Up Against IT - Background

Background

Orton's screenplay was a revised version of a 1966 script called "Shades of a Personality", by Owen Holder, which producer Walter Shenson wanted Orton to "punch-up", in his words; Orton incorporated portions of this prior draft, but used, as the opening of the story, a concept he and his lover Kenneth Halliwell had explored in a now-lost novel from 1957, The Silver Bucket. The story's skeleton also borrowed liberally from Orton's final novel, written in 1959, called The Vision of Gombold Provol (posthumously published as Head to Toe).

After a proper contract had been drawn up, allowing Orton to buy back the rights to his script should it be refused, Orton submitted the script to the Beatles's manager, Brian Epstein; after a long period without hearing from either Epstein or the Beatles on the subject, his screenplay was returned to him without comment.

Orton further revised Up Against It after this event, paring down the four leads to three (mainly by combining the George and Ringo parts). Producer Oscar Lewenstein accepted the script, considering Mick Jagger and Ian McKellen for two of the leads. Lewenstein and Orton together planned a meeting with director Richard Lester at Twickenham Film Studios to discuss filming options on the script; unfortunately, the morning a chauffeur arrived to take Orton to the meeting, he discovered Orton and his lover Halliwell dead inside their home. Halliwell had bludgeoned Orton to death with nine hammer blows to the head, and then committed suicide with an overdose of 22 Nembutal tablets washed down with the juice from canned grapefruit.