Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (21 page)

There was a mass of sleeping bags and plastic all along the edge of the pavement – rarely much class or style, except that under the trees outside the ICA a long table had been set with candles and four men in full dinner jackets and bow ties were sitting down to a meal and wine.

Time Bandits
biz in second week is down, as Denis said, by about 20%, but then so is everyone’s except James Bond and
Clash of the Titans
. We move up to No. 3 in London above
Excalibur
, now in its fourth week, and the fading
Cannonball Run
.

Marvellous review by Gavin Millar in the
Listener
. I wonder if TG had time to see it before he went off to France yesterday. The
Ham and High
and many of the rest of England papers turn in good reviews too, so that all cheers me up. But the bad news is that the figures for week one in Bristol are, by any standards, very disappointing. Cardiff is better, but certainly no signs of it being anything but an average performer outside London.

An early lunch (cheese and an apple) and drive back through Suffolk villages and down the M11, listening to another tense Test Match. Cloudless sky when I arrive in Oak Village. Australia nearly 100 with only 50 to go and seven wickets standing. But by the time I’ve unpacked, oiled myself and settled down for a sunbathe on the balcony they have collapsed and within an hour Botham has wiped them out and England have won.

I drive into town for lunch with Neville Thompson at Mon Plaisir.

Neville is the third of the main strands of
The Missionary
project. Denis
is supplying the money, Loncraine the direction and Neville could be the producer.

Like everyone else he has qualifications about the script, but has faith in the project. I try to give him as many ‘outs’ as possible, but he clearly feels that there is some rich vein to be tapped wherever Pythons are involved – even if he can’t immediately see it in
The Missionary
as it stands. I feel a little like the Missionary myself at the moment, trying to convert the waverers to the joys and virtues of this bloody film.

Loncraine rings. He’s back from New York, where he’s been to see Sting – of ‘Police’ – for part in
Brimstone and Treacle
.

Over to Loncraine’s for further talks on
The Missionary
. Richard has read it again and sees certain problem areas. Richard talks from the hip a bit, firing ideas out fast and in a not particularly disciplined way. Tendency to broader jokes, but, on the credit side, we come up with three very good visual additions to the script which I can immediately incorporate in the rewrites. Another heavy storm breaks – starting with an apocalyptic clap of thunder – ‘Didn’t like that idea, did he?’ says Richard, looking out of the window respectfully.

Reagan has dismissed 13,000 of his air traffic controllers for going on an illegal strike, but Sheila [Condit, who was organising our US holiday trip] has checked with LA Airport and international flights are coming in 95% on time.

In the evening Helen goes to badminton. I stay in to watch the news. Whilst Reagan pursues his hard line against the air traffic controllers, European air traffic controllers are quoted as advising against flying to the US. Disturbing stuff – 25 near misses reported in US air space since the strike began, the new military controllers plus non-striking controllers are working longer hours and ‘safety is being endangered’. American government says rubbish, and the airlines flying to the States say so too. But not a very comforting way to have to start the holiday. I feel that, if the BA pilots are still prepared to fly with the new controllers then I’m happy – but don’t go to bed elated.

Denis met with Loncraine and got on well and is anxious to sign him up.
Time Bandits
is still No. 3 in London. It will not be the blockbuster they were predicting. They’d been looking for a distributor’s gross of a million, but have revised this downwards to half a million. But he has done a deal in America. Avco Embassy are to release the
Time Bandits
on November 6th with four million dollars committed to prints and advertising. Modest, by today’s standards, and Avco Embassy are guaranteed against loss by Denis and George.

To my desk to wrestle with the most immediate problems. One of the first calls on our return, Tuesday, was from a humbled Stickley and Kent asking if my offer of £28,500 for No. 1 Julia Street still stood. Apparently they have had some difficulty selling at £37,750. As my offer had been so summarily dismissed, I told them I would think about it.

Helen is not really keen and sees No. 1 as a lot of hard work, but on the other hand she does see the advantage of having control over the site. Edward keen to take on the job and will supervise, so on balance I stick to my first instinct and renew my interest – at the same time twisting the knife a little and giving my cash offer as £26,500. We shall see.
⁴²

On to viewing of
Hollywood Bowl
on screen for first time. Sixty-five minutes it runs. Sketches well performed and quite well filmed – the rest a wretched disappointment.

Back at Neal’s Yard, those Pythons who saw the film – Terry J, John, Graham and myself (TG and Eric being in France) – all agree it isn’t right. Main criticisms – links, atmosphere, shapelessness.

I felt very proud of our little group today. In the face of much pressure to put the ‘
Bowl
’ film out as soon as possible, to recoup our money and to have done with it, we held out for quality control first.

Drive into town to join the London Library and take out, at last, some books on African missionaries –
Winning over a Primitive People
, etc – to read as background on the film.

Evening of phone calls, latest of which is Denis O’B ringing from New York. I tell him all is well, except that both Richard Loncraine and Neville Thompson think that the budget will be nearer £2 million than £1 million.

Turns out that he has sold
The Missionary
project to George on the basis of a £1.2 million cost.

I watch a programme about the colossal, massive, virtually incredible madness of our world in 1981 – the designing, building and deployment of weapons of self-destruction.

It worries me that we accept now that we have to live with bombs which could kill two million people with one blast. That somewhere in the world there are men designing and manufacturing and loading and aiming and controlling and making serious considerations of policy based on the use of such weapons. Meanwhile we pay for such collective madness with unemployment, a crumbling health service, a polluted planet. It seems we know that we shall destroy ourselves somehow and the multi-megaton bombs are like the cyanide pills which will put us out of our misery instantly.

A solid morning’s work on
The Missionary
. Few distractions and I fall into a good rhythm.

