"Ken Pitt, meanwhile, firmly believing that David
should develop a wide range of talents, had been searching fot other routes
to popularity. He met the actor,
Michael Armstrong, who had ambitions of becoming
a film director. Armstrong had written a screenplay of Offenbach's opera,
Orpheus
in the Underworld, and
suggested to Pitt that David would be ideal to
play Orpheus himself, since in Armstrong's version he was a pop singer
who is torn apart by his fans.
The film went no further: there was a strong homosexual
undercurrent to Armstrong's script, which called for two naked men - one
of them David - to kiss. The
British Board of Film Censors, to whom Armstrong
had submitted a script, advised that it could never be shown, and Armstrong
shelved his plans. In the summer
(of 1967), Armstrong wrote a script for a new
film, The Image. He showed it to David, explaining that it was intended
to explore the relationship between reality
and illusion in the artist's mind at the moment
of creativity, and asked if he would like to play the part of an artist's
model who appears to be killed time and again,
only to rise on each occasion. David found intriguing
similarities with some of the themes he had been exploring himself, and
agreed.
David spent most of the first day's filming being soaked with a hosepipe while clinging to the window-sill of a derelict house in Paddington, and that night he developed a chill. Fortunately, the rest of the film was shot indoors: David performed ably enough, given his lack of acting experience, but the film - just fourteen minutes long - was awarded an X certificate and was rarely shown until released as a video in 1984."
[Peter and Leni Gillman; 'Alias
David Bowie' p145-146]