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A screenplay written by Anthony Shaffer and featuring Christopher Lee and Edward Woodward was expected to be an ideal venture for director Robin Hardy while the production of The Wicker Man over 50 years ago.

Although today it is revered as a cult horror masterpiece, the degree of misery it caused the film-makers has now been uncovered in previously unpublished letters and early versions of the script.

The Storyline of The Wicker Man

This 1973 movie revolves around a puritan police officer, played by Edward Woodward, who travels on a remote Scottish island looking for a lost child, only to encounter sinister local pagans who claim she ever existed. Britt Ekland appeared as an innkeeper’s sexually liberated daughter, who seduces the religious policeman, with Christopher Lee as the pagan aristocrat.

Creative Conflict Revealed

But the creative atmosphere was frayed and contentious, the documents show. In a letter to the writer, Hardy wrote: “How could you treat me like this?”

The screenwriter had already made his name with masterpieces like Sleuth, but his typed draft of The Wicker Man reveals the director’s harsh edits to the screenplay.

Heavy edits feature Summerisle’s lines in the final scene, which would have begun: “The child was but the tip of the iceberg – the part that showed. Do not reproach yourself, it was impossible for you to know.”

Beyond Writer and Director

Tensions boiled over outside the writer and director. A producer wrote: “Shaffer’s talent has been offset by a self-indulgence that drove him to show he was too clever by half.”

In a note to the production team, the director expressed frustration about the editor, the editing specialist: “I believe he appreciates the theme or style of the picture … and thinks that he is tired of it.”

In one letter, Lee referred to the movie as “alluring and mysterious”, despite “dealing with a garrulous producer, an underpaid and harassed writer and a well-paid but difficult director”.

Forgotten Papers Uncovered

An extensive correspondence relating to the film was among six sack-loads of documents forgotten in the loft of the old house of the director’s spouse, Caroline. Included were unpublished drafts, storyboards, production photos and financial accounts, which reflect the struggles faced by the film-makers.

Hardy’s sons Justin and Dominic, currently in their sixties, have drawn on the material for an upcoming publication, titled Children of The Wicker Man. It reveals the extreme pressures faced by Hardy during the making of the movie – including a health crisis to bankruptcy.

Personal Consequences

At first, the movie failed commercially and, in the aftermath of its failure, the director abandoned his spouse and their children for a new life in America. Court documents show his wife as an unacknowledged producer and that he was indebted to her up to a large sum. She was forced to give up their house and died in the 1980s, in her fifties, suffering from alcoholism, never knowing that the project eventually became an international success.

His son, a Bafta-nominated historian film-maker, called The Wicker Man as “the movie that messed up my family”.

When someone reached out by a resident living in his mother’s old house, inquiring if he wanted to retrieve the documents, his initial reaction was to suggest destroying “the bloody things”.

But then he and his brother examined the bags and understood the importance of their contents.

Revelations from the Documents

Dominic, an art historian, commented: “Every key figure is represented. We discovered the first draft by Shaffer, but with dad’s annotations as filmmaker, ‘controlling’ the writer’s excess. Because he was formerly a barrister, Shaffer tended to overwrite and his father just went ‘cut, cut, cut’. They sort of loved each other and hated each other.”

Writing the book provided some “resolution”, the son said.

Financial Hardships

His family did not profit financially from the production, he explained: “The bloody film earned a fortune for others. It’s unfair. His father agreed to take five grand. So he never received any of the upside. Christopher Lee also did not get any money from it as well, although that he did the film for no pay, to leave Hammer [Horror films]. So, in many ways, it’s been a very unkind film.”