Otto Plaschkes Rip

[Allen Dace]

Otto Plaschkes

Film producer uncompromising in his honesty and passion

David Robinson
Wednesday February 16, 2005
The Guardian

Otto Plaschkes, who has died suddenly at the age of 75, did
not fit any popular stereotype of the film producer. He was
a man of rich culture, equally passionate about books, art
and music. He was possessed of incorruptible honesty and had
the exquisite manners of a scion of the old Austro-Hungarian
empire, even though he had left his native Vienna before the
age of 10.
Perhaps if he had not been such a nice man, of such
uncompromising taste and an incorrigible socialist, he could
have enjoyed a more flamboyant and financially profitable
career in the film business.

Plaschkes's father, a butcher, came from Bratislava and his
mother from Budapest, but they had settled in Vienna by the
time Otto was born - perhaps in 1929, though he always
suspected his mother had added a year to his age to qualify
him for the kindertransport with which he arrived in England
in 1939. He was temporarily adopted by a family in
Liverpool.

Luckier than most Jewish refugees, he was subsequently
reunited with his parents and his older sister, and grew up
in Salisbury, Wiltshire, where his father established a
sausage casing business. At Bishop Wordsworth school, his
teachers included William Golding, and his contemporaries
later claimed to recognise themselves in Golding's novel,
The Lord Of The Flies. All agreed that Otto was the original
of Piggy. The character would have been right, and Golding
never denied the claim.

Plaschkes went on to read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge,
and later took an education diploma at Wadham College,
Oxford, but he had already discovered the cinema.

This was largely thanks to the Cambridge Film Society, which
had hit a high point in its membership and programming under
the chairmanship of Roger Few. Its undergraduate committee
included Tom Pevsner, later producer of the James Bond
series and a constant friend to Plaschkes, and Michael
(later Lord) Birkett. Another lasting influence from this
time was Lindsay Anderson and the Free Cinema movement, with
their watchword, "an attitude is a style and a style is an
attitude".

Thus enthused, Plaschkes wrote to Sir Michael Balcon, who
took him on at Ealing Studios as a runner. He was soon
promoted to production assistant, though he also worked in
the cutting room - and anywhere else where he could satisfy
his passion to know everything about film craft. At Ealing,
he established some lifelong friendships, including the
producer Anthony Havelock-Allen, and the director Jack
Clayton, whose biography Plaschkes recently wrote for the
new Dictionary Of National Biography.

In 1960 he was assistant director to fellow-Viennese Otto
Preminger on Exodus, and, in 1962, production assistant on
Lawrence Of Arabia. By this time, he had already embarked as
a producer in his own right with a film for the Children's
Film Foundation, Bungala Boys (1961).

Plaschkes found his true place with the 60s renaissance of
British cinema, starting as co-producer of Georgy Girl
(1966), directed by Silvio Narizzano, with James Mason, Alan
Bates and Lynn Redgrave, who took over the role after her
sister Vanessa withdrew from the project. After that came
The Bofors Gun (1968), directed by Jack Gold from John
McGrath's play, and an American production, Larry Peerce's A
Separate Peace (1972), for Paramount.

As executive producer for the American Film Theatre,
Plaschkes produced Peter Hall's film of Harold Pinter's The
Homecoming (1974); Bertolt Brecht's Galileo (1975), directed
by Joseph Losey, who had directed the original stage version
in New York in 1947; Pinter's appreciative direction of
Simon Gray's Butley (1976), with Alan Bates and Jessica
Tandy; and, perhaps most notably, Lindsay Anderson's
adaptation of David Storey's In Celebration (1975). Jack
Gold's screen version of David Garnett's The Sailor's Return
(1978) is one of the most underestimated films of its time.

Plaschkes's most commercially successful film was Hopscotch
(1980), a civilised thriller, directed by Ronald Neame and
teaming Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson. His most recent
production was Shadey (1985), directed by Philip Saville
from a script by Snoo Wilson, with Antony Sher as an
eccentric trans-sexual with the ability to project
telepathic film images. Notable television productions
included two directed by Desmond Davis, The Sign Of Four
(1986) and Doggin' Around (1994), and another Sherlock
Holmes adaptation, Douglas Hickox's The Hound Of The
Baskervilles (1984).

A brief, unlikely episode in Plaschkes's career was as head
of production, from 1984 to 1986, for the buccaneering
Cannon Productions, under its colourful Israeli founders
Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus. He was also, for a while,
an inspiring teacher at the National Film School. At the
time of his death, he was working energetically on three new
projects for the cinema.

As a conscientious member of the American Academy of Film
and Television Arts, Plaschkes went earlier this week to a
West End preview theatre to judge the Swedish film nominated
for the Oscar for best foreign language film, Kay Pollak's
As It Is In Heaven, the story of a talented conductor struck
down by a heart attack. Since he had already seen the second
film to be screened that night, the French Les Choristes, he
left the cinema after watching the Pollak, only to suffer
his own fatal heart attack minutes afterwards.

Plaschkes met his future wife, Louise Stein, a woman who
shared his artistic interests, particularly in opera, at an
end-of-shooting party for The Homecoming. They married in
1975. She survives him, with their only daughter.

* Otto Plaschkes, film producer, born September 13 1929;
died February 14 2005

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