Running Blind: The Hemisphere screenplay and the enigmatic Sol Reybvinnar

I first came across this intriguing, undated screenplay of Running Blind almost nine years ago in 2017 whilst researching Bagley’s archives at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center in Boston USA. Written by Sol Reybvinnar for the London-based Hemisphere Productions, the archivist had listed it as ‘possibly an early draft of the BBC film script as it seems to follow the BBC production line’.

In February 2024 I acquired a copy of the screenplay myself from Royal Books, a specialist rare book dealer in Baltimore, Maryland. They specialise in rare books and paper relating to twentieth century literature, genre fiction, the arts, and popular culture, with a particular emphasis on cinema. On closer inspection, the screenplay actually follows Bagley’s novel, not the BBC production line. Furthermore, the BBC commissioned Jack Gerson to write the screenplay, and it held the film and television rights from 9 May 1977 until they were released on 4 February 1986.^{1 2}

This screenplay initially appears to fall between the period of 1974, when the film option on Running Blind that Geoff Reeve Productions Ltd. held, with a screenplay written by Ian Rodger, lapsed, and 9 May 1977, when Bagley gave the go-ahead for BBC Scotland to acquire the rights.³ However, oddly, there appeared to be no film options agreement appears connected with the Hemisphere screenplay filed in Bagley’s papers.

Neither Rodger’s nor Gerson’s screenplays are archived with Bagley’s papers; indeed neither is Bagley’s own screenplay written during his frustrating trip to Hollywood commencing on 18 November 1970. Of his own screenplay Bagley wrote:

It was the first script I’ve written and I don’t go a bundle on it – best to keep it hidden, in my opinion.⁴

All of these screenplays currently remain hidden, destroyed, or filed in other archives yet to be discovered, with no trace of any in Bagley’s archived papers in Boston. What follows is an account of the only screenplay for Running Blind filed with Bagley’s papers, the Production Company that produced it and the enigmatic Sol Reybvinnar who wrote it.

Whilst researching, I found an erroneous listing of this screenplay on WorthPoint, listing it as a 1973 screenplay for The Mackintosh Man, written by Sol Reybvinnar under the working title of Running Blind. It’s perplexing how this erroneous listing came about; the person who listed it must have known little about either storyline.⁵ Walter Hill wrote the screenplay for The Mackintosh Man, and you can read more about the filming of Bagley’s novel The Freedom Trap here.

When I first found the screenplay in Boston, I thought it might be connected to Bagley’s 1970 Hollywood visit. However, upon reading it, it became clear this wasn’t Bagley’s hand. The screenplay was clearly written by an American, and it lacked Bagley’s trademark attention to detail. There’s a somewhat irksome renaming, or misnaming, of Elín Ragnarsdóttir as Elin Ragmansdottir, an air stewardess meeting Alan Stewart for the first time on his flight to Iceland for Slade’s package collection and delivery. The screenplay includes flashback daydream sequences, one of which finds Stewart in a rest home after Jimmy Birkby’s death.

Wanting to learn more about the enigmatic Sol Reybvinnar, and realising there was little information about this mysterious individual, I found it logical to research the production company.

The screenplay lists Hemisphere Productions as based at 105 Mount Street, London W.1. 105 Mount Street, Mayfair, was previously Winston Churchill’s bachelor flat, where he lived in 1904, when he crossed the floor of the House of Commons from the Conservative to the Liberal benches. In the 1970s, the address was home to Hemisphere Productions, run by independent film producer Barry Michael Levinson. Levinson was born in New York on 2 June 1932 and is not to be confused with the Academy Award winning American film director Barry Lee Levinson, who was born in Baltimore, Maryland on 6 April 1942.

Hemisphere’s Levinson produced the 1972 film The Amazing Mr Blunden, adapted from Antonia Barber’s novel The Ghosts. Lionel Jeffries wrote and directed the film, starring Laurence Naismith as the eponymous Mr Blunden. It is a children’s classic, fondly remembered and later remade as a television film, written and directed by the multi-talented Mark Gatiss.

In 1973, Levinson teamed up with executive producer Patrick Dromgoole, and associate producer Mike Towers from HTV (originally Harlech Television) in a joint Hemisphere/HTV production for ITV. Brian Moore adapted the 90-minute television film Catholics, also known as Catholics – A Fable, Catholics – A Fable of the Future, The Catholics, Conflict, The Conflict and The Visitor, from his 1972 novel. It is the story of an abbot who finds himself the reluctant figurehead of a doctrinal conflict with the Vatican. Jack Gold directed the production and Trevor Howard starred, both of whom Levinson would work with again in his next project, Who? Martin Sheen, Cyril Cusack and Andrew Kier played other leading roles. Trevor Howard, who had then starred in forty major films, said at the London preview of Catholics that this was possibly the finest he had done.⁷

Catholics aired in the US on 29 November 1973, and ABC, CBS, and NBC received a Peabody Award that year for ‘outstanding contributions to entertainment through an exceptional year of televised drama’, which mentioned CBS’s airing of the drama. The following year, on Easter Sunday, 1974, Catholics was shown in the UK.

