1970, Wardour Street is awash with advertising for it's latest offerings, there is Twinky, the schoolgirl sex comedy starring Susan George and Charles Bronson, Hammer is pushing When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth and Tigon is unveiling their menage a trois drama Monique. There to record it all was ATV and director Ross Devenish for the TV documentary 'Celluloid Village of Dreams' which was shown on ITV on the 13th October 1970 in the 10:30pm slot.
Wardour Street was and is the hub of Britain's film industry, to the movie biz what Denmark Street was to the music industry. As the documentary's title implies, Celluloid Village of Dreams portrays Wardour Street and the surrounding Soho area as it's own little village. One that is unreal looking to outsiders, detached from the rest of Britain, and whose residents toil away in either the film or sex industries, the line between the two becoming very blurred by 1970.
For star spotters there is fleeting glimpses here of Marty Feldman, Julie Ege and Danny LaRue, seen at swanky film industry get togethers. The real stars of Celluloid Village of Dreams though are people who you've either never heard of or know only as names on movie credits.
Like any village, Wardour Street had it's own societal structure and hierarchy. On top there are big men flaunting their success in the form of fat cigars and rolls royces, but Celluloid Village of Dreams is equally fascinated by the have-nots of this society. Youths lugging film cans around Wardour Street, and the cleaning ladies of film industry offices, dining out on their brief interactions with Stanley Baker and Richard Attenborough. A smoky, boozy pub, where pipe smoking and sideburns are the norm, is described as the film industry's answer to the labour exchange, it's where actors go to talk shop, seek work or just drown their sorrows.
The current big shot of the industry is Nat Cohen, the head of EMI. Cohen is exactly how you'd imagine the man who brought you the On the Buses movies to be...fast talking, chauffeur driven, inevitably the owner of a rolls royce and a racehorse, very Arthur Daley. Celluloid Village of Dreams is an ode to showmanship, with many men of Cohen's generation having backgrounds in the carnival, gambling or boxing promotion, the skills honed there serving them greatly when they transitioned to the film industry. Entrepreneurism is the name of the game in Wardour Street, with Jack Isow's restaurant -located just under the famous Raymond Revuebar signage- playing to the village giants' vanity and love of showbiz razzmatazz by offering amazing, personalised seats embossed with the names of the movie industry elite. Conveniently giving an idea of who was considered the film industry's most valuable assets at the time. Recipients of the embossed seats treatment including the aforementioned Nat Cohen, Colonel James Carreras of Hammer films and the American comedian Jerry Lewis. While visibly a patriarchal society, the documentary doesn't overlook the few female villagers, including hardworking film editor Marlene Fletcher and the elderly female owner of the Playboy strip club.
Sex and showbiz are seen to go hand in hand in Wardour Street, even if they occasionally seem reticent to be seen holding hands in public. Celluloid Village of Dreams takes a detour into the Pigalle nightclub where glamour girls work three backbreaking shifts a night in order to put food on the table of their young families. The odd hours they work, often returning home at 3am, leads to malicious gossip from normy neighbours about what these girls do for a living.
The TV Times coverage of the programme placed particular emphasis on the participation of a Soho stripper called Hazel Longley, who sounded burnt out and disillusioned "My eyes have been open by Soho. Now I'm so hard that if anyone really upsets me in the street I think I'd kill without thinking". Longley is a Soho subject who would have been worth hearing from, disappointingly then that the programme itself barely features her, apart from a few seconds of her strip routine. It wouldn't be until 2022 that Longley would get to tell her full story of stripping, sex work, beatings and her involvement with Maltese gangsters in her autobiography 'Wounds that never heal...broken' which sounds like a harrowing read. More Celluloid Village of Nightmares, than dreams.
Existing some place between the sex and film industries are the fellas of Nymph films, seen shooting an 8mm glamour film starring Lucienne Camille alias Sylvia Bayo. "I like film, I like good looking girls, I think if one has to work one should enjoy what one is doing...and err I like good looking girls" explains glamour filmmaker Derek, as footage from one of his earlier titty flicks, starring Sue Bond (pre-Benny Hill Show) unspools onscreen.
Celluloid Village of Dreams also captures a truly notorious figure to be, in the form of future blue filmmaker John Lindsay, who'd come to prominence in the 1970s for his jailbait fixated hardcore shorts like 'Jolly Hockey Sticks' and 'Schoolgirl Joyride'. Beginning as he meant to go on, Lindsay is here seen doing promotional work for Miracle films in Piccadilly Circus, taking photos of girls handing out flyers for 'Naked England' an Italian Mondo movie that Miracle was releasing. One embarrassed member of the public, sat at the statue of Eros, uses the flyer to conceal their face from the camera. The girls are topless, albeit covered by union jack flags, and true to form Lindsay is ordering the troops to be more daring "let's see a bit of booby, show em what you got, luv" insists Lindsay in his distinct Scottish brogue. One of the girls notes that the police have arrived, a situation that Lindsay would grow accustomed to in the 1970s.
Truth be told, there is nothing too deep or profound in Celluloid Village of Dreams, nevertheless it's an invaluable time capsule of the film industry at the dawn of the 1970s. Many of these people are gone now, but the documentary lives on, because Celluloid heroes, and villains, never really die. The documentary's funniest line, and it's own epitaph, is "there are two kinds of prostitution in Soho...and films pay better".
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