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A screenplay penned by Anthony Shaffer and featuring Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward should have been an ideal venture for director Robin Hardy while the production of The Wicker Man over 50 years ago.

Even though today it is celebrated as an iconic horror film, the degree of misery it brought the production team has now been revealed in previously unpublished correspondence and script drafts.

The Storyline of This Classic Film

This 1973 movie centers on a devout policeman, played by the actor, who travels on a remote Scottish island looking for a missing girl, only to encounter sinister local pagans who claim the girl was real. the actress was cast as the daughter of a local innkeeper, who tempts the God-fearing officer, with Lee as the pagan aristocrat.

Production Tensions Uncovered

However, the working environment was tense and contentious, according to the letters. In a letter to Shaffer, the director wrote: “How could you treat me like this?”

The screenwriter had already made his name with acclaimed works like Sleuth, but his script of The Wicker Man shows the director’s harsh edits to the screenplay.

Extensive crossings-out feature Summerisle’s lines in the ending, originally starting: “The child was but the tip of the iceberg – the visible element. Don’t blame yourself, it was impossible you could have known.”

Apart from Writer and Director

Tensions boiled over beyond the writer and director. One of the producers commented: “Shaffer’s talent has been offset by a self-indulgence that impels him to prove himself overly smart.”

In a letter to the production team, the director expressed frustration about the film’s editor, Eric Boyd-Perkins: “I don’t think he appreciates the subject or approach of the picture … and thinks that he has had enough of it.”

In a correspondence, Lee described the movie as “alluring and mysterious”, even with “dealing with a garrulous producer, an underpaid and harassed writer and a well-paid but difficult director”.

Lost Documents Found

A large collection of letters about the film was part of multiple bags of documents forgotten in the attic of the old house of the director’s spouse, Caroline. There were also previously unseen scripts, visual plans, on-set photographs and budget records, many of which reflect the struggles faced by the team.

The director’s children his two sons, now 60 and 63, have drawn on these documents for a forthcoming book, called Children of The Wicker Man. It reveals the extreme pressures faced by the director throughout the making of the movie – from his heart attack to financial ruin.

Personal Consequences

At first, the film failed commercially and, following of its failure, the director abandoned his wife and his family for a fresh start in the US. Court documents reveal his wife as the film’s uncredited executive producer and that he owed her up to a large sum. She had to sell their house and died in the 1980s, in her fifties, battling alcoholism, never knowing that the project later turned into a global hit.

Justin, an acclaimed documentary maker, called The Wicker Man as “the film that ruined my family”.

When someone reached out by a resident living in the former family home, inquiring if he wanted to collect the documents, his initial reaction was to suggest destroying “the bloody things”.

But then he and his brother opened up the bags and understood the significance of their contents.

Revelations from the Documents

His brother, a scholar, commented: “All the big players are in there. We found the first draft by the writer, but with dad’s annotations as filmmaker, ‘controlling’ Shaffer’s overexuberance. Because he was formerly a barrister, Shaffer did a lot of overexplaining and his father just went ‘cut, cut, cut’. They loved each other and clashed frequently.”

Compiling the publication has brought some “resolution”, Justin said.

Monetary Struggles

The family never benefited monetarily from the film, he explained: “The bloody film earned a fortune for others. It’s beyond a joke. His father accepted a small fee. Thus, he missed out on any of the upside. Christopher Lee never received payment from it either, although he performed his role for zero, to leave Hammer [Horror films]. So, in many ways, it’s been a very unkind film.”