Catacombs Credits GuideBrian Johnson
Catacombs Credits GuideComments from talks at London 2024 convention
I left school with one O Level, which was art, and I just scraped through on that. I got a job the Cement And Concrete Research Association at Wexham making 5 inch concrete blocks which were cured. Those 5 inch concrete blocks were test samples of different mixtures to test for bridges for the M1 that was going to be built. There was a man called Les Bowie and we were in the Dog And Pot Public House in Stoke Poges (in Slough). I lived at 43 Rogers Lane, a man called Roy Field lived at 41 Rogers Lane, another man called Leslie George Bowie lived at 45 Roger Lane. All three of us got Academy Awards at different times, that must be absolutely unique. the Dog And Pot Public House was at 92 Rogers Lane; it closed in 2012
In the pub Les said to me one day, I'd been doing the concrete stuff. 'Do you want to get another job, would you like a job sweeping the floor in a film studio' and I said yes done, straight away. I went to Anglo Scottish Pictures in Addlestone, in an old church, on my Lambretta, which was all I could afford, and started work, doing camera work, loading magazines, sweeping the floor, that stuff.
(Anglo Scottish Pictures was founded by members of the RAF Film Unit after World War 2. It had built up a reputation for making sponsored documentaries for the government and commercial clients such as Cadburys Chocolate, and quickly added making commercials for the new ITV network in 1955, winning advertising awards in 1958 for Martini and at Cannes in 1961 for Schweppes. They were one of the few companies to introduce animation and stop motion effects to commercials. Other sources state their building was a converted cinema, not a converted church; they built their own studio in Halliford, near Shepperton, which they would move to in 1958. Les Bowie worked out of Addlestone doing matte paintings for Anglo Scottish as well as free-lancing on films, with his assistant Derek Meddings, and a few other young technicians, including Kit West. Among the crew for Anglo Scottish were Alan Perry and David Elliot, later to become editors and directors for Gerry Anderson. Bowie later set up his own company, Bowie Films Ltd, in the old AP Films Studio at Ipswitch Road on the Slough Trading Estate, after Gerry Anderson had moved to nearby Stirling Road in 1962. Bowie did use Johnson as an uncredited effects technician for Hammer's Quatermass 2 in 1957).
I was about 18 and Jim Davis, who ran Anglo Scottish Pictures said to me 'I want you to take a unit driving the company van up to Scotland, to shoot a documentary called Busman's holiday. Now this was 1958 and I went up to Scotland with the crew, which was the director Jim Goding and Ben Knoll and one or two other people. We had all our lights in the trailer at the back. We went up to Scotland, and we started off on the west coast, Edinburgh. We drove all the way around the top of Scotland, and all the way back down again and in between and we shot thousands of feet of film on a Newman Sinclair clockwork camera, 35 mm. I was loading, and organizing all the hotels and everything else. The director Jim Goding used to say 'oh if you got a fiver, give me a fiver, I need some need to have a drink, or something like that. He never signed for anything, I just thought he would pay for it all in the end.
When we got back to Anglo Scottish Pictures at Halliford, near Shepperton Studios, he refused to he said he had nothing to do with it. I had run up a bill on his drinking of 60 pounds. They fired me, there and then, cold turkey, right on the spot. I got fired because he lied.
I went on to do other stuff, and then eventually wound up in the Royal Air Force for two years. When I came out, Les Bowie gave me a job on The Day The Earth Caught Fire. I got involved in effects and it went on from there.
Peter Beales from 20th Century Fox called me and said um he'd like to come down to the studios and see what he we were doing. He was going to bring some people with him, an English effects man called John Stears and he brought two Americans. The two Americans asked me all sorts of questions, why was I doing it multiply exposed, why wasn't I using motion control, why wasn't I doing this, why wasn't I doing that. And that turned out to be George Lucas and Gary Kurtz. George asked me if I would do the first of a series of films. He was going to make nine of them and it was called the "star"... something or other. I said I yesterday I just signed with Gerry Anderson to do the second series of Space 1999 and I couldn't go back on that.I'm really glad actually because I think I'm not sure I'd have done very well with the first Star Wars. The second one, with Empire, we got it all together then.