Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (61 page)

Our chat, based on his viewing of
The Dress
, which he liked, is a little defensive – testing each other’s tolerance towards teasing. He is one of the few journalists whom Maggie S gets on with. He describes her as a very rare and delicate thoroughbred, but admits that this is not the kind of thing he could say to her face … ‘You make me sound like a bloody horse,’ he mimics, quite accurately.

Maggie is to get the
Standard
award for Millamant, he confides, indiscreetly.

Put Mother’s house once again on estate agents’ lists, but this time with the serious intention of moving her within the year. The man I speak to says he has a house on the Common which is being converted into four flats. It sounds interesting. He suggests I move as quickly as possible as they are under offer already.

A light snow-shower swirls round the Common as we look at the architect’s plans for the ironically-named Sunset House. The rooms look of reasonable size and, though the two ground-floor flats are already gone (to single, elderly ladies), there are two more, on the first and second floors, with two bedrooms. One of these is already being chased.

Home in good spirits, but no Helen, the fire won’t light and the first stage BAFTA awards show nominations for
Private Function
as Best Film and in most categories except Best Actor. For an hour this hits me very hard, but looking at those who have been nominated (including, of course, the obligatory pair for
Killing Fields
), I realise how little chance an easy, natural, light comedy performance stands.

To Odette’s to meet Jonathan P.

He tells me that Liz Smith went all the way up to Leeds for the
Private Function
premiere last Thursday, a week early. He’s getting quite a steady flow of job offers, including eight weeks in Samoa and Australia playing Robert Louis Stevenson. ‘If only it weren’t so bloody far away,’ he mutters, rather gloomily.

Best news of the day comes from John Kelleher at HandMade.
The Missionary
has finally been sold to a French distributor. They’ve had good reactions to their screenings and are spending 200,000 Francs on the launch!!! Les peanuts, mais c’est quelque chose.

Kelleher also tells me that
Private Function
is to open the LA Film Festival – Filmex – in March (as I think
Holy Grail
did about ten years ago). And
Private Function
has been selected for the Un Certain Regard category of the Cannes Film Festival – ‘the second most prestigious category’ as JK describes it.

See Maggie collect an
Evening Standard
award for Best Theatre Actress of ’84. Maggie accepts it nervously and yet still has time to complain about the lack of heating in the Haymarket dressing rooms.

I take a taxi to the Inn on the Park to meet Marvin Antonowsky, who called me yesterday. He hugs me to his bosom and then we have a drink and a chat.

He loves
Brazil
and likes to see himself as Terry’s supporter against Sid Sheinberg. Sid S wants to cut the picture with Terry. Marvin thinks Terry should cut it without Sid, make ten minutes’ difference, and then Sid S would be happy. Trouble stems from the contractual requirement to supply a 125-minute film, no more. TG has supplied a 140-minute film.

To Fitzroy Square to meet Tony Ross, who is to illustrate the limericks. He is a boyish, middle-aged man. He’s soft-spoken, enthusiastic and went to art school with John Lennon. At one time he knew more guitar chords than John and claims to be the only man who was asked to join the Beatles but turned it down!

Richard Benjamin
¹¹⁵
has rung Anne re a film part he wants me to do (via Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment). He’s in town and would like to meet. The script is sent over. It’s called
The Money Pit
(heart falls at the title) and it’s by David Giler. There are hundreds of relentlessly funny New York Jewish one-liners, but the whole lacks any real warmth, depth of character or indeed charm of any kind.

I am to play the part of a successful, sexually irresistible orchestra conductor. Well … I ask you.

To collect papers at ten. Mr Nice Man
¹¹⁶
has been attacked in his shop. Three days ago at four o’clock a boy of 15 or 16, wearing a mask and holding a gun, came into the shop with a bag which he laid on the counter and asked Mr N to fill with the money. He struck Mr N and as he fell down behind the counter he grabbed at something beneath it to break his fall. The ‘gunboy’ thought he was going to a weapon or an alarm and rushed off.

