Reflections on the Swinging Sixties and the Permissive Society.    London 1964 – 1967  

 by Barry McKnight. 

Author of “A Traveller’s Journal”

As I came from a small country town in Queensland, when I travelled to London in 1964 I found myself flung into a completely new world: a vastly different world from the one that I knew set in the Queensland bush just south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Mount Morgan was a town of around five thousand people that depended on the huge gold and copper mine for its existence and once that ore body was depleted the mine would close and the town would lose its reason to exist.  As I worked in the Survey Department I knew that day was coming in the not too distant future. With complications in my personal life weighing heavily upon me I made the decision to change my life and try my luck elsewhere. In this case “elsewhere“ was on the other side of the world. I arrived in London in the summer of 1964 full of hopes and dreams of starting a new life but suddenly I was plunged into a new, foreign environment that in itself was undergoing rapid change. The young people’s revolution that began in the Fifties was now in full swing in the London of the Sixties and the decade became known as the “Swinging Sixties.” However the young people’s revolution did have a darker side in England with the emergence of the youth gangs; the Mods and the Rockers. My arrival in London was just after, what the media described as “The Battle of Brighton” where both gangs clashed at the seaside town of the same name. Quite a few people were injured and the police made many arrests. The Rockers were long haired gangs of youths who rode motor bikes and modelled themselves on Marlon Brando’s character in “The Wild One”, a film that was banned outright in New Zealand because it too was having trouble with motor cycle gangs. The “Mods” on the other hand, liked to dress in the latest trendy gear with fashionable suits and carefully styled hair. Their means of transport were the small motor scooters that were very popular at that time. The Brighton riot was followed by more confrontations and clashes at other seaside towns. I sympathised somewhat with the rioters in these towns as nobody in their right mind would actually go there for a swim as the beaches were quite dreadful. The rioting was probably just a way of relieving their boredom. There was no such boredom in the entertainment industry however as music was everywhere, as was long hair, colourful clothing and short skirts, with the centre of fashion being Carnaby Street. The music of that time took us “Down Town” with Petula Clark; a song full of optimism that seemed to echo the general feeling of the era.  Herman’s Hermits added to this with “Something Tells Me That I’m Into Something Good”, sung by Peter Noon who looked no more than twelve years old. He was later to tell “Mrs Brown” that she “Had a Lovely Daughter” (with “daughter” sounding like “dor-a” due to Peter’s midlands accent.) Not to be outdone Gerry and the Pacemakers took us on a “Ferry Down the Mersey”, while Cliff Richard had a “Summer Holiday” on a bus touring Europe with his “Young Ones” friends. The Beatles joined in and sailed away in their “Yellow Submarine” and sang about “Lucy in the Sky of Diamonds” after a “Hard Days Night”. The “Lucy” title set off a furore when someone pointed out that the capital letters in the song’s title were “L.S.D.” which was the abbreviation used for the hallucinogenic drug “Lysergic Acid Diethylamide” currently in fashion in the world of the entertainment elite. It was a reminder though that all was not sunshine and roses as London had a seamy side that was dominated by the Kray brothers, Ronnie and Reggie. Thankfully England was still very much a class society which meant that ordinary working people, like ourselves, were rarely involved in that high society level where the twins operated. Their activities, however, made for many lurid headlines in the newspapers at that time and the brothers were treated more like celebrities than criminals. I guess this was part of the new Permissive Society that arose in the Sixties that said   you could do more or less as you please as long as you did not harm others. Well the Kray brothers, in their gangster role, definitely did do a lot of harm to many others so they would not be a good example of the new morality. I remember being quite shocked when I first arrived in London, at what was on sale in the bookstores there. In Australia at that time we banned everything including the infamous book “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”; yet here it was on sale in London together with magazines that showed complete