Séamas O'Reilly: The restaging of a single interview must be catnip for audiences

A Very Royal Scandal was released this week

Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874, the son of a rabbi who moved his family to America when Harry was just three. Raised in dire poverty, he was a circus act by the time he was nine, and a globally famous stunt performer by the time he was 25. Within five years he was travelling Europe challenging local police forces to “restrain him in shackles and lock him in their jails”, successfully breaking out of Dutch prisons, German police stations and Siberian prison transport trucks — sometimes fully naked, having been searched beforehand for any trace of contraband.

In London, 4,000 people watched The Great Houdini undo a pair of handcuffs which a master locksmith from Birmingham had taken five years to construct. In New York, he burst out of a straitjacket while suspended from a crane. He jumped, while manacled, from over 40 bridges in exotic locales as Berlin, Paris, Melbourne and Hull, freeing himself before he drowned. This he did, and such was his success that even now, a century after his death, almost everyone reading this will know his name.

His story is, in other words, ripe for dramatic treatment. And yet, discounting a made-for-TV movie in 1976, there’s only ever been one decent stab at putting his life on screen, a little-remembered 1953 film starring Tony Curtis that eschewed much of his hard-scrabble upbringing, and erred toward screwball comedy.

Though it may be apocryphal, I’ve heard one story about why this was the case: in the late 70s, at a time when many of the major studios were on the brink of collapse, several Houdini movies were in development. The details, even for this sketchy story, are lost to me now, but each had big name stars and
directors attached, ready to go into production, imagine Brian de Palma directing Robert Redford in one, William Friedkin directing Jack Nicholson in another, and you’ll get the gist. With the name recognition of the movie’s star character, not to mention the Hollywood talent assembled to bring his story to life, any one of these could have been a major hit.

The problem was, they couldn’t all be. If any one of these big budget period pieces was greenlit, so the story goes, the others would be too, landing at the box office en masse, diluting the overall pot, and obliterating at least one studio forever in the process. This Mexican standoff deprived the world of the Houdini film it still craves, but it also seems like something that could never happen today. For this week, A Very Royal Scandal dropped on Amazon Prime, the second big-budget filmic treatment of Prince Andrew’s Newsnight interview to have been released in just five months.

I’ve long been fascinated by such twins. It is striking that no one had thought to make a full-length CGI animation about ants and then received both Antz and A Bug’s Life within six weeks of each other in 1998. Deep Impact and Armageddon, or Dante’s Peak and Inferno are similar 90s adventures in double programming. In the realm of biopics alone, there were two Truman Capote biopics in theatres in 2006, and in the past decade or so, Gary Oldman, Timothy Spall, Brendan Gleeson, Brian Cox, Michael Gambon and John Lithgow have all played Winston Churchill, after decades of apparent apathy toward putting him on screen.

Rufus Sewell as Prince Andrew in Scoop

Where A Very Royal Scandal, and its recent forebear Scoop differ is in their scope. These are not rangy biopics tracing the ebb and flow of a famous man’s life. Nor are they devastating exposés on the central horrors referenced in their runtime — namely the allegations that the person eighth in line to the British throne had partaken in sexual assault while a regular guest of convicted paedophile, and alleged human trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein. No, both Scoop and A Very Royal Scandal are dramatisations of the 49-minute long interview of Prince Andrew by Emily Maitlis for Newsnight — despite the fact that said interview took place just five years ago and was widely watched at the time.

Scoop saw fit to extend that real document to fit a roomy one-hour 42-minute runtime, while A Very Royal Scandal has gone even bigger, opting for a three-part series so that viewers can really experience the high drama of that interview everyone saw and which is still available in full, for free, on YouTube. At the current rate, we should expect a nine-hour treatment of the interview sometime around February but until then we will have to content ourselves with the always welcome appearances of Michael Sheen and Ruth Wilson in the starring roles.

I do wonder if there are more interesting stories to tell about a man who was born world-famous, in a fairytale castle, and spent his entire life richer than God at the centre of the UK’s social and political elite; stories which might even foreground the strangely absent voices of the actual women who allege that Prince
Andrew was one of dozens of the world’s most famous and powerful men, with whom they were repeatedly ordered to have sex on a private island owned by a billionaire who later killed himself pending prosecution for those very crimes.

It’s likely Netflix and Amazon have data telling them that the restaging of a single interview — and the admin associated with making that interview happen — is catnip for audiences. I can’t help finding the process slightly hollow and absurd, myself, and long for the sweep and grandeur of another, more distant age. If they ever did try and make a Houdini film, it would probably focus on the one time a journalist asked him some questions about some things he did, and the letters necessary to confirm their appointment.

Maybe a single afternoon he spent filling out the permits necessary to rent a crane in central New York, told from the point of view of the clerk who stamped the forms. Perhaps, a century after his death, avoiding such indignity has been Houdini’s greatest escape to date.