How Lindsay Anderson got fired from Wham's China documentary — SkimNews
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- Lindsay Anderson was hired to direct a serious documentary about Wham!'s 1985 China trip, but after his 80-minute work-in-progress "If You Were There…" was privately screened for George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley, he was dismissed and the film became an "un-film," with only a BFI centennial screening rescuing it from obscurity.
- Jazz Summers and Simon Napier-Bell engineered the firing because they wanted to repurpose the footage into a commercial VHS product, motivated by Vestron's "Making Michael Jackson's Thriller," which had sold millions as one of the first sell-through home videos.
- The film's producer resigned on the spot rather than fire Anderson, after being summoned to Summers' office and told to dismiss the director he had known for 14 years but hired only six months earlier.
- After Anderson's removal, music video operators assembled a one-hour derivative called "Foreign Skies," which premiered at Wham! The Final at Wembley in June 1986, slotted between Elton John—costumed as Ronald McDonald—and Gary Glitter on the bill.
- George Michael told his managers after the August-September 1985 North American stadium tour that he was done with Wham! and wanted to go solo—news that alarmed his managers, who operated on a handshake rather than a written contract.
- A new documentary, "Wham! 10 Days in China," sanctioned by the George Michael estate, draws on Anderson's archive footage "rescued from the vaults" but does not focus on why the director was dismissed.
Why it matters: Anderson's firing freed footage for a Thriller-style VHS sell-through that never materialized—Foreign Skies was effectively shelved after its single Wembley screening. Now his rescued archive underpins the estate-sanctioned "Wham! 10 Days in China," finally delivering the serious documentary the original producers had envisioned nearly 40 years ago.
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