The Big Freakout

by Dan Sickles

Audrey Hepburn here, darling. As I lie on my deathbed, here in my elegant Swiss Chalet, I have but one regret. A real stinkeroo of a picture I made back in 1967 called TWO FOR THE ROAD. Haven't seen it? Good for you, darling. But just for the record, here is the story I REALLY wanted to tell. Rated T for dark themes, twisted values, and rock and roll.

THE BIG FREAKOUT

This is a psychedelic retelling of TWO FOR THE ROAD, a Sixties comedy-drama about a married couple starring Audrey Hepburn. I adore Audrey and mean no disrespect to her legacy of glamor, compassion and elegance. Please comment nicely!

No, darling, I have no regrets. The doctors say it won't be long, yet as I lie in bed the winter wind of Switzerland howls and moans and I am content. The cold wind is a part of me. But I wouldn't change one thing about my life. I was blessed, so very fortunate to spend so many years traveling the world, helping poor children. And I had husbands, so many wonderful husbands, and no matter how weak or greedy or controlling they were, I only remember that they loved me and together we raised children, wonderful precious children of our own.

Do I regret anything? Perhaps I do regret Two for the Road.

What's that? You haven't seen it? Please don't bother. To be brutally honest, darling, Two For the Road is a tepid, uninspired, faintly depressing "comedy" about a married couple on the edge of divorce who drive through France reminiscing about the past ten years of their marriage. It's like a very, very watered down version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, minus the tragedy, minus the pain, minus the insights, minus the truth.

Yet in the beginning my wonderful co-star Albert Finney and I were hoping to create something very different. We wanted to make a movie we secretly called "the Big Freakout." We wanted to show everyone – our spouses, our peers, our fans – that we were hip, and with it, and digging the kids who wanted to change the world. Remember, darling, this was 1966. We wanted to film a new kind of movie, a personal statement, not the bland, marriage on the rocks story that was concocted by studio hacks.

We wanted to shock everyone who wanted to keep us chained down, who chose to see us as nice, sweet, bankable stars. We wanted to make our own version of a psychedelic road movie. Of course it didn't happen. The studio wouldn't allow brave, wonderful Albert and me to risk our careers and reputations with a psychedelic assault on all the nice people who wanted a nice fairy tale ending. So we gave in. We told the story they wanted to hear.

Now here's the story I really wanted to tell.

The story opens with me, a wild-haired little street urchin, squatting to urinate on the grave of Winston Churchill, who raped my mother while touring the East End during the darkest days of the London Blitz. Drooling and sneering, a stodgy MP listens to my story, calls me a liar, and then clubs me with an umbrella.

In this movie I'm not the demure Audrey the world loves. I'm afraid I'm very unmanageable, darling. And so I'm sentenced to two years in a sadistic girl's reform school. After a montage of lesbian sex, gang violence, and field hockey (all inter-cut with a scorching live UK performance of "Rock Around the Clock" by Bill Haley and the Comets) I emerge from prison at the edge of womanhood, ready (as Albert puts it in the script) for "loads of men, loads of fun, and loads of destruction!"

Now dear Albert first enters the film as a young Oxford lad presenting a paper on youth unrest in Britain. A kindly professor suggests that our hero needs "street research" to "sharpen his insights." And so the sweet but gullible lad immediately rents a cheap motorcar and goes cruising across the British countryside.

The first person he meets is yours truly, thumbing for a ride in the pouring rain while singing "I Wanna Be Your Man" by the Beatles at the top my lungs. Instead of a tiresome, bickering married couple, we're a pair of swinging nihilists. We get acquainted by having steamy sex in a barn to the sounds of "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones. But in the morning our car is gone!

Now I pretend I know about a fortune in jewels buried in a nearby churchyard, and I lead poor Albert on a desperate scavenger hunt that swiftly leads to cannibalism, necrophilia, grave robbing, and blues wailing at a local club, where I actually get to sit in as vocalist with the original 1964 lineup of the Animals, reunited for a smoking set that includes "Boom Boom," "House of the Rising Sun," "I'm Crying," and "Send You Back to Walker." Then just as the police arrive, I say very quietly "I died many years ago," and blow my brains out with Winston Churchill's personal pistol.

Back at Oxford, Albert presents his paper on teen violence and street crime to a standing ovation and top marks. Wandering out into the yard, he sees a beautiful wild flower growing up between the bricks. Of course that flower represents my spirit, the spirit of Audrey Hepburn, set free at last.

Outside the wind is howling, and my time is short. I'm glad people will remember my innocence on screen, and my kindness and good deeds in the real world. But there was sadness in my life, and hidden pain, and howling darkness. That's a side of me that the world never saw.

And I wish I could have made a movie like The Big Freakout.