nudity. Unlike Australia the Gay scene in London operated quite openly. When going to the cinema alone you had to choose your seat carefully if you did not wish to be sexually molested. If you did, you just selected a seat next to the attractive man of your choice and once knees touched it was on. It went largely unnoticed in the cinema as most people wore overcoats that were folded up and placed on one’s lap when seated. One small newsreel cinema that ran continuously had a dark standing room only section at the back where no usherette dared shine her torch. There were even male brothels tucked away at various discreet places around London for those who wished to go further from what was available for free at certain cinemas. Now how did I come by all this information you may be thinking. Well, it all came from my rather outspoken Gay friend Keith, with whom I worked at the Humphries Film Laboratory in central London. Kieth was a jovial young fellow with a twinkle in his eye who liked to shock people and generate laughter with his revelations about life in the seamy side of London. His explanation about the newsreel cinema offered an answer to a puzzle that played in my mind as I had occasionally visited that cinema and often wondered why many men preferred to stand in the shadows at the back when there were seats available in the main area. Unfortunately Keith and 345 others were later to be killed in the crash of a Turkish DC10 airliner which was flying out of Paris in 1974. It was later found that a faulty cargo door had caused the crash where there were no survivors. The summer of 1964, however, was dazzling with bright sunshine and good spirits with much to do and much to see. I remember thinking that this was not the gloomy, rainy summer that I was told to expect. The numerous parks were full of flowers and masses of people enjoying the warm sunshine. I chuckle now when I remember one particular incident that occurred that first year when I was walking on my own through the Soho area of inner London which was a notorious red light and entertainment area. It was a day of golden sunshine and I was walking along with a spring in my step enjoying every minute of it when a lady leaned out of an upper floor window and called out “Would you like to come upstairs luv?” “What for?”  I called back innocently. When relating the incident the next day to a friend, Bob, who worked with me at the Film Lab, he rolled his eyes and said “Barry! Nobody could be that dumb!”  “Well she might have had a problem with her plumbing!” I replied. “She wanted you to check out her plumbing alright” he answered with a smirk on his face. Less than a year later something else happened that again caused my friend Bob to fling his hands up in despair and put me at the top of the hopeless idiots class. When the Easter weekend was coming up another workmate, Alan, suggested spending the holiday weekend in Paris. We checked up on tourist guides and they all said that it was not necessary to book ahead as Paris had plenty of accommodation available. They were not, however including the Easter weekend for when we arrived there in the evening there was absolutely nothing available anywhere in the city. However I had read previously that if one had difficulties finding accommodation it was often possible to get  cheaper rooms at the French equivalent of English guest houses. After walking for what seemed like hours we finally found what looked like a guest house in one of the back streets. Alan volunteered to go to the booking in desk as he could speak a few French words. While I waited I looked around and I noted that the lounge area had very frilly decor and on the balcony above a few scantily clad ladies had gathered and were waving to us. Alan, I noted, was having trouble with the lady at the booking desk and I heard the word “Mademoiselle” mentioned frequently. He had not seen what I had seen. I hurried over to him and whispered quietly in his ear “Forget it Alan. It’s a brothel!  Let’s get outta here.” He turned around and saw what I saw. “Oh Shit!” he said. We quickly grabbed our bags and fled into the night. Thus our first night in Paris was spent sleeping on benches in a small park that we found beside the river Seine. It was, however, quite interesting to see the great city coming back to life as a new day dawned. After a leisurely breakfast we went to a tourist accommodation bureau where they found us a very nice room in a hotel on a tree lined boulevard not far from the Paris Opera House and the Place de la Concorde. When I returned to the lab and told Bob of the latest blunder, he looked at me, rolled his eyes and said “You’re telling me that you tried to book into a brothel for the weekend!!