Bugsy Malone (16 page)

D
ANDY
D
AN'S GANG
lined up against their bike sedans. Bronx Charlie stroked his splurge gun, and hugged it close to him for protection. Chinese Benny Lee chewed his toothpick until it shredded at the end. His oriental grin looked even more evil than his oriental scowl. The rest of the gang looked pretty pleased with themselves as Dandy Dan walked back and forth, giving them his final address. He was dressed in a snazzy grey overcoat with an astrakhan fur collar. His tie was fastened, as ever, in an immaculate knot. He stroked his moustache with his forefinger as he spoke. He was feeling even more superior than usual.

“Gang, this is the caper that's gonna take the lid off City Hall. This is the big one.”

The faithful gang mindlessly repeated everything their dapper boss said.

“The big one.”

“The shakedown,” said Dan.

“The shakedown.”

“In fact, this is the pay off.”

“The pay off.”

“It's got to be good, it's got to be neat, and it's got to be quick.”

The gang responded with monotonous loyalty. “It's got to be good, it's got to be neat, it's got to...”

However good Dandy Dan felt about the situation, the last line was enough. He bit off the end of the sentence.

“Stop repeating everything I say, will you!”

The gang's self-satisfied faces dropped a notch or two. Jackson coughed loudly to fill the embarrassed silence. Dan stroked his moustache once more and continued to be superior.

“You shouldn't have any trouble – just Fat Sam and a few dance hall girls.”

The gang laughed at Dandy Dan's joke. They always did.

“OK off we go, then. And good luck.”

As Dan turned to his tan sedan, his loyal hoods broke into a round of applause. Bronx Charlie stood on the running board and held his gun in the air.

“Three cheers for Dandy Dan. Hip Hip Hooray!”

Dan was overwhelmed. Not very convincingly, he waved aside their praise, and murmured, “Too kind, boys. Too kind.”

Dan climbed into his car and Jackson slammed the door. Shoulders and Yonkers climbed into the front seat beside him, balancing their splurge guns on their knees.

“Now for Fat Sam's Grand Slam.”

 

At the speakeasy, Bugsy, dressed in a waiter's white jacket, organised the down-and-out gang as they changed into snazzy tuxedos to look like regular speakeasy customers. Leroy wrestled with a starched collar that sprang out as quickly as he clipped it into place. Fat Sam supervised trays of custard pies as they were brought in and tucked away secretly under the tables. The bartenders stowed their splurge guns close at hand behind the drinks counter. The dancing girls arranged their costumes as if nothing was happening. Razamataz tinkled on the piano, checking the notes. He looked nervously at the door and back to the battle preparations on the speakeasy floor.

The hubbub was deafening as Bugsy fired out instructions. Leroy checked the barrels of the guns and demonstrated how to load the splurges. Fat Sam kept close to Tallulah, Dotty and Tillie. He wanted someone to duck behind should the action get hot. Suddenly, Babyface's head appeared through the peephole that led to the bookstore. He yelled, “They're here! They're here!”

Jelly pulled the lever and the door slid back to let Babyface in. He vaulted over Jelly and the hat-check lady as Bugsy shouted at the crowd to be ready.

“OK, everybody. Just act like normal. Girls, off you go. Razamataz, music.”

Razamataz pounded into the piano. The dancing girls erupted into their number with a frenzy of syncopated legs and waving arms. It wasn't to last long, however. Dan's procession of cars had arrived outside.

Dandy Dan stepped out of his sedan and stroked his moustache with his forefinger. The rest of the gang stood, splurge guns at the ready, waiting for their orders. He coughed to clear his throat and make his final speech.

“OK, gang, I don't have to tell you how important this is to me. When you get in there, keep those fingers pumping. Because, remember, it's history you'll be writing. OK. Let's go.”

Inside Pop Becker's bookstore, Shoulders and Benny Lee pulled the sliding door across and Dandy Dan and his gang rushed through, fingers twitching on the triggers of their guns. Dan's voice sounded more superior than ever before in his career.

“OK, everybody. Freeze.”

The speakeasy customers turned their heads in the hoods' direction, but there were no screams. Just a silence that was broken by Sam, who popped up and shouted, “Bugsy, guys, let them have it.”

