Ken Russell's Dracula Read Free

that crime, and had shown remorse.
Coppola had hired Salva because he thought Salva was the best man for the job.
Coppola’s Catholic-Christian upbringing had taught him that ‘forgiveness and
redemption’ are essential parts of civilised life. The American press, and it
seemed from the way it was being reported, much of the American public, disagreed.
The American press and public believed that if a man committed a crime then he
should be tarred with that crime for the rest of his life. Coppola stood by his
Christian values and, in interview after interview, he stood by the man he had
hired. This made the news in England, a country which then still prided itself on
having ‘Christian values’.
    Out of
curiosity, and respect for Coppola’s stance, I went to see Jeepers Creepers .
I was amazed. It was the most enjoyable horror film I’d seen since the horror
heyday of the genre-redefining films of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. Francis
Ford Coppola had indeed hired the best man for the job.
    Jeepers
Creepers is about a
teenage brother and sister driving through the countryside and being terrorised
by a man-bat which collects human body parts, and which lives in a deconsecrated
chapel decorated with the preserved nude corpses of his mostly young male
victims. ‘Jeepers Creepers where did you get those eyes,’ sings the film’s
musical refrain.
    Years later I
finally got to read Ken Russell’s Dracula script, which every Hollywood producer worth his salt had read. ‘Jeepers
Creepers, Francis, where did you get those ideas!’, I thought when I read a
scene set in a deconsecrated chapel, to where the nude body of a boy is
brought. The scene ends with:
    ‘Dracula is
drawn into the whirling incandescent dust until, with a mighty beating of oily
black wings, he flies forth through the shattered, gaping windows into the
darkening night, like a creature from Dante’s Inferno. All faces watch his
triumphant flight in complete awe.’
    Which sort of also
serves as the ‘written on the back of an envelope’ précis for Jeepers
Creepers 2 (2003).
    And Coppola’s Dracula ? Was it an open steal from Ken
Russell? No, Coppola is too good a filmmaker, an artist with his own agenda, to
need to steal a fellow artist’s work. Coppola’s Dracula is Coppola’s own, but Coppola was wise enough to learn from
the filmmaker whom Don Boyd calls The Master. Boyd produced Aria (1987),
a portmanteau musical film with sequences directed by Robert Altman, Derek
Jarman, Jean Luc-Godard, Ken Russell and others. Russell’s sequence, shot for
less money and in less time than any of the others, is the towering highlight
of the film. So what did Coppola take/learn from Ken Russell?
    The
scene-to-scene changes. We hadn’t seen their like before in Coppola’s films.
The camera closes in on the eye of a peacock feather and dissolves to the ‘eye’
of a tunnel from which a train is emerging; bites on Lucy’s neck dissolve to
the eyes of a wolf. Attributed to Roman Coppola in Francis Ford’s DVD commentary,
this device, it seems to me, is a steal in form but not content from the Dracula script by Ken Russell. In the
thirty-five 35mm films Ken Russell made for the BBC between 1959 to 1970 (most
of which are still suppressed), he perfected and advanced the art of the
scene-to-scene transition, and of the symbol-to-symbol transitional dissolve.
Russell’s Dracula script contains
perhaps the greatest scene-to-scene transition of all. A shot of a steamship on
the sea dissolves to a shot of the famous steamship engraved on an ‘England’s
Glory’ matchbox. The matchbox opens and out crawl insects. An insect is picked
out and put into the mouth of the man holding the matchbox: Renfield.
    In addition to
being a jaw-droppingly great moment of cinema, this transition has added depth
and resonance because it references a key symbol within Russell’s oeuvre. The
England’s Glory matchbox was used in a pop painting by the artist Derek Boshier
in Ken