To the airport to collect Al and Claudie. Wet roads. Repairs close the motorways, London seems empty, ghostly. At the airport soon after ten – find them waiting, the plane was early. Best flight ever, opines the bronzed and ageless poet, pulling eagerly on a cigar as they had sat in non-smoking. Claudie, just a gently convex stomach showing discreetly, looked very well and in good colour.

Up to Burgh House at 6.00 for the Grand Launch [of Al’s book of poems, called
Travelogs
]. Robert laid out a display of Signford’s
⁴³
wares on the piano of the Music Room and hardly anybody turned up. More and more I had the feel that I was in one of Richmal Crompton’s ‘William’ situations. Involved in one of his ‘grate skeems’ which never quite work.

But there were enough there for me to rise to my feet and embark on the speech. No sooner had I begun than a dozen latecomers arrived in the next one and a half minutes, so the speech wasn’t helped, but the party was. And in the end it was quite difficult to move everyone out.

Then out to Vasco and Piero’s [Pavilion Restaurant] with Al, who had been quaffing malts during the afternoon, then much champagne at the party, but was in a big, expansive bear-like mood of delight, Claudie, and Mike Henshaw
⁴⁴
and his excellent new ‘companion’ Penny. We all had a wonderful time and Mike paid.

For Mike and me it was a reconciliation. Having been good and close friends for 13 years, accountancy got in the way and we have not spoken or seen each other for two years. We picked up as if nothing had happened.

In mid-afternoon take advantage of dry, still, bright weather for a run across the Heath, then down to Eyre Methuen to discuss with Geoffrey S and Terry J a new edition of Fegg which we agree to call
Dr Fegg’s Nasty Book
. We look through the artwork of the old – now seven years past – up in Methuen’s boardroom, sipping white wine and looking out over a panorama of city buildings turning reddish-gold in the waning sunlight.

Work delayed this morning by arrival of TG, fresh from Hollywood, bearing such gems as a market research survey on
Time Bandits
– a wonderfully thorough and conscientious document analysing test
screenings and reactions to all the various elements of the film in that earnest American way which reduces all things to ‘product’. They confirm that the film is not for Fresno, but it could well be for bigger, more ‘sophisticated’ city audiences.

Interesting thing it
did
reveal is that the audience at Sherman Oaks went to the movies on average ten times a month, and in Fresno seven. Which shows the health of movies in the US is still good, whereas here the admissions level is still dropping to all-time lows.

Work on the Fermoy scene, but got involved in helping Tom with his geography homework. Then drive down to the Long Room at the Oval cricket ground for Pavilion Books launching party.

Soon was in the middle of a swirling throng – past the literary editor of the
Express
, Peter Grosvenor, on to a very persistent Scottish lady publisher who wants to have lunch and discuss some project involving Miriam Stoppard, Tom Stoppard and sex, grabbed by Molly Parkin, who’s very oncoming – she says I always was her favourite – and meet Max Boyce. ‘Oh I love being in a corner with two comedians,’ she soothed, as we had photos taken together.

Then Bob Geldof in green lurex jacket, black skin-tight trousers and mediaeval floppy boots approached and we hailed each other like old friends, though I don’t know him that well. After a brief exchange of mutual abuse, we talked about school and missionaries and he swore blind that he had been at a missionary school in Ireland where the French master was mainlining quinine, Irish was compulsory and, even if you got seven or eight ‘O’ Levels, none of them counted if you failed Irish.

Drink in the Nag’s Head. Aggressive podgy Cockney looms up.

‘Are you Eric Idle?’

‘No …’

‘You’re Eric Idle.’

‘No, I’m not …’

‘Well, it’s a very good impression,’ he mutters and wanders back to his mates.

After lunch out with the family to visit Uncle Leon in Hampton Wick, in the tiny, neat, long and narrow cottage which Leon moved into only two weeks before Helen’s Aunt Peggy, wife of 38 years, died early this year. He took a long time to recover and said he couldn’t bear being alone in the house in the evening. He confessed very touchingly that he’s often found himself turning to talk to someone who isn’t there.

A big tea with scones and home-made jam, then home under angry skies ranging from slate grey to pitch black, through the well-kept roads of Hampton and Twickenham. Perfect example of Tory middle-class orderliness. No rows of council flats with rubbish flapping around them, or grandiose public works schemes left half undone through lack of funds. This is the tidy, thrifty world of private planning, from which the poor and the underpaid seem absent. But at least personal enterprise is allowed and encouraged to flourish here, when the grey blocks of Camden seem only to have extinguished it.

Back home I watch quite brilliant first film of Bill Douglas trilogy,
⁴⁵
My Childhood
.

Came near to giving up this morning. For a full hour I sat and stared. Every word I wrote seemed dull and wooden. The last three weeks of fairly solid application (well, two and a half, anyway) seemed to have produced just sludge. And tomorrow was the last day of September, when I had once optimistically estimated I would be finished with the [
Missionary
] rewrites.

But abandoning now would seem so feeble. I had to carry it through. Besides, I’d burnt my boats – turning down every other piece of work. So it was that in the hour and a half before lunch I buckled down and ideas began to flow and in fact I was well into my stride when the door bell rang at 2.30 to herald the arrival of a BBC crew to film me giving testimony in a programme about giving up smoking.

Woke at 8.30. The boys already downstairs and breakfasted. Outside a steady drizzle, which increased to heavy rain and the children and I took Mrs Pratt [my mother’s neighbour] to morning service at Reydon.

We leave her and drive into Southwold for more secular activities. Despite all my doubts and rational resistance to the dogma of the church, I still feel a powerful guilt at taking the children to the amusement arcade on the end of Southwold Pier on a Sunday morning. You don’t notice the presence of the church in London, as you do in Southwold.