Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (5 page)

Collected Eric from Carlton Hill and we drove on to JC’s. A talk through material. Eric and John have searched the archives, Terry J has been away, GC doesn’t appear to have done much, but I saved my bacon by writing an extension to ‘Penis Apology’,
⁹
which produced an outstandingly good reaction. Near hysteria. I think Python is definitely working out all the repressions of childhood – and loving it!

Lunch with the French translator of
Holy Grail
and
Brian
at the Trattoo. A wonderful-looking Frenchman with a very special face which could not belong to any other nation. White hair, eyes droopy with a sort of permanent look of apology, a long, curved nose which never goes far from his face at any point. A lovely, squashed, humorous, used feel to the face like a Gauloise butt in an ashtray.

Home by six. Have promised TG that I will read the new, shorter version of ‘Time Bandits/The Film That Dares Not Speak Its Name’, so I spend most of the evening on that. Poor Terry is being given a hard ride by the doubters and the pessimists. On reading I feel that the movie, which is, after all, an act of faith in TG, is, on balance, do-able by May. But only just!

The weather has sharpened a little, but most of February has now gone, with no weather that wouldn’t have graced an average April. In short, no winter at all here. But I don’t feel any benefits. Wake up feeling like a piece of chewed rag. I have a sore throat, a mild coolness of the blood and a general enervation. There are so many loose ends to be tied up. I feel old for a few minutes.

Some work after breakfast, then round to Eric’s. That’s very cheering – mainly because all of us are happy to be together at the moment and the tapes that André’s prepared of the sketches and songs for the LP assembled by Eric, with a certain amount of gentle bullying over the last two months, are a great boost.

To lunch at a nearby French, where Eric chides Graham for not being totally opposed to nuclear power. Eric deals only in certainties. His views, like his lifestyle at any one time, are very positive.

The talk veers to desultory discussion of bizarre sexual exploits. GC caps all, as he puffs at his pipe and declares that he once had an Indian in an aeroplane. JC is quite skittish too and suggests that perhaps the Pythons should set each other a sexual task. I agree to try and seduce the Queen!

I have a brief script chat with T Gilliam (cheering him up, I hope). Then I drive both of us round to a rendezvous with J Cleese, who was given TG’s script and wants to, or ‘is prepared to’, talk to us about it. John is looking after Cynthia at the moment, on his own as far as I can tell, since Connie’s in New York for 11 days.

Cynthia answers the door. With her long blonde hair, tastefully ribboned back, and her neat school uniform she looks, at nine years old, like an Estée Lauder model. Very New York, somehow. She chats confidently and behaves quite like a young lady 10 or 15 years older than she is, but she’s humorous with it, which keeps her on this side of precociousness.

She comes out to eat with us. No room at the Japanese, so we go on to
Mama San – a clean, smart, soulless Chinese in Holland Park Avenue. Cynthia won’t really let John get a word in, but after half an hour she settles to sleep beside an unoccupied table and the three of us talk about the script.

JC speaks with a slight, elder statesman of comedy air, as if he really
does
know how, why and when comedy will work, and we feel a little like naughty boys being told what’s good for us. But this is rather unfair to John. I think he went out of the way to try
not
to sound too paternal, and he did give us some sound, unselfish advice, much of which will help in the rewrites. But I couldn’t accept his final judgement – that we should postpone the movie on the basis that one day it could be a marvellous film, but if we rush it and go on the present script, it will be just a good-natured mess,

Mind you, JC had a piece of gossip that rather undermined his chances of ‘stopping’ the movie. He’d heard that Sean Connery was interested and Denis O’B has flown to California to see him!

To Gospel Oak School to see Ron Lendon [the headmaster] about Tom’s future.

Ron’s report is glowing. Tom, it seems, is regarded very highly indeed. He is in Verbal Reasoning Group 1 – which is the comprehensive system’s acknowledgement that abilities have to be tested at some point. There is less chance of him going to William Ellis [school in Highgate Road] if he’s Group 1 – the idea is to spread them around the local schools. But Lendon, whose manner is chatty, informal, direct and quite unpatronising, feels that William Ellis is the best place for Tom. His closest friends – Lendon makes much reference to ‘peer’ groups – will be going there, he’s keen on music and Lendon admits that he thinks the academic standards are higher at William E.

