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Twinkie: Richard Donner and the Copacabana Club

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Twinkie: The fixer
Walter Lassally Film-maker
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In New York, when we were doing the shooting in New York, we had a fixer who was... I'm almost certain that he was Jewish, but he carried a number of credit cards in different names. Some of the names were Jewish, some were Italian, some were sort of straightforward English, and as the administration changed in New York... If you had an Italian Mayor, he used the Italian credit cards. If you had a Jewish Mayor, then he'd use the Jewish credit cards. We very nearly came a cropper once because he could fix anything. But there's a scene where the car crosses the Brooklyn Bridge and we're in a helicopter, following it from a helicopter, and they said, 'Yes, all right'. And then it turned out that he hadn't got the right permission. He was read the riot act and we said, 'If you ever do that again, you know, you'll never work on a movie again'.

Born in Germany, cinematographer Walter Lassally (1926-2017) was best known for his Oscar-winning work on 'Zorba the Greek'. He was greatly respected in the film industry for his ability to take the best of his work in one area and apply it to another, from mainstream to international art films to documentary. He was associated with the Free Cinema movement in the 1950s, and the British New Wave in the early 1960s. In 1987 he published his autobiography called 'Itinerant Cameraman'.

Listeners: Peter Bowen

Peter Bowen is a Canadian who came to Europe to study and never got round to heading back home. He did his undergraduate work at Carleton University (in Biology) in Ottawa, and then did graduate work at the University of Western Ontario (in Zoology). After completing his doctorate at Oxford (in the Department of Zoology), followed with a year of postdoc at the University of London, he moved to the University's newly-established Audio-Visual Centre (under the direction of Michael Clarke) where he spent four years in production (of primarily science programs) and began to teach film. In 1974 Bowden became Director of the new Audio-Visual Centre at the University of Warwick, which was then in the process of introducing film studies into the curriculum and where his interest in the academic study of film was promoted and encouraged by scholars such as Victor Perkins, Robin Wood, and Richard Dyer. In 1983, his partner and he moved to Greece, and the following year he began to teach for the University of Maryland (European Division), for which he has taught (and continues to teach) biology and film courses in Crete, Bosnia, and the Middle East.

Tags: Brooklyn Bridge, New York, Twinkie

Duration: 1 minute

Date story recorded: June 2004

Date story went live: 24 January 2008