Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (25 page)

Call George in Henley at nine o’clock. After a few rather terse exchanges he says ‘You’re obviously not a
Dallas
fan, then’ and I realise I’ve interrupted a favourite viewing.

 

 

It had been decided that, as with
The Life of Brian
and Barbados, we needed somewhere exotic to finalise the new film script; Jamaica had been chosen.

Touch down in Montego Bay about 8.30. Soft, stifling blanket of hot, humid air takes me by surprise.

A large black limousine is backed up outside and Brian, our driver (why is there always a Brian wherever Python goes?), squeezes us all and luggage in.

About an hour’s cramped and uncomfortable drive through the night along the north coast of the island. We turn into the drive of a long, low, unadorned rectangular mansion, called ‘Unity’, some time after ten o’clock. A youngish black man, Winford, and a middle-aged, beaming black lady, Beryl, come out to settle us in.

Our main problem is the selection of bedrooms. Four of the rooms, all off a long passageway/landing on the first floor, are splendid – spacious and well-furnished and one has a full tester four-poster. But there are three other rather small rooms, less well-furnished and clearly intended as children’s rooms, annexed on to the main bedrooms.

So we sit in the grand downstairs sitting room, with a fine selection of polished wooden cabinets and Persian carpets, and wing-backed armchairs and some attractive maritime oil paintings, and draw our bedrooms out of the hat.

J Cleese has been very crafty and claims there is only one bed which he, being so tall, can fit in, and that so happens to be in one of the ‘master’ bedrooms, so he isn’t included.

Terry G and I pick the two sub-bedrooms. At least they all look across the lawn to the sea (about 100 yards away) and mine has a bathroom. A heavily stained bathroom with rotting lino and no hot water, but a bathroom all the same – though I share it with Mr Cleese, who has the big double bedroom of which mine is the ‘attachment’.

Winford advises us not to swim tonight as there are barracuda which come in from behind the reef at night-time. This puts a stop to any midnight high-jinks, though Terry J goes and sits in the sea. But it’s a
lovely night with a big full moon and, apart from the inequality of rooms, I think Unity will serve us well.

GC is quietly puffing away as we sit outside. He looks like any trustworthy GP. But his pipe is well-stocked with Brian’s ganja.

I sleep very little. Possibly three and a half to four hours. Doze and listen to the sea. I sit up, turn on the light and read our script at 5 a.m. It’s light just before seven and I walk outside, having unlocked my room door and the heavy iron doors at the top of the stairs and then the iron and wood double doors out to the garden. Clearly this property is a target.

The house is right beside the sea, only a lawn and a few trees between us and the Caribbean – and the trees are healthy-looking and have leaves of many and rich colours. The house is kept spotless, and already the leaf-scratcher is removing the six or seven leaves that have fallen on the patio overnight. The house is not so grand as Heron Bay [the villa in Barbados where we worked on
Life of Brian
] – there are no soaring Palladian columns. Its simple shape and plain limestone construction dates, they say, two or three hundred years back, when it was the chief house on the Runaway Bay plantation. The mountains rise up behind the house and across to the west.

I sit at the table and read my script. There are one or two young black boys hanging around the beach. One of them comes over and sits down and introduces himself as Junior and offers me ganja and a trip to see Bob Marley’s grave. He says he’s 19 and he grows his own pot up in the mountains.

Run up the beach as far as the Runaway Bay Hotel and back. Nearly a mile. Then a swim in the limpid, lukewarm waters of the Caribbean.

Breakfast is good coffee, fresh grapefruit and eggs and bacon and toast from very boring sliced bread.

Everyone’s reactions to the script are then discussed. All of us, to some extent, feel disappointed. I think the material is still very static. It could still be a radio show. The rain seems set in for the day as we sit around for a long afternoon discussion session.

It’s agreed that we should proceed from the material we have and create a strong story or framework to contain it. Some silly moments in this free and fairly relaxed session – including a title from TG, ‘Jesus’s Revenge’. But though everyone occasionally flashes and sparkles nothing ignites.

Supper is early – about 6.30. We’ve bought in some wine from the supermarket across the road and we have a delicious starter of fish mixed with akee fruit – a little black, olive-like fruit off one of the garden trees.

Then a group of us go up to the Club Caribbean next door. A black lady pinches Graham’s bottom and GC altruistically turns her over to TJ. It turns out she is a hooker. She looks a nice, open, smiley lady, and keeps dropping her price in a determined effort to interest any of us. As TJ finally leaves, empty-handed, she asks him for two dollars.

An early breakfast, and splitting into groups by 9.30. Terry J and Terry G, Eric and JC, myself and Graham.

GC and I, however, soon find ourselves in one of the most bizarre and distracted writing sessions of all time. Beryl, the cook, was under the impression that someone would take her up to the market, eight miles away, for all the provisions she will need for the Jamaican food we’ve asked her to produce. So GC and I decide to take her and work on the way.

It starts quite well as we drive up winding mountain roads for a half-hour and emerge into a busy little township with a stout stone Anglican church set in the middle of it. GC and I make a quick shopping sortie for shoes and swimming trunks then back to the car. Vegetables in the back, but no Beryl.

Still talking over our idea for a John Buchan-type story framework, we have a Red Stripe beer in a small bar. Beryl comes back and deposits fish, but then has to sally back into the market for yams.

Halfway down the perfectly named Orange Valley, beside stone walls and almost classic English parkland, is an akee-seller. We skid to a halt. When we proceed again we not only have akees, but also two black boys who want a lift. Stop at the supermarket for bully beef, and our writing session finally turns into the gates of Unity two and a half hours after we set out.

