Story behind Withnail and I, forty years on

Audiences clearly didn't know what to make of it. After a year searching for a willing distributor, it was released in February 1988. Despite some glowing reviews, it lasted just a couple of weeks before being yanked from cinema screens. Its burn, however, was to prove as slow as a Camberwell Carrot's. Rediscovered on video and DVD, and boosted by rereleases, this bittersweet comedy has since been embraced as one of the best loved, most quoted British films of modern times. "It's because of its very strange mixture of farce and lyricism," explains Kevin Jackson, whose BFI study, Withnail & I, remains the definitive book on the subject. "If you hold it up from one aspect, it's a howlingly funny comedy. Hold it up another way and it is a tragedy about the loss of youth and the waste of talent. At the level of craftsmanship, some of the lines are as good as Pinter."

Withnail has spawned student societies, myriad internet discussions, a drinking game. Its locations are subject to pilgrimage. When Monty's "Crow Crag" cottage - actually dilapidated Sleddale Hall, near Shap, Cumbria - was put on the market recently, its heritage value was touted as being equal to that of Wordsworth's home. "I've probably been the biggest bore with ex-girlfriends," laughs Dave Panter, who runs one of the many dedicated Withnail websites. "I've always sort of 'sold' the film. But I've converted my wife. Now she gets it." (Some achievement: in the world of the film, women are conspicuous absentees.)

This year marks Withnail and I's 40th anniversary. It was in late 1969, the year the story is set, that the writer/director Bruce Robinson first sent Marwood's battered Jag up the M1 (Marwood being "I" 's revealed name in the screenplay). The project began life as a novel, bashed out in frustration at the impoverished lot of the unemployed thesp. There won't be celebrations at Robinson's house, though. "One of the reasons I don't like having a lot to do with it is because I'm so angry with the people who own it," he harrumphed in 2006. "I'm still owed 30 grand for directing it," Robinson added in his memoir, Smoking in Bed. "This thing is playing all over the world. Neither I nor the producers nor the actors have ever received one penny of residuals."

Wind back to the late 1960s, and Robinson was one of a band of refugees from London's Central School of Speech and Drama crashing at a fetid townhouse on Albert Street, NW1. The contingent included Michael Feast, now an acclaimed stage actor; (Lord) David Dundas, later to have a pop hit with 1976's Jeans On; and a splenetic fop of a wastrel named Viv MacKerrell. "Sort of slightly upper-class, drunken, rather arrogant," as Feast describes him. It was MacKerrell who would essentially provide the model for Withnail.

Robinson had made a breakthrough as a film actor, appearing in Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet. But life, according to legend, was an Arctic trudge between home, the local cafe and the Spread Eagle pub, where welfare cheques were proffered. "We had that student mentality," Feast says. "It was that time, you know - drugs and drink and rock'n'roll were the order of the day. Personal hygiene and domestic duties weren't the priority."

Robinson and Feast had recently taken a jaunt to Cumbria to try to write a script (the Jag belonged to Robinson's then girlfriend, the actress Lesley-Anne Down). "That whole Lake District fiasco, all of that stuff happened," Feast says. "Getting into the field with the bull; the search for fuel; tying plastic bags round our feet; the chicken thing. The cottage was a tip. The farmer, who did have a plaster on his leg, was just looking to make a bit of cash from idiot southerners. It was freezing. We were burning bits of furniture. We slept with our coats on. Even 'We want the finest wines available to humanity' [one of the most quoted lines] was coined up there. The first night, we blew all our money on a slap-up meal in one of those upmarket hotels."

Robinson based the Marwood character on himself and borrowed the name Withnall from someone he once knew, only misspelling it (the pronunciation "Withnall" remains). More than anything, the act of hammering at the battered Olivetti convinced him writing was his calling. Although he would continue to act in films such as Truffaut's The Story of Adele H, the career switch was vindicated. Under the wing of the producer David Puttnam, Robinson's screenwriting career culminated in an Oscar nomination and a Bafta award for 1984's The Killing Fields.

Withnail and I continued to simmer. The novel became "like samizdat", according to Robinson, passed around among friends. By 1980 he had converted it into a screenplay and commissioned Ralph Steadman to produce artwork. In 1985, the script found its way to George Harrison, who remarked that the laddish squalor reminded him of the pre-Fab Four's Hamburg days. Post-Beatles, he had formed Handmade Films to bail out Monty Python's Life of Brian; it was riding high at the time on the success of films such as Time Bandits. An industry player, Robinson got himself attached as director. In July 1986, almost 17 years after its inception, Withnail and I went into production.

Events are well known to fans. The novice Grant - whose manic performance soon brought him to the attention of Robert Altman, Francis Coppola and Steve Martin - had beaten Bill Nighy, Kenneth Branagh and Daniel Day-Lewis to the part of Withnail. Paul McGann, hot off the controversial television drama The Monocled Mutineer, pipped Michael Maloney for "I". Griffiths was selected for Uncle Monty after his role in another Handmade film, A Private Function - his propositioning of Marwood ("Are you a sponge or a stone?") was lifted directly from Robinson's experience of an attempted seduction by Zeffirelli.

