Nothing Succeeds Like Success : Hollywood Beckons British Screenwriter Again After Triumphs

Dennis Potter, Britain’s most potent and provocative TV dramatist, turned his back on Hollywood after his “Pennies From Heaven” did for MGM what “Howard the Duck” did for Universal.

“I built up record-breaking losses for MGM,” he says. He can afford to laugh about it now, because Hollywood wants him back.

The reason is Potter’s highly acclaimed British miniseries “The Singing Detective,” whose screening on PBS in July moved New York Times film critic Vincent Canby to call it one of the best movies of the year--even though it was not really a movie.

“I know from the offers being made to me--most of which I’m happy to turn down--that there’s a renewed interest and understanding in America of what I’m about,” says Potter.

That should heighten with the opening this week of “Track 29,” Potter’s first movie in three years, made by cult British director Nicolas Roeg. “Track 29,” which stars Roeg’s wife Theresa Russell and rising young English actor Gary Oldman, will reinforce its writer’s reputation for stirring controversy.

Set in North Carolina (though backed by former Beatle George Harrison’s British company, Handmade Films), it is about a bored, unstable, alcoholic

housewife who has an affair with a passing Englishman she believes to be her long-lost son.

The movie, shot in Wilmington, N.C., on a tiny budget (around $3 million), is based on a TV play called “Schmoedipus,” which Potter wrote for the BBC in 1974. It explores many familiar Potter themes--in particular, the thin boundaries between fantasy and reality. Is the stranger really there? Or does he exist only in Russell’s head? Is he her past--or is he her future?

Really good artists, says Roeg, only have one subject. And Potter admits that his main concern has always been to write about what goes on in people’s heads.

“In the last resort, all writing is about what’s in people’s heads--unless it’s about car chases,” he says.

“Reality is shaped by the memories and feelings we have, there’s no question about that. It can be a beautiful day and you can walk down the street and something’s disturbing you. You don’t see the beautiful day, you just see the disturbing thing.

“People have the imperative to create and shape their own lives, and they only tend to do that via crisis or fantasy. It’s when the crisis and the fantasy come together that you get the interesting self-discoveries.”

Potter could be talking about the heroine of “Track 29” or about Philip Marlow--the central character in “The Singing Detective” who, lying in a hospital bed with a horrifying skin disease, loses control of his body temperature and begins to fantasize about his life.

The writer could also be talking about himself.

Like his fictional creation, Potter, 53, suffers from psoriatic arthropathy--a rare hereditary disease that causes the skin to blister and joints to swell painfully.

Permanent reminders of the illness are Potter’s gnarled and knotted fingers, which he can never uncurl. And every six months he gets a renewed attack which, at its worst, can make it agony to move.

The treatment includes doses of an anti-cancer drug that makes him physically sick. But even so, the writer describes the illness that has dogged him for 27 years as “half enemy, half friend.”

“Not many people have had the chance to address themselves in prolonged crises in the way I have,” he says. “That’s what the illness has given me. I gave up all my public aspirations--journalism and politics, my original careers. Everything I thought about myself had to be re-examined.

“That turning inward can be destructive, of course. But if you turn a very hard eye inward and really look, then it is creative. You have to remake what you thought you were, and what you make is better. It was like an enforced lesson in what it’s like to be a human being.

“Seeing ‘The Singing Detective’ made me realize for the first time what I’d gone through. It made me a bit depressed at first, then worried, because it had come up too close.

“I thought: ‘What am I going to write about now?’ I felt the Singing Detective was sitting on my shoulder, with his scabby skin, clutching my neck. But I think I’ve killed him off now.”

In Britain, Potter is TV’s most acclaimed writer and one of its most popular.

“Dennis has a fan club,” says Roeg. “I think people recognize something in his work that secretly they feel themselves, and it’s a shock to see that depth of truth on the screen.”

