Ismail Merchant: For whom film sets were a family affair

Ismail Merchant, whose film-making collaboration with James Ivory created a genre of films with visually sumptuous settings that told literate tales of individuals trying to adapt to shifting societal values, died on May 25 in a London hospital. He was 68.

The Indian-born Merchant?s carnival-barker personality contrasted dramatically with the artist?s reserve of the Oregon-reared Ivory, but as producer and director respectively they achieved a personal and professional partnership that endured 44 years and produced award-winning films including A Room With a View, Howards End and The Remains of the Day.

Impulsive, scheming and devoted to the deal in pushing his influence behind the scenes, Merchant was so unfailingly ingratiating up front that actor Simon Callow once said the phrase ?to curry favour? was invented for Merchant.

At his death, he and Ivory were in London shooting The White Countess, from a script by Kazuo Ishiguro, starring Ralph Fiennes, Natasha Richardson, and Lynn and Vanessa Redgrave. Among the other notable films he produced were Shakespeare Wallah, The Europeans, Quartet, Heat and Dust, Mr. and Mrs. Bridge, Jefferson in Paris and The Golden Bowl.

A Merchant-Ivory film set was always something of a family affair, with Merchant a more frequent visitor than producers generally are and the same crew members returning for service over decades. Once on the scene, Merchant was just as likely to be fetching tea for a company member or making one of his celebrated curries for the cast as pitching a fit about cost overruns or schedule snafus.

Merchant travelled frequently between Europe and an apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, but he and Ivory centred their life in a 14-room manor house in Claverack, N.Y., built in 1805 and filled with enough elegant furniture, prints and paintings to be a setting for a Merchant-Ivory film.

Ismail Merchant (far right) with actress Naomi Watts and James Ivory at the premiere of their film Le Divorce

Born in 1936 in what was then Bombay, Merchant moved to New York in 1958 and earned a master?s in business administration at New York University. His first film was a theatrical short, The Creation of Woman, which was a United States entry in the 1961 Cannes International Film Festival. En route to the festival, Merchant met Ivory, and they formed a partnership to make English-language features in India for the international market.

The first Merchant-Ivory project was The Householder, based on a book by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, an author who grew up in Britain and married an Indian. She then became the team?s writing collaborator in an agreement signed on a napkin in a Manhattan restaurant in 1963.

?When we first began, Ruth told us she had never written a screenplay,? Merchant told The Associated Press. ?That was not a problem, since I had never produced a feature film and Jim had never directed one.? Merchant-Ivory came to symbolise scenes of rich d?cor and period atmosphere, palaces and parade grounds of India, castles and country houses of Europe, and lavish dinners and drawing-room intrigue.

The two men asserted that the opulent settings were essential to portraying the breadth and diversity of the culture clashes central to their screenplays, which often portrayed societies in jeopardy with individuals fighting to retain their ideals.

Merchant?s adventures included stealing props and bailing actors out of jail. One famous stunt was getting around a ban on filming The Proprietor inside the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles, France, by draping himself in robes and posing as the Maharajah of Jodhpur. His crew masqueraded as his entourage and, once inside, set up the shoot. Merchant believed that visual pageantry made narratives more accessible.

Asked to assess Merchant?s strengths during the filming of The Golden Bowl in 1999, Ivory said: ?He?s a natural showman, a great publicist, and he?s just very, very good at getting his way. He?s made some casting decisions by just going ahead and offering jobs to people on the spot. He shouldn?t do it, but then, when it?s people like James Mason and Maggie Smith, how can I complain??

Commenting on Merchant?s ability to finagle spectacle at bargain rates, Uma Thurman, a star of The Golden Bowl, looked out at the grounds and turreted mansion that he had secured for the shoot and said: ?You?d think this movie was three times the budget that he has. I think of Ismail as this person who keeps pulling rabbits out of hats.?