Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (32 page)

Interesting reaction from Huttons was that it took them by surprise. It was nothing they had expected from either the synopsis or from previous work of mine. They all talked very positively about it – shook my hand and congratulated me.

Have to leave early to go to a Python wig-fitting.

Halfway through one of the most hectic years of my life. That in itself is encouraging. I’m still alive and healthy. A few grey hairs showing since
The Missionary
, but I feel quite trim (11.1) and just about on top of things.

Take Rachel to school. Apparently her teacher says she has been much better this last week. I think she needs her dad and I feel very relieved that my five weeks’ absence on
The Missionary
is over (longer, I suppose, if one counts the weekends and the early starts and late finishes we worked even when we were in London).

A showing of the film so far at four.

There is much good laughter and the Slatterthwaite sequence goes so well that it’s impossible to follow in terms of audience reaction.

The Scottish sequence is disappointing to me in terms of performance. The last 15 minutes become very serious and very quiet and I don’t enjoy them at all in the present company. I know they’re wishing Michael Hordern would come on again (says he paranoically).

RL is very anxious for me to work with him on the next two weeks’ editing – for we have to present a fine cut at the end of that time.

He wants me to cancel my trip to Columbia in LA. I feel it’s essential to meet these faceless people before I go into Python confinement, so we compromise. I will go to the States for two days instead of three, returning Friday lunchtime and working with Richard right through the weekend.

At 9.20 a car collects me and takes me down to the US Embassy to collect my passport. There is a tube strike so the roads are packed. It’s raining heavily. Into the dreadful world of visa applications – rows of faces looking anxiously to a row of faceless clerks behind desks. No-one wants to be there. I collect my passport – have to sign that I’m not a communist or a Nazi, and several pieces of paper for fans who work in the Passport Office.

Then out to Heathrow, where I arrive at eleven. The delights of travelling First Class then take over. I have only hand baggage so check quickly through and into the BA Executive Lounge for some coffee and another long call to RL. I feel we should not show Columbia the end of
The Missionary
until it’s right, but Denis has a video with everything we saw yesterday on it – so we’ll have to do a re-editing job, and erase some of the tape. Get Rose Mary Woods
⁶⁵
in as adviser!

The flight leaves a half-hour late. DO’B travelled Club Class with his two daughters. I visited them occasionally – taking them smoked salmon and other First Class delights. Denis’s daughters sat, very well-behaved, and read and coloured books whilst DO’B immersed himself in columns of figures. Most of his deals, he says proudly, were worked out at 35,000 feet.

Denis calls about nine o’clock to tell me that their reactions to the three video segments of the movie which they’ve already seen have been excellent. Everyone from Antonowsky (he’s the President of Marketing) downwards filled with enthusiasm. That’s a good start.

Am picked up by Denis and Inge at ten. He rents a brand new Mercedes, and we drive out to his office at Burbank. There meet Dan Polier – a thin, slowly-precise talking, late-middle-aged man with neat silver-grey hair – and David Knopf his chunky junior partner. They are Denis’s sidekicks on film distribution.

‘Just been working with a fan of yours,’ says Polier. ‘Steven Spielberg.’ That doesn’t spoil the morning either. Apparently they are working on
ET
, which looks set to be the biggest box-office picture ever.

At midday we walk over to Columbia Pics.

Long, low, modern office. Softly and thickly carpeted. Tall, gaunt figure of Marvin Antonowsky looming over them all. He stands like a great bird, eyes flicking around, his lean frame held back almost apologetically. He welcomes me into his office with some kind words about what he’s seen, then a group of about eight or nine Columbia hacks are brought in. All seem very quiet and respectable and deferential. Young – mostly my age or less. Ken Blancato, the creative publicity head, is neat and trim and looks like a hairdresser. They don’t immediately strike me as an intimidatingly forceful team. Very well-behaved in the presence of their president, behind whose desk is a shelf full of maybe 40 screenplays. I notice
Scrubbers
is there, alongside
The Missionary
.