… and the Easter weekend too!! Shame on you Barry! What would your mother say?”  Perhaps the Permissive Society did not really work for some of the music groups like the Rolling Stones who came out with a song titled “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction!” Perhaps I should have given them address of that lady in Soho. Then again, maybe their music was too downbeat. For really great uplifting music one only had to join the queues outside the London theatres and cinemas where the most popular movies were the great musicals of the era. “My Fair Lady”, “Camelot”, “Oliver”, “Oklahoma”, “The Matchgirls” and “The Sound of Music” were just a few of  the titles on offer that caused one to want to go singing down the street afterwards. One very popular long lasting live show that attracted audiences for years was “The Black and White Minstrel Show”. I went with my Aussie companions many times and never gave a thought to the morality of the painted on black faces that were entertaining us. I guess in those days people didn’t look for things to offend them like they do today. The English people loved to laugh and nothing was sacred to them and I loved them for it. I was many times referred to as “cobber” and told to go away and “rattle my chains” or to “play in my billabong”. Comedy shows were everywhere; in television, live theatre, radio, the cinema, and even the pubs. The top comedians like Spike Milligan, Peter Sellars, Alf Garnet, Benny Hill, John Cleese, Tony Hancock, plus the duo Peter Cook and Dudley Moore were but a few who kept Britain laughing. However, across the Atlantic in the U.S.A. it was a different story as the Afro-American people there demanded more justice and freedom. Mid decade the Vietnam War began escalating into something much bigger that would cause a whole generation of young people to lose respect for the law. Their protest demonstrations and confrontations with the law again brought more violence, and in some cases deaths. A new singer called Bob Dylan appeared on the scene with a song called “The Times They Are a-Changing”. In London however, after the success of the singer Frank Ifield, the Australian cultural invasion had begun. The Seekers arrived on the scene and had hit after hit with titles like “Georgy Girl”, “World of our Own”, “I’ll Never Find Another You”, and “Morning Town Ride” to name but a few. Rolf Harris had his own television programme and entertained audiences with his quick as a flash paintings, songs, and, of course, his Wobble Board. In the West End another musical called “Robert and Elizabeth” opened to rave reviews. It featured a trio of Australians with Keith Mitchell and June Bronhill in the leading roles, singing the songs that were composed by fellow Queenslander, Ron Grainer. In the world of opera a young Joan Sutherland stunned audiences with her magnificent voice winning widespread praise for her role in “Lucia di Lammermoor”. The Sixties also saw the arrival of some cultural refugees from Australia one of whom was Barry Humphries. In London he joined the staff of the satirical magazine “Private Eye” where he created the uncouth boozy Australian, Barry McKenzie who rampaged through London’s polite society. Humphries, himself, was later to morph in to the formidable Edna Everage, who is still keeping us entertained today in the new millennium. Others fleeing Australia at that time were Richard Neville and Martin Sharp who set up another satirical magazine simply called “Oz” with the idea of pushing the censorship boundaries in Britain even further. They had already had been in and out of Australian courts on various obscenity charges with their “Oz” magazine so now they thought they would try their luck in Britain and endeavour to make the Permissive Society there even more permissive. However, when they set up the British version of “Oz” they pushed a little too vigorously at the boundaries and once again Richard and Co found themselves in court. On the political scene there was a lot of discussion on whether Britain should join something called “The Common Market”. The Prime Minister at that time was Harold Wilson and the general opinion seemed to be that it would be a good thing for Britain if they aligned themselves more with Europe. Towards the end of the decade as the winters seemed to be getting colder and the sunshine less and less thoughts of Australia became uppermost in my mind. I had made a friend at the lab, Roger Cowland, whose brush with fame at the Lab was sharing a lift with Beatle Ringo Star. We planned to spend some time in Canada before travelling to Australia where Roger would become one of the leading lights in the emerging feature film industry.

