Trick or Treat (unfinished film)

Trick or Treat is an unfinished British film directed by

• Bianca Jagger
• Nigel Davenport
• Elsa Martinelli
• Jan Smithers
• Carlo Puri

Production

Ray Connolly first thought of the film's idea in 1969 and wrote it as a novel in 1974. He then turned it into a screenplay and succeeded in attracting the interest of David Puttnam of Goodtimes Enterprises. Regarding his idea for the film, Connolly said:

It was, in my mind, a love affair between four people, a sort of erotic Chabrol piece about sexual relationships and emotional ambivalences. It was to be set in Europe and to star three Europeans and one American. At a time when English films were unattractive outside Britain, here seemed an opportunity to make a film with international appeal. In fact I’d even gone to Paris to write the novel in the first place.^[1]

Production costs were obtained from the

She wanted the script to be more faithful to the book, which was a surprising request since the book was much more sexually explicit than any of the scripts. During the next six months the question of the sex and nudity was to be a point for endless discussions between Bianca and the rest of us; we wanted to make a serious film about a sexual relationship between two women and a man. To us that involved nudity. In Bianca's mind there was some big bad film baron who wanted us to make a dirty film; that was absurd. Neither the producers nor the financiers ever put any pressure upon us to make a film other than the one we had always intended to make. Bianca never said she wouldn’t do the nudity – and even signed a contract to say that she would: she just moaned a lot about it. But then she moaned about most things … the costumes, the way the film was lit, the importance of having a say in approving the other girl and the eventual choices of the married couple... But most of all she moaned about the script.[1]

Kathleen Tynan was called in to work on the script.^[4] Jagger refused to film nude scenes in Rome,^[5] claiming that the movie was "pure pornography".^[6]

The filming of the movie was eventually called off in January 1976. Connolly estimated that around £400,000 had been spent, leaving under forty minutes of usable footage.^[1]

Impact

The result of the film contributed to the breakup of the partnership between David Puttnam and Sandy Lieberson.^[7] It also resulted in a number of lawsuits^[8] and was how Tynan met Puttnam and Apted; the three later made Agatha together.^[4]

References