Up Against It

Up Against It is an unproduced script by Joe Orton, written in 1967 for The Beatles at the height of their fame.

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 companion 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 planned a meeting with director Richard Lester at Twickenham Film Studios to discuss filming options on the script. On the morning the chauffeur arrived to take Orton to the meeting, he discovered Orton and Halliwell dead inside their home. Halliwell had bludgeoned Orton to death with a hammer and then committed suicide with an overdose of Nembutal tablets.

The screenplay begins with the expulsion from a provincial town of two young men of no fixed ambition, Ian McTurk and Christopher Low; Ian is a sexually profligate charmer, Low quixotic and pure of heart. They are banished because Ian has deflowered Rowena Torrence, niece of the local high priest, Father Brodie; present to see them off are amiably opportunistic Mayor Terence O'Scullion, sexually dangerous police official Connie Boon ("rhymes with loon", the Mayor says), and plain-Jane secretary Miss Patricia Drumgoole, who is desperately in love with Ian.

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