Fat Sam's newly-found allies burst into action. The smartened up down-and-outs appeared from behind the bar, hurling custard pies and firing splurge guns. Dandy Dan's gang didn't know what had hit them.

They ducked down to avoid the barrage of missiles that whistled around their ears and occasionally hit them fair and square between the eyes. Bugsy and Leroy fired away without stopping. Soon, the entire speakeasy was a deluge of splurge, custard pies and flour bombs. In seconds, the rich dark brown walls turned to milky white as the battle raged. Pies and splurge flew in all directions. Tallulah caught one head on, and it splattered across her painted face and spread round the back of her ears. Fat Sam was a more elusive target. He ducked and dived, avoiding everything that was thrown at him. He was particularly pleased with himself when he caught Dandy Dan a direct hit on the shoulder, and then followed it up with a bulls-eye on the nose. He clapped his hands and laughed out loud – but his mouth was still open when Benny Lee returned the compliment with a crafty butterfly curver that nearly took Sam's head off. Leroy also caught one, and his smiling black face was suddenly an unsmiling white face. Fizzy tried to take refuge in the broom cupboard, but was floored by a sly one from Bronx Charlie – who, in turn, was changed into a mountain of splurge by a particularly accurate burst of shooting from Babyface. The girls in the chorus took refuge behind Razamataz's piano, but found it hard to find a safe place because the band were piled eight high in the two-foot wide space behind the instrument.

The entire speakeasy floor was covered by an eerie white cloud that made everything seem unreal. Almost everybody resembled a melting ice cream cone on a summer's day. Suddenly, Razamataz, still in his exposed position on the piano stool, ducked a vicious-looking pie from Laughing Boy, who was not coming out of the fight with as many honours as he would have liked, and fell on to the sticky, splurge-covered piano keys. The musical chord cut through the milk cloud of the splurge battle and all at once the ear-splitting din was replaced by silence. Razamataz, unaware of exactly what he'd done, did the only thing he knew how. He started singing. It was a ridiculous thing to do, considering the circumstances, but however frightened he was inside, he couldn't stop his fingers hitting the keys – the words coming out of his mouth.

Suddenly, a miracle occurred. The band picked themselves up and joined in his song, as did the chorus girls, and the barman, and the down-and-outs, and Dandy Dan's hoods. Fat Sam and Dandy Dan looked at one another in disbelief. Then Tallulah broke away from Sam and started singing too. So did Bugsy and Blousey, who had managed to escape the worst of the splurge battle. Soon the entire speakeasy was buzzing and tingling with the sound of their song and dance. Fat Sam and Dandy Dan, overcome by the ridiculous, mad, happy situation, began to join in. All rivalry was forgotten, all nastiness vanished, as people began to hug one another. Sam shook hands with Dan. Tallulah got kissed a little too often by Leroy – and Blousey and Bugsy sneaked for the exit, where Dandy Dan's empty sedan stood at the kerb.

The sound of the singing seemed as loud on the open road as it did in the speakeasy, as Bugsy and Blousey drove off into the sunset – the kind you only see in movies, and the kind they say dreams are made of.

 

Open your eyes and see

Just what you want to see.

See how nice it is to be

Just what you want to be.

Before
Bugsy Malone
was a film it first was just a story. In 1974 I had four small children and to keep them occupied on long (and mostly boring) car journeys I would invent a story for them. It was a world of gangsters and showgirls and set in New York City, a long way from where we lived. Most importantly, at my eldest son Alex's insistence, the story was peopled with kids, just like the four of them sitting in the back of the car.

Most of the scripts I had written at the time were very English and it was hard to get them made as films, so I thought that I would write an ‘American' story. To be honest, I didn't know much about America at the time but I had always loved American movies and
Bugsy
became a basketful of the memories that had filled my head as a small boy at the Blue Hall cinema, Islington, when I was growing up.

The most difficult task when making a film with just children is the casting. It's also, arguably, the most important, because if you don't get the casting right you won't get the film right. For a whole year I went all over England to American air force bases, to dancing schools, drama schools, French schools, German schools, boxing schools, American schools. After a year we had seen over 10,000 kids – the narrowed down shortlist alone amounted to 20 hours of videotape. In New York and Los Angeles, I lugged my video camera all over – from dance schools in North Hollywood to local schools in Brooklyn, Harlem and the Bronx.

