"Yello, The Last Tycoon" Select: August 1990 by Russell Brown Yello -- No Business Like Snow Business Cinema and YELLO come even closer together as internationalist and millionaire musician DIETER MEIER works on their major new feature film, Snowball, in Poland. There are clocks everywhere in Wroclaw Feature Film Studios. But hardly any of them work. It's as if room by room, corridor by corridor, time has stopped over the past 20 years of Polish history. Stopped and begun to crumble like the tatty arches and discoloured domes that sprout off the studio building. Behind the studio lies a small boating lake, once intended as the focus of a people's park. Two men in a boat drag weeds off the bottom and another methodically mows the lawns. The only people not paid to be present are a handful of young German tourists stretched out in the sun. The great, round bulk of the nearby Century Hall, for a long time the largest unsupported dome in Europe, only emphasises the stillness. Yet behind the dignified decay, inside the studio complex, there's another world. A world of bustling activity, outrageous fantasy and European culture-clash. Yello are making a movie. The magic word is "snowball". Just to speak this word, the film's title, would salve any number of sins in Wroclaw, the stately provincial capital that sprouts from the endless farms of Western Poland. As writer, producer and director, Yello's Dieter Meier has brought not only good, hard American dollars, but a sense of artistic event to a country where art-for-art's-sake is still a major social force. Snowball is a modern baroque fantasy. Events slip from contemporary New York to an underground world where the rule of myth takes over. Depending on your view, it's an art movie, a comedy or a fairytale. And it's being made chiefly by people who haven't been asked to exercise imagination for over a decade. The snowball story began two years ago, when an American journalist interested Dieter in the location possibilities of Poland. Eighteen months later he and Austrian TV producer Eddy Oleschak arrived in Warsaw looking for somewhere to make a film from Dieter's story. Not a very good idea, on the face of it. Poland then was still a Stalinist state and the two government film companies, Poltan and Film Polski, were not keen on allowing them free run of any state facilities. To make matters worse, the man who claimed to have access to an independent film studio in Wroclaw was a crook, one of the breed of shysters that flourished as post-Cold War Poland melted. He took them for 30,000 dollars... "It was the crook who made it possible for us to be here," says Dieter with a smile. "People said I should put him in jail, which isn't something I'd do, but I explained to them that it was this swindler who led us to the studio. What he pretended was possible is now possible." The studio had been occupied for the past ten years with soft-porn, Western exploitation flicks and cheap domestic drama for the local market. The American cartoon giant Hanna-Barbera used it to cut the huge labour costs of animation work. The local crews had taken to strong drink on the job. Alcohol is now banned from the complex and, even if several workers are occasionally half-cut by lunchtime, everyone is caught up in the idea of Snowball. Builders have created a stunning cave set in the main studio space -- supported not by bars and rivets but by an almost comical jungle of rough-cut timber. Bucolic Polish cameramen, using outdated equipment, are calmly behaving like artists. Elaborately costumed extras go about things, a steely determination in their eyes. It looks like a happening thing. Most of the cast is Polish, including the impressive Malgorzata Potcka, as Hera, the stupid and spiteful queen of the Underworld, and the startling seven-year-old Marzena Krol as the royal astronomer. Alongside the Poles works an international "family", including British actor Johnny Melville. Tucked away as an extra is Prince Hubertus von Hohenlohe, a real-life Austrian aristocrat who had been down for a bigger part before he wrecked his leg skiing in the World Cup downhill competition. He lives in a castle, his mother owns a third of Fiat Motors, he has skied in two Olympics, released two albums as a singer/ songwriter and is as alarmingly narcissistic as you'd expect from all that. Dieter, a true internationalist, gets through two, three, possibly four languages on one lungful of air and local translators convey the more complex instructions. Somehow everyone gets the idea. The most obvious sign of Poland's new awakening is the novelty of capitalism -- goods in shops and crowds with eyes bigger than their wallets. With a grim austerity programme already biting, that could soon prove a fickle promise, but the country may also be on the brink of an unfettered creative boom like that of post-Franco Spain. "The events in Poland haven't affected the story. We had a libretto to make a film from," says Dieter. "But the making of the film is, of course, the central part, and the historical situation has had a huge effect on that. It was the first time all these fantastic architects, costume makers, technicians and actors could work under the new circumstances. "They don't have some late Stalinistic commissar or some director who's part of the old game dominating things, and don't believe that some of these big-shot Polish film-makers were not liaising with the government. They had no responsibilities to any political manoeuvring. I don't know why we've been so lucky. "It was really not a smart decision to come here -- it was an intuition." If Dieter Meier gets tired it doesn't ever show up as pique or pettiness. Just as well for a man who works 12 hours a day during the week and flies home to Zurich every weekend to do what Yello are best known for -- making records. A new Yello album is about to be born -- at about the same time as Dieter's third child, as it happens. During the week this particular baby is in the care of Boris Blank, the more musical half of Yello, working in their recording studio which now has, in theory at least, a 132-track capability. This probably explains why Yello find it difficult to finish things... Dieter emphasises that film and record are part of the same body of work. They are both Yello productions and a snowball soundtrack LP will released. With recent soundtracks for Nuns On The Run and the American movie Ford Fairlane in the bag, cinema and Yello are closer than ever. Not that they were ever that far apart. "I think Boris has a talent that lets us create from visual ideas, which is the way we work. What he does immediately creates images, it's incredibly three-dimensional. He could make a movie in sound if you gave him nothing more than a few household implements." Yello's first ever record contract, a 10,000 dollar deal with San Francisco's Ralph Records in 1980, required the duo to deliver an album and two self-directed promo films. The deal was made the year before when Boris, then a graphic artist turned truck driver, traveled to California to discuss his music with The Residents, the mysterious figures behind the weirdo record label. "At that point we were overdubbing