What followed was Levinson’s foray into espionage thrillers, the timeline I suspected the Running Blind screenplay belonged to.

Who? was a 1974 film from Lion International and Hemisphere Productions, directed by Jack Gold with music by John Cameron, and starring Elliot Gould, Trevor Howard and Joseph Bova. Levinson and co-producer Kurt Berthold produced it, and it was later retitled Roboman and, in Australia, Prisoner of the Skull. The screenplay was written by John Gould, based on the 1959 science fiction novel Who? by Lithuanian/American Science Fiction writer Algirdas Jonas ‘Algis’ Budrys. The story concerns an enigmatic individual with a metal face who is returned from East Germany claiming to be Lucas Martino, an American scientist who was working on a top-secret project but was severely injured and scarred in a car crash. American authorities hold him in custody as they try to establish whether the man is the real Martino or an impostor looking for secret information about the ultimate rocket project developed in the West.

Ohio based JTC Video Inc., or indeed H H and Associates (the package designers), made an error in their circa 1991 video distribution of Roboman by mistakenly crediting the film’s Producer to the wrong Barry Levinson, Director of Bugsy and Rain Man.

Additionally, they changed the story’s synopsis—perhaps attempting to cash in on the success of The Terminator franchise, as 1991 saw the release of Terminator 2: Judgment Day—by describing the character Lucas Mantino as, ‘A Deadly Human Terminator! A monstrous Roboman, half-man, half-machine designed for massive world destruction.’ I imagine both Barry Levinsons, and perhaps even James Cameron heaved a weary sigh of incredulity.

The Internecine Project, was a 1974 film from Lion International and Hemisphere Productions, directed by Ken Hughes with music by Roy Budd, and starring James Coburn, Lee Grant, Harry Andrews and Ian Hendry. Andrews previously played Edgar Mackintosh in the 1973 adaptation of Bagley’s novel The Freedom Trap, filmed as The Mackintosh Man. The Internecine Project was produced by Barry Levinson for MacLean & Co., with co-producer Andrew Donally. Levinson and Jonathan Lynn wrote the screenplay under the working title Internecine, the title of Mort W. Elkind’s original novel. It is the story of former spy Robert Elliot, who has recently been promoted to a government advisory position. To start his new job without ties to his shady past, he crafts a scheme which will take out his four former associates over the course of one fateful night.

In her memoirs I Said Yes to Everything, leading lady actor Lee Grant comments on the film:

I had a really flimsy film to do in London, The Internecine Project. The script was no more than a sixteen-page outline, but the money was good and my co-star was James Coburn, an actor I admired and wanted to play with.⁶

The connection with Alistair MacLean’s ‘MacLean & Co.’, which featured in my previous article about a failed production of Running Blind by Geoffrey J. Reeve, is an interesting one, as Reeve was also connected to MacLean & Co. There does therefore exist an obscure possibility, as there are no film options agreements filed in Bagley’s papers specifically relating to the Hemisphere screenplay, that it may have some connection to Reeve’s production, prior to Ian Rodger being commissioned to write the screenplay.

In July 1976, Levinson reportedly revealed plans for a $10-million program of five British-based movies from Hemisphere Productions over the next 18 months. British producer Aida Young also joined the board of Levinson’s company, and she would produce his first movie, Youth, Age and a Frog Prince, based on three John Collier short stories.⁷

The Hemisphere Production related to Youth, Age and a Frog Prince was in fact called Michael the First, the script a commissioned work of three short plays adapted from a story entitled A Youth from Vienna, one of which, Youth, was written by Jack Rosenthal, who whilst writing it ‘had no idea of the identity of the other writers’, who were Keith Waterhouse & Willis Hall and Tom Stoppard. It was the story of Michael, a medical student, romantically obsessed with finding the perfect girl. Three months earlier, on 7 April, 1976, Aida Young wrote to Jack Rosenthal, suggesting he might like to adapt it for a feature film. The project never came to fruition, and the surviving draft, dated around 1976, is currently preserved as part of the Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection at the University of Sheffield.⁸

In 1979, an advertisement appeared in The Stage urgently requiring ‘young (16-18 years) Beautiful Girls to play Cinderella-type princesses in a forthcoming television series of folk-stories’.⁹ This became the series Storybook International, another Hemisphere and HTV joint production, which enjoyed great popularity, and is somewhat cherished. The weekly, half-hour series collected folk tales and fairy stories from around the world. Veronica Kruger adapted the stories, and Victor Gollancz Ltd., published them the same year, accompanied by line drawings by Patricia Drew.

