Ronnie Shedlo R.I.P.

[julian_craster]

The Independent Obituary
Ronnie Shedlo
Uncompromising film-maker who migrated from LA to London and was the producer of 'Carrington'

Published: 05 April 2007

Ronald Terence Shedlo, film producer: born Los Angeles 1 May 1940; died London 2 April 2007.

The independent film producer Ronnie Shedlo was a child of Hollywood, with an insider's special contempt for the failings and petty corruptions of his home town. Born during the Second World War in Beachwood, Los Angeles, an only child, he took solace, like many a solitary teenager, from the glamorous world of the movie palaces, and, in particular, from one of its most glamorous citizens, Errol Flynn.
At the age of 16, armed with his scrapbook, Ronnie summoned the courage to ring on Flynn's doorbell. Impressed by the boy's knowledge and dedication ("Blimey," Flynn apparently said, "you know more about me than I do"), Flynn instantly employed him as secretary, dialogue coach and general factotum, a position he retained until Flynn's untimely death three years later.
After the usual years of apprenticeship, Ronnie Shedlo drifted across the Atlantic with the horde of American producers attracted by the already guttering flame of a brief British cinema renaissance. His first film as a producer, written and directed by Bryan Forbes, was The Whisperers (1966), a sensitive mood piece which gained an Oscar nomination for Edith Evans. I met Shedlo the same year, at the first night of my first play in the West End, When Did You Last See My Mother?; a slim figure in an elegant pinstripe suit, he invited me to lunch, arranged for Bryan Forbes to buy the film rights of my play and commissioned my first screenplay. The film was never made, for the usual technical reasons; but this was the beginning of a close and lasting friendship.
Shedlo's next film was The Reckoning (1969), a tough Liverpool story somewhat in the manner of Get Carter, directed by Jack Gold and written by John McGrath, with whom Shedlo also forged a partnership which extended over many years and a number of projects. He then gave a copy of Nathanael West's savage denunciation of Hollywood The Day of the Locust (1939) to John Schlesinger and returned to Los Angeles to make it: but, at some point, he caught the whiff of compromise; and, arguing that this of all subjects required an unforgiving rigour, he withdrew from it.
Work in television films kept him on in America, until in 1981 he produced his favourite of his American films, Back Roads, directed by Martin Ritt with Sally Field. He then spent a brief period as a studio executive at Columbia; but, though he made friendships at the studio, he found the restrictions chafing and the corporate ethos intolerable.
He came back to Britain and, with John McGrath as writer, produced The Dressmaker (1988), based on Beryl Bainbridge's 1973 novel. A little gem of a wartime drama, with Joan Plowright and Billie Whitelaw, directed by Jim O'Brien, it gave Ronnie Shedlo great pleasure and cemented his decision not to return to America.
At about this time, staying in my flat in Notting Hill, Shedlo, a lifelong insomniac, stumbled across a script I had written a decade earlier, Carrington, based on Michael Holroyd's ground-breaking 1967-68 biography of Lytton Strachey. He became obsessed with the idea of getting the film made and, after seven or eight years of constant cliffhangers, he and John McGrath invited me to direct it.
After a gloriously sunny and enjoyable summer of shooting, the film, with Emma Thompson and Jonathan Pryce, opened at the Cannes Festival in 1995, where it won the Special Jury Prize and the Best Actor Prize for Pryce. For many of us, and, I think, Ronnie Shedlo in particular, it was one of those happy experiences that make years of struggle seem entirely worthwhile.
In the years that followed, Shedlo continued to develop a number of interesting projects: a little too interesting, as it turned out, for the majority of potential financiers. Among these were a film about Tom Dooley, an American hero of charitable medicine in Quiet American-era Indo-China, who was in fact being blackmailed on account of his homosexuality by the CIA; an Italian project dealing with an incident towards the end of the extravagant life of Gabriele d'Annunzio; and my adaptation of Somerset Maugham's The Moon and Sixpence, the copyright of which had become insanely complicated and which Shedlo had just succeeded in disentangling after years of patient effort and negotiation.
Despite the many setbacks inevitably associated with a life as an independent film-maker, Ronnie Shedlo was always good company; though often argumentative, he could invariably be disarmed with humour and his explosive laugh was irresistibly infectious. The only serious fight I had with him involved six minutes I agreed to take out of Carrington at the request of the studio, Polygram: Shedlo saw this as a disgraceful compromise - and it was characteristic of him that this must be one of the only known confrontations between a producer and a writer-director in which it was the producer who was insisting on strict adherence to the script.
He was a true original and the most loyal of friends.

Christopher Hampton