An Acci­den­tal Studio

With British cin­e­ma now in rude health, it’s easy to for­get just how bleak things were in the ​’80s. At the start of the decade that gave us Duran Duran, Pac-Man and the Walk­man, the British film indus­try was basi­cal­ly on its back­side, with Brits aver­ag­ing a mea­gre 0.4 vis­its a year and just over 20 British films being made annu­al­ly (today it’s well over 90).

Acci­den­tal Stu­dio, a new doc­u­men­tary about Hand­Made Films, the film stu­dio co-found­ed by George Har­ri­son, shows how the for­mer Bea­t­le helped revi­talise British cin­e­ma dur­ing this peri­od by bankrolling uncon­ven­tion­al mas­ter­pieces such as Mon­ty Pyton’s The Life of Bri­an, The Long Good Fri­day, Time Ban­dits, Mona Lisa and With­nail and I.

Although it uses a fair­ly typ­i­cal talk­ing heads set-up, which mix­es new inter­views with the likes of Ter­ry Gilliam, Richard E Grant and Michael Palin with archive footage of Har­ri­son and Bob Hoskins, Acci­den­tal Stu­dio is a fun his­to­ry les­son that leaves you with the feel­ing Har­ri­son was incred­i­bly uncom­fort­able being a businessman.

Hand­Made Films grew from his hob­by and a chance to have some fun with the Pythons into a bit of a cor­po­rate mon­ster large­ly due to co-founder Denis O’Brien, who pushed the stu­dio away from quirky British come­dies and into cer­ti­fied dis­as­ters such as epic Madon­na flop Shang­hai Surprise.

The film works best when it con­sid­ers how the waters of inde­pen­dent stu­dios are often sul­lied by more sin­is­ter cap­i­tal­is­tic forces. O’Brien is very much pre­sent­ed as the vil­lain of the piece, who tried to sab­o­tage With­nail & I while push­ing a con­fused Har­ri­son into far more com­mer­cial film-mak­ing. In archive footage, he even con­cedes: ​“Man­ag­ing a film stu­dio is a con­stant bat­tle between the artist and the mon­ey, and I don’t like being the money.”

But even if Har­ri­son was indif­fer­ent to the busi­ness of film, it’s clear that his gen­eros­i­ty helped to cre­ate some of the most inter­est­ing British films of the time. This doc­u­men­tary should at the very least inspire a new gen­er­a­tion to reassess the studio’s lega­cy, while hope­ful­ly inspir­ing them to revis­it lost Hand­Made Films’ clas­sics such as Pow­wow High­way and A Pri­vate Func­tion. In a hilar­i­ous anec­dote, it’s revealed some­one received a cred­it as ​‘buck­et boy’ for the lat­ter film. His unfor­tu­nate job? To pick up the pig actor’s poo through­out the shoot.

An Acci­den­tal Stu­dio takes a while to get going, only real­ly com­ing alive when we start to get a sense of the pol­i­tics that go hand-in-hand with pro­duc­ing a film. But it is a thrill to be immersed in an era of film­mak­ing so far removed from end­less super­hero sequels, where char­ac­ter actors like Bob Hoskins were allowed to shine and orig­i­nal ideas about time trav­el­ling teenagers some­how dom­i­nat­ed the box office. Hand­Made Films only oper­at­ed as a stu­dio for just over 10 years, but its impact on British cin­e­ma will last forever.