The Who recorded the soundtrack with the whole cast from January to March 1974. The Specialist was originally to be played by Christopher Lee, but it is Jack Nicholson, who was in London at a time when Lee wasn’t, who finally raises his eyebrows in his best Jack Nicholson impression as the doctor who seems more interested in Tommy’s mum than he is in actually curing the boy. Other small parts were distributed by chance, like Eric Clapton, who took on the part of the Preacher as a favour to Pete Townshend, who had helped him give up on heroin, or Jack Nicholson, who agreed to appear in the film because he was intrigued with Ken Russell’s films. David Bowie and Mick Jagger were in talks to play the Acid Queen but both turned down the role of the drug-addict gipsy prostitute in favour of Tina Turner, who fantastically delivers in one of the film’s peak moments. With one condition though: to keep the character’s outfit, including his huge brown Dr. While Ann-Margret and Oliver Reed were already cast in the parts of Tommy’s mother and stepfather, a lot of stars pushed the doors of the casting director’s office: the Pinball Wizard part was first offered to Tiny Tim by Townshend, a proposition Stigwood immediately ruled against, then to David Essex and Rod Stewart, until Elton John talked the latter out of it and took the part. Ken Russell, in the meantime, struggled with the casting. The Who created brand new arrangements for the songs to transfigurate the uniformity of their 1969 rock album into a film soundtrack that led them to paths they had never taken before, venturing into fanfare music (‘ Bernie’s Holiday Camp’), Christmas songs (‘ Christmas’), silent-film soundtracks (‘ Cousin Kevin’), even gospel music (‘ We’re Not Gonna Take It’). In the winter of 1973/1974, the two men worked separately on the film. In the end, Tommy would include all twenty-four songs from the original album, with Townshend eventually changing some of the lyrics and adding a few songs for the story to run more smoothly.Įric Clapton as The Preacher in Tommy. For a whole year, Russell and Townshend wrote a script that would include elements and scenes from some of Russell’s unfilmed scripts as well as some new material written by Townshend especially for the film version of the rock opera. So, when producer Robert Stigwood convinced Russell to direct Tommy, the filmmaker embraced The Who as part of his delirious endeavour to bring composers to the big screen and started working on the film adaptation of the band’s rock opera album along with Pete Townshend, The Who’s guitarist and the genuine éminence grise behind Tommy. In the 1960s, he told the life and times of composers such as Sir Edward Elgar, Prokofiev, Béla Bartók or Claude Debussy in a BBC documentary series, and depicted a fictionalised version of the life of Tchaikovsky, before doing the same with Mahler, Liszt and Wagner. The convention-shattering Ken Russell was also a very refined man, who had the utmost respect and admiration for artists of times passed, especially composers. All those films gave Russell the opportunity to develop and perfect an aesthetic that would be his very own, characterised by psychedelic visual experimentations and a heavy taste for opulence of all kinds-particularly in costumes and set design. While still facing severe controversy because of The Devils (the historical horror film released two years earlier), the director, in the time frame of a year and a half, managed to finish the shooting of his Gustav Mahler biographical film in addition to the previous releases of his Twiggy-starring musical The Boy Friend and his biography of French artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Savage Messiah. The year was 1974 and Ken Russell was at the peak of his artistry. Ann-Margret, Roger Daltrey and Oliver Reed in Tommy.
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