Blade Runners, Deer Hunters and Blowing the Bloody Doors Off By Michael Deeley

Splashed across the cover of Michael Deeley's autobiography is a quote from Michael Caine. "You'll enjoy this book," Sir Michael assures us.

Its foreword, by Ridley Scott, further promises "an accurate and entertaining read": high praise indeed by this dour director's standards. But Caine and Scott both worked with Deeley on two of the producer's best known movies, The Italian Job and Blade Runner. Can we trust their endorsements of his new book?

Deeley certainly has quite a tale to tell. He has presided over everything from cheap nudist movies at the start of his career to The Knack, for which he won the Golden Palm in Cannes in 1965, and The Deer Hunter (Academy Award for Best Picture in 1979). He was closely involved with Don't Look Now, The Wicker Man and The Man Who Fell To Earth. And much of what he has to say is, indeed, entertaining.

Deeley has not been an active producer since 1991; and it's probably because he no longer needs to flatter associates that many get the sharp edge of his tongue. They include Lindsay Anderson, Steven Spielberg, Julia Ormond, Harrison Ford, Bernard Delfont and Michael Cimino, the director of The Deer Hunter, whose "depths of malice and dishonesty" are announced on page three and elaborated in detail. We hear how Warren Beatty arrives on the doorstep of Deeley's Belgravia home at 11pm to beg him to remove the famous love-making scene in Don't Look Now between Donald Sutherland and Beatty's then-lover, Julie Christie. A coked-up Sam Peckinpah bursts into the editing suite of Convoy, proclaims "To be or not to be" and promptly passes out on the floor. Such stories are alone worth the price of admission, although grazing through the gossip is made more difficult by the absence of an index. There is also, annoyingly, no filmography.

Deeley has a neat turn of phrase, and his assessment of his own work is shrewd. He also admits to the great movies that got away: Life of Brian, The Godfather and Day of the Jackal. Long swathes of narrative are devoted to the three title movies – somewhat redundantly, since Deeley's co-author, Matthew Field, has already published a book on The Italian Job, and much has been written about the others. Still, it's good to hear this insider's side of the story.

Gradually, Deeley's role turned into that of a corporate executive. He joined Harold Wilson's think-tank on British cinema in 1974 and today is deputy chairman of the British Screen Advisory Council. He weathered the collapse of EMI's film division, of which he was president, in 1978, and became known as "Wheeley Deeley" for his cunning in scratching together finance. What makes his book more than another stream of amusing anecdotes is his experience of the snakes and ladders of the film industry over the past half century.

Towards the end, one senses he was finding the business increasingly thankless. After Blade Runner, Deeley went into retirement. Coaxed back to work for American television, he declares himself excited, but the final chapter – on a mini-series about Catherine The Great – ends on a dying fall. Some passages may be hard going for the general reader; the sawdust and tinsel of a movie set undoubtedly makes for more colourful material. But the book includes many illuminating insights. By the way, for those who wonder what a producer actually does, Deeley's answer is simple and pointed: "Everything necessary".

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