Penn Shefford - a short biography

A U.S Marshall climbs off his motorbike and stares down the dusty highway at the ever-receeding image of the car as it accelerates away from his speed-trap. There is a close-up of his sunglasses, an eyebrow arches and a prairie-dog coughs. Darkness. We are inside the cop's pocket. We are now given the bullet's-eye view as the cop reaches in to grab the bullet, he cocks open the gun and we are literally inserted into the chamber. Silence. Then a deafening roar as we are launched at sub-sonic speeds towards the car he has aimed at. We arrive at the car just as the occupant turns to see where the noise has come from. He opens his mouth and, bang, the screen washes to red...

Surely the most stylish and innovative beginning to a film in history. The film, of course, was "Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice" (US, 1977). The director, Penn Shefford.

Penn Shefford was born in Santa Monica in 1951. The son of his father and mother, he had an idyllic childhood collecting butterflies and Twinkie wrappers. An early interest in photography lead to an interest in films. However, Penn would often stand up in cinemas shouting "Why can't they keep the picture still?", missing the crucial concept of film as a series of moving images.

War came in 1968 and Penn was sent to Vietnam to cover the conflict. As a photographer, he witnessed some of the crucial moments of the war - the bit with the purple flare in "Apocalypse Now" (US,1981) and the bit when Willem Dafoe flings his arms out in "Platoon" (US, 1986) - and all of these were to influence his film-making on return to the States in 1974. His first job was as a still photographer for the promotions department of MGM. For this job, he had to stand very still for long periods of time until heat exhaustion would cause him pass out.

He went to the famous Famous Film School film school to study film-making in 1975. In his class were Ang Lee, Atom Egoyan and Blake Edwards. One day, Penn was caught passing a note about the feasibility of non-generic film-making in a consumer-led market to Blake Edwards and made to stand in the corner with a dunce's cap on.

His first feature was a documentary, "Bluebells in New Hampshire" (US 1976), a heart-warming evocation of spring in New England. Unfortunately, his tendancy to film roadkills in action and the hunting of squirrels with live ammunition meant that the film became noted for all the wrong reasons.

Similar problems occured with "...And We Shall Have Brownies" (US, 1979), the story of a mother's fight to save the life of her son, stricken with cystic fibrosis. The use of gunplay and a particularly drawn-out car-chase sequence were all criticised by the censors and the film was cut from 117 minutes to a 10-minute short.

Perhaps the pinnacle of Penn's career was the magnificent Vietnam film "Damaged Helmet" (US, 1985). Following the fortunes of an army cook in the final weeks of the conflict, the film was a poignant and often horrific account of food preparation under duress. The scene in which the white sauce is burnt and the chef has to use a hastily concocted mixture of cornflour, white wine and whipped cream prompted an outcry in government circles, leading to the banning of certain ingredients. The famous "lost" footage of the damaged Baked Alaska has now been restored to the film, the American censors now having deemed it relevant in the context of the film's denouement.

Controversy has never been far from Penn Shefford's life and, in 1991, he was arrested for possession of an illegal weapon, a gun he claimed was planted in the glove-compartment of his car by an obsessive fan. The police agreed that the gun had been planted, but the evidence of soil and growth-promoter did not neccessarily point to a fan, and Penn was sentenced to 5 months in prison.

On release, he started work on "Window Rear" (US 1993), a film many saw as blatant stealing from Hitchcock, a claim Penn denied. His following films, "East by South-East" (US, 1994), "Dial R for Robbery" (US/GB, 1997) and "More Birds" (US/UK 1999) were equally villified but, by now, Penn had became an A-list director and could do what he wanted.

Penn Shefford is currently working on another Vietnam film following the fortunes of a butterfly collector in the last weeks of the war. The story of his life has come full circle and who knows what to expect from Penn Shefford in the future?