Donald Cammell
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Born in the camera obscura (then known as outlook tower) on Castlehill, near the castle in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of the poet and writer Charles Richard Cammell. The older Cammell wrote a biography of Aleister Crowley focussing principally on the occultist's poetry and Crowley, who lived near the Cammells for a time, knew the young Donald. A prodigy, he was a society portrait painter and, thanks to family connections, a prominent fixture of the 'swinging London' social scene of the 1960s, specifically of what became known as the 'Chelsea Set'.
Cammell was a central figure in the making of Performance. In writing the screenplay he drew on both his familiarity with the London underworld of the 1960s and association with the pop musicians of the day. In his collaboration with Roeg, Cammell concentrated on working with the actors, and took heavy responsibility for the prolonged editing process of the film in California; producer Sanford 'Sandy' Lieberson and co-director Roeg were by then committed to other projects.
After Performance Cammell struggled to make another film produced until the visually stunning, but low key Demon Seed in 1977. He also made the eccentric horror thriller White Of The Eye in 1987. Between infrequent film and TV directing jobs, Cammell directed music videos for the likes of U2.
When Cammell's 1995 film Wild Side was cut by the producer, he committed suicide in Hollywood, California by shooting himself, though his wife claimed the wound was not immediately fatal, and that he asked for a mirror so that he could watch himself die. (This is disputed in the published Cammell biography.) A posthumous "director's cut", commissioned by FilmFour, and edited by his widow and co-screenwriter China Kong and editor Frank Mazzola, was released in 2000 to critical acclaim.
In 2005, Fan-Tan, a novel Cammell conceived with actor Marlon Brando in 1978, was published.
Filmography
Films as director
- Performance, with Nicolas Roeg (1968; released 1970)
- Demon Seed (1977)
- White Of The Eye (1987)
- The Argument (1971; released 1998)
- Wild Side (1995; released uncut in 1999)
- Donald Cammell: The Ultimate Performance (1999)
