Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (56 page)

He tells me that the old lady who lives in the Transit Van in the driveway of his house considers herself to have equal rights over the entire property. She complained about Alan playing his music too loud, so he tends to listen on headphones. He admits that he does sometimes sing along with the music in his phones, which must sound odd, but was not prepared to be told by her that she had heard strange sounds coming from the house, as from someone under the influence of drink!

A long day and the meat is beginning to smell. An old actor called Don Eccles, who was once directed by Bertolt Brecht andW H Auden (they hated each other), joins us. We sit on chairs in the street.

Farewells. Rather sad to leave them all. I like the crew better as we get to know each other. It does say a lot for working with a repertory of actors and crew – as Python and Woody Allen have found to their advantage.

Cleese rings. I put to him thoughts on ‘Vikings’. He isn’t anxious to become involved in any more films besides a Michael Frayn script (JC as headmaster) he’s been sent and the film he’s been writing for many months with Charles Crichton.

About one o’clock Helen hears something in the street outside. Look out to see two men, one with black gloves, going down the street trying car doors. Helen rings police. Just slipping to sleep when police knock on door. Helen goes down – tall, dark, handsome PC to say they caught the pair. They were let off with a caution, having pleaded that they were very pissed off after seeing
Friday 13th Part II
, which they regarded as a complete waste of money.

TG rings to ask if I’m going to Pam Stephenson’s party. I’m in that ‘I will if you will’ mood. So we find ourselves, at nine-fifteen, driving along unlikely back streets of Hammersmith looking for a house described as No.
The Fish Factory.

Pam wears a dress made of a facsimile copy of
The Times
for March
19th ’84 (when their much-publicised baby was born) and people bring her outrageous presents. The Pope’s double waits at the door, a man dressed as Tarzan serves the drinks, dressed only in a loincloth and holding a plastic club with difficulty. A fully-turbaned Indian sings ‘Living Doll’ and other classics in front of a live band.

There is neat, trim, smiling and genuinely good-humoured Dick Lester, belligerently entertaining Peter McDougall, setting his moustache alight regularly as he fires his roll-your-own cigarettes.
¹⁰⁶

Talk to Billy [Connolly] as we’re leaving. He’s lost so much weight he looks physically much less substantial than his brawling, extrovert comedy style suggests. We talk of
Water
. He has one more week to go and is driving down to Devon for the filming after the party. I notice he’s not drinking.

I have a long-standing commitment at the Bluebell Railway to re-launch the only North London Line steam loco existing anywhere.

Met at the station by David Ryder and the team who have restored 58830 to service. Mostly much younger than myself. All with other jobs – electronic engineers, British Caledonian ground staff, etc.

At 2.30 the loco is steamed up the platform. Give my short speech, which is upstaged by a loud railway announcement, followed by the sweep in of the preceding train, which obliterates three-quarters of my audience. Raise three cheers for the team who worked on the loco, then I’m given a ride on the footplate up the five miles to Horsted Keynes and back, through classic English arable landscape, looking well in the sun.

There can’t be many industries in which you can, or even would want to, return to your old trade well into your 80’s as some of them do here. A mucky, dirty enterprise full of happy, fulfilled workers.

To Don’s for 9.15 haircut appointment. The extraordinary mixture of
Brazil
and
Private Function
has left my head looking like a hairstyle
exhibition site. Don notices the silvery threads. I’m going grey, gently but alas irreversibly.

This evening I go to catch my first glimpse of a
Brazil
cut at the Baronet viewing theatre – a full house with 30 or so people crammed into a very small space.

The film is two and a half hours long. As expected, each frame an oil painting. A garden of visual delights. Dream sequences puzzling but unfinished.

Jonathan’s central performance is masterly. He holds all the disparate pieces together. Manages to react 600 different ways to the same sort of situations and carries you along, explaining by expressions what we are required to think and feel.

Detail as usual of design, costume, props, etc, marvellous. Definitely a film for two or three viewings. Doesn’t have the naive charm of
Time Bandits
– in fact has no charm at all – but is a spirited, inventive, enormously intriguing work of imagination made celluloid.

Jonathan Pryce rings to borrow a video machine. He still has some flying shots to complete.
Brazil
will have been a year of his life. He goes to New York in October to do
Accidental Death of an Anarchist
on Broadway, for a nine-month contract. He says he now can’t open the script without depression setting in. On the page it seems to be so awkward and yet he knows that everything happens in the performance.

He hopes to get a film part – opposite Meryl Streep – in David Hare’s
Plenty
. This is why he needs the video – to copy some of the
Brazil
tapes to show the director. ‘It’s always the way,’ he says dolefully, ‘these sort of directors never really know who I am.’ In his way he is as powerful as Brando or De Niro. But you have to be in the right sort of movies and you usually have to be American to be that big.

To Waterloo on the Underground for a trip to the Methuen reps’ conference at Andover.
¹⁰⁷
Since yesterday LT have banned smoking on all
their Underground trains. A great step forward. Smoking should only be allowed in large country houses after dinner.

Later out with Helen to see Erice’s
The South
¹⁰⁸
– a superb, hauntingly beautiful film. Perfectly controlled and paced and shot to focus our attention on the simple elements of a very sad and touching tale. Goes above
The Servant
in my Top Ten instantly. And as a writer I am impressed again by how few histrionics are needed to make it work, how few epic visuals, grand locations and characters. It is precise and precisely satisfying.

And Helen is quite tearful afterwards as well as during. Wonderful.

