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That was a time when loaders were still called clapper boys, Young was rather formally billed as ‘Frederick A. Young’ and Thomson, then aged just 18, was still pinching himself that he was actually working alongside these “stars of cinema.”
Thomson, tall and now with a familiar thatch of grey hair, will be 70 next year. But despite the odd knee problem he shows no signs of slowing up as he continues to take responsi- bility for juggling his own work sched- ule which comprises regular offers of commercials, features and even the odd documentary.
It has been an astonishing ongo- ing career across half a dozen decades - as DP from the Swinging Sixties of Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush to megabudgeted Hollywood studio pictures in the Nineties like Executive Decision, Alien 3 and Demolition Man.
All of which seems a very long way from altogether more humble beginnings in the North London sub- urb of Kingsbury. There were no direct family connections with cinema apart from an undiminished love of movies - “my Veterans’ pass is almost worn out”, Thomson now jokes. His father was a tailor and happened to be making some clothes for the pro- ducer Anthony Havelock-Allen who was partnered with David Lean and Ronald Neame in the distinguished film company Cineguild.
“My father must have been telling him about my enthusiasm for getting in the business and he kindly said, ‘send him down to Denham Studios and I’ll have a look at him.’ So off I went to see him and he asked me what I wanted to do. I said I knew they used cameras and that was prob- ably what I wanted to do.
“First he took me on the set of Odd Man Out which Bob Krasker was shooting for Carol Reed and Bob took me over to Bert Easy who ran the camera department at Denham. There wasn’t anything for me at that time but I continued to ring him and eventually, about two years later by which time I’d almost given up any hope of getting a job in the industry, Bert finally replied, ‘Right, you can start on Monday.’”
Two years after that, Thomson graduated to focus puller on Anthony Pelissier’s The Rocking Horse Winner, photographed by Desmond Dickinson. Thomson says :”I got the job by default because Reg Morris (Ossie’s brother) had to leave the picture halfway through. I remember the direc- tor saying to Dickinson one day, ‘I can’t see the boy’s eyes; do something about that.’ After coming back from lunch, I had some magazines to unload and I saw Dickie round the back saying to the boy (John Howard Davies), ‘Keep your bloody eyes open!’”
When Denham closed, Thomson switched to Pinewood and then on to
Technicolor until its camera depart- ment closed with the demise of the three-strip camera. Like his col- leagues, he was thrown out on to the freelance market. Thomson started working for The Danzigers - “which was about as low as you could get” - at their new Elstree studios on vari- ous series mainly aimed at the US market. They were four day shoots, with two days interiors and two days exteriors, on shows like The Protectors (with John Ireland) and The Pursuers (with Louis Hayward). The upside of this strictly bread-and- butter business was that Thomson began to forge an important collabo- ration with cameraman Nicolas Roeg.
With Thomson now as operator, the pair worked together for nearly six years on films such as The Caretaker, Nothing But The Best and Roger Corman’s Masque Of The Red Death, easily best-looking of the American filmmaker’s cultish Poe horror cycle.
“Corman,” recalls Thomson, “was a speed merchant and could also be quite irascible. We were at Elstree’s ABPC Studios and one afternoon we moved over on to a big castle set at around 4pm. It was the only picture in the studio, things generally were a bit in the doldrums, and the ‘sparks’ were very militant. The break would be called at around twenty past five and on this occasion, Nico said to Corman that he didn’t think we’d be able to
get all this done so it might have to be the first shot in the morning.
“Corman replied firmly: ‘I want to shoot it tonight.’ We were still lighting the set at 5.20pm when the break was called at which point Corman threw his script up in the air and all these loose pages began to rain down like confetti. ‘Call me in the morning,’ he barked to the crew. To which my focus puller said, ‘Alright, Guv, what shall we call you?’ He was hauled up to the main office next morning to apologise.”
Thomson and Roeg were also paired together in Spain and Morocco for about 14 weeks shooting odd bits for Lawrence, including most of the spectacular train derailment sequence: “In fact, we ended up fin- ishing the picture as the main camera unit because everyone else had had enough and gone home. I remember the last shot they did after which Peter O’Toole and David Lean almost broke down as they hugged. It was very touching.” He and Roeg had been working in Israel on Judith, with Sophia Loren and Peter Finch, when he was approached by Ephraim Kishon, the humorous Hebrew writer, who asked if Thomson would operate on a film which Kishon was going to direct from one of his own stories. “I said I would - if he’d also let me pho- tograph it.” The result was a film called Arbinka in which Topol not only starred but also doubled as
Photos: from left: The King’s Troop; Alex Thomson on the set of Excalibur with John Boorman; with Julie Christie in Fahrenheit 451; with Peter O’Toole on High Spirits; John Boorman’s Excalibur. (Courtesy BFI Stills & Posters)
EXPOSURE • 6 & 7