Iain Johnstone obituary

There were few great movie stars of the late 20th century not filmed, interviewed or profiled by the television producer, film-maker and author Iain Johnstone, who has died aged 80. He was both a respected critic of the movie business and a participant, as screenwriter and maker of documentaries, about the making of films.

He had a long professional relationship with Steven Spielberg, beginning in 1974, when Iain had just spent a year in the US as professor of broadcasting at Boston University. Having heard that the movie Jaws was being shot on Martha’s Vineyard, he made a short film, The Jaws Report, for the BBC. He went on to make seven more films about the director’s works, including Jurassic Park, Minority Report, the Indiana Jones sequence and War of the Worlds.

Before this, as a TV producer, he had originated BBC1’s flagship review programme Film …, beginning with Film 71, trying several presenters before settling on Barry Norman. Iain presented Film 82 himself for a year, in Norman’s absence.

He had been filming profiles of stars for the BBC since 1971, the first being Dustin Hoffman on location for Straw Dogs. Others followed, and in 1976 he spent time with John Wayne on board the star’s converted minesweeper off Mexico. Wayne assumed much of the camera directing and claimed his screen characterhad “never been mean or petty or small”, a phrase Iain liked to savour.

In 1975 Iain had formed his own company, and the following year Richard Attenborough asked him to make a documentary about the shooting of his film A Bridge Too Far. This was the subject of Iain’s first book, The Arnhem Report. His second, in 1981, a biography of Clint Eastwood, sprang from his 1977 documentary The Man With No Name.

Other film profiles included Barbra Streisand, Warren Beatty, Stanley Kubrick and Jack Nicholson making The Shining, Woody Allen and, in 1979, a documentary about the Monty Python team as they made Life of Brian.

Iain became friends with John Cleese and filmed the making of A Fish Called Wanda in 1988. By then Iain had been working as film critic of the Sunday Times since 1983, and after a decade in the post gave it up to write a film script with Cleese. This was the less well-received Fierce Creatures (1997), starring Cleese, Kevin Kline, Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Palin.

Fortunately Iain was then commissioned to write a companion volume to the 1999 Bond film, The World Is Not Enough. More biographies followed (he had published a third, of Dustin Hoffman, in 1984): Tom Cruise in 2006 and Meryl Streep in 2009.

He also wrote fiction – Cannes: The Novel (1990), a thriller, Wimbledon (2000) – Iain was a keen tennis player, a member of Queen’s and Campden Hill clubs in London – and Pirates of the Mediterranean (2010).

Born in Reading, Berkshire, to Ethel “Gillie” (nee Gilmour) and Jack Johnstone, Iain went to Crosfields school, before his father got a job as a postmaster in Belfast, and he went to Campbell college there. He studied law at Bristol University, graduating in 1965 – late in life he used his law to train as a commercial mediator, practising at central London county court from around 2005.

At Bristol he worked for BBC Points West and on graduation joined ITN reading the late bulletins. There he made a friend in Richard Whiteley, whose biography, Richard by Kathryn, he later co-wrote with Whiteley’s partner in 2006.

From ITN, Iain went to the BBC in 1968, where his work stretched far wider than films. I met him there the following year, when I was sent to work as his number two on Points of View, presented by Robert Robinson. He also made Robinson’s Travels documentaries about India (1979), while Robinson Cruising (1981), on a cruise liner, upset P&O. He worked on the nightly current affairs programme 24 Hours, ran Watergate coverage from Washington in 1973, and produced The Frost Interview (1974).

Three more productions stand out. First, a 1977 documentary about Muhammad Ali, when Iain spent 10 days with Ali, at his training camp, in his home town of Louisville and on a visit to Harvard where Ali had been invited to speak. Then, the chatshow Friday Night, Saturday Morning (1979-80), where Iain took the unheard of risk of changing presenters every two weeks – some triumphant professionals, such as Ned Sherrin and Tim Rice; one a disastrous amateur, the former prime minister Harold Wilson. The third, Snowdon on Camera (1981), two witty, insightful films about photography presented by Tony Snowdon, was nominated for a best documentary Bafta.

For eight years in the late 1980s to early 90s he was host of the BBC Radio 4 quiz Screenplay. He was marvellous company, a charmer, with a wry wit and an almost old-fashioned politeness. He valued good manners and said his nicest interviewee was James Stewart; the antithesis being Yul Brynner – “He actually thought he was the King of Siam.”

Close Encounters – A Media Memoir (2015), was his 12th and last book, brimming with tales of the film industry and the characters, famous and otherwise, who inhabit it. He was working on projects till nearly the end, including ghosting a memoir for a distinguished lawyer (as yet unpublished), and writing a drama about the pianist Glenn Gould.

A brief marriage to Renate Kohler ended in divorce. In 1980 he married Mo Watson, a script supervisor, and she, as well as their three children, Sophie, Holly, and Oliver, and six grandchildren, survives him.

Iain Gilmour Johnstone, television producer, documentary maker and author, born 8 April 1943; died 4 May 2023

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