Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The 8th January deadline for official pre-production arrived. Dolk was still unobtainable and no monies had appeared. They did, however, engender a brief visit to London by one of the Leuk committee, Bruno Becchio. Seeing for himself, the reality of the problem, Becchio offered further assurances that the money would be forthcoming subject to a short delay.

With the publicity machine still at full throttle, work on the film continued, albeit slowly and in restricted areas - funded solely now by hugely increasing bank loans and other borrowings by O’Keef and de Vos.

Luckily, an intended performance of the album in Concert at the Royal Albert Hall was being sponsored by Hohner and so remained independent of the film’s financial problems. [ See Theatre Archive: The Enchanted Orchestra Concert ]

Now, despite Sutton’s every effort to put a hold on expenditure, each succeeding day was bringing in bills from the previous year that should have been covered by the bridging monies. Many of these were threatening legal action. To make matters worse, a couple of unpaid crew salaries had set rumours flying.

A desperate call was placed to Becchio, requesting an urgent meeting with those individual members of the Leuk committee who had originally sanctioned the project under Dolk. Becchio promised he would attempt to arrange it.

Leaving Armstrong and Sutton to hold the fort, O’Keef left on January 7th for the Midem Festival at Cannes; it being the annual international buyers and seller’s marketplace for the music business.

He had barely left before the all-powerful film union, the ACCT (now BECTU) were on the phone demanding an immediate meeting to explain what was happening with the film and why certain members’ salaries were unpaid.

An urgent call to O’Keef failed to convince him that his return to meet the union was imperative even though the ACCT had the power not only to shut down the film immediately but also blacklist the company and its producers. His instruction was for Armstrong and Sutton to attend on his behalf.

Fortunately, both Armstrong and Sutton were in excellent standing with the union (Armstrong had even sat on the writer’s committee for several years). They explained as much as they knew of events and O’Keef’s situation with the Leuk Foundation and their confidence that the unpaid members’ salaries would be honoured the following week.

Having diffused the union situation, the problem now was to ensure that O’Keef returned from Midem with a cheque sufficient to clear, at the very least, the unpaid salaries.

Armstrong and Sutton knew that, even if O’Keef succeeded in getting the money, it would almost certainly now involve re-scheduling the live-action shooting, thereby putting the film way over its original budget.

Learning from O’Keef that the Leuk committee members had been invited to a meeting in Cannes the following Monday on January 21st, Armstrong decided to take no chances and caught the next plane to France.

He arrived to be swept into a blaze of publicity and an organised press conference for the film at the Press Club, Malmaison. From 12.30 till 1.00 he sat next to O’Keef extolling the wonders of the project to the world press.

That evening, the committee of internationally renowned doctors due to head the Leuk Medical Centre sat opposite O’Keef and de Vos due to head the Leuk Arts Centre at dinner in a Cannes restaurant. Armstrong was present. Dolk was not.

“The whole evening was unreal,” Armstrong recalls, “It was like some terrible bad joke. The doctors - nice men and, I’m sure, honourable men - seemed as confused by events as Barry (O’Keef) and Theo (de Vos). Apparently, the development money Barry had received at the beginning had come from them, personally, not the Leuk Foundation. They’d also - the Medical Centre fraternity and the Arts Centre fraternity - both thought it was the other who was the basis of the Leuk enterprise. The whole thing got worse because no one there had anything like the kind of money needed to get the film off the hook, never mind fund it. I must say, at that particular point of time the last thing I was interested in was who’d thought what - or Dolk’s whereabouts or - whatever. All I knew was there was no way I was going to fly back to London without a cheque for the union to cover those unpaid salaries. I didn’t care who it came from just as long as I went back with it safely in my pocket - not forwarded, not posted, not a bank transfer - but actually in my pocket!...I remember putting the fear of God into them all, trying to ram home the seriousness of the situation. I also ended up footing the bill because Barry hadn’t got any money - a bill for twelve people! - at a top restaurant! - in Cannes! - at the height of the Midem Festival! But I did head back with a cheque to pay the salaries!”

Back in London, news of the catastrophe was revealed only to Sutton and O’Keef’s staff. Grimshaw, Gibson and Early, philosophically, carried on working in the hope that it would not prove a waste of time in the long run.

Fortunately, there was little media or industry reaction when it was announced that, due to the scale of the project, shooting was to be delayed. Likewise, because of Armstrong and Sutton having put brakes on the production, enquiries concerning stars and musical artistes had been allowed to go no further than availability checks. No major contracts or commitments had been signed and most creditors bowed out, gracefully, knowing the all too familiar “one minute it’s all happening, the next it’s all off, now it’s happening again, now it’s all off ” scenarios so frequent in the film industry.

As Armstrong points out, “Producers and production houses live such precarious lives because, however careful they are and whatever precautions they may take legally, they’re forever at the whim of their investment sources. I’ve known of so many instances where productions have started up in good faith only for one of the backers to withdraw suddenly and without warning. And there’s nothing you can do about it. And down comes the pack of cards with everyone in it. And it’s the producer who ends up getting the blame.”

Meanwhile, as the film was grinding to a halt, what had been intended to be a spectacular star-studded televised Royal Gala Charity Concert for Save the Children, had killed off its every opportunity to be a high profile event due to administrative ineptitude.

