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Donald Seton Cammell (17 January 1934 – 24 April 1996) was a United Kingdom painter, screenwriter, and film director. He has a cult reputation largely due to his debut film Performance, which he wrote the screenplay for and co-directed with Nicolas Roeg. He died by suicide after the last film he directed, Wild Side, was taken away from him and recut by the production company.
Brought up in a bohemian atmosphere, Cammell was raised in an environment he described as "filled with magicians, metaphysicians, spiritualists and demons" including Aleister Crowley. Charles Richard Cammell had known Crowley personally and was an admirer of the magus, particularly of his poetry. In Charles Cammell's 1962 biography Aleister Crowley: The Man: The Mage: The Poet, he wrote that Crowley "was a poet of lyric genius."
Owing to his father's relationship with the diabolist, Donald Cammell met Crowley. He claimed he sat on Crowley's lap. As an actor, Cammell would play Osiris in Lucifer Rising, a film made by Kenneth Anger, a Crowley disciple who based the film on Crowley's poem "Hymn to Lucifer".
After the end of a short-lived early marriage, he moved to New York to live with model Deborah Dixon and concentrate on painting nudes.
After Performance, he wrote a script called Ishtar that was to feature William Burroughs as a judge kidnapped while on holiday in Morocco. Like most of the scripts he worked on, it remained unproduced. His unwillingness to compromise his ideas alienated him from the Hollywood establishment that perceived him as an eccentric troublemaker. Several of Cammell's major frustrations involved Marlon Brando. In 1978, Brando invited Cammell to collaborate on a script called Fan Tan which Brando soon lost interest in; then he asked Cammell to adapt the script as a novel and again scuttled the project halfway through by losing interest. In 1987, Brando employed Cammell to direct a script he had written called Jericho. After eighteen months of work, while on pre-production in Mexico, Brando again decided he did not want to go through with the project.
The next project Cammell managed to get made was a short called The Argument that was shot on location in the Utah desert by Vilmos Zsigmond on the sly in 1971. Cammell had obtained the camera on the grounds that Zsigmond was shooting tests for another film. This confrontation between a frustrated film director and a goddess (played by Myriam Gibril, Cammell's lover and Isis to his Osiris in Kenneth Anger's Lucifer Rising) covers many of Cammell's favourite themes, but Cammell never completed the film. It was rediscovered and put together by his editor, Frank Mazzola, in 1999.
Cammell's next feature was Demon Seed (1977). Although not a personal project, this science fiction thriller (based on a book by Dean R. Koontz) featured many of Cammell's obsessions. A super-computer takes over a scientist's house with his wife (Julie Christie) inside and proceeds to terrorise and ultimately impregnate her. A two-hander between Christie and the computer, Demon Seed's mind games and closed environment are reminiscent of Performance, while the idea of the machine giving a child to the heroine and thus providing itself with a human incarnation is another example of Cammell's fascination with transformative sexuality. Cammell had to wait until 1987 to complete another project, White of the Eye. This study of a serial killer features a return of his cross-cutting techniques (absent from Demon Seed).
His final film Wild Side (1995) was a troubled production. Financed by Nu Image, a production company that made exploitation pictures, Cammell was hired to shoot an art film as a prestige project, to boost Nu Image's stature in the movie industry. As Cammell shot and edited his film, the producers became anxious over his artistic avant-garde techniques. Nu Image executives reportedly demanded that he include more nudity in the film. Ultimately, they took over the film, abandoning Cammell's cut and re-cutting the film to eliminate his innovative cross-cutting (a technique that goes back to Performance) to create a more linear narrative, and inserting more nudity. The Nu Image cut made the narrative incoherent and was disowned by Cammell. Cammell's brother said after his brother's suicide that the production company's interference made him consider retaliating with violence. David Cammell said, "...at one point he Donald was going to go and shoot producer Eli Cohen, but I managed to persuade him that it was a negative thing to shoot your producer and then shoot yourself."
Cammell's depression reportedly was exacerbated by the studio's recutting of his recent movie Wild Side without his permission.
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