An interesting sign of the times is that Tom is one of only three boys amongst 15 in his class who does not come from a broken home.

So we come out greatly heartened and I feel once again the great relief that our children – all of them – will have started out at a school as caring and sympathetic as Gospel Oak.

Work on Python material for a couple of hours, then meet TJ at the Pizza Express in Hampstead. TJ has written something which he cheerfully acknowledges as the ultimate in bad taste – it’s all about people
throwing up – very childish, but rather well controlled, dare I say – it had me in as prolonged and hysterical a bout of laughter as I can remember.

Always feel that March is the end of the winter, but this year there has been no winter to speak of and this mild, orderly March morning is only different from much of January and February because the sun isn’t shining.

Have to go and talk over script details with TG. The advantage of living within walking distance of your collaborator. Stroll up with my script over the Heath. Up to Terry’s mighty attic. Listen to a couple of tracks of the new Elvis Costello.

The good news is that Ian Holm wants to be our Napoleon and loves the script. No further news from Denis who is, much to TG’s irritation, still star-searching in Hollywood.

Walk back at 8.15, past South End Green where
Life of Brian
is in ‘5th Fantastic Week’ at the Classic.

A most relaxed and happy day. Sun shone – a very springlike Sunday. I cleared my desk prior to beginning the railway script.

Found lots of excuses to talk, drink coffee and generally indulge in what’s called a writer’s ‘negative capability’, but eventually was ready to start. Notes assembled, clean sheet of foolscap in the typewriter (I still use a typewriter for the serious stuff!). Then a strange tension gripped me – a tightening of the stomach, a light sweating of the palms just as if I were about to go on stage.

Do all writers, or any writers, suffer this ‘typewriter fright’, or is it just because I’m a writer/actor and I know that anything I put down now I will have to enact at some future time? Anyway, it’s a very difficult task to start the documentary. To actually set this huge and daunting mass of facts and accumulated knowledge in motion.

Woken by bright sunshine. Rachel unhappy about school. I take her. She tries to be very brave, but bolts back towards the house when we get to
the end of Oak Village, and I have to carry her most of the rest of the way. When we arrive at the school, her class are already sitting quietly, waiting for the register.

On the way back up Oak Village, an old lady leans out of her window. She looks distraught. Her gas supply has failed, and she’s had no tea or heating. She’s asked the gas people to come round, but she’s concerned that they’re not here. This all takes my mind off Rachel’s predicament as I go home, phone up the gas, and Helen goes round to see her and make her tea and fill her hot water bottle.

Set to writing Python stuff. Rachel arrives back from school, a lot happier than when she went, but she
did
cry – ‘Only one big tear,’ she told me.

Another sparkling day. Clear blue skies and a brisk chill giving an edge of freshness to the air. Write more Python material – it’s flowing easily and I’m enjoying the chance to write some fairly direct satirical stuff again. Jury vetting was on the list today. And the courts generally.

From two until half past three, TJ and I read. TJ has a good idea for the RAF Pipe-Smokers – extending into wives. I’ve written huge amounts, as usual, but this time it seems to stand up – and almost nil failure rate over the last two days, which is encouraging. See what the others think on Thursday.

TG has been hearing from Denis O’B in Los Angeles.

Denis, who had sent me a telegram saying the script was ‘sensational’, is voicing doubts over the quality of writing – especially in the ‘Napoleon’ and ‘Robin Hood’ scenes. He even suggested to TG that they could ‘get some writers in’. He still hurls out casting suggestions which bear all the hallmarks of a man more desperate about a bank loan than about anything to do with quality of script or trust of the writers – Burt Reynolds for the Evil Genius, Art Carney for the Ogre. All the qualities these actors have are blinded for me by Denis’s heavy-handed Hollywood approach. It’s killing T Gilliam and may kill the film.

