By Dalya Alberge
BBC Television Drama Publicity
Production: Love is the Devil
Media: The Times
A film being made about the artist Fancis Bacon, starring Derek Jacobi, may be halted by the administers of his estate. The film's director says they are claiming ownership not only of his images but also of his spoken words.
Bacon, widely considered to be the greatest British artist since Turner, died in 1992, aged 82. Filming has begun in east London on Love is the Devil, which is being publicized at the Cannes Film Festival by the British Film Institute.
John Maybury, the director, said that a year ago he showed a draft of the screenplay to the estate administrators, who objected to the entire script. ?They claimed they owned everything in the script, meaning all my creative writing. They were saying you can't use them (Bacon's words)."
Maybury said the administrators ? his lover John Edwards and the Marlborough Gallery in Central London, which was the artist's dealer ? told him that he would be taking a risk if he went ahead with the project. The director is receiving legal advice from the BFI, which is co-producing the film with the BBC.
Ben Gibson, the head of BFI production and executive producer of Love is the Devil, said: "We are about to have a meeting with the estate's lawyers on Monday. They have no grounds for an injunction. The estate has never been keen on the project. They have seen the script, and dialogue has begun."
The estate administrators have asked to see the finished screenplay. Much of it is based on interviews with Daniel Farson, Bacon's friend and biographer. He owns the copyright to the interviews and is an advisor to the film. He removed direct quotes the artist had made to another interviewer.
A British copyright expert said yesterday that Bacon's literary and artistic works were protected by copyright, but not his casual conversations.
Robin Fry, a partner with the solicitors Stephens Innocent, of central London, which specializes in intellectual property law, said: "There is no copyright in a life, only in artistic works for 70 years after death. So the filmmakers would have to have the consent of the Bacon estate to use imagery depicting his works in a film, as was the case with the recent film about Picasso."
When it came to spoken words, there was no copyright in short sentences, he said. Public lectures, prepared talks or long discourses on a particular subject might be protected in the same way as literary works.
"So, if you listen to a prepared speech and write it down, then the copyright is still with the author. The same applies if Daniel Farson had asked Bacon his views on various matters and Bacon had held forth for some time without any interruption."
Interviews were a moot point; "But if the film script is based on Farson's recollection of what Bacon said, rather than specific tape recordings in which Bacon sat down and extemporized or dictated his views, then I would say these were not protected."
Mr. Fry added that such legal disputes were generally no about copyright but about censorship. "What they usually represent is the wish of one person to protect a reputation, or the views of one person of another's life."
Maybury, whose Remembrance of Things Fast was acclaimed at the Berlin Film Festival in 1994, said that, while other film biographies had attempted to rewrite history, his script did not. "This is the first film about Bacon. I really don't think it will be the last. He is far too significant to be left untouched."
The film focuses on the 1960s and 1970s and the turbulent relationship between Bacon and his lover George Dyer, who committed suicide on the eve of Bacon's triumphant retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris. Maybury emphasized that it was not a gay film and that there were no raunchy sex scenes.
Nobody from the Marlborough Gallery was available for comment.
