by Rigorous Intuition » Fri Feb 10, 2006 8:06 pm
<!--EZCODE IMAGE START--><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/JeffWells/subalbum1/Performance.jpg" style="border:0;"/><!--EZCODE IMAGE END--><br><br>I haven't seen it in years, but Performance is a terrific film about the fragility of identity. And there's a really rich backstory to the production. Jagger's co-star/co-dependent Fox had a breakdown and conversion experience, and left acting for nine years while labouring as a Christian missionary.<br><br>From <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,7943-1101625,00.html">www.timesonline</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br>Rumours also abound that the actors were taking as many drugs as their on-screen counterparts. Spanish Tony, the Rolling Stones’ infamous drug dealer, claimed that both Jagger and Fox were smoking DMT between takes, a strange psychotropic drug that produces a 15-minute trip. “I didn’t see anything like that, but I wouldn’t be surprised. In those days things were a bit hush-hush,” says Pallenberg. “Spanish Tony was bringing me other things. By the completion of filming I was heavily into drugs.”<br><br>From "Spanich Tony" Sanchez's Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, quoted <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://72.14.207.104/search?q=cache:m7eXDRL7MAkJ:www.geocities.com/WestHollywood/Club/2419/reviews2.htm+DMT+%22Mick+Jagger%22+Fox+Performance+Sanchez+bomb&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=1">here</a><!--EZCODE LINK END-->:<br><br>"I could see the film draining both Jagger and Fox, for they were being forced to question the very roots of their beings. James, particularly, was becoming as dangerously disoriented off screen as he was on. And Jagger, too, seemed to have become Brian; he was beginning to crack up and lose his identity. The two would smoke DMT together in their dressing room so that they could add realism to the drug scenes. But the drug has the hydrogen bomb impact of a twelvehour acid trip crammed into the space of fifteen minutes and served to only alienate them further from the real world. Recently doctors have discovered that DMT can cause irreparable brain damage."<br><br>"Irreparable brain damage"? Hadn't heard that before.<br><br>Some interesting asides about the director, <!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.phinnweb.org/roeg/films/performance/cammell/">Donald Cammell</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br>When Donald Cammell put a shotgun to his head at his home on April 23, 1996, he was expecting a quick death. He'd been depressed for some time. He had even told some of the people close to him that he was contemplating suicide. But most people still saw the witty, urbane 62-year old they'd come to know. His death was to be the brutal resolution to a life filled with promise but plagued with false stars and setbacks. Cammell's disillusionment was now total; his marriage was over, and his latest film, Wild Side, had, he thought, been butchered by its producers.<br><br>But when Cammell pulled the trigger, the wound did not kill him immediately. When the emergency services were called, he was still shockingly alive, and if the ambulance hadn't had such trouble finding his home in the Hollywood Hills, he may have survived. <br><br>...<br><br>Born in Edinburgh, on January 17, 1934, he was older than the Stones' crowd, but he was an urbane figure, and they enjoyed his company. His father, Charles, was a poet, journalist and the author of books on Byron and Rossetti. <!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong>More significantly, he had written a biography of Aleister Crowley</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->, the occultist branded "the wickedest man in the world" by Lord Beaverbrook. Cammell was well versed in the arts and literature, plus it was<!--EZCODE BOLD START--><strong> rumoured -- entirely without foundation -- that Crowley was his godfather</strong><!--EZCODE BOLD END-->.<br><br><!--EZCODE IMAGE START--><img src="http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v226/JeffWells/subalbum1/performance1.jpg" style="border:0;"/><!--EZCODE IMAGE END--><br> <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p216.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=rigorousintuition>Rigorous Intuition</A> at: 2/10/06 5:11 pm<br></i>
