Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (23 page)

There are some very enterprising audience suggestions – ‘Did you know, Mr Palin, that it is a tradition for solo performers who visit the Arts Theatre, Belfast, to run round the auditorium from one side of the theatre to the other? The record is held by Groucho Marx at 45 seconds.’ So I peeled off my jacket, paced out the course and went off like a rocket. 38 seconds. Whoever he was, I should have thanked him.

So I rambled on until ten to ten, just over two hours on the stage. Thoroughly enjoyable. Michael Barnes very pleased backstage.

Gemma, a helper at the Festival and English girl, says that the worst thing about living in Northern Ireland is the way people have become used to the violence. They hardly turn a hair when a bomb goes off. Her father, who has worked here for years, will return to England when he retires. Resignation and survival rather than hope or rebuilding seem to be the watchwords.

I leave on the 10.30 shuttle. We take 55 minutes, with the help of a north-westerly tailwind, to reach Heathrow, where it’s dry and sunny.

At half past two Neville Thompson arrived to talk about
The Missionary
. His doubts, which had worried me so much earlier in the week, seemed less substantial as we talked and I think I was able to persuade him that there were very funny things in the script. He in turn gave me a thought about Fortescue’s character which clarified something very constructively – that Fortescue should enjoy sex. A simple, but clear observation, which gives greater point, irony and tension throughout.

This is one of those mornings when it’s worth buying
Variety
. ‘Bandits Abscond With 69G in St Lou’, ‘Boston’s Ambitious Bandits Bag 269G’, ‘Bandits’ Larcenous 45G in KC’, ‘Bandits Looting LA. Hot 368G’. Lovely breakfast reading.

Work in the afternoon, watch Miles Kington’s ‘Great Railway Journey’, which makes me want to start travelling again. But the best news of the week is that Loncraine rings with a very positive reaction to the new
script. He thinks it’s an easier read and much funnier. Eight out of ten, he thinks, rather than six for the first one.

I had to bestir myself and turn out, on an evening I dreadfully wanted to be in, to run the auction for Westfield College in Hampstead. Predictably chaotic student organisation, but on the whole very nice people. They gave me a list of nearly 100 items to be individually auctioned.

The slave auction at the end
was
fun. Boys offering their services to do anything for 24 hours. Girls offering massage. I won that myself – with a bid of £23.00. Finally I had to auction my own face, on to which anyone could push a custard pie. Not once, but five times. Collected nearly 30 quid for this alone. All the pies were delivered by girls, and the last two gave me kisses through the foam!

At six o’clock take Willy and Tom to the Circus World Championships on a common in Parsons Green. This is a Simon Albury trip – his present to Willy on his 11th birthday.

It’s mainly a TV event with cameras all over the place and a wonderful BBC floor manager squashed into a very tight-fitting evening dress with white socks on and an arse so prominent it looks like a caricature of Max Wall. Simon has secured us seats right by the ring – so we can see the sweaty armpits, the toupees and the torn tights that the viewers at home will miss.

The things I like least about circuses are animals and clowns and there are neither tonight. Instead about a dozen different varieties of balancing act. Russians holding ladies doing headstands on top of a 20-foot pole balanced on their forehead, petite Chinese ladies who throw (and catch) coffee tables from one to another with their feet. A Bulgarian boy who jumps backwards off a springboard and lands on the shoulders of a man, who is in turn on the shoulders of three other men.

The virtuosity on display is dazzling. One Polish woman can do a double backward somersault off a pole and land on the pole again. Dangerous area for punning.

In the middle of it all Willy has the evening made for him by being called out by the ringmaster as a birthday boy. There in the middle of the
ring in the middle of the Circus World Championships, Willy publicly declares his support for Sheffield Wednesday! We don’t get back until 11.00. Boys tired and happy and I hungry.