Barry McKnight & Roger Cowland.
Niagara Falls 1967.

Cinema Papers……….October - November 1980.

              

 

      Interview with Roger Cowland  

  

“The funny part about it” says Roger Cowland "the good opticals are the ones you don't see.”

    Where did you start, Roger, and how do you come to be supervising the feature opticals department at Colorfilm?

    It goes back 20 years to George Humphries, a film lab in the heart of London. I started there in the negative cutting department doing all sorts of jobs, and learning all the laboratory procedures. Then I went to Toronto, Canada, to work at Film House where I was in charge of quality control. After a year in Canada, I came to Australia to work on the Tony Hancock series that was being made at Channel 7. Unfortunately, he died on the first week of the series, so because there wasn’t a lot of neg cutting work about then, I alternated between cutting and opticals, gradually moving into opticals full time. Then I came to Colorfilm.

    The year in Canada must have been interesting. They have a very high standard there.

They have, extremely high. We did mostly commercials, they weren’t doing a lot of features then. We used to do a lot of release prints of features for the States, it was cheaper for them.

    Let’s talk about opticals work. Could you briefly explain the process?

    There are two areas in Colorfilm’s Optical Department, make up and printing. Make up is the actual translation of the effects required on to a print. To do that the make up operator must be able to visualise the effects that the editor has in mind. When we get the cut work print the edge numbers are recorded and sent to the neg department , and the negative is extracted from the original camera rolls. It’s graded and sent back to us. Each scene is matched to the cut work print and cued according to the required optical. This is all laid out on a make up timing sheet which sets out in frames the desired effect and how long it should run for. The cued sheet then goes down to the printer. This is a slow process — you’re printing a frame at a time, and when you’ve got multiple exposures, you’ve got to keep going back over the same piece of film. If you’re a frame out, it’s history, and the job’s no good.

So all the opticals are printed in the optical department. Do you have special printers?

As a matter of fact, we’ve just installed another new one, an Oxberry. It’s an aerial image machine with two projector heads, one mounted behind the other so you can run negatives in one and your hi-con mattes or titles in the other. This makes it a lot easier for re-positioning, zooming of the other image, re-positioning a title, or just enlarging an image. It’s got automatic zoom, skip framing, fades, dissolves, things like that.

If I bring a film into Colorfilm, what can I expect optically?

     Given the right material to start with, there’s nothing we can’t do if it’s properly prepared. That’s terribly important, preparation. One of the things I try to get clients to do is to come in and talk the opticals over before they get into expensive shooting and find out when they have shot it the effect they want is not going to work. 

    You’d rather people came in and talked about the opticals at the script stage?

    Yes. In a few cases people have come in and talked about things and of course they work because we know what they want, and they know how to help us get it for them.

    Can you give us an example?

    Well “Harlequin” was one, although it didn’t go from pre-production stages. They asked me to go down to Melbourne when they were cutting to discuss the opticals.

There were a few opticals they wanted and they weren’t quite sure if they’d work. So I saw the whole fine cut down there, which is a good thing, I got a feel for the film. Which is important for matching the opticals to the mood. Anyway, there’s some places in Harlequin where they looked at the edited work print, and decided some scenes needed sunsets which didn’t have sunsets. We had to superimpose them, and it worked very well. We added a streaky sunset sky, and storm clouds over the house.

I didn’t notice it.

No. The good opticals are the ones you don’t see. There are about 70 in “Harlequin“, and quite a lot in “Newsfront“, which most people wouldn’t notice. Then there was the client who wanted a special optical for a commercial. They wanted two guys — one on each side of the frame - facing each other, swing in together and shatter. They talked about it before they shot it and we discussed how they should shoot it. They brought it in great. The effect worked. If you can get people to shoot things with the opticals in mind, it works much better. You know, if they have an effect like a double exposure in mind, they work better if they are shot correctly, like a night shot superimposed over a day shot just won’t work.

How else can an editor help get the opticals he wants.

By clearly marking work prints. One very common mistake made is that they don’t check their trims. They want a dissolve and we find that there is not enough material to cover it. I think a lot of editors leave things out of the cut work print that they should put down. For example fades and dissolves, they just mark them up and assume that you’ll understand what it is. For titles choosing a good legible lettering style. This is very important because depending on the backgrounds they can break up and be lost. I can only say pick a bold style.

Avoid serifs?

Yes! Night shots tend to be the worst for titles to be over.

Can you see any radical changes in the business of opticals in the future?

Well, a lot of things have gone over to videotape, especially commercials, mainly because of the speed. But I think the advent of the CRI has made a difference - with opticals being turned around quicker. I still think you can’t beat film for quality.

Do you like films?

Do I like films? You can say that again. I’ve always liked films, that’s why I’m working here. That’s another important thing. I feel that if it is possible for anyone to work at something they really love doing, that’s great. I think that’s when you put your best into it.

Do you have a favourite film?

“2001” I’m a science fiction freak.

An optical man’s dream or nightmare?

Dream. I’d love to do something like that.

What makes Colorfilm a special lab?

The people. They place a lot of importance on skilled technicians. And they look after their staff. It makes for a lot happier working area, people are more interested in and care about what they are doing. I think it’s terribly important for a producer to feel that he’s in safe hands, that his film is going to be looked after as an individual thing, and he can be assured of the result.