‘Toomorrow’: the forgotten Olivia Newton-John sci-fi musical that led to a lawsuit [proofread]
Olivia Newton-John might have gotten her big-screen break with Grease in 1978, but the singer had actually dipped her toes into the world of cinema many years before, starring in a bizarre sci-fi musical that has since been long forgotten.
Her career began back in the ‘60s, when an appearance on the Australian talent competition Sing, Sing, Sing exposed her talents on a national scale, leading Newton-John to pursue a professional music career, recording her debut single, ‘Till You Say You’ll Be Mine’, in 1966, in England, but within a few years, producer Don Kirshner had signed her up to appear in a band called Toomorrow, which quickly proved to be a fruitless endeavour.
Shortly after the band formed, they landed a leading role in a movie, also called Toomorrow. This trend of bands starring as themselves in movies had, of course, begun with the success of A Hard Day’s Night starring The Beatles, while The Monkees had also taken a crack at it with Head in 1968. Kirshner was heavily involved behind the scenes with The Monkees, so perhaps he thought he’d have the same success with Toomorrow, but it wasn’t meant to be.
Toomorrow saw Kirshner team up with Harry Saltzman, who’d previously produced various James Bond movies, as well as British classics like The Ipcress File and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, so the odds of success seemed promising. Yet, in the end, the film’s failure all came down to a lawsuit that halted its release.
For more than 40 years, the public was unable to watch Toomorrow, leaving it a hidden gem in Newton-John’s filmography that, watched now, stands as a fascinating piece of sci-fi cinema history. It’s campy and ridiculous, released the same year as another camp movie about a band, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
In this instance, though, we’re taken to space, with the film blending the excitement of a pop band with the widespread interest in space travel which had emerged in the wake of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. But why was the movie’s release halted by a lawsuit? Well, director Val Guest (best known for making many low-budget sci-fi movies, such as The Quatermass Xperiment) was unhappy that, despite working on the project for several months longer than his contract agreed, a pay cheque was nowhere to be seen.
As it turned out, Saltzman had run out of money to pay everyone involved in making the movie, and of course, Guest wasn’t going to walk away empty-handed. So, after the movie’s initial premiere, the director secured an injunction to prevent its release unless everyone got paid.
Saltzman died in 1994, and that year, Guest revealed that he still hadn’t been paid for Toomorrow, which remained banned from being screened in public. It had seen the briefest of runs in cinemas during opening week, but then it disappeared from circulation, and while a rather amateur-looking DVD release emerged in 2012, the BFI have finally got their hands on it, restoring the film for a Blu-Ray release to be available this year, while another is set for release from The Deaf Crocodile.
So, after all this time, it looks like Toomorrow might finally receive the love it never got. It’s by no means a masterpiece, but with its incredible display of outfits, questionable special effects, and exciting encapsulation of youth culture from a now-bygone era, Toomorrow is certain to become a proper cult classic.