Time Bandits
is No. 1 grossing film in the US almost exactly two years after
Brian
held the top spot. I still can’t get over a sense of awed surprise. US new releases are falling like nine-pins. The brightest successes, apart from
Time Bandits
, are
Chariots of Fire
, still only on limited release, and
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
, which is going well, but not spectacularly. Three English movies setting the pace.

George rings. He’s got my
Missionary
script – but said he’d do the film just from the letter I sent with it! What
did
I say? He does express a worry as to whether
The Missionary
will interfere with the Python film and says he doesn’t want to be the cause of any split in Python. As I told TG later, this didn’t sound like a spontaneous George H concern. I mustn’t get paranoid, but it suggested to me that someone somewhere was trying to shut down
The Missionary
for unspecified reasons.

Richard Loncraine rings early. He just wants to talk and make sure we are still happy. I give my usual reassurances, though I must admit I haven’t had time to read the script for a week! RL’s main concern seems to be making a movie that will be noticed – especially in the States. I tell him that, with
Time Bandits
,
Chariots of Fire
and
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
doing good business over there, they are just ready for a beautifully photographed, sensitive portrayal of Edwardian period life, full of belters.

I hope he’s convinced. I know it will be better when people are signed and the movie is an established fact, but at the moment I feel the strain of dealing with bigger egos than I became used to at the BBC – where people were just falling over themselves to get near a ‘Ripping Yarn’!

To Park Square West for Python writing. Very cold today. The house in which Python has been through so much now has a beleaguered air. As
Anne and family have moved out to Dulwich it’s now just an office, and a temporary one at that. But we are well looked after. Jackie [Parker] scurries about making us coffee, setting out biscuits and nuts and putting Tabs for Graham and Perrier for the rest of us in the fridge. The result is that we ingest steadily. Anne even ensures that a plate of sweets – Glacier mints, chewing gum and Polos – is on the table after our quiche and salad lunch.

Usual desultory chat – about
Brideshead
⁵¹
on TV again – generally agreed it’s overblown. TJ wants to talk about sex or get angry about the way Thorn-EMI have put
Brian
onto video, cropping it for TV. John will suddenly call me over: ‘Mickey. Tell me what books you’ve read in the last four months.’ Today I give him Al Levinson’s
Travelogs
to read. It sends him quite apoplectic. He cannot understand how people can write modern poetry. ‘It makes me quite Fawltyish,’ he cries.

We proceed well on a general pattern and order of sketches. But at one point the Oxford/Cambridge split, avoided most successfully for the rest of this week, suddenly gapes. The point on which we argue is not a major one, but John rationalises his obstinacy as being the result of his grasp of ‘the structure’. It’s hard work, but in the end he wins his point.

I find myself telling TJ that I shall be mightily relieved when this next Python film is done and out of the way and we don’t have to write together for another four years.

Full of Monday hope and optimism, I launch into Python writing. Feel much less rushed, muddled and negative than on Friday.

To Covent Garden for a special tenth anniversary meal given by Geoffrey and Eyre Methuen for the Pythons.

All of us are there, as well as wives, except Alison Jones (who is out planning a campaign of action against school cuts). Anne and Jonathan, Nancy Lewis [our Python manager in America] and several Eyre Methuen types. A beautiful Gumby cake and indoor fireworks adorn the table in our own dining room.

Eric is in a suit, and myself too – otherwise all the Pythons look exactly
the same as they always did. Graham is there with David, and I sit next to John’s new wife, Barbara. She says she desperately wants to take him back to LA for a few months, but he won’t go as it gives him the creeps.

Into Python meeting at 10.30. I read the large chunk that TJ and I have put together right from the start to beyond ‘Middle of the Film’ and into the ‘randy’ sequence – which goes exceptionally well. The whole lot is very well received and even applauded.

JC and GC have written some first-class stuff about an Ayatollah, but then one or two of their later scenes – especially a torture sequence – drags on and becomes a bore. Eric has written a couple of nice things and plays us a song he’s recorded – ‘Christmas in Heaven’.