The series, first broadcast on ITV on 31 July 1981, ran for 65 episodes across three seasons, and although its distribution was originally confined to Britain and Europe, it enjoyed extensive cable play in the US, Scandinavia and the Middle East in subsequent decades. In 1984, Walt Disney Home Video released the series as Stories and Fables, and it was available on VHS throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with the full series finally released on DVD in 2006.

The distinctive opening credits famously began with an animated title sequence, a troubadour singing the theme song, The Storyteller, accompanied by a friendly fox. Larry Grossman composed the theme song, and Barry Levinson wrote the lyrics. It’s an enjoyable composition in the traditional English folk style, with Levinson’s lyrics and Grossman’s melody evoking nostalgia for those who remember the series.

In 1985, Levinson and Hemisphere made another joint production with HTV, co-produced by Sebastian Robinson and directed by Alan Bridges. The one-hour television drama, D.P. (Displaced Person), was based on a short story by Kurt Vonnegut; Fred Barron adapted it, and it was filmed in the West Country in spring 1985. Starring Rosemary Leach and Julius Gordon, it told the story of a young black orphan boy in Germany during the country’s occupation by Allied troops. Running away from an orphanage and the nuns who care for him, he meets his first black man, an American Sergeant, and thinks he must be his father’.¹⁰ Screened on the coast-to-coast PBS American Playhouse network in 1985, it won critical acclaim and an Emmy Award from the American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. It was shown on the ITV network in the UK on 14 June, 1987.¹¹

Barry Levinson passed away at The London Clinic, 20 Devonshire Place, Westminster, on 23 October 1987, leaving a widow, Janet. His death certificate recorded their home address in Bal Harbour, Florida.¹² Although nothing came of Hemisphere’s Running Blind project, Levinson left us some notable productions, not least the critically acclaimed Catholics and Displaced Person, but also the cherished Storybook International and The Amazing Mr Blunden.

And what of the enigmatic Running Blind screenplay writer Sol Reybvinnar? Well, those of you with a penchant for puzzles may well have already worked out that Sol Reybvinnar is an anagram of Barry Levinson. Perhaps Levinson’s own lyrics from The Storyteller are quite appropriate:

I’m the storyteller, and my stories must be told. I have many stories, tales for both the young and old. I have many voices to describe many places, many names have I, and many faces.

DISCOVER THE HISTORY OF BBC SCOTLAND’S TV ADAPTATION OF RUNNING BLIND

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References

• Images © Philip Eastwood, © Hemisphere Productions Ltd., © Lion International, © JTC Video Inc., © MacLean &Co., © HTV, © Victor Gollancz Ltd, © The Stage & Television Today.

1. Knittel, Robert. Collins Publishers, London. Personal correspondence to Desmond Bagley, 6 May 1977. The Desmond Bagley Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Unpublished. ↩︎
2. Zannini, Shirley. BBC Enterprises, London. Personal correspondence to Blake Friedmann Literary Agency, London 20 Feb. 1985. ↩︎
3. Bagley, Desmond. Handwritten note recording telephone call to Robert Knittel & Kendall Deusbury, Collins Publishers, London 9 May 1977 11am. The Desmond Bagley Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Unpublished. ↩︎
4. Bagley, Desmond. Personal correspondence to Francis Bennet, Collins Publishers, London 18 July 1971.The Desmond Bagley Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center, Boston University. Unpublished. ↩︎
5. WorthPoint ‘Mackintosh Man English script ’73 screenplay by Sol Reybvinnar, working title Running Blind!’. https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/mackintosh-man-english-script-73-1841913049. Accessed 8 June 2026. ↩︎
6. Grant, Lee. I Said Yes to Everything. Blue Rider Press, 2014, p. 280. ↩︎
7. Clarke, Sue. The Hollywood Reporter, 1976-07, Vol.242 (10), p.1. ↩︎
8. ‘Jack Rosenthal Drama Scripts Collection.’ University of Sheffield Library – Special Collections and Archives. Ref MS 286. ↩︎
9. ‘Hemisphere Productions advertisement.’ The Stage and Television Today, 20 Dec. 1979, p.19. ↩︎
10. ‘Alan Bridges to direct HTV play.’ The Stage and Television Today, 14 Feb. 1985, p.16. ↩︎
11. ‘Moving Story.’ Bridgewater Journal, 13 June 1987, p.4. ↩︎
12. Levinson, Barry. Death certificate, City of Westminster, 1987, ref. 245. ↩︎