Chad Taylor

Find Your Ancestors: The Avengers girl

The Cathy Gale role was originally written for a male. When the makers decided to recast the role for a female the studio was too cheap to commission rewrites so Honor Blackman was given the first eight scripts as they were written, dialogue and fight scenes included. Thus the "Avengers girl" was born.

BRIAN CLEMENS: I didn't do Diana a very good service. It made her an international star but I think I could have done more for her as far as the script was concerned. She was rather a stooge to Patrick Macnee's Steed.

JULIE NEWMAR: This is what I get from people when they talk to me about the original Catwoman and compare it to the latter ones. I think people prefer the more humorous one, the lighter one. People seem to complain that the recent ones are too dark in spirit. But that's what reflects what's going on... It was a heck of a lot more fun when Adam West and I did it.

BOB RINGWOOD: We had to justify the catsuit. Where did the Selina character get it? Black, shiny fetish clothing can very easily slip into the sleaze/porn world and this, after all, was a film for family viewing.

Q: How much information did you have on the Catwoman issues before drawing the covers?

ADAM HUGHES: Sometimes I'll get one of Will Pfeiffer's scripts, and sometimes I'll get a synopsis because Will is still writing the script. And then sometimes I'll say, "Can I draw Selina in a pool?" And they'll say, okay.

ALAN MARTIN: During the mid-eighties I was in a band with the then unknown Philip Bond. One of our favourite songs was a track we had written called 'Rocket Girl.' I was studying at Worthing at this time, which is where we met up with Jamie Hewlett. He and Philip hit it off straight away. I was a little put off by Jamie's habit of drawing huge penises on any paper that he came across.

Jamie had drawn a grotty looking girl brandishing an unfeasible firearm. One of our friends was working on a project to design a pair of headphones and was basing his design on the type used by World War II tank driver. His studio was littered with loads of photocopies of combat vehicles. I pinched one of the images and gave it to Jamie who then stuck it behind his grotty girl illustrations and then added a logo which read 'Tank Girl'.

DR: Where you surprised at how popular she became?

AM: It didn't really come as a shock to us.

STIEG LARSSON: I considered Pippi Longstocking. What would she be like today? What would she be like as an adult? What would you call a person like that, a sociopath? Hyperactive? Wrong. She simply sees society in a different light. I'll make her 25 years old and an outcast. She has no friends and is deficient in social skills. That was my original thought.

The moving hand

After digging out my (UK) copy of Raymond Chandler Speaking to quote for the previous post (he liked cats) I started flicking through it, stopping at the many corners I'd folded down. On 5 Feb 1951 Chandler wrote to Hamish Hamilton*:
'I am not much interested in stories about Martians or 3000 A.D... The trouble with fantastic fiction as a general rule is the same trouble that affects Hungarian playwrights** - no third act. The idea and the situation resulting from the idea are fine; but what happens then? How do you turn the corner?'
This the point I was considering in my notes on Brian Clemens' screenplay for Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde. By grafting Stevenson's stories on to the Whitechapel Murders, Clemens gave the original story a third act. To create his elixir of life Jekyll extracts hormones from female corpses. When the corpses run out, he hires corpse robbers (Burke & Hare) who provide an adequate supply. Jekyll's experimental elixir causes his transformation and subsequent addiction. Desperate for more, Jekyll discovers Burke & Hare have been caught, and must resort to killing his own victims. Jekyll becomes the Whitechapel murderer (the name Jack the Ripper is never mentioned) but is caught when he is betrayed by his own inner turmoil, transforming to Hyde at a fatal moment. Bada-bing: Stevenson's two-act novella becomes a three-act screenplay, with a subplot.

It's only a schlocky horror movie, but I really admire the craft behind that storyline.

* Obviously a fake name.
** Hungarian playwrights? No idea about that one. Also: he liked cats.

The Positive Negative Man

Went to see Brian Clemens talk at the BFI. He's old and grumpy now, as opposed to young and grumpy: a straight shooter and a brilliant mind. The event was to discuss his role as a writer and show runner for The Avengers. He wasn't asked enough about his influences; he talked a lot about how much he liked film but never expanded on why he'd done so well in TV. He had a lot of anecdotes but the ones that stayed with me were about the writing.

