walked.

Before that, something rather shady occurred that took me years to understand.

The sugar daddy lived on Fire Island, New York. He had inherited his wealth from a boyfriend who had died of AIDS.

He got wind of the fact the director was making a film and driving around in a Porsche. And in the knowledge that the guy had no means of wealth himself, decided to come over and investigate.

He arrived during post production. His mews house in Kensington was the project’s headquarters. His bedroom, the edit suite.

He'd been in England for a few days, when one morning we tried to wake him to get into the edit suite to cut the film. He couldn't be woken. For hours we waited for him to get up, believing it was some kind of jet lag, even though he should have been over that by then. Eventually, the editor gently roused him and helped him out of bed.

He came out of the room very confused. He shook everybody's hand and introduced himself even though we had met him several days previously and seen him every day since he'd been in London. Then he burst into tears and checked himself into the nearest hotel, which happened to have high security because a Saudi prince was staying there.

I never really understood what had happened till much later when I bumped into the sugar daddy. I asked him about that day. He said the previous evening the director had been behaving very strangely around a drink- a sort of cloak and dagger affair. He had served cocktails and then changed his mind and decided the glasses weren’t clean enough and taken them away then served them again. After which he acted really creepy - constantly asking the sugar daddy if he was ok.

I asked him if he thought he had been poisoned. He said he believed he had.

The director served time in prison for fraud and extortion, but he was never prosecuted for this alleged poisoning.

And yet the film is still the best thing on my show reel. It took us to the Sundance Film Festival, we won a prize in Hollywood for it, and it sold to over twenty territories worldwide. Despite that I never got paid a penny and only got my expenses back through taking drastic action.

The director in question

To be continued...

The first 2 images are from Pixabay