What can this intelligent, polite, hard-working Asian make of this country? I notice a greater contrast than usual between the US and the UK on my return [from
Private Function
publicity in New York & LA]. There seems to be a weariness here, a lack of direction, a lack of unity, a low national morale (the defeat of the miners is only seen as a great victory by the Thatcherites) and a feeling, quite unlike the States, that the bad news can only get worse.

To the family dentist – Mr Lewis – in Camden Town. I no longer have enough confidence in Gerry Donovan to replace the constantly ejecting bridge. Quite a break, after 20 years with Gerry, whom I liked very much, except as a dentist.

Lewis’s surgery is busy, unglamorous and informal. He is a very direct, no-nonsense Northerner, and impressed by the state of my mouth. ‘Quite a battlefield in there,’ he mutters in some awe. But he sounds much more businesslike than Gerry and clearly relishes sorting it all out.

I ring Susan Richards [at Enigma] for her reaction to
East of Ipswich
. She likes it and, more encouragingly, says she feels it is much nearer a finished product than a first draft. Puttnam and Goldcrest sound like parting company over the
First Love
series, which hasn’t been a financial success, and Susan R has a Machiavellian plan to try and get them to drop
East of Ipswich
so it can then be taken to Anglia TV, who she thinks will absolutely leap at it.

Helen’s taxi arrives at 4.30, which must be a record for early starts.
¹¹⁷
She looks almost unfairly bright and breezy considering the hour. Bid her goodbye from the top of the stairs, then back to bed and sleep through without difficulty for another three and a half hours.

I go up to Pizza Express with the Pryces. JP very funny about the ‘celebrity’ screening of
Brazil
at which no-one recognised him. He didn’t mind so much before the film, but when, after two hours 22 minutes constantly on the screen, very often in searing close-up, the first person to come up to him afterwards said ‘Are you Patrick?’ he could take it no longer.

Trying to keep up my resolution to catch up on movies while Helen is away, I drive down to Cinecenta to see
1984
. It impresses me a lot, though I can see why [Michael] Radford got annoyed with the grafting on of the Eurythmics soundtrack. He keeps very tight control of the picture and it’s only when the modern music comes in that it begins to sound like a pop video.

Struck by the similarities with
Brazil
. The police state, the dreadful grubbiness of the city, the love story which is at the heart of the action, the tiling in the torturer’s cell, the design of [Richard] Burton’s office,
even the chair in Room 101 itself and the eventual destruction of the central character. It’s all there in both films.

But whereas Radford keeps his nasty tale tightly under control, TG fires off in all directions. Difference between the two people, I suppose. But Radford’s careful, wordy approach to his adaptation of the Orwell tale produces considerable yawns and restlessness, which I’ve never heard in a
Brazil
screening. Mind you, you can never hear anything in a
Brazil
screening apart from the film.

To see Mr Lewis for preparation work on my new bridge.

Lewis is the complete renaissance dentist. He rambles on – no, ramble is not the word to describe his delivery, it’s more abrasive, views expressed challengingly, inviting confrontation, which it’s hard to provide with a mouth half full of mould-making gunge. Anyway, in an hour and a half he covers a wide ground from dentistry (which he loves), psychoanalysts (whom he doesn’t like), nineteenth-century English watercolourists (who he not only likes, but collects and knows a lot about), to Russian drama (which he goes to see regularly with his wife, who is a Russian) and to holidays in a camper in Southern Turkey. Turkey he likes very much because it is as he remembered Greece (now spoilt) 25 years ago.

He enjoys playing to a captive audience, but does his job skilfully and carefully and with a pride in the result which dear Gerry never seemed to convey.

The Missionary
has won top prize at a festival of ‘humorous films’ at the French Alpine town of Chamrousse (which I check in the atlas. It
does
exist; it’s near Grenoble).