Clemens worked on the original series of The Avengers. A producer had come up with the title but didn't know what it meant and threw it to the writers to come up with something. The Cathy Gale role was originally written for a male. When the makers decided to recast the role for a female the studio was too cheap to commission rewrites so Honor Blackman was given the first eight scripts as they were written, dialogue and fight scenes included. Thus the "Avengers girl" was born.

Commissioning writers, Clemens would sit down with the other person and discuss the story. They'd talk while Clemens "typed telegrams" (gesturing typing with both index fingers), keeping notes of what they'd discussed. Clemens looked for "eight moments of intrigue" for every a script. (Three ad breaks equals four parts equals eight moments, I guess.) When he felt he had it down he'd give the notes to the writer and keep a copy for himself so he could write the script "in case the writer got hit by a bus." The notes came in handy when Terry Nation was commissioned a script and delivered something different. Clemens rewrote it - "but I didn't take the credit, I would never do that; it's not my style." Nation was so shocked he delivered the next two in perfect shape and on schedule. Clemens stressed how much he admired Terry's work, and gave effusive credit to his fellow writers and producers. More than once he emphasised the importance of writers taking a credit and getting paid.

When The Avengers broke through in the US the producers fired Clemens and his co-writer. Soon after the producers realised they couldn't come up with any more scripts and had to hire them back. Clemens talked at length about how he refused to kill off characters, including Mrs Peel. "It leaves a bad taste in the mouth - it ruins the re-runs for the viewer."


Clemens cracks wise. He's famous (among writers, at least) for his word play. One of his jokes was that changing a single letter of Dr Jekyll & Mister Hyde would create an entirely new spin on the story, i.e.: Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde. Clemens wrote the screenplay for the 1971 Hammer Horror which was screening as part of the BFI celebration of Clemens' work so I went and saw it to settle an old debt. It screened at the Manurewa Cinecenta when I was way too young for the R16 rating but I remember finding the poster disturbing.

Nowadays Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde is presented as a camp amusement (the BFI flyer was apologetic) but the film is the usual Hammer grimness: the makers are taking it seriously and bring it off rather well. Clemens' version of the story is no more preposterous than Robert Louis Stevenson's and the gender change gives it a satisfying, predatory twist. Jekyll cannot control changing into the female Hyde: he is cursed like a werewolf, as a victim of the same scientific folly that transformed Francois Delambre into The Fly. Hyde is as sleek and elegant as Dracula - an avenging lamia whose scheming to overtake her male host's body has more than a slight echo of Norman Bates in Psycho. In one murder scene editor James Needs cuts between the male and female killers: that would be paging Brian de Palma's Dressed to Kill. It's all in there.

What Psycho couldn't show in 1960 but Hammer could toss off in 1971 under the banner of horror was the sexual extent of Jekyll's transformation. The movie's most disorienting effect of the movie is casting. Ralph Bates as Henry Jekyll is an eerie mirror of Martine Beswick as Sister Hyde, especially around the eyes. Beswick's smaller, so the camera angle drops to accentuate her jawline; Bates is handsome, but speaks softly.

The effect simple but amazing. Over at Comic Con, the kids - and me - are getting excited about a similar effect with Jeff Bridges that cost hundreds of millions. In 1971 they did it simply by getting two actors who looked the same. Roy Ward Barker and DOP Norman Warwick even conjure a seamless in-camera transformation from Hyde to Jekyll that is one take, POV, no opticals. (It took me a good hour to work it out: while the camera is tilted down at one actor, they tip the mirror towards the other sitting alongside.)

The dramatic result is that Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde freaked the audience out. The flip from the tortured Doctor to the transformed Hyde creates more than one uncomfortable scene which the story dwells on, unblinkingly, and people in the theatre were squirming. There's even a knife-through-the-throat gag that predates Tom Savini's squirt trick in Friday The 13th. Clemens sets the story in the Ripper's Whitechapel. Burke and Hare appear along with other characters and tropes from the period - if you're looking for the inspiration for Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, look no further. (Including the white face and penny specs. Go see it - you'll see what I mean.)

Basically I went to see the movie for fun and left shaking my head thinking this property alone could spawn a modern remake and countless sequels. After fidgeting for half of Avatar and being disappointed by the last werewolf fighty thing, Dr Jekyll & Sister Hyde was pleasantly disquieting.

Some more notes on the plot structure here.