There’s to be a retrospective of my work at a prestigious film festival. Of course, they’re concentrating on my earlier films rather than my more director for hire work that I’ve doing for the last decade or more now. Still, a retrospective’s a retrospective.
I’d really love to show The Corn Mother. I know it’s not all my work, that somebody else directed parts of it but from a rough cut I saw after I’d been replaced a fair bit of the spirit of what I was trying to do was still in the film and hopefully made it into the final edit. And it’s never been seen. Never had a release, so it would be quite the story to show it.
I thought that maybe Gines would have mellowed about it all over the years. I tried contacting his people, even tried to phone him directly, see if anything could be done. I just came up against one brick wall after another. Eventually I resorted to flying over to his mansion hideaway. They wouldn’t even open the gates for me. Gines wouldn’t talk to me.
A month or so later I got a letter in the post. Inside was a copy of a paid invoice for the disposal of film materials. It was addressed to Gines’ production company and the date was 1984. There was no note or other explanation with it. I can only think that it’s Gines’ way of telling me that the film doesn’t exist anymore, that it was thrown out when everything imploded.
I phoned Conrad and he said he couldn’t remember any film reels being disposed of but they might well have been, without his knowledge, as he didn’t tend to have all that much to do with the day-to-day running of things, and even less so when the walls came crashing down. He said he’d just wanted out of there.