Fortunately, the performance, itself, despite front office bungling, proved to be a huge success with the audience.

It had even survived an attempt by the Swiss medical group’s lawyers to take out an injunction to prevent it happening unless, amongst other things, the development money they had invested in the film was returned. The concert had only gone ahead because an angry Armstrong had threatened them with exposure in the press if they tried to stop it.

The concert more or less heralded the end of The Enchanted Orchestra project. In two desperate efforts to revive it, O’Keef took the package to Disney but came back empty-handed. Even interest by Stan Lee of Marvel Comics came to nothing. He had read about the project in an article about Armstrong by Alan Jones in Starbust magazine and contacted the Maiden office to enquire about the film’s progress.

“Quite what happened, I don’t know,” Armstrong recalls. “Stan Lee called me and was so enthusiastic about what he’d read and some of the artwork featured in the article. I put him onto Barry (O’Keef) and Barry flew over to meet him. Then, somehow it all cooled. I suspect it may have been because of all the in-fighting over copyrights which was going on at the time between Barry, Theo, the Swiss and God-knows-who else.”

The copyrights fight began within days of O’Keef having arrived back from Midem. The Swiss doctors wanted something in return for their investment and claimed to own all rights to The Enchanted Orchestra. This proved to be far more complicated than they had ever imagined. Fights over who owned the album rights and in what capacities, were bad enough: the film was an even greater legal nightmare. Utter confusion developed over the ownership of the film’s designs, character creations and illustrations - let alone those of the album. Similar disputes concerned the re-written scores by Early.

The only unquestioned certainty was that Armstrong owned the screenplay. Because it had never been commissioned, contracted or paid for, it made him the major investor in the film’s development budget. and, consequently, an investor in the film itself.

“Of course,” Armstrong points out, “ the screenplay was still based on Barry’s original album script so there was no way I could run with the script myself. The whole thing was a Mexican standoff. Nobody could do anything with anything. There was talk of fraudulent deception, there was talk of contracts between this party and that party and separate rights agreements over this and over that and covering different territories and different allocations of merchandising rights and book rights and audio rights and TV rights and...it was endless - and, ultimately, pointless because without the film actually being made, none of it was worth a penny.”

Throughout all of this, Dolk was noticeable by his absence.

He continues, “To this day, I don’t know the full details as to what the whole Leuk thing was really about, what was for real, what were just dreams or intentions ... I don’t think anyone knows or ever will know now. Barry certainly wasn’t naive enough simply to believe whatever he’d been told. He and I had numerous conversation about it and - really, the whole thing was so utterly incredible and even improbable - and yet, the people involved, the town of Leuk itself...when Barry described the reception he received and the mayor so excited about it all - and seeing the plans for the town’s expansion to accommodate the new world medical and arts centre - and meeting the architect and - everything - and then, of course, the development money arriving as promptly as it did. However sceptical one was at the beginning, gradually the evidence seemed all too convincing. Besides, as so many of us reasoned, where was the gain for anyone if it wasn’t true?”

Although Armstrong’s involvement was only with those areas directly affecting the film’s creative side, he did hear various explanations as to why the money had never arrived and why Dolk had suddenly become impossible to contact.

“One version I heard, from Barry,” he recalls, “was that he’d been told - I don’t know by whom - that this had been some great personal dream that Dolk was putting together and that the money was coming from the Shah of Persia. When the Shah was deposed, the new Iranian government had demanded his personal wealth and assets be returned to Iran. As it was all held in Swiss banks, the Swiss instantly froze the account - which, apparently, is what stopped the release of money not only for the film but the entire Leuk project. Barry speculated that, instead of letting everyone know immediately, Dolk had tried to save face by finding the money elsewhere and failed. If that was the case then my warning him what would happen if the money didn’t arrive on time must really have got him worried, especially - if Barry’s theory was true - the international press had found out.”

Although, as Armstrong adds, “Whatever the truth, there was certainly a lot more to the whole thing than had appeared on the surface because of what happened subsequently, several years later - which made one wonder exactly who’d been in cahoots with whom and who knew about things they said they didn’t - or whatever...I’ve no idea - except that a wonderful idea sadly never happened.”

Adding to the mystery, Armstrong relates, as a post-script, “Some years after Barry’s death, his widow Joan, Neil Grimshaw, Chris Sutton, Bob Gibson and I - all received individual calls from Theo de Vos asking to meet with us - separately - in London. I went to the Strand Palace Hotel and was shown into a suite to find Theo and Dolk sitting behind a desk, looking very nervous. They quizzed me to see if there was a way The Enchanted Orchestra film could be revived. I told them the simple truth: only with full consent of the original creative team and advance placement of finance in a bank account to cover the film’s entire budget from start to finish. Joan, Neil and I, predictably swapped notes after our respective ‘interviews’ where we’d all, apparently said more or less the same thing in no uncertain terms. Anyway, apart from a letter afterwards from Theo confirming they were trying to re-launch the project, none of us heard anymore about it so...who knows? - except, of all the projects I’ve ever been involved in, only one or two still hurt when I recall them - and The Enchanted Orchestra is one of them.”

Copyright © 2007 Michael Armstrong