Insomnia Is Good For You

Shooting script, 33 mimeographed pp., stapled in to oversized red card wrappers. Typed title label to front cover, typed ownership label ('Park Lane Films Ltd., Quadrex House, Park Lane, W.1.') to inside front cover. Contents very clean, covers a little creased at edges, and with one small (1cm) closed tear to leading edge. MORDECAI RICHLER'S FIRST SCREENPLAY, FOR ONE OF PETER SELLERS' MOST RARELY-SEEN FILMS. By the mid-1950s Peter Sellers was a huge radio star, thanks mostly to The Goon Show, but the film career which would later define him was yet to begin. In 1955 he appeared in The Ladykillers, his first major feature, with his idol Alec Guinness. Sellers' performance was excellent but the film failed to launch him, and for the next two years he continued to work on The Goon Show, appearing on screen only in spin-offs from his radio work (most notably The Case Of The Mukkinese Battle-Horn (1956), the closest a camera ever came to reproducing The Goon Show formula successfully). But in 1957 Sellers broke through at last: roles in The Smallest Show On Earth and The Naked Truth brought him to the attention of the Boulting Brothers, who cast him in Carleton-Browne Of The F.O. and I'm All Right Jack, both released in 1959, after which Seller's cinematic future was assured. At the beginning of 1957, however, Sellers didn't know all this was about to happen. Increasingly desperate to get things moving, he agreed to star in three short features, all of them comic pastiches of government information films: Cold Comfort, Dearth [sic] Of A Salesman and Insomnia Is Good For You. Insomnia. was produced by a new and unknown company, Park Lane Films, directed by Leslie Arliss, and co-written (in his screenwriting debut by the Canadian novelist) Mordechai Richler. (Richler would later work uncredited on the film adaptation of Room At The Top (1959), and make his most important contribution to cinema with the criminally underappreciated The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974), adapted from his own novel and starring a pre-Spielberg Richard Dreyfuss). Richler and Lewis Greifer's screenplay is light on dialogue, heavy on voiceover (provided by Sellers himself), and makes frequent use of stock footage -- all of which suggests both a tight budget, and a star desperate for screen time. In Insomnia Is Good For You Sellers plays Hector Dimwittie, a pen-pushing office worker. One Monday morning he is told by his boss to report to his office the following Friday. Dimwittie spends the intervening week unable to sleep, convinced he is about to be fired. When Friday comes he discovers that his boss merely wants him to spend the weekend showing some important clients the town. Relieved but shattered, he falls unwakeably asleep in the first bar they visit. All three of these films are rare. Ropey prints of both Cold Comfort and Dearth Of A Salesman were shown at the Cardiff Screen Festival in 2004, but they seem not to have been seen since. Insomnia Is Good For You has, for now at least, disappeared completely. Its last sighting is reported in a 2004 issue of the newsletter of the Peter Sellers Appreciation Society. The author of the article, Mr. Robert Farrow, tells of finding a number of film cans discarded in a skip in Park Lane in the early 1990s. He writes that six contained the master prints of all three films; six others contained the negatives; a further six had the soundtracks; and the last two contained the titles, credits and cuts. According to the article Mr. Farrow rescued the cans from the skip and had the films transferred to VHS. Mark Cousins, a leading authority on the work of Peter Sellers, tells us of a rumour that a screening of all three films once took place at a PSAS meeting many years ago. But neither we nor Mr. Cousins can find anyone to confirm this, and we have been unable to trace Mr. Farrow to ask him where the films are now (his article is silent on the subject). No Sellers biographer we have contacted has seen Insomnia.…