A rather important day ahead. My first sight of
Private Function
– my life for seven weeks in May and June.

I quite enjoy Gilbert and find myself wanting to see more of him and his wife and ma-in-law. Lots of good things in ‘
PF
’. Performances – especially Denholm E (best thing he’s done) and Richard – are all strong and watchable. Much laughter.

Only drawbacks – too much sub-plot detail in the middle of the first half and a pervasive depressing feeling about most of the characters, their relationships and the world they inhabit, which makes it rather an inward-looking piece. That’s where Gilbert is important – he’s honest, if plodding, and one of the only characters with whom Bennett really allows the audience to develop sympathy.

No music yet, or pig effects.

To L’Escargot with Ray and Malc and Mark and Annie.

I only have time for a smoked haddock starter before I have to rush back to [Roger] Cherrill’s to post-synch ‘screams and gurgles’ for
Brazil
. I die horribly three or four times, then back to L’Escargot for the rest of the meal.

Steve [Abbott] has just come back from a week in Russia. Though it didn’t radically change his views about Russians, it did make him more anti-American. So much in what he saw and did contradicted the American-instigated
anti-Russian propaganda. He was free to wander, he found a synagogue where Jews were free to practise their religion. He found the great buildings of the past preserved carefully and beautifully. He found an underground system in Moscow superbly clean and free of ads and litter.

I pack ready for three days up in Southwold. On the way I go to a screening of
Private Function
.

The film has lost ten minutes and now runs 94. Denis looks like being proved right, for most of the trims and tucks are beneficial.

‘I see you’ve lost me then,’ says Alan in mock umbrage, referring to the ending-up on cutting-room floor of ‘Man Coming Out of Lavatory’.

As I write this, ten has just struck downstairs on the carriage clock I had restored for Mum. It’s a Saturday morning. Birds sing almost constantly from various vantage points around the house. Heavy low cloud flattens out the landscape. It’s cool.

Outside the window in front of me is a telegraph pole and a makeshift scarecrow of yellow polythene in a field of potatoes and clover. There is no other sign of human habitation.

The extraordinary appeal of Croft Cottage – and one that I feel sure I shall not be able to enjoy for much longer – is this momentary timelessness, this feeling of being settled in a warm and comfortable armchair from which one can survey the past easily, the present comfortably and the future hardly at all.

We play a lot of tennis, for the first time this year.

Suddenly aware of time passing when Helen and I are struggling to beat Tom and William. They’re both potentially very good. Tom has a fierce serve, but doesn’t concentrate hard enough to produce it with consistency. William is the eye-opener. He has a very quick eye, can’t serve overarm well, but always seems to be in the right place at the right time (if you’re playing
with
him) or the wrong time (if you’re against him).
Helen and I just hold our own, but very soon we’ll be out of their league.

A run – as I feel I need all the exercise I can get before the holiday indulgences begin on Wednesday. It’s very hot and humid and the going isn’t very comfortable. I note from the
Sunday Times
that Jim Fixx, whose book was the greatest single influence on my decision to start regular running five years ago, has died of a heart attack aged 52, whilst … running.

Halfway across Kenwood Meadow I meet Warren Mitchell. He says he’s breaking in a new hip and talks of a return to Alf Garnett with Dandy Nichols in a wheelchair.

To the Zanzibar to meet Sam Goldwyn. Sam is tall, clear-eyed, silver-haired, strong-jawed. He could be an evangelist or a Republican politician or the owner of a million fast food restaurants. In fact he’s a rather gentle, concerned, almost avuncular figure who has a strong liking for British comedy of the gentler kind. He’s nice about what he’s seen of
A Private Function
and thinks we have ‘a real winner there’!

We discuss a possible remake of the 1974 TV play [
Secrets
] TJ and I wrote (coincidentally enough, with Warren Mitchell playing the lead), which Sam G likes in script form, but feels that there should be a rewrite developing a more sympathetic character.

The second idea, and more constructive still, is that if TJ and I don’t feel it’s fresh enough to be our next writing project, then is there anyone else we could trust? Both TJ and I quite independently suggest David Leland. Good on structure, taut and spare in his writing, convincing on the big business detail.

To West Hampstead for lunch with JC. The restaurant is completely empty when I get there. I walk in, mildly put out at not even being able to find a waiter, when John’s head pops up from beneath one of the tables and squeaks, mouse-like, making my heart stop momentarily.

We are almost the only diners. The waiter is a complete Manuel clone. We talk of friends and eventually of the whole area of behaviour, relationships, etc – the subject nearest to JC’s heart at the moment. He does
seem to spend an inordinate amount of his time thinking about himself – trying to get to the bottom of why he is what he is and is there anything he can do about it?

It’s a very warm, humid afternoon. Neither of us is in a great hurry and JC drives me, at a stately pace, back to Julia Street in his Rolls. He makes strange faces as we ring the doorbell, aiming to surprise Helen, but surprises instead Sam Jarvis the painter – whose reaction as he opens the door is something well worth seeing.

Ring Eric to thank him for our weekend [at his house in France]. The difference between us, I thought pithily as I plodded up to Kenwood today, is that I’m a natural agree-er and Eric is a natural disagree-er. But we are in harmony over the likely enjoyment of another collaboration – Python or Python without John. Eric says he’d been thinking of a ‘Brian 2’, when Bowie, with whom he was lunching, suggested we do the ‘Old Testament’ … ‘We could be so rude about the Jews.’