In a Brooklyn Catholic school I found Fat Sam. My normal practice was to go into classrooms, and with the permission of the teachers, involve the kids in conversations about movies, etc. In one of the classes I asked them, “Who is the naughtiest kid in the class?” Thirty kids pointed to one chubby little boy at the back of the room. “Cassisi!” they screamed in unison. John Cassisi, as modestly as he was able, put his hands up, palms out, smiled and nodded. He spoke in Italian, apparently agreeing with his classmates' conclusion. I took him off to a corner of the schoolyard and although he had never acted before, he yelled out the lines from my script with gusto. He was a natural, and I knew right away that we had our Fat Sam.

Back in Manhattan, I found Scott Baio. He had already done small parts in commercials and I loved his gravelly voice – still a child's voice, but with that wonderful New York ‘raspy tonsils' sound that we needed to make our dialogue sound believable. In a Harlem dance school I found Alvin “Humpty” Johnson, who plays Fizzy. To be honest, he couldn't dance very well, and reading the script was impossible for him, but he was a beautiful kid.

In Los Angeles I met with Jodie Foster. Although only twelve, she was very experienced, having started acting very young. She was uniquely brilliant and frankly, she had made more films than I had. During filming I would always joke that if anything happened to me, Jodie could easily take over.

Back at Pinewood Studios, outside London, we had started to build our sets. The main New York street, slightly scaled down from the original, was built inside Pinewood's biggest stage so that we could film night scenes during the day. Also an army of seamstresses were busy making 500 miniature costumes, many cut down from a mountain of clothes from the actual period, we had found at flea markets.

Paul Williams, who did the music and lyrics, was touring across America and whatever town he stopped in, he would record a few more songs and send tapes off to us so that we could rehearse the songs and choreograph the dance routines. At Pinewood, our cast would walk around with portable tape recorders learning their songs and routines.

For the duration of the film, throughout the summer and autumn of 1975, we set up a full-time school at Pinewood with six teachers coping with US and UK students and kids of differing ages and abilities. The local welfare officer was always lurking with a stopwatch to make sure we obeyed the rules with regard to how long child actors could be ‘under the lights' on set before being whisked away to lessons. To feed them, the kitchens churned out thousands of hamburgers – the Pinewood canteen becoming the biggest hamburger restaurant between London and Birmingham!

We took over the local Holiday Inn, which became an enormous dormitory for the entire cast. Each day Jodie would regale me with the previous night's shenanigans as the cast broke their strict curfew: chaperones chasing Johnny Cassisi, chasing dancers, chasing boys, chasing exhausted assistant directors. The activity at the Holiday Inn during filming would have made an interesting film of its own.

Our other challenge was the ‘splurge gun'. With the obvious logic that a gangster story needed guns but a kids' film didn't, I had envisaged a projectile version of the silent movies' custard pie. The original models were powered by compressed air and fired a missile of cream encapsulated in a ball of wax. The producer, Alan Marshall, and I were the original guinea pigs for the prototype gun. We both survived the early tests, being smacked in the face by missiles that felt more like golf balls than benign puffs of cream. We were both walking around with a red splotch on our foreheads for weeks afterwards. Consequently, in the film the effect is an illusion: the guns fire ping-pong balls and, through the magic of film editing, what usually arrives is a dollop of whipped cream usually thrown by myself or the prop-man. After 70 days of filming, over a thousand custard pies were thrown and we also got through 100 gallons of artificial cream.

In the final scene – the speakeasy ‘shootout' between the two gangs, the rich brown set was instantly turned into a snow-scape by the entire cast in a frenzy of custard pies, splurge guns and flour bombs, which destroyed the set in about thirty seconds flat. No one was left un-splurged – including the film crew.

I had written a couple of chapters of this book before the film started and completed it after the film was finished. Thinking up a story is one thing, making it into a living, breathing film is quite another and the film was undoubtedly a labour of love for everyone involved. But first comes the story, which I told to the Parker kids all those years ago. As Razamataz sings in the speakeasy in the final scene:
You give a little love and it all comes back to you
.

Alan Parker