One agent represented the talent for these fascinating films: Maggie Abbott.
According to this agent, the initial choice to play the central character in ‘The Man Who Fell To Earth’ was Peter O’Toole until Maggie – now retired and writing books in the desert near Palm Springs – suggested Bowie was the only guy made for the role.
She also represented Jagger and I believe Nicolas Roeg for ‘Performance’. Of the making of that film she said that the experience deeply traumatised Edward Fox, who took a sabbatical of almost a decade from acting in films before he had fully recovered.
‘The Stuntman’ is another amazing story and read – as a book – playing with ideas of reality and perception, when a guy on the run, closely pursued by authorities, stumbles across a movie set in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere and decides to hide himself as a crew member, ‘in broad daylight’ as it were. His saviour and nemesis is the satanic Svengali director figure – Peter O’Toole – another client of this mysterious agent. The treatment looks a bit like a TV film, as opposed to a twisted but subtle trip, but still fascinating as a story.
The Acid King, a book by Maggie, is a fascinating account of how – unbeknownst to her, until she invited Marianne Faithfull to her boyfriend-at-the-time’s party – she came to be dating the man who set up the police raid on Redlands: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Acid-King-Maggie-Abbott-ebook/dp/B00NBJCP9G