A Private Function
increased its take in NYC this weekend and went up in its second week in Boston. In the UK it will have grossed a million pounds by the end of the month and hopefully one and a half million pounds by mid-May. So over a third of the initial production cost could be cleared in the UK alone.

Shivas sends over Canby’s latest from the
New York Times
. He has written a long piece criticising the tendency to ‘cynical’ comedy – the Hollywood genre of
Ghostbusters
,
Porky’s
,
Risky Business
, etc – and contrasting with ‘sceptical’ comedies exemplified by
Purple Rose of Cairo
and ‘the delightful new British import
A Private Function
’. ‘Performed with dazzling assurance by Miss Smith, Mr Palin, Denholm Elliott …
A Private Function
is a comedy of the first order … ’.

To lunch at Odette’s with Walmsley to give him the Glen Baxter entitled ‘Walmsley seemed to be experiencing some difficulty with the seafood salad’ – at which our waiter laughs so much he is unable to describe the vegetables and another, more serious waiter has to come and replace him.

To Glasgow for
Private Function
publicity. A photo with the Lord Provost and two pigs in a pen outside the Odeon. The Lord Provost is a game little Scotsman who reluctantly enters the pen where two hairy pigs – one of which I’m assured is a boar – snuffle violently for food in a bucket, which I hold. The photographers shout at him as if he were some witless object – ‘Lord Provost! Look up!’

Then into the theatre to talk to the audience after the screening. The film seems to have been appreciated. Sign autographs and generally receive good feedback from the young in the audience.

Then more photos with the pigs and the Lord Provost outside in the street. One of the pigs is snapping greedily – just like the photographers – and despite my warning that the food has run out they keep me in there until it bites my finger quite sharply, draws blood and at last they believe me.

Up to Hampstead to address the Hampstead Gay Community. The organiser apologised in advance for some recent poor attendances. He said that a well-known writer ‘who shall be nameless’ refused to speak until ten people arrived. They never did and he somewhat reluctantly spoke to nine. Last time they had an MP – Matthew Parris – who gave a complete,
self-contained party political speech and no-one knew what to say afterwards.

So I am flattered to find 30 people at the Citizens’ Advice Bureau – none of them looking anything other than completely respectable and demonstrating the shallowness of the archetypal ‘gay’ look. I respond to their general laughter and appreciation and thoroughly enjoy talking and answering questions for an hour and a half.

After breakfast and settling and clearing my desk of immediate business, I settle down to read Paul Zimmerman’s ‘A Consuming Passion’ as
Secrets
has now become. Full of expectations. But after a bright, but roughly-written opening, it gets stuck for page after page on a broad exploration of all the jokes about collecting human bodies, making it a heavy black farce rather than the sharp satire I’d hoped it could be.

At four I go to the Body Centre to play squash with TJ. We discuss our reactions. They’re both the same. Disappointment.

Talk to Paul Z. He says TJ called him last night whilst ‘well oiled’ and was therefore able to be very frank. PZ sounds resilient, but clearly unhappy at our reaction. But Goldcrest and Goldwyn have reacted well and he (Paul) is so pleased with it, that he makes me feel rather a spoilsport. ‘The ball’s in your court now,’ is Paul’s view. ‘Tell me what you want me to do.’

A harassed Mr Jones arrives at half past ten. Settle down with a cup of tea. Then we begin to compare notes on the Zimmerman script, prior to meeting Paul at lunchtime.

As we talk it’s clear that Terry and myself are in general agreement that what is wrong is that Paul has gone for a much too stylised, full-frontal, ‘schlock’ approach, emphasising the acquisition of meat and the procurement of human bodies much too directly. The tension of the concealment attempt has gone and the believability which to me seemed the raison d’être of the whole piece is shot to pieces.

It’s clear that we cannot expect Paul to rewrite it on the lines we want, nor can we co-write it with Paul. Either we find a new writer altogether, or we abandon the project or Terry and I take it on.