I ring Rachel and wish her a happy seventh birthday in still-frozen London.

After lunch we sit and present our ideas. I present GC’s and mine. A breathtaking, marvellously choreographed musical overture all about fish – with us in spectacular fishy costumes. Then into an exciting Buchan
mystery tale, involving strange disappearances, unexplained deaths, all pointing to Kashmir. The hero would have to unravel the story by various clues, which bring in our existing sketches.

John and Eric have taken the view that the film is primarily about sex and they’ve reinstated the Janine/girls’ paradise idea that I’d gone off a year ago. Even less response to this idea.

TG and TJ have gone back to first Python principles to link it – a rag-bag of non-sequiturs and complex connections. It’s full and frantic and, when TJ’s finished describing it, there is silence. It’s as if no-one can really cope with any more ‘solutions’. As if this is the moment that this material – the best of three years’ writing – finally defeated us.

I take Eric’s advice and we walk up to the Runaway Bay Hotel and sit on the terrace there and have three very strong rum punches and get very silly and laugh a lot and devise the idea of a Yorkshire Heaven, in which Yorkshiremen are revealed to have been the chosen people.

Wake to sunshine and a feeling that today is make-or-break for the film. We certainly cannot continue stumbling into the darkness as we did yesterday.

TJ says that, from the timings of the sketches we all like alone, we have over 100 minutes of material. This seems to spur people into another effort. TJ suggests a trilogy. The idea of a rather pretentious Three Ages of Man comes up and a title ‘Monty Python’s Meaning of Life’, to which Eric adds the subhead ‘See it now! Before it’s out of date’.

We decide to group the material together into phoney pseudo-scientific headings – ‘Birth’, ‘Fighting Each Other’ and ‘Death’. Suddenly ideas come spilling out and within an hour there seems to be a remarkable change in the film’s fortunes.

Writing has definitely taken a turn for the better. Eric, TJ and I in the big room make some encouraging progress on linking the ‘War’/‘Fighting Each Other’ section. TG stands on a sea-urchin just before lunch. He’s in some agony for a bit and has about nine or ten black quills in his heel. Doc Chapman ministers to him. Neville T rings from London to say the
[
Missionary
] script is probably two hours long. When I tell the Pythons that Sir Laurence Olivier has never heard of us, he is heaped with abuse.

Out to dinner with Jonathan and Shelagh Routh.
⁵⁴
This involves a convoy into Ocho Rios and beyond.

Rather characterful house, very different from the mansion of Unity. It’s a collection of wood-framed cottages, set on the edge of a low cliff down to the sea. Foliage everywhere. About 20 people amongst the foliage. An Australian diplomat – who, at 25, seems to run their High Commission – his Texan wife, who seems bored with Australian diplomacy. There’s an English artist called Graham, tall and rather aristocratic, a French/Australian who writes novels and tells me that Jamaica is a very restless society and not what it seems on the surface. Much resentment of whites.

On my way from the Rouths’ a man in khaki tries to hitch a lift, but I speed on. Only later do I realise I’ve driven straight through an army roadblock.

Snooze a little, watch Eric doing Tai Chi on the lawn, then breakfast at 9.00, and set to with Eric and TJ to put the last section of
The Meaning of Life
into shape. Not very inspired work and we get rather bogged down on the ‘Christmas in Heaven’ song.

At 4.30 everyone returns from various postcard-writing, T-shirt-buying trips to read through work assembled over the last three days. JC and GC and TG have come up with a tremendously good, strong opening set in a hospital during the birth of a child, and there is only one section of the film about which people have doubts.

The
Meaning of Life
theme and structure does seem to have saved the film and justified our being here. There are now tightenings and improvements to be done and songs to be written and these will occupy us for our four remaining writing days. Tomorrow we have off.

A beautiful ‘zebra’ butterfly flutters around us as we read. A good omen, perhaps.

GC announces at breakfast, after one of his regular and interminable phone calls to London, that he is going to sue Denis O’B. This causes a few dropped jaws over the toast and marmalade. Apparently GC, having enlisted the help of Oscar Beuselinck
⁵⁵
to try and buy back the
Yellowbeard
rights from Denis, who keeps increasing his demands and conditions, has just heard that Beuselinck has found enough ground for negligence in Denis, and Anne, to proceed with a lawsuit. As GC says, the shit has hit the fan in London.

All of us are concerned that Anne should not be hauled over the coals – especially as she has been doing everything to try and improve GC’s financial position over the last few months by getting the rest of us to withhold payments, etc. But GC lights his pipe in determined fashion and sounds terse and unmoving.

Late lunch, and at 4.30 Jonathan and Shelagh Routh arrive to collect and lead us to a place called Round Hill, where a friend of theirs is laying on a beach party for us.

Pleasant, countrified drive, avoiding mongooses which are apt to suddenly scuttle across the road. When JC returned from his trip to Kingston and said he’d passed four dead dogs and a calf, GC speculated that journey distances in Jamaica could be categorised quite usefully as a ‘two dead dog journey’ or a ‘three dog, one pig journey’.

Round Hill turns out to be an estate of luxurious holiday homes set on a headland with very beautiful views. We are taken to a little house higher up the hill, set amongst the trees, for a party given by ‘a prominent Washington horsewoman’. She welcomes us with a bright, quick, sympathetic smile and sincere handshake. Her long blonde hair is swept up on top of her head most dramatically, but giving the physical impression that her face has somehow been swept up as well and is pinned painfully somewhere in the scalp. She wears a long white dress. I am in running shorts – thinking only that we were coming to a beach party.