The one movie George Harrison regretted producing: “It proved to be very painful”
Even the most passionate George Harrison fans might not know the extent of his involvement in the film industry. They may know that he started his production company, HandMade Films, with the sole purpose of funding Monty Python’s Life of Brian or that he produced Withnail and I, but his influence goes much deeper. The production company has helped make dozens of movies, and although it has changed hands in recent decades, it has produced everything from the classic 1980 gangster film The Long Good Friday to Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning drama 127 Hours.
After founding the company with his business manager Denis O’Brien in 1978 for Life of Brian, Harrison played a hands-on role in the work, executive producing nearly two dozen films and even contributing original music to some of them. Unfortunately, O’Brien turned out to be a lousy business partner, and Harrison had to sell the company in 1991 due to its enormous debts. He went on to sue his former partner to the tune of $25million.
The painful collapse of HandMade Films was not the first time Harrison may have rued the day he got into the moviemaking business. Five years before, he had embarked on a project that he would come to bitterly regret. Featuring two of the biggest stars of the era and a budget that dwarfed anything the production company had coughed up before, it turned into a spectacular disaster for all involved.
Directed by Jim Goddard, Shanghai Surprise was an action comedy romance about a conman in Shanghai who teams up with a Missionary nurse to steal some opium for her patients. Madonna and Sean Penn had just gotten married when they signed on to do the project in 1985, and they weren’t exactly in a sporting mood when it came to filmmaking.
Harrison admitted that he had been dubious about the project even before the stars signed on to it. The whole thing almost got shelved at one point due to the scope of the project, and for him, the involvement of Madonna and Penn was actually a boon. “At that time, it sounded like a good idea,” he said in a 1988 interview with Film Comment. “But when we went ahead with it, it proved to be very painful for most of the people involved.”
The primary issue was the behaviour of the lead actors. Richard Griffiths, who played a supporting role in the film, remembered that Penn was sensitive about his status, feeling short-changed by the fact that his new wife was treated as the film’s star. As a result, he wielded his one bargaining chip over the production, which was that Madonna had a clause in her contract that she had to approve of her co-star. If Penn was fired, she would simply refuse anyone else, effectively making him un-firable.
Harrison blamed the “attitudes of the actors” for causing most of the tension but also acknowledged that things were wrong on every level. “It was like ‘Springtime for Hitler’ in The Producers,” he said, referencing the Mel Brooks movie in which the lead character deliberately tries to make his production bomb by hiring all the worst people. “We got the wrong actors, the wrong producer, the wrong director,” Harrison said. “Where… did… we… go… right?”
When the film was released in 1986, it did indeed bomb. Hard. Off of a $15million budget, it only scraped back $2.3m at the domestic box office. The crew must have found some consolation in the fact that Madonna won the ‘Worst Actress’ award at the Razzies that year.
