Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (36 page)

Today all the Pythons are together to be fish and, as this is probably the last time we shall be gathered in one place until February next, there is an added note of almost hysterical urgency around. Iain Johnstone’s
⁷⁵
BBC crew are filming the ABC ‘20-20’ film crew filming us trying on our fish harnesses. I’m a goldfish, Graham a grayling, the two Terries perches and John is a carp.

It’s a very weird and effective make-up, making us all look like John Tenniel’s
Alice
pictures – semi-anthropomorphised.

‘Shit, it’s Mr Creosote’ are the memorable last words of the day, nine weeks after John and I had begun the film in the chapel of the Royal Masonic School.

As if to bring everything full circle, RL rushes into the dressing room as lashings of solvent are being applied to my hair to remove the glue, with Polaroids of the day’s poster session.

On the way home in the car TG and I discuss it and TG feels it’s too solemn and stylish and too busy. He feels that we should be looking for a much simpler, more direct approach. Even something as corny as lipstick on a dog-collar, he says.

As I lie awake, some time around nine o’clock, I feel with great certainty that Richard’s second attempt to produce an alternative to the Columbia poster is still not right. It lacks a sharp and clear indication that
The Missionary
is comedy – it’s fun, something to be enjoyed.

TG’s aside about a dog-collar with lipstick on comes into my mind. It’s clear, neat and simple. As soon as she’s conscious I tell H about it and she enthuses.

Run in the morning. The Heath is filling up again as if summer had returned unexpectedly. Pass a group of ladies with easels in a line and five straw hats and five cotton skirts all painting next to each other.

Sit out after my run and soak up the sun – read on with Nabokov, write some letters, then collect my
Missionary
outfit from Bermans for another and final attempt to crack the poster.

Drive down – roof open, a balmy evening – to W8, to yet another photographer’s studio.

As it gets dark I clamber once again into my
Missionary
robes, Sandra [Exelby – make-up] plants a thick, rich red kiss on the dog-collar – we try various angles of kiss – then I’m out in the street, where one should be on such a warm and beckoning evening, trying the silly expressions.

About nine o’clock I’m called in to take a very urgent message from Helen. She had heard from Mark Vere Nicoll, who had in turn just been rung by Antonowsky with the alarmingly sudden news that if
The Missionary
is not delivered to Columbia by this Friday they will pull out of the deal.

I call Antonowsky to try and find an explanation. He’s out at lunch. Could I call back in 45 minutes?

Finally get through to Antonowsky. I ask him what’s going on over the delivery dates. MA goes straight into some story about Richard Pryor involving Columbia in a damaging lawsuit because the final, fully edited version had not been shown to the blind bidding states. MA cannot let this happen over
Missionary
. ‘It’s us who have to pay, not you,’ he garbles on. The movie must be ready to be shown within a week of this Friday or they’re stuck.

‘Can we deliver it by Monday?’ I ask – any delay will help us.

‘I’m only the middle man,’ Marvin, President of Marketing and Distribution, pleads.

Tom McCarthy is the man to talk to about delivery.

At 12.30 a.m. I get through to DO’B at the Carlyle Hotel. He is in a fighting mood. MA had called him this morning and said that the movie was off, there was no deal. DO’B had argued with him for an hour and
left MA in no doubt that if he pulled out he would have a major lawsuit on his hands. Anyway, DO’B has now declared war on the man who [he] said only a week ago was decent and straight. Any communications with Columbia must be noted down word for word and any agreements struck must be passed on to Denis so vital evidence is in writing.

I sense that Columbia still have some hope for the picture, but Denis firmly believes that they are now trying desperately to extract themselves. But then this is probably de rigueur in Hollywood, I comfort myself as I drive back home.

Good news is that Columbia have not renewed attempts to cancel the film. Tom McCarthy is being helpful and we hang on by the skin of our teeth. But it was Richard who suddenly brought me down to earth by reminding me that the movie opens in the States five weeks from tomorrow. No wonder they are desperate for delivery.

Indian summer continues. Balmy, sultry sunshine – more like the South of France than South of England. Work at desk in the morning, lunch with Kathy Sykes [producer’s assistant], a treat for all her hard work. Eccentric restaurant in Richmond called the Refectory, beside the church, run by a rather fine-looking man with a weathered, baggy-eyed face.

I have to let myself dwell for a moment on the vagaries of chance which end up with my sitting at lunch with Eric Sykes’s daughter nearly 30 years after Graham and I sat and watched his programmes on the telly in Sheffield and dreamed of nothing finer to do than be Eric Sykes. Now I find Kathy telling me that Eric wants a part in my next film.

The roads of London are so empty at 5.15 on a Saturday morning that any other vehicle glimpsed in the rear-view mirror appears as a threat.

Pick up Loncraine, who groans unhappily as we head out onto the A40. Still pitch dark when we reach Rank Labs at Denham, and their long, low modern buildings and general Hollywood aspect only increase the dreamlike quality of the experience.

To the viewing theatre to see a checkprint taken from the interpositive that leaves for the States this very day. Although there are only a handful of people watching, most of whom have seen the movie endlessly, I feel tight-stomached at the lack of reaction, until someone else enters and starts to laugh most encouragingly.

The laughing man turns out to be Mike Levy – one of the top men at Rank. ‘Lovely movie,’ he says and then starts to take his own lab apart for not projecting the print with the correct light intensity. Once that is corrected we can see, to our relief, that there is nothing wrong with the print itself. Peter Hannan is very unhappy about the grading in two or three places and will be going out to the States on Wednesday to make the changes in LA. This is our last line of hope.

A sour-looking man brings any further discussion to an end by pointing out that he has to take the film to the States today. So I leave Denham at eight o’clock with the sun already hot and my film being loaded into the back of a Cortina Estