Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (20 page)

After breakfast walk down to the BBC and, at about eleven, we start one of the most gruelling, physically and mentally demanding day’s work I can remember. Again the concentration required is greater than anything I’m prepared for, with preliminary read-throughs of each episode included. I have to speak continuously for two and a half hours, in six or seven different voices. My eyes swim out of focus when I stand up- my brain has rarely been required to work so fast – to process and redigest so much information, all the time knowing that this will be judged as a performance. We plough through five episodes by five o’clock, leaving two for tomorrow.

I feel drained – ‘Biggled’, I think must be the word, well and truly Biggled – as I lie back in my bath at the North British with a Carlsberg Special as a reward.

Up to meet John Gibson of the
Edinburgh Evening News
at breakfast at nine. We talk for almost an hour. He’s easy company, and a dutiful journalist – he makes sure he scribbles something down about all my activities. This is primarily a
Time Bandits
piece.

From talking to him I am reinforced in this feeling that’s been coming over me lately – that my reputation follows about three or four years behind what I do. Somehow, though none of the individual projects were treated with respect or reverence at the time, the cumulative effect of Python and
Ripping Yarns
and the
Life of Brian
and the ‘Great Train Journey’ seems to have been to raise my stock to the extent that I am now not only good copy everywhere, but also I sense a sort of respectfulness, as if I’m now an experienced hand and a permanent addition to a gallery of famous British people. It’s all very worrying and offers me little comfort, for I know I am still the same bullshitter I always was.

A quick walk through Prince’s Gardens – where everyone is lying out in the sun like extras in a documentary about nuclear war. Up the Mound to a restored National Trust house in the Royal Mile. Fascinating, but as soon as I enter it there is quite a stir amongst the nice, middle-class family who run it.

I’m followed from room to room by a breathless young man who finally confronts me in a bedchamber – ‘Excuse me, but you are Eric Idle from Monty Python … ?’

More rioting on TV tonight.
⁴¹
It’s replaced sport as the summer’s most talked about activity. The scenes are frightening. One can only hope lessons will be learnt fast. Whitelaw and Thatcher go out of their way to support the police, but bad policing and the effects of unemployment vie with each other as the two most oft-quoted reasons for what’s happening.

Settle down to read
The Missionary
, which arrived today from Alison – the first really smart copy. It read far better than I expected. It seems tight, the religious atmosphere is strong, the story and the characters develop well and, all in all, it’s just what I had hoped – a strong, convincing, authentic sense of place, mood, period and a dramatic narrative providing a firm base for some very silly comedy.

I finish reading at half past eleven and, though I write these words with great trepidation, I feel the film is over 70% right – maybe even more. Now names of actors, directors, keep coming into my head.

But the chiefest decision of all is how to play Denis. I must show it to him, or I think be prepared for a final breakdown argument with him. The situation is full of uncertainties and dangers. My prestige is such that I could show it to any number of producers and get a sympathetic hearing. But I have told DO’B that I will offer it first to HandMade – so there’s the rub.

I call Denis in Fisher’s Island [his home near New York]. It’s half past eight in the morning there and Denis sounds subdued, a little cautious at first, but when he realises it isn’t bad news, he begins to wind up and by the end we are both beginning to celebrate.

He asks if I have a director in mind. I mention Richard Loncraine, who I haven’t spoken to for a few months, and could still be a long shot. I mention spring of ’82 for shooting and he says ‘We would have no problem’ – ‘we’ being, I presume, he, EuroAtlantic, Trade Development Bank and George.

Feel relieved that I’ve taken a positive step forward. It would remove endless complications if Denis accepted the script. Should hear something by the weekend.

To Rachel’s end of term concert at Gospel Oak. A rather flat affair. All the children look as though they’re acting under orders. Rachel plays a lettuce.

A call from Loncraine. Good news – for me – is that the
Brimstone and Treacle
film has collapsed – Bowie having let them down very much at the last minute. He has two film projects he wants to do, but claims to be very keen to work with me, and wants to see the script as soon as possible.

Out of the house at a quarter to eight. Stuck in rush-hour traffic, ironically trying to get to Marylebone High Street for Radio London’s live programme called
Rush Hour
.

Talk to Jackie Collins, who’s also a guest. She’s doing the circuits for her new book,
Chances
, which my Radio London interviewer confides to me is ‘the filthiest book I’ve ever read’.

Out in Marylebone High Street by nine o’clock. [
Time Bandits
opened in London yesterday.] Buy all the papers and treat myself to a reviving plate of bacon and eggs and a cup of coffee at a local caff. Read the
Guardian
– ‘British, if not best’. Plenty of praise, but all qualified. In the
New Statesman
our friend and
Jabberwocky
fan John Coleman said many things, but concluded that the taste left by the film at the end was not just bad, it was sour. Cheered up by an unequivocal rave in
New Musical Express
. Nothing else.

Drove on down to Terry J’s. Terry is on good form.
Paperbacks
has finished and we natter happily over various things. Realise that I’m enjoying writing with an immediate sounding board again. In fact I have rather a good day and add to the ‘Catholic Family’ sketch rather satisfactorily, whilst Terry deals genially with a mass of phone callers.

Home soon after six. Bad review on Capital. Much praise for the film, but he blatantly calls it the new Monty Python film. If I had more time and energy I’d sue him.

In early evening an important call – the first professional opinion on
The Missionary
– from Richard Loncraine. He liked it up to page ten, then not again until page sixty, from whence he felt it picked up.

But I was hopeful from our short chat for two reasons. One that he doesn’t dislike it enough to not want to do it, and the other that all he said about the script and intentions about how to film it I felt very much in agreement with.

Now Denis and Terry J are to report! They’re the only others who have copies.

After lunch a party of ten of us go to see
Time Bandits
at the Plaza.

The audience is responsive, consistent and picks up the jokes, but I find that, at one or two points, we stretch their goodwill by over-extending on a moment that’s already been effective. The Giant is on for too long and the trolls don’t add much. Heresy I know to agree on this, but the acts
do
hold up Napoleon and
don’t
get a positive reaction. And, though I don’t object to the parents blowing up at the end, we hold the moments afterwards for too long, as if making a significant statement, and, in doing so, overloading the gloom and killing the black humour.

So I came away feeling a little numbed. Despite three or four people seeking me out to tell me how much they’d enjoyed it, I was disappointed that I’d seen faults in it and that there wasn’t a greater sense of excitement amongst the departing audience.

TG rings later. He feels this sense of doom as well.

Woke to yet another day of concern. I have to learn my ‘Plankton’ speech for a Save the Whales rally in Hyde Park. Then there’s the Sunday papers – how will
Time Bandits
fare today?

A marvellous selection of qualified raves. But somehow the qualifications seem to be significant rather than the raves. I read Alan Brien, who starts wonderfully and then qualifies. Philip French in the
Observer
chunders on at length for a column and a half before one word of doubt. But then it comes in, like a trip wire 20 yards from the tape at the end of a mile race.

As I describe them to Gilliam later – they’re the worst set of rave notices I’ve ever seen.

I feel Alan Brien’s observation is the most perceptive thing anyone’s said about the film – ‘Where it falls below earlier Python movies, or Gilliam’s own
Jabberwocky
, is in the sense it gives that once the basic idea was established the makers thought everything else would be easy.’

Still, no time to mope, as I have to take myself and rapidly-learnt script down to Hyde Park to address the Save the Whales rally – which was allowed to go ahead by [Police Commissioner] McNee despite a month-long ban on London marches following the riots, because it was termed ‘educational’.

Start of a Python writing fortnight. We tried such a session a year ago and it was not successful. Today, a year later, things feel very different.

Time Bandits
is complete, so TG is back with the group. Eric is relaxed and well after France. Terry J has got
Paperbacks
out of the way and is keen to get directing again. Graham, with
Yellowbeard
, and myself, with
The Missionary
, both have projects which look like being completed by summer ’82.

We decided, without any bickering or grudging, that we should now work separately until the end of the week. Everyone agreed that this film should not be extended indefinitely and if it was to become a reality it had to be next year.

So, after lunch and an amiable chat, we disperse to our separate writes.

About ten o’clock DO’B rings from Fisher’s Island. He’s just finished reading
The Missionary
. As I expected, the last thing he wants to do is give any artistic judgement on the script. He talks of it purely from a business point of view. He sounds to have no doubts that it’s a commercial reality and he’s treating it accordingly.

DO’B reckons it’s an eight- or nine-week shoot, 65% studio, and will cost about one and a half million. We are looking at a March, April, early May ’82 shoot.

Drive over to Richard Loncraine’s office in Clarendon Cross. How neat, well-preserved, paved and bollarded this little corner of Notting Hill has become. Charming, I should think is the word. Richard bounds down to answer the door, and is soon showing me his latest gadgets (he runs a toy factory employing 200 people making ridiculous things like eggs with biros in the end), pouring me some wine, raving about
Time Bandits
, which he thought absolutely wonderful, calling
Chariots of Fire
‘Chariots of Bore’ and generally bubbling and enthusing like an English version of Gilliam.

Richard is going to do it and will commit to it. He repeats that he wants to work with me and he’s doing it largely out of faith in what I can achieve, which is flattering and exciting at the same time, and because, although there is much in the script he thinks doesn’t yet work, he thinks there’s more that does.

The next step is to bring DO’B and Loncraine together next week. But I think I can say that
The Missionary
became a reality tonight.

Richard rings to suggest Maggie Smith for Lady Ames, which shows he’s been thinking positively about it.

To a Python meeting at 2 Park Square West, giving T Gilliam a lift. A successful day, everyone participating. John tending to chair in a barristerish way, but it’s all good Python trough work. We re-read the ‘bankers’. They nearly all survive and, by half past three when TJ has to go, we have a solid 50 minutes, with viable links and a sort of coherence.

Ring Terry J to find out if he has read
The Missionary
. He has, and finds it all ‘unbelievable’. Not an encouraging reaction. Set off to [EuroAtlantic in] Cadogan Square. Denis, tall, tanned and looking as confidently turned out as ever, meets me and we walk through the balmy evening to the Chelsea Rendezvous.

I start by telling Denis that all three people who have read
The Missionary
haven’t liked it. A little provocative, I suppose, but it’s the way I read the reactions. Terry J’s, strangely enough, doesn’t trouble me as much as I thought. Maybe, as TJ and I just improvised over the phone this evening, it would be better for Welles to be given a mission in England – possibly the saving of fallen women. But talking to Denis I feel, obstinately perhaps, that my instincts are right and that my choice of director is right and that the film can work. Denis is not at all discouraging. Quite the opposite.

I wake in the early hours in general discomfort – head and tooth aching and very hot. Just not ready for sleep, so walk about a bit. Then, from three a.m. until half past four I sit and scribble some dialogue for a new scene in
The Missionary
– trying to take the story in a different direction, as I discussed with TJ over the phone.

Drain my cup of tea and look up finally from deep absorption in the work, to see the sky has lightened to a dark, pre-dawn blue. Feel much
better. Feel I’ve defeated the aches and pains! Back to bed.

Later take Granny and the Herberts to
Time Bandits
.

Afterwards we all walk down Regent Street into a Mall thronged with pre-wedding [of Charles to Diana] crowds. A feeling of celebration and slightly noisy camaraderie, as if the revolution had just happened. Of course, quite the opposite; everyone here tonight was celebrating the longevity and resilience of the Establishment.