Antonowsky and Blancato are very confident that they have some wonderful campaign ideas and, without much ado, an artist reveals six of the most crass and dreadful drawings I’ve seen in my life. If I had set down on paper my worst fears of what they might produce, these would be they. A grinning, Animal House-like caricature of myself with girls dressed in 1960’s Playboy Bunny-style outfits, with tits and thighs emphasised at the expense of period, beauty, truth, honesty and everything else. I have to say I find them a little obvious. ‘Oh, yeah, well that’s why we have another version …’

Ah, the subtle one. The subtle one consists of me kneeling at a long bed, with a dozen 1950’s beauties lined up on either side of me in a parody of the Last Supper. I sit there, with all these expectant faces looking towards me, and I wish the floor would open and swallow me up – or
swallow them up, anyway. If ever there was a moment when I wanted a Los Angeles earthquake, this was it.

But the moment passed and they proved to be not at all unadaptable. It was not a terribly easy session, though. They revealed, with a sparkling air of revelation, their slogan: ‘He used his body to save their souls.’ Denis sat there remarkably unmoved and I couldn’t leap up and down with excitement.

Some more writing of blurb for ads, then Denis collects me at ten. Drive to his office at Warners and I show him, Knopf and Polier my suggested ad lines and synopses. They are instantly typed up, to be presented to Columbia at our 11.30 meeting.

Also sketch out an idea for a trailer – very quick, short one-liners showing Fortescue becoming progressively more trapped. DO’B loves this and, when we file into the even more gaunt and haggard Antonowsky’s office, DO’B cheerfully announces that I’ve solved everything – we have radio, TV and trailer advertising all sewn up. His faith in me is embarrassing, as I fumble with pieces of paper to try and bear out this hyperbolic introduction.

I read them some of the ad lines – quite a few chuckles. Outline the trailer idea, which is also met with approval. ‘He had a lover, a fiancée and 28 fallen women. And he said yes to all of them’ sounds the favourite, though they still cling to their ‘He gave his body to save their souls’ line. But Antonowsky reacts well, directs them to work on the lines I’ve proposed and, unless he is just flannelling me, I feel that we have progressed by leaps and bounds since yesterday – and hopefully my work yesterday evening and this morning has given me the initiative.

Taken to Hamptons – a big, noisy hamburger restaurant just beside Warners’ Burbank studio – by Polier, Knopf and Denis O’B. Then a return visit to Columbia, in which I am wheeled into a conference room where about 15 PR people sit round a table. Ed Roginski, a rather calm, soft-spoken and intelligent head of publicity, chairs the meeting and all those around the table introduce themselves to me – name and position.

They ask me things like whether I have any special needs I would like catered for when I go on promotion. They are (thankfully) against a three-week cross-country whistle-stop tour (which TG underwent for
Time Bandits
). They suggest instead a week and a weekend in New York
– including a ‘Junket Day’, when they bring key out-of-town press and radio into the city, all expenses paid, and throw me and, they hope, Maggie to them.

Polier and Knopf feel that the sooner exhibitors can see
The Missionary
the better for choice of cinemas, etc. Columbia is going through a bad time with
Annie
⁶⁶
– despite enormous amounts of publicity effort it has not brought the house down on its nationwide launch – and there really isn’t any picture they can get excited about (apart from
Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl
, which opens tomorrow) until
Missionary
comes along.

A limousine picks me up at 4.30 and I’m driven back to the airport. Onto the 6.30 flight.

Sleep through
On Golden Pond
for the second time in three weeks.

The start of Python rehearsals and writing for
Meaning of Life
coincides with the first national rail strike for 27 years and a London tube and partial bus stoppage. I drive quite easily to Regent’s Park, and by great good fortune, find a parking space right outside the new office, and arrive only just after JC. He, too, is sporting a moustache. He grins delightedly at me and says I look
quite
different. Not sure how to take this.

Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl
opened at 60-70 cinemas in NYC and Philadelphia to overwhelming apathy. Various reasons put forward – first weekend of excellent weather in NYC; very strong opposition from Spielberg,
Star Wars
and
Rocky
; opening too wide with too little publicity. EI very strongly blames
Secret Policeman’s Ball
, which GC advertised on American TV evidently.

After a half-hour discussion it’s clear that no-one has an answer. The movie collected good reviews in both the big NYC papers.

Eric wins ‘The Meaning of Life’ song with no declared supporters for TJ’s version apart from myself and TG, and neither of us felt Eric’s version deserving of any stick. But on ‘Every Sperm is Sacred’, on which TJ has done –
had
to do – so much work, there is quite a strong split. Eric takes up the position that his version is much better, musically and in every other way, than TJ’s. GC bears him out quite vehemently. TJ says that his version is better, musically and in every other way, than Eric’s.

Once we start discussion it’s clearly crucial that JC comes down firmly in favour of TJ’s version.

Sandwiches at lunch and talk over the ending. Eric feels that we have cheated the audience by not having come to grips with our title. I see our title as being a statement in itself. There is no way we can tell anyone the meaning of life – it’s a cliché and we are using it ironically to show how irrelevant we can be when faced with such a pretentious subject. John sees fish as the answer to our problem.

Eventually I ad-lib, with Eric’s help, a very short and dismissive lady presenter winding up the film and reading the meaning of life from an envelope – this fed on from a nice idea of a Hollywood awards-type ceremony where we asked a glittery compere to come on and reveal the meaning of life. He opens a gold envelope and reads … ‘And the meaning of life is … Colin Welland!’ I think this was the best laugh of the day.
⁶⁷

We broke up about 3.30. I had a cab driver who at one point came out with the line ‘Do you know how long I spent in the shower last night … ? One and a half hours … Mind you, I felt better at the end of it.’

Bowl
returns even worse than Denis had led me to believe at the beginning of the week – we were ‘gasping’ in Philadelphia to a gross less than that of a
Bambi
reissue the week before and in NYC only managed 125,000 dollars at 58 sites! Dreadful.

If the cliché ‘you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all’ applies to any sphere of human activity, it must be school fairs – or ‘fayres’ as they’re wont to call them. As with the Gospel Oak Fayre two weeks ago, the William Ellis version was the usual collection of bric-a-brac, shabby clothes and grubby books for sale.

A few gallant sideshows run by the boys. Two tombolas run with steely-eyed efficiency by the sort of parents who like running things. Some rather wet chicken tikka out in the car park, and not much else.

Helen had put together a hamper and she sat for nearly three hours
beside it for about £17.00. Tom played in the wind band in the main hall at four, which was a very pleasant addition to the usual format. Took the girls back via a toyshop and bookshop in Kentish Town (I bought Mary Kingsley’s
Travels in West Africa
), then home.

Am I getting more like my father in old age? I’ve noticed definite signs of easily roused impatience and intolerance since
The Missionary
. I put it down to the fact that co-producing, writing and acting was a giant public relations job in which I had to be all things to all men every day for eleven weeks, and the thing I need the rest from most is not acting or writing, but people.

Take the children for a swim. Re-read W L Warren’s book about my favourite English king – John. Discover Angevins had violent tempers. Also that the twelfth century was the best-documented in English mediaeval history.

To Python rehearsal, to find that Neil Simon had been on the phone and wants to meet me – he has some film project.

After a costume fitting I drive up to Britannia Row Studios in Islington to record ‘Every Sperm’ track. Ring Neil Simon. He professes himself to be a fan, says he is halfway through ‘one of the best things I’ve written’ and there’s a part in it for me. Arrange to meet him on Wednesday.

The recording session is delayed while they find a piano tuner, so I sit in the big and comfortable games room and watch England start their vital match with Spain. They must win and by two goals to be certain of going into the semi-finals. Our defence is unshakeable, mid-field quite fast and controlling most of the game, but we can’t score. 0-0 at half-time.