We discuss which of the Pythons has talked the most in group activities since we began 13 years ago. John will have it that I’m the outright winner, but I think he greatly underestimates himself and, of course, Terry J. Graham happily accepts the Trappist sixth position, and when JC wants to know whether he or TJ talk most I have to say it’s absolutely equal, because whatever statement one of them makes is almost automatically contradicted by the other.

Then much talk of where we go to write in January. GC wants to go to Rio for naughty reasons. I suggest a mountain chalet in cool, clear Alpine air. But swimming and associated aquatic releases are considered important. No conclusion. Except that we don’t go to Rio.

Watch
Brideshead
. Halfway through, when Charles is just about to crack Julia, the doorbell rings and we’re brought down to mundane earth with the news that the sun-roof on the Mini has been slashed open and the cassette/tuner has been ripped out. The police seem wholly unconcerned with the possibility of apprehending anyone. ‘Be round in the next couple of days,’ is their reaction.

TJ arrives at 1.30. Unfortunately only a small part of the section I’m rather proud of makes TJ laugh, so we ditch most of it and, in the two and a half hours remaining, cobble together a possible penultimate sequence, starting with the Ayatollah breaking into the sex lecture and the firing squad of menstruating women. It’s mainly TJ’s work.

Neville rings with the best news so far on
The Missionary
. Irene Lamb, the casting director who was so good on
Time Bandits
has read the script and likes it ‘immensely’. Clearly she’s had a most positive effect on Neville. Tonight he says ‘You know, Michael, I think that
very
little needs changing.’ John Gielgud is available, and Irene has already made the best suggestion so far on the knotty problem of Lady Ames – Anne Bancroft.

Buy
Variety
,
Screen International
and croissants. All are nice.
Time Bandits
still No. 1 in the US after three weeks, with
Raiders of the Lost Ark
chasing behind.

I drive over to Notting Hill for meeting on
Missionary
.

Some very good ideas come from our session and I find RL’s suggestions – especially for setting each scene somewhere interesting, trains, etc – very encouraging and exciting.

At half past five Denis O’B arrives, and we have our first meeting together – DO’B, RL, Neville and myself. I’ve brought a bottle of champagne with which we christen the film.

Then some thoughts on casting. RL floats Laurence Olivier, with whose wife he’s working at the moment. Denis throws up his eyebrows in horror. ‘He’s a sick man!’ This rattles RL a bit and nothing is solved.

I drive Hollywood’s currently most successful executive producer back to Hyde Park Corner, in my Mini with the slashed roof lining hanging down above his head.

Time for quick breakfast. Drive rapidly, for it’s a Sunday morning, over to Clarendon Cross.

Richard is already in his office with his business partner Peter Broxton. They’re looking at Loncraine-Broxton toy ideas for 1982. Boiled sweets in a box which is a moulded resin mock-up of a boiled sweet wrapper.

We begin, or rather continue, our work on the
Missionary
script at half past nine and work, very thoroughly, without interruption, until midday. Careful concentration and analysis. This is the least funny, but very necessary stage of the script. Does it convince? Do the characters fulfil a function? Is there a moral? Is the story clearly told? And so on.

Write a grovelling letter to Sir Alec Guinness, accompanying a script, then to meeting with Denis O’B. I’m there for nearly three hours. I try to keep our thoughts on
The Missionary
, to impress upon Denis that I think he has been over-optimistic in only allowing £1.6 million budget. He in turn tells me that it is the most expensive of the three films HandMade Productions are planning for 1982. Mai Zetterling’s
Scrubbers
is £525,000 and
Privates on Parade
(with J Cleese) is £1.2 million. But he won’t give me final cut in the contract – says only Python get that and Gilliam didn’t on
Time Bandits
.

The dynamic and shifty-eyed duo of Jeff Katzenberg and Don Simpson
⁵²
are back in town. But this time, over a drink and inexhaustible servings of nuts amongst the green fronds of the Inn on the Park lobby, they pitch to all of us, bar John Cleese.