‘You’re a comical looking geezer. You’ll look funny when you’re fifty,’ Chas the gangster says to Turner the rock star in Performance, Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg’s notorious Sixties movie. ‘A heavy, evil film,’ the reviewer from It magazine wrote when Warner Brothers finally released Performance in 1970. ‘Don’t see it on acid.’
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Fifty years on, I’m casting the pod on this week’s Green Room with cinema historian Jay Glennie, author of a definitive account of the legendary and still alarming making of Performance. Perhaps surprisingly, most of the protagonists are still alive: Mick Jagger, who played Turner; James Fox, who played Chas; producer Sandy Lieberson; Cammell’s co-director Nicolas Roeg; many crew members; and several cast members whose criminal records are longer than their Imdb listing. Glennie has interviewed them all, and confirms that every rumor and legend you’ve heard about Performance is probably true.
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