5 Things You Didn’t Know About the Who’s 1975 ‘Tommy: The Movie’
Fifty years ago, on March 19, 1975, rock ‘n’ roll’s favorite pinball wizard hit American movie theaters, when the film adaptation of the blockbuster album Tommy by the Who was released. The movie — which starred singer Roger Daltrey as the titular deaf, dumb and blind kid who sure plays a mean pinball, Ann-Margret as his complex mother, Oliver Reed as her brutish boyfriend, and rock royalty ranging from Elton John to Eric Clapton to Tina Turner as assorted characters who push Tommy along on his strange journey from mute child to world leader — was a major hit. Not only did it make more than 10 times its $3 million budget at the box office, but it was also a critical success, garnering Ann-Margret an Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe win.
The film remains popular to this day, especially with rock music fans who treasure it as one of the only films to successfully capture a band and album’s essence on the big screen. But while most of us can’t imagine the film any different than it is, the truth is … it could have been very different (and possibly even weirder).
Read on for five Tommy facts that are more fun than getting knocked down by a river of baked beans.
1Ken Russell didn’t like the album
The Who’s Tommy, which was released in 1969, was a bonafide phenomenon. Between the original release and a version recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1972, the album sold over 10 million copies. But there was one person who was not a fan: director Ken Russell. Russell reportedly preferred classical to rock music in general (he’d done multiple films prior based on great classical composers), but that wasn’t a stumbling point for him: He was attracted to the film’s themes, even if he didn’t appreciate its songs about supple wrists.
2Russell incorporated a previous film he’d written (that starred Mia Farrow as God)
Harry Benson/Daily Express/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Spoiler alert for a 50-year-old film and even older album: Tommy eventually comes out of his fugue state and becomes spiritual leader of a large, cult-like group. Prior to his involvement in Tommy, Russell had already been working on a movie about a cult founded by an artist, in Swingin’ ’70s England — a film called The Angels. A 1972 New York Times article said it would focus on a cult based around a film director and star Mia Farrow as God, while others reports maintained that the film was about a cult-creating rock star named Poppy Day.
No version of The Angels was ever put into production, but in a 2004 interview, Russell said that the script for Tommy “reminded me of a screenplay I’d written called The Angels, which was about false religions, which I was told was uncommercial and I couldn’t get finance so I saw this … it could be an amalgam of the two.”
3The Acid Queen was almost … Mick Jagger?
Tina Turner’s run as the Acid Queen, a cape-wearing prostitute who feeds Tommy mind-altering drugs (via a syringe-covered torture device), is unforgettable. But her character was almost very, very different — so different that Mick Jagger was originally approached to play the role. Jagger, however, allegedly passed on the role because he wanted to sing his own songs, rather than those written by the Who.
However, a very different male rock star did tackle the role years later — Tenacious D, the comedy rock band led by actor Jack Black, performed a Tommy tribute in 2022 as a charity fundraiser, and in the accompanying video, Black does briefly don a sequined dress and some false eyelashes to pay tribute to Turner.
4The baked beans scene sent Ann-Margret to the hospital
If any moment from Tommy has stuck with you, it’s likely the scene when Ann-Margret, playing Tommy’s emotionally troubled mother, has a breakdown that culminates her writhing in a massive pool of baked beans. In a 2011 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Ann-Margret recalled the scene as “such fun” to shoot, though the beans hit the singer/actress with surprising force: “They had built a wooden tube coming from way above to pour the things down to make it shoot out at me. No one had tried it before. Ken wanted me to look up and pretend that I don’t see anything until it hits me. And when the beans hit me, it just THREW me. My goodness!”
But the real problem was the TV screen, which Ann-Margret breaks with a champagne bottle earlier in the scene. “When I threw the champagne bottle at the TV set, it really smashed,” she recalled. “They got rid of all the broken glass on the carpet, but they had not gotten rid of all the jagged glass in the TV set. And Ken wanted me to thrash my arms around. And of course, one time, I brought my hands up and the soap suds were pink from blood. So they took me away, put loads of towels on me. And here I come into the hospital, looking like a drowned person in this silver knit shrinking catsuit with blood all over. There were 27 stitches.”
5Roger Daltrey found life after the film “very hard to deal with”
Everett Collection
His role in Tommy, as well as his starring turn in the other 1975 Ken Russell film Lisztomania, kicked off Who singer Daltrey’s film career; he continued to have small roles in films for more than a decade afterwards. However, when making the film, Daltrey worried that the film would overshadow his and the band’s other work — a prospect that he found very painful. In a 2013 Rolling Stone interview, Daltrey revealed, “I didn’t ever realize the difference between being what you would call a film star and a rock star. It was enormously different. It was very hard to deal with for a year or two after that. … It was just crazy. People just treat you so differently, and you go, ‘I don’t want to be treated differently. I want to be in a rock band.’ It was hard. Just very, very difficult. ”
Later in the interview, he put it a bit more bluntly: “[People] would call me Tommy, and it would really get on my tits.”
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