Trivia

Loosely based on an experience of Peter Brook's while rehearsing "Boris Godunov" at the Covent Garden Opera.

This was originally intended as part of an anthology or "omnibus" movie, in the manner of such multi-director continental movies as Boccaccio '70 (1962), which were very popular in the 1960s. Tony Richardson, Lindsay Anderson, and Peter Brook were each to direct a short movie for this compilation, which was announced in a 1968 United Artists publicity brochure as being titled "Red, White and Zero". Richardson's movie was to be the first of the set, called Red and Blue (1967), and starred Vanessa Redgrave and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; Anderson's was The White Bus (1967), to come second; Brook's "Ride of the Valkyrie", the shortest of the three, followed. However, the movie was not released as the three-part entity originally intended. Richardson's contribution, which was a sort of mini-musical with songs by Bassiak, was press-shown in London, but got no wide release; it was later was seen on late night Australian television in 1984, and Vanessa Redgrave did make a record of songs from the movie. Anderson's segment actually got cinema showings in Britain and elsewhere in late 1968, just before his biggest success in the cinema, If.... (1968). Brook's was shown once years later on British television and then disappeared. All three segments were finally shown together, in order, for the first time under its original title "Red, White and Zero" at the BFI in London in 2018, and released by BFI on DVD under that collective title shortly afterward.