by putting one cassette player up against another and recording through the microphone, so they said when you do something with more music than tape noise on it, we might be interested. So we got a four-track and did something better than cassette and they were interested," says Dieter, widening his eyes as if still touched and amazed that someone so far from home cared. The first album was 'Solid Pleasure', the first American single, 'Bimbo'. They sold to the people who liked Ralph Records. But the second single, 'Bostich', did something interesting. It became a cult hit in dance clubs and on black radio. They made their only true live appearance before a mainly black and hispanic crowd at New York's Roxy club. Eight years later another single, 'The Race', became their only UK Top Ten hit -- off the back of the Acid House scene. "Rhythm was always important to our music. It starts with rhythm and sound, not song, and maybe that's where we came in with Acid House. People tell me it was a smart move to become part of this Acid House movement. It's a joke! We just think rhythm is the centre of music. "The first music played on this planet was rhythm and it was music to move to, not to sit to. We're very proud that we've always been dancefloor. It's the biggest compliment when people like to dance to your music." Dieter stresses that the main reason for making most of Snowball in Poland was not to keep costs down. But it can't be denied that to make a film this way in the West would be financial madness. As Dieter stands bug-eyed in the middle, directing, propelling, improvising and occasionally slipping into the action as the supporting character, Balthasar (a kind of bowler-hatted jester), miles of film roll through the cameras. Eddy, an effervescent, endlessly helpful guide, and co-writer and Creative Production Supervisor of the project has invented a new unit of measurement -- the Kubrick. One Kubrick equals about one per cent of film shot for each part of the film, the one per cent that will make the final cut. Editing will take at least four months and 99 per cent will go wherever out-takes go. Unusually, most of the studio scenes are being shot in black and white, to be transferred onto colour stock to be washed into sepia or shades of blue and green. "Image is all here," explains Eddy. "We're playing with light and movement. As Dieter says, we're working less with a shooting script than a libretto." Fortysomething and greying a little, Dieter Meier has always been a few years wiser than his comrades. Even when Yello started he had released two solo singles, and one as a member of Fresh Colour, all on the American label Periphery Perfume. Before that he wrote, made films and textiles and exhibited as an artist. For six years after leaving school he was a professional gambler, playing poker 14 hours a day. And he has always played a mean game of golf. When he entered pop music, the home of the rags-to-riches dream, he was and always had been independently wealthy. His father was an orphan who became a wealthy Zurich banker and the family never wanted for money. The prosecution case would be that his life has been that of the rich dilettante; the defence that he's part of the tradition of the European gentleman scholar. He says neither. "I never had anything do to with the art world. We were never scholars in the European tradition, because I think scholars in the European tradition have a big problem. I just felt that perhaps I was a storyteller and I should go back to what I did when I was a boy. I got around my shyness by entertaining people with stories. "But whatever I did, my films or my writing the scholars said, This is a millionaire's hobby, it's not serious. But the big luck for me was never the money -- I didn't live off my family -- but being born to a mother and father so full of love. I remember the first piece I ever did, in a public square I counted a hundred thousand pieces of metal into bags of a thousand. It took me a week, ten hours a day. Much later I learned that I did it because I wanted to do something that I did and it made absolutely no sense. "Anyway, after four days one of the Zurich papers carried a picture of me sitting there doing this, looking very strange, with long green hair. And when my father came into work that Thursday, everyone came into his office to tell him, y'know, this fucking drunkard hippy is your son, what do you have to say about it? It was very aggressive but he loved me for doing it. The guy loves you, and your mother loves you, that's what matters. "But one thing about the way I grew up is that I will never be impressed by money. Recently, we had to deal with Mr Joel Silver of 20th Century Fox, who swept into the room and said, Do you know who you're talking to? I am responsible for the grossing of 1.2 billion dollars for my last five films! Then he tried to push us into a soundtrack deal that bought our music like a piece of shit. The conversation was over in two minutes. Our manager and the agent were scared. They said, Dieter, you can't do this, but I'm simply not impressed by the Hollywood mafia and their money." With post-production and extra location shooting still to be done, Snowball won't see release until early next year, by which time their UK management company aims to have the hip shops full of clothes based on Ines Boesch's costume designs. For all the on-set buzz, it will stand or fall on its post-production, the editing and dubbing into proper English (the Polish actors have been sturdily mouthing the lines as Dieter shouts them out). Dieter's first feature, the thriller Jetz Und Alles, commissioned by the German government in 1981 after his script won first prize in a competition, was spoiled, he says, by an over-anxious producer and "a pseudo-professional so-called top editor". Yello's distrust of authorities and experts is, as much as anything else, a typically Swiss trait. "Throughout Switzerland's history, no one has been able to tell the little mountain farmer with one hectare and two cows what to do, because every hillside is different and only ke knows the right thing to do -- and he hates the authorities. With Yello it was the same, we cultivated our own little garden in the way we saw fit. "We're just going to continue working the way we are now. We have our studio, we love to work there. I have some other film projects (including the proposed Polish thriller Warsaw Palace), we have some soundtracks and we have an incredible amount of fun being an independent circus. That's what Yello's all about. "Maybe it's a bit pretentious when I say this, but I think we've crossed the border. We can't be disturbed by the business or by Hollywood or anything. Boris said to me, Right now we are painting a fresco and there are big possibilities, but I don't care if in a year from now we are back with a pencil and paper drawing. No problem. That's the future of Yello." Photo 1: Dieter Meier, bowler-hatted Charlie Chaplin lookalike. Photo 2: Dieter Meier, smile on his face. Photo 3: Dieter Meier and two actors. Photo 4: Dieter Meier, bowler-hatted Charlie Chaplin lookalike. ------------------------------------------------------------------------