The Sex Pistols movie written by Roger Ebert but scrapped after three days: “The picture couldn’t be made”
It sounds like a fever dream befitting the excess of the 1970s, but Roger Ebert really did write a screenplay alongside Malcolm McLaren that was created with the intention of being to the Sex Pistols what A Hard Day’s Night was for The Beatles.
Realistically it was always going to be a risk, but it’s ironic the band themselves never actually shot any scenes before the plug was pulled a mere three days into principal photography. According to the people involved, McLaren had no clue of what the film business would entail, and it showed.
Provisionally titled Who Killed Bambi? – which would be reflected in the ending when a 12-year-old girl gunned down Johnny Rotten in retaliation for the death of the Disney deer’s mother, obviously – shlock merchant Russ Meyer was in line to direct, continuing his creative partnership with the future critic and reviewer.
He and Ebert had fostered a close working relationship, with the latter contributing to the screenplays for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Up!, and Beneath the Valley of the Ultra-Vixens, with the key creatives hoping that the movie would help the Sex Pistols crack the American market by making them the focal point of a suitably anarchic adventure.
As Meyer explained to Film Comment, though, there were issues from the start. “McLaren had no conception of what it would cost,” he suggested. “We did some eight versions of the script. And then, when they sat down and figured out the shooting days, they said, ‘What are you doing here? This is too complicated.’ So I’d say, ‘Well, take this out or take that out’. And they’d say, ‘Oh, no. You can’t do that. You’ll destroy it’.”
Another issue was the band’s simmering resentment for their manager. Rotten and Sid Vicious, who Meyer referred to as “absolutely nuts,” would regularly call him up in the middle of the night “to say unspeakable horrors about him.” As per the terms of the screenplay, Vicious had no issues with scenes where he was shown having sex with his own mother, “but he objected to us showing them shooting up.”
Was that the extent of the madness? Of course not, because there’s room in this bizarre tale for Grace Kelly, too. The initial budget was $150,000, but when the Sex Pistols caught fire, McLaren wanted more money. The budget cobbled together was around a million dollars, which still left Who Killed Bambi? several hundred thousand short of being able to even think of reaching the finish line.
Kelly, who was a board member and major shareholder in 20th Century Fox at the time, was against not only the film but the person directing it. “I understand Princess Grace got involved in it,” Meyer reflected. “She despises me, and she’s an important stockholder at Fox. She was going to pull out all support of Fox in Europe.”
Sets were built, the ensemble cast had been populated, three days of shooting were in the can, and then the arse fell out. As Meyer remembers it, “Malcolm McLaren really overextended himself,” and “they folded the show” 72 hours after it had kicked off when the mounting issues from all sides became too much for the production to bear.
Only in the wild world of cinema could Roger Ebert, Grace Kelly, and the Sex Pistols be involved in the turbulent tale of the same production, and it was fitting, given its chaotic existence, that Who Killed Bambi? never ended up being made at all.