The son of a coal miner whose father had only read one book in his life, Potter won a scholarship to Oxford and wrote his first novel, “The Glittering Coffin”--a searing indictment of modern Britain--the year he graduated. In those days, he confesses, he used to “spit on Rolls-Royces.”

He became a journalist and stood unsuccessfully as a parliamentary candidate for the Labour Party. When his illness made it impossible for him to continue, he put himself on the map with a series of TV plays about a coal miner’s son who becomes a member of Parliament and betrays his family and background.

A product of a church upbringing, he is seen as a religious writer who likes dishing out the hellfire. But his work, while popular (the original TV series of “Pennies From Heaven” made Bob Hoskins a star), is often controversial. It was only last year that the BBC felt safe to air one of his plays, “Brimstone and Treacle,” after banning it for more than a decade on the grounds that it was “offensive.” (The film dealt with the unsettling influence of a young male stranger on a conventional British household.)

Potter still lives in a modest house on the Welsh border--only a few miles from where he grew up--with his wife of 29 years, Margaret (his childhood sweetheart), and their three children.

He writes everything by hand in an anonymous London flat, sending the pages home by train to be typed by his daughter Sarah (who has captained England’s women’s cricket team).

Despite his enormous reputation and critical acclaim for his last low-budget British film, “Dreamchild,” (whose main character is based on Lewis Carroll’s inspiration for “Alice in Wonderland”), Potter has still to find success in the movies. He was for a time in the early ‘80s one of Hollywood’s highest-paid writers. But the failure of his $19-million big-screen adaptation of “Pennies From Heaven” and of “Gorky Park,” for which he wrote the screenplay, sent him back to Britain “demeaned and disappointed.”

The warm American reception for “The Singing Detective” (it may even be shown shortly in a New York theater) has, however, encouraged his cinematic ambitions. He is particularly pleased that Canby credits him with “single-handedly restoring the reputation of the screenwriter.”

“The screenwriter should have dignity,” Potter says. “The main difficulty in movies has always been the underemphasized status and rights of the writer.

“The writer is crucial at the setting-up stage. But it’s taken for granted that, once the so-called ‘film maker’ is on a project, the writer is relegated to a status that is nothing like he enjoys in the theater or in British TV.

“I think it’s a major flaw in the system and so does the Screenwriters Guild. Good films are made by good writers.”

Potter will soon be able to put his dictum firmly to the test. Health permitting, he intends to make his debut as a director next year on his own script, “Blackeyes,” an adaptation of his latest novel (due to be published next month by Random House).

To make things even more complicated, Potter would like to shoot the project--which deals with men’s attitudes toward women and the limits of pornography--as both a movie (for the United States) and a TV miniseries (for Britain) simultaneously.

“If I’m strong enough, emotionally and physically, I’d like to see something from the concept stage all the way through for once,” he says. “I’d just like to have one less layer between what I write and what appears on the screen.”

This is not, he adds, meant as a criticism of any of the directors he has worked with in the past. He particularly enjoyed working with Roeg on “Track 29,” although a serious recurrence of his illness prevented him from being on location in North Carolina during filming.

“There are certain mental similarities between Nick and I, I suppose,” says Potter. “Certain ways of looking at things which, if not precisely similar, are not opposing, anyway.”

It is a feeling Roeg shares. The director, like his writer, has always been preoccupied with the inside of his characters’ heads and finding ways of putting that on the screen.

“Dennis’ script was the first I’d ever read which was constructed the way I saw things,” says Roeg. “Everything that happens is connected to one incident in the past of the main character, Linda. Her whole life, every thought, stems from that one thing and must be looked at. You see what’s happening inside that person.

“I was apprehensive about showing him the finished film, because things change on the set and a movie is like a relay race--you hand it on to the actors. But when he saw it, he said: ‘I’m surprised how much it’s a complete combination of you and me.’

“With a writer of Dennis’ stature, no director could hope for anything more.”