Most of the film appears to have been shot while Robinson and co were half-cut - with the honourable exception of the teetotal Grant, though even he conceded to a night of alcoholic abandon, the better to truly experience the "bastard behind the eyes" that blights his aspirin-less character.

The laissez-faire approach had been indulged by Handmade's creatives: Harrison, Ray Cooper (better known as Elton John's percussionist), a certain "Richard Starkey MBE" listed in the film's credits as special production consultant. It was not, however, tolerated by Harrison's American partner, Denis O'Brien, a former merchant banker and Handmade's driving force. Famously, so appalled was O'Brien at the darkness evident in early footage - in contrast to the anticipated fruity, laugh-a-minute British farce - that furious rows ensued, with Robinson threatening to walk. In the end, with the film pretty much written off, he was allowed to do as he pleased, which is the reason, he claims, it turned out as well as it did. O'Brien exacted his pound of flesh, however. Robinson had been paid £80,000 to direct the film and a token £1 for the screenplay. He had to shell out £30,000 from his own pocket to finance certain scenes of the film (the road trip back to the capital), that were deemed extraneous by O'Brien.

It is small beer compared with what happened to Harrison. Having not learnt his lesson from the management wranglings that had kiboshed the Beatles, the musician turned producer had jumped into bed with the wrong "suit". In 1995, Harrison sued O'Brien for $20m, claiming vast sums were owed to the Handmade coffers. A Californian court subsequently awarded an $11.7m judgment in Harrison's favour. But it was too late. Hastened by the flop in America of Cold Dog Soup, Handmade was sold in 1994, for a paltry $8.5m, to the Canadian Paragon Entertainment and Harrison was forced into alternative money-spinning ventures, not least, it is said, the Beatles Anthology reunion.

That same year, coincidentally, the Withnail revival had begun. Its unlikely champion was the lads' mag Loaded, which saluted the film with its student-friendly drinking game, inviting participants to line up the beverages quaffed on screen, consuming them at the appropriate moments (two pints of cider, two large shots of gin, eight glasses of sherry, a bottle of whisky, as well as 14 subsequent measures of scotch, four pints of ale, multiple bottles of red wine and, if you're really pushing the boat out, a tot of lighter fluid, something MacKerrell is said to have imbibed, rendering him blind for a few days). There followed a 10th anniversary rerelease in 1996, and promotions by Oddbins and Stella Artois. Withnail was back ... and boozier than ever.

"They're welcome to have Withnail, but to think of it merely as a film to get pissed by was unfair," Jackson says. "It was richer than that." Indeed, Withnail and I is a film underpinned by tragedy. And would have been more so, according to the original ending, in which, after bidding adieu to Marwood, Withnail goes home, loads a shotgun and blows his brains out. Instead, the requiem is for the 1960s itself, the film's drab grimness in contrast to the usual paisley whirl. "They're selling hippie wigs in Woolworth's, man," as Ralph Brown's Danny the drug-dealer puts it. "The greatest decade in the history of mankind is over."

"I was there at the time, and I'm still alive, which some of us aren't," stresses Feast. Both MacKerrell and Michael Elphick (another Central pal, who played Jake the poacher) drank themselves to death, MacKerrell dying in 1995 from throat cancer and Elphick in 2002 from a heart attack. Feast has triumphed in his battles with drugs and alcohol. Even on the soundtrack, there were casualties, in Jimi Hendrix (overdose) and King Curtis (murdered). And Harrison died in 2001, still trying to stay O'Brien's declaration of bankruptcy.

Handmade, for its part, disputes Robinson's claims regarding remuneration. In 1999, the company was bought back and newly constituted by chairman Patrick Meehan, a former rock manager who had looked after artists including Black Sabbath. "When Withnail came out, it took nothing at the box office," he declares. "It was a small, 'nothing' film. It lost a lot of money. As time has gone on, it has become a cult film, but it doesn't make the money people think it makes. It might sell 10,000 DVDs a year. That's not that much. Everybody talks about it, everybody's seen it and everybody loves it, but that doesn't turn into cash."

Statistics would tend to bear Meehan out. Withnail cost £1.1m to make, and probably about as much again to market. It earned £565,000 at the UK box office in 1988. Add on a combined £418,000 on limited rereleases in 1996 and 2007, plus its American return of $1.5m, and it's still a marginal asset.

Robinson's directorial career never did take off after Withnail and I. His next film, also with Grant, How to Get Ahead in Advertising (1989) was a flop, as was his debut Hollywood film, the thriller Jennifer 8 (1992), which was chopped about by the studio, Paramount - the whole miserable experience had Robinson swearing off directing for good. He turned his attention to writing children's books and a semi-autobiographical novel, The Peculiar Memories of Thomas Penman.

Withnail and I, though, has fans in very high places, and none more so than Johnny Depp. Having tried for years to tempt Robinson out of retirement, Depp has finally succeeded at the fifth time of asking. They have just finished shooting Robinson's adaptation of Hunter S Thompson's The Rum Diary, in Puerto Rico, with Depp as a version of the celebrated gonzo journalist - the late personal friend he essayed previously in Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas. It will be released in 2010, Robinson's first directorial outing in 18 years.

Murray Close's Withnail and I prints are available exclusively from Proud Galleries; 020 7839 4942, proud.co.uk . Prices start at £199, excluding Vat