In a better world than the chaotic yet circumscribed one we are currently stuck with, there would still be video stores. They would be staffed by underpaid, emotionally underdeveloped, and over-opinionated clerks who would have something to say about Peter Sellers. Those clerks would curate shelves with their personal picks and microscopically specific sub-sub-genres (“Blind Detectives”, “Parent-Child Switcheroos”).
Somewhere, there would be part of a shelf devoted to the truncated but crucial list of movies about movie productions that went off a cliff. Bahr and Hickenlooper’s 1991 Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse would be there, of course, as would Pepe’s Lost in La Mancha (2002), Blank‘s Burden of Dreams (1982), and Tan’s Shirkers (2018).
But would Peter Medak’s The Ghost of Peter Sellers make the cut? On paper, it hits all the genre highlights: comically disastrous production woes, money problems, bad vibes on the set, impending sense of doom, and at least one bona fide maniac. But if it was included, that clerk would most likely do so grudgingly, to fill out space. Again, it’s a small genre.
He was on a roll when Medak signed on to make Ghost in the Noonday Sun in 1973. The Hungarian director had made three acclaimed movies (1968’s Negatives, 1972’s A Day in the Life of Joe Egg, and the rapturously received The Ruling Class). Since kicking off the Pink Panther series the previous decade, Sellers was one of the world’s top comedic actors.
Given Medak’s bent for dark material, Peter Sellers’ off-kilter sensibility, and the film industry’s Sure Why Not? attitude in the post-Studio Era, the pairing makes sense. Still, the series of events that led to the two Peters being locked in mortal combat while trying to make a pirate comedy in Cyprus seems hard to fathom, not least because it’s difficult to come up with an example of a successful pirate comedy.
The Ghost of Peter Sellers is a highly personal and somewhat airless account from Medak about an event that happened over 40 years ago whose painful memory he still seems unable to process. Walking through London and the shooting locations in Cyprus with a rotating cast of friends and former colleagues, Medak acts as a self-investigator. He’s like a self-flagellating version of John Cusack’s Rob Gordon in High Fidelity. But instead of interviewing his ex-girlfriends about why they broke up with him, Medak is reconstructing one of the worst times of his life (“nightmare” gets thrown around a lot) and trying to pinpoint how and why his career went off the rails.
Part of that answer is simple: Peter Sellers. The mercurial star just broke up with Liza Minnelli before Ghost in the Noonday Sun shooting started, and showed up in Cyprus ready to start trouble. He started fights with everyone possible, disappeared for hours, stirred up mutiny in the crew, and behaved like some dictionary definition of a pampered Hollywood prima donna.
At one point, his bickering with co-star Tony Franciosa became so heated that Sellers refused to share a scene with him, forcing Franciosa to fight with a disembodied sword blade sticking up through a trap door. In a move worthy of something that Klaus Kinski might have pulled on Werner Herzog, Peter Sellers even faked a heart attack to get out of one more day playing accidental pirate captain Dick Scratcher. (Yes, that is his character’s name.)
On top of Peter Sellers’ antisocial antics, Medak and his crew encountered one production setback after another, starting with their painstakingly constructed pirate ship sinking on the first day. There were also money problems and just every kind of bad gossip. None of this was improved by a script that everyone agreed was subpar. But flying in Spike Milligan, Sellers’ old The Goon Show buddy in comedic anarchy, for rewrites and to act as the star’s security blanket, just threw more gasoline into the cinematic dumpster fire. When Columbia Pictures finally saw the finished product, the studio determined it was better kept on a shelf.
Many stories of Hollywood disasters can quickly become morality tales where the capital sins are Lack of Preparation and Hubris. In this way, The Ghost of Peter Sellers calls to mind The Devil’s Candy, Julie Salamon’s 2008 book about how De Palma’s 1990 film, The Bonfire of the Vanities, went down the tubes through confusion, creative inattention, and a lack of any coherent artistic vision. Medak spends much of The Ghost of Peter Sellers understandably trying to come to grips with why Peter Sellers had worked so hard at ruining his life. (While he eventually became a journeyman director, Medak’s career was brought to a screeching halt by Ghost in the Noonday Sun.)
However, instead of seeking an answer to the unanswerable, Medak may have done better to listen to the film’s spry and blithe producer, John Heyman, who notes that they should never have made the movie. Even though Medak acknowledges he mostly came aboard for the money, he seems to have a difficult time accepting Heyman’s insight.
The answer lying in plain sight all along deprives The Ghost of Peter Sellers of some of its sting. From the clips shown in this documentary, the world didn’t miss much with Ghost in the Noonday Sun. It limped onto home video about a decade later. Sellers’ fright wig and “Oirish” accent are childrens’ TV-level hacky, the jokes broad and moony like third-rate Terry Gilliam, and once again, there’s the cinematic near-impossibility of making pirates funny.
While Medak’s struggle to find meaning in it all is moving at times, this documentary would have had far more impact if the subject of all this agonizing were some lost masterpiece or misunderstood groundbreaker. Medak’s pain is wincingly real. However, the real tragedy of The Ghost of Peter Sellers is that his memories don’t have a more worthy subject.