The ‘Altered States’ feud between Ken Russell and Paddy Chayefsky
When making a movie, it’s often the case that there is a clash of artists who both want their own way concerning a production. When Ken Russell made his 1980 science fiction horror film Altered States, starring William Hurt, Blair Brown and Bob Balaban, he found himself in the midst of a deep feud with Network and The Hospital writer Paddy Chayefsky, who had adapted the screenplay from his 1978 novel of the same name.
Inspired by John C. Lilly’s sensory deprivation tank research conducted under the influence of LSD, ketamine and mescaline, Altered States tells of an obsessive psychopathologist, played by Hurt in his debut film role, who explores the nature of human consciousness while ingesting large quantities of psychoactive mushrooms.
While Altered States was a success, it was somewhat marred by the deep feud at the core of its production between Russell and Chayefsky. During the three weeks of rehearsals that took place during March 1979, there a rift emerged between the director and writer, with Chayefsky quickly departing the production, something he had never done previously in his career.
According to a book on Chayefsky by Dave Itzkoff, Russell had banned the screenwriter from his set after he had been interfering in the production. In turn, Chayefsky followed up by trying to get Warner Bros to find a new director, but seeing as Russell had already replaced original director Arthur Penn, the studio weren’t keen on rocking the boat any more than had already been deemed necessary.
Initially, Russell had been affable toward Chayefsky, but as rehearsals and the film’s production gained traction, he began to treat the writer with an air of indifference, leading Chayefsky to consider the director to be a “duplicitous, mean man”. On the other hand, Russell felt that Chayefsky was simply meddling where he wasn’t welcome to.
“He didn’t like the colour of the paint on the isolation tank,” Russell had once noted. “Then it went on to other things. He didn’t like the lighting, then he didn’t like the machinery, then he thought I was making the actors appear drunk in a scene where they were written to be slightly tipsy in a bar.” In fact, Russell found that within Chayefsky’s novel and the first draft of the script, there was a lot of “embarrassing” dialogue that he simply wasn’t happy to include in the film.
What’s more was that Russell found an “impossible” problem in shooting the hallucination scenes described in Chayefsky’s novel and script, in which the director said had read, “‘Interstellar gas shot through five million miles of universe like a puff of cigarette smoke.” Russell responded by doing the best he could, trying to create “a certain experience common to all men”, but he felt that Chayefsky had simply never worked with a non- “malleable” director like Russell, who would disagree with the writer as and when he truly felt like doing so.
Chayefsky had initially promised to be a “benign influence” on the set of Altered States, but this was evidently not how he actually behaved. Still, Russell claimed to have not changed any of Chayefsky’s script, although some felt that he had sought other ways to destroy Chayefsky’s original story and deliver his own vision instead.
The case of Altered States was one where two steadfast artists were going head-to-head in order to get their visions of artistry onto the big screen. Sadly, Chayefsky and Russell never really saw eye-to-eye, and the film ended with Chayefsky removing his name from the credits and replacing it with the name Sidney Aaron, his actual first and middle name. Really, it’s a surprise that Altered States ended up being made at all, and certainly in the impressive quality it finally came out in.