I go to bed trying to put it all out of my mind. But a nagging corner can’t be forgotten – I
did
write the script in a month. Denis is right – it
could
be better. Am I just now beginning to get some inklings that I really made a wrong decision to get involved in this project at all? Wrong not because I couldn’t do it, but because I couldn’t do my best.

I know I’m funnier writing unrestricted Python material. I know I could contribute more as a writer if it had been a ‘Ripping Yarn’ sort of story. But it wasn’t. Will it ever be what everyone wants it to be? Or just a jumble of different ideas and preconceptions? Is it comedy or adventure? Why should it have to be either?

Because that’s how Hollywood wants it to be, and Denis wants Hollywood.

No brooding today. Up at eight. Buy
The Times
and read of Mugabe’s victory in Rhodesia. The Brits have been patting themselves on the back for organising such an orderly election – in best British fashion – so they can hardly grumble at a Marxist getting 62% of the vote. It seems one of the most hopeful transitions from white to black power. But it’s taken a guerrilla war to make the point and that must give great heart to guerrilla movements in other countries.

Rain, most of the day. To Eric’s for a Python read-through. Neil [Innes] is staying there. He looks cheery and already his new life in the Suffolk countryside seems to have made him physically different. As though the land has moulded our ex-Lewisham lad. He’s rounder. His hair, arranged in a neat coronal around his bald pate, is much fuller and frizzier than I remember before. He looks … He looks rather like a Hulme Beaman
¹⁰
creation.

Terry J looks tired and harassed and throughout the day there are odd phone calls for him which give one the feeling that his life is a box which is far too full. John C is grumbling about his health again – doing a perfect imitation of the Ogre in
Time Bandits
which he didn’t like!

Eric is being very friendly, warm and accommodating. Terry Gilliam isn’t there (which provokes some rumblings of discontent from Eric, who, I think, being unaligned to either of the main writing groups, feels that TG’s absence deprives him of an ally). GC is as avuncular and benign as ever. And arrives easily last. Eric is trying to get GC to stop smoking his pipe so much. He’s the only Python who still smokes.

JC reads out an outrageously funny schoolmaster sex demonstration sketch. Our stuff doesn’t go quite as well as expected this morning. Eric has a chilling ending for the film, when the outbreak of nuclear war is announced. He’s been reading about the dangers of, and plans in the event of, nuclear war happening.

We talk for a while on this subject, which is so macabre and disturbing because the weapons for our destruction exist – they’re pointing at us now – and our response is to build more.

Tried to write a startlingly new and original, brilliantly funny and thought-provoking piece for Python. Did this by staring out of the window, playing with paper clips and shutting my eyes for long periods.

Pressing on. Endless days of writing. They seem to have been going on forever and are stretching on forever. Not that I mind
that
much. I quite enjoy not having to drive across London, not having to go down rain-spattered motorways to locations, not having to make meetings and business lunches, not going out to dinners or buying clothes.

Yes, I’m afraid this monastic existence suits me rather well. I shall keep it up this week, hoping for a breakthrough on Python and a completion of the railway script – then I shall take Concorde to New York at the expense of NBC and ‘party’ for 24 hours.

Work on Python until it’s dark outside, then break and work on the railways until midnight. Impossible. I’m beginning to sink under a mass of names, lines, distances, facts, details, anecdotes, diversions, sidings …

Denis O’B rings – he’s returned from the States and positively glowing with enthusiasm for the TG/MP movie. He has Sean Connery absolutely ‘mentally committed’ (which means he hasn’t enough money for him) and George H, who at first was not at all sure why Denis O’B was putting his money into it, has now re-read the script twice, feels it has great potential and is trying to hustle Jack Nicholson into letting us have his name on the credits!

Paramount have agreed a distribution deal with Denis in the US and are seeing it as a new
Wizard of Oz
! However, they are very keen to get the hottest name in Hollywood – Gilda Radner – onto the credits too. Denis, who knows nothing of Gilda, has promptly turned several circles and is now homing in on Gilda as the Ogre’s Wife instead of Ruth Gordon. ‘Apparently she does a really good old lady on
Saturday Night Live
.’