THERE never was a film company like Palace Pictures, and there probably never will be again. That view will be shared, for very different reasons, by those who admired many of the movies released or produced by Palace by the envious industry rivals who could never match Palace's panache for promotion and by the many creditors burnt by the company's collapse.
The many exuberant highs and just as many nerve wracking lows are chronicled in Angus Finney's lively, commendably well researched history of the company. The Egos Have Landed, sub titled The Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures. It's as full and comprehensive an account as one could expect, and apparently was even fuller and even more comprehensive before the lawyers combed through it.
Learning the hard way and regularly making it up as it bent along, Palace carved a unique niche for itself in film production and distribution in Britain and Ireland for 10 hectic, wildly adventurous years from 1982 onwards. Palace took huge risks, artistically and financially, as it fostered productions by burgeoning young film makers and releases from a highly eclectic selection of directors from all over the world.
The two principal characters in the dramatic story of Palace's chequered history are its maverick co-chairmen and driving forces, Nik Powell and Stephen Woolley. Powell came from a middle class background and was a partner in Virgin with Richard Branson, a very close friend from childhood, until he went out on his own with Palace. Woolley came from a working class background and made his debut in the film business as a cinema usher at the age of 16.
Powell brought his business acumen to the company and Woolley brought in passionate love and knowledge of world cinema. Powell emerges from Finney's book as a driven, sharp witted and gauchely dressed businessman who ran a very tight ship, and sometimes behaved absurdly tight fistedly. Angela Morrison, a lawyer who worked for him recalls offering a Dutch banker, her new business card and Powell. intervening, saying. "Don't give him that. He already knows you. "Those things costs money!"
Woolley comes across from the book as a producer whose drive, and ambition are enormous, and is utterly persistent in getting what he wants. Michael Caton Jones, who directed Woolley's production of Scandal, describes him as" "terribly, terribly bright". And Woolley and Powell's boundless enthusiasm attracted and motivated a loyally committed, hardworking and underpaid young staff who often released the tensions of the day during drunken nights in a nearby Soho pub. However, Finney notes, the staid British film industry "deeply resented Palaces happy go arrogant approach to getting things done".
The company's earliest releases ranged from Neil Jordan's first film, Angel to Rainer Werner Fassbinder's final film, Querelle,, and spanned a remarkably wide range of genres exotic art house, delights (Diva), stylish low budget horror (The Evil Dead), gritty Brazilian social drama (Pixote) and, Japanese war epic (Merry Christmas, Mr Lawrence). And that was just in the first two years as Palace was getting started.
The company's subsequent releases included such diverse material as Stop Making Sense, Blood Simple, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Paris, Texas, Kiss of the Spider Woman, River's Edge, Sid and Nancy, Wish You Were Here, Prick Up Your Ears, Red Sorghum. A World Apart, My Left Foot (in Britain). Cinema Paradiso, Monsieur Hire, Then Harry Met Sally, The Grifters, Wild at Heart, Edward II, Life is Sweet, Whore and Nikita.
The Palace team demonstrated remarkable instincts when it came to choosing movies to buy and release, and in their unstinting determination to secure the cream of the crop. they regularly, and with relish. ran hoops around their distribution rivals. Regardless of a movie's scale and of conservative estimates of its commercial prospects, the relentless Palace publicists aimed for the sky every time, seven though their budgets were a fraction of those available to the offices of the Hollywood studios in London, and where possible, they aimed for as much free publicity as possible.
Every release had to be "the biggest thing since Gone with the Wind," former publicist Angie Errigo recalls, yet Nik Powell dept a firm hold on the purse strings.
One of the most extreme examples revealed in Finney's book concerns one of the company's ,most expensive purchases, When Harry Met Sally. When Phil Symes, the mild mannered mastermind of so many Palace campaigns, learned that neither of the film's stars, Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan, would travel to London to help publicise the picture, them adopted the deep rooted Palace policy of never taking no for an answer.
Symes wrote to Princess Diana at Buckingham Palace, inviting her to attend the movie's London premiere. After a number of screenings to officially vet the film, due to concern over Meg Ryans faked orgasm scene, Buckingham Palace gave the go ahead and Symes wooed the princess to the premiere. As soon as the news of the royal premiere reached Hollywood, the stars, director and writer of the film all desperately wanted to come to London for the occasion.
Not content with that achievement, Symes seated the tabloid, press right in front of the royal box when the fake orgasm scene came on screen, all the reporters and photographers turned round to capture her reaction for the next day's front pages. The film became one of the ten biggest hits of the year in Britain.
IN 1984 Palace had decided toe take the leap into making their, own films, and just as Neil Jordan's Angel was the company's first release, Jordan's second feature, The Company of Wolves, became their first production, building the bond between Jordan and Woolley which continues to this day. Jordan's third movie,, Mona Lisa, became one of Palace's most successful productions, while Julian Temple's Absolute Beginners became its most flamboyant and infamously hyped, but a hit in Britain nonetheless. But there were many failures along the way.
The circumstances surrounding almost all of Palace's 20 ventures into feature film production often, make for chilling reading and serve as a salutary warning to any,one entering the high risk arena of independent film production. Powell, Woolley and their collaborators lived on their nerves as they surmounted one disaster after another, financial or logistical. The, ultimate horror story was the plagued Palace Television venture, Woman at War.
The more Palace diversified into video stores, video games, television, editing studios, a record company the more its problems grew and ultimately proved its undoing. Finney's book lucidly outlines the mounting chaos, escalating budgets and labyrinthine financial tangles which finally brought the company down in 1992. And just as it was a Neil Jordan film which launched both Palace's distribution and production outlets, so it was another Jordan movie which was Palace's last ,picture in production.
That film was The Crying Game, and in the supreme irony in a fascinating story replete with ironic" developments, it became far and away the most successful of all the, Palace productions, becoming a, huge hit in America and bringing Jordan an Oscar. By then, how's ever, it was too late and it was all over for Palace. "We were the Eric Cantona of film distributors," for comments Steve Woolley, whose,, other love is football. "All too capable of running into the terraces at any moment, but what else could we do? We were part of la film industry, not a business.
. Angus Finney's The Egos Have, Landed, The Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures is published by Heinemann on April 29th, (price £16.99). A season of Palace productions, now running at the IFC in Dublin, continues tomorrow with The Company of Wolves, On Sunday, May 5th, following the 2.30 p.m. screening of The Crying Game at the IFC, Angus Finney will participate in a discussion session on Palace, Pictures.