Background
Donald Cammell was born on 17 January 1934 in the City of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. He was the son of Charles Richard Cammell, who wrote about Byron and Aleister Crowley.
Donald Cammell was born on 17 January 1934 in the City of Edinburgh, United Kingdom. He was the son of Charles Richard Cammell, who wrote about Byron and Aleister Crowley.
As a youth, Donald attended the Roval College of Art and became a noted portrait painter (and an expert on portrait society) in London.
He did illustrations for Alice Mary Hatfields King Arthur and the Round Table when he was only nineteen. As such, he was very well placed as an artistic figure in what became “swinging London." That’s how he got to be a screenwriter—on The Touchables (68, Robert Freeman), in which some groupies try to kidnap a pop singer, and Duffy (68, Robert Parrish), about half-brothers, played by James Coburn and James Fox.
One may see these ingredients feeding into the spectacularly outrageous yet enigmatic Performance. Maybe, like the Mick Jagger and James Fox characters, trying to resist osmosis. It's known that Roeg shot the film, and that Cammell edited it— and legend has it that the larger aura of perverse experiment was more to Cammell’s taste than Roeg’s.
Probably not many people have ever watched Performance all the way through too many times. On the other hand, moments from it are as unforgettable as they are influential. Seldom has there been a vaguer, but more idyllic, stew of poisoned drugs and wicked sex—it may well be revealed one day as an ideal diversion for very self-consciously naughty children. And it could be a rare case where being there as it was done remained more interesting than any viewing of the finished film.
Demon Seed is awful, yet the idea of a computer mating with Julie Christie moved many people at the time. By now, Cammell was living largely in America, and attracting the long-winded and ultimately misty overtures of such figures as Marlon Brando—who allegedly wanted Cammell to do a pirate film with him. Nothing developed until White of the Eye, which may be Cammell's most coherent film—and not to be damned on that account. Taking advantage of the tortured landscape around Globe, Arizona, it is a story of sex and serial killing that builds towards real fear. It also has good performances from David Keith and Cathy Moriarty.
Cammell died in possession of a screenplay for Pale Fire, and a collaboration with Kenneth Tynan on a Jack the Ripper film. There was also a script set in Istanbul in 1933—called just 33—about the heroin trade, for which Cammell wanted Stanley Kubrick as director. Aren’t such dreams more potent than the actual release of a bizarre sexual story—Wild Side—from which there dangles the eventual hope that we may one day get “the director’s cut.” As it was, New Image removed it from Cammell, and he asked for his name to be dropped.
There is a good, atmospheric documentary film (by Chris Rodley), and surely one day there must be a biography—for which Christopher Walken (he’s in Wild Side) is the providential casting.
As the sultry age of the late sixties and early seventies recedes, so Donald Cammell may seem most plausible as an invented or literary figure—the brilliant, handsome boy with roots in fine art, the occult, and drugs, who has only a few, threatened, credits for films that may be more intriguing in description than actually witnessed on screen. But Cammell was a real person—and in a future age of electronic amateurism, where countless characters and geniuses have fragmentary career outlines, he may even seem like a prototype. On a more mundane and tragic level, it is clear that, at the age of sixty-two, as a longtime and failed resident of Los Angeles, Cammell killed himsell because he could not get enough opportunity to work.
He was married to China Kong.