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The portents, to put it mildly, were far from good. In the apparent absence of original ideas, exhuming old TV shows and adapting them for the big screen has been a growth industry in Hollywood over the past decade. Unhappily, the results rarely prove to be worth the effort.
To Shepperton Studios, then, with a strong sense of foreboding. The Avengers has been shooting here as well as at picturesque sites such as Blenheim Palace, Greenwich Naval College and landmark locations in London.
The first person I bump into on the set is Ralph Fiennes, playing the dapper English gent John Steed, personified on TV by Patrick Macnee. Resplendent in a grey chalk-striped Savile Row suit, and a bowler worn at a jaunty angle, Fiennes looks just the part. Then in walks statuesque Uma Thurman, stepping into Diana Rigg's kinky boots as his sidekick Emma Peel. Poured into a black leather catsuit that encases her from the neck down, Thurman looks ravishing; one feels one's spirits lift.
Onwards. Jerry Weintraub, the film's American producer, has a caravan as spacious and luxurious as the living room of a suburban British house; nibbling on sunflower seeds, he speaks of having wanted to make an Avengers film for 12 years.
"I was concerned with keeping the true, quintessentially English background and characters of the show," he muses. "That's tough when you're making a big action-adventure movie. Your natural tendency is to Americanise it. I didn't want to." I start to feel some of my pessimism ebbing.
Why such relief? Because of what often happens when TV series become films. An odd Hollywood rule dictates that if a studio adapts a beloved old TV show, much of what gave the show its appeal is ruthlessly discarded. Often all that remains is the saleable, easily recognisable title.
Thus Dragnet, deadly serious on the tube, was played strictly for smirks on the big screen. Light-hearted and sparkling on TV, The Flintstones limped lamely into cinemas despite the reported contribution of 32 screenwriters.
Not all adaptions have been complete failures. The Addams Family films were competent, even funny, but never replicated the tacky black-and-white charm of the TV originals. Mission: Impossible and The Fugitive? Well-crafted hi-tech thrillers, both quite contrary in spirit and style to the TV shows which inspired them.
Worst of all was The Saint, which crept (oozed may be a better word) into British cinemas last year. It was based, of course, on the ATV series - where Roger Moore, suave, wide-eyed and with one eyebrow constantly raised in self-parody, played the very English crime-fighter Simon Templar, hero of Leslie Charteris's novels.
All this was jettisoned for the film, and the charmless Val Kilmer played Templar with the intensity of a Method actor - but without the elegance of the TV Saint.
The Avengers, planned for release this autumn, has pitfalls it must avoid. Hearteningly, its principals at least know what they are. You sense that however the film turns out, it will at least have a twinkle in its eye, and will not deny its British roots.
"The script we have now is light and witty," Fiennes says. "It's a comic thriller, really. In other films where they've tried to push the action genre to make it more extreme, there's a kind of sweaty seriousness - the muscles are bigger, the explosions more unbelievable, it's all done with pumped-up, gritted-teeth humourlessness. Like it really matters. "I think we're saying in this film, isn't it bizarre that Steed can be involved in a long drawn-out fight, yet remain so immaculate throughout."
Still, The Avengers is an action-adventure film with a high budget - around $60 million (£38 million). To maximise an audience, Weintraub knows he must have spectacular fight sequences and chases: "I thought sexual tension, innuendo and the repartee between Steed and Emma was important. But you can't do a NoÎl Coward piece as a big blockbuster movie.
"Yet I wanted it intelligent enough for adults. So it's a romantic comedy with an action-adventure background of five or six set pieces. And you could take out the set pieces and have a pretty good play."
Noel Coward? I read the script, and while Private Lives did not readily spring to mind, it was certainly a cut above average for the genre. This may be because screenwriter Don MacPherson is British, and grasps the appeal of the TV series. His story pits Steed and Emma against the villainous Sir August de Wynter, who aims to rule the world by controlling the weather. He is played by Sean Connery, who never portrays bad guys.
MacPherson's story is set in a 1999 Avengersland where "the Sixties have never ended; they've just been going on for a very long time". In this world there is no London traffic, nor are there extras behind the principal actors, thus duplicating the sparsely populated sets of the low-budget TV series. The men charged with realising this imagined London on screen are legends in their fields. There's cinematographer Roger Pratt (who has made Terry Gilliam's films look so arresting) and a pair of three-time Oscar winners - production designer Stuart Craig and costume designer Anthony Powell. To convey an Avengers-like London of uncluttered, crisp images, Craig zeroed in on buildings with classical symmetry: Greenwich Naval College, the stuccoed Nash houses of Regent's Park.
For Emma's apartment he used the home of architect Richard Rogers, who knocked-through adjacent Georgian houses in a Chelsea square and gave them a hi-tech interior. Craig created Steed's home as a Belgravia bachelor pad, all yellows and golds, with objets d'art and antiquities carefully placed.
Powell spent long hours with Fiennes in Savile Row, looking at various pinstripes and weights of cloth. ("I must say it was addictive," Fiennes tells me, a little shame-faced.)
As the actor is not a flamboyant type, Powell added subtle touches to Steed's suits to suggest a raffish soul lurking beneath that conventional wardrobe: the waistcoat of Fiennes's suit has horizontal rather than vertical stripes. Powell also suggested unusual crescent-shaped pockets for Steed's various tweed suits - an almost subliminal detail.
The trademark bowler was a problem. Weintraub presented Fiennes with one when filming began, but Powell recalls he resembled "a poor man's version of Charlie Chaplin". This impression was also conveyed by photos of Fiennes in an action scene. "Those were paparazzi pictures," Fiennes complains. "You can look perfect in clothes, but when you run, the hat slips down a bit." Powell experimented with various hats and fittings, and had Fiennes wear the bowler at an angle for the right look.
If, as they say, God is in the details, the film version of The Avengers
would seem to stand a chance. And as Fiennes says: "I hope its strength
is in its lightness and wit."
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© EL STEPHO
Added to the RF Reading Room on February 10, 1998
EL STEPHO