Privilege

Synopsis

“With Privilege, Watkins merged documentary style with metaphor to expand his interrogation of media and politics. The film was a product of Universal’s late 1960s European production program, which invited young European directors such as Watkins and François Truffaut to create low-budget features for the studio. More conventional than the director’s debut efforts, it nonetheless retains his trademark first-person interviews and pseudodocumentary style. The story concerns Steven Shorter (Jones), a successful pop singer who is convinced by the government to perform violent theatrical rock that will distract youth from politics and social problems and lull them into a "fruitful conformity" with church and state. When Shorter withdraws after realizing he is being manipulated to control the public, his fans turn against him and he becomes an enemy of the state.” – Harvard Film Archive

"In 1966, following the collapse of a film which I hoped to develop with Albert Finney’s production company, on the 1916 Easter uprising in Dublin, I was approached by John Heyman, a British artists’ agent, to make a film based on an original screenplay by Johnny Speight, which dealt with the influence of Steven Shorter, a pop star in the 1960s. American novelist Norman Bognor and I adapted the script, which we retitled Privilege, to emphasize the significance of Steven Shorter as an allegory for the manner in which national states, working via religion, the mass media, sports, Popular Culture, etc., divert a potential political challenge by young people. In case this theme appears exaggerated, it is important to keep in mind that it was set in the ‘swinging Britain’ of the 1960s, and was prescient of the way that Popular Culture and the media in the US commercialized the anti-war and counter-culture movement in that country as well. Privilege also ominously predicted what was to happen in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the 1980s – especially during the period of the Falkland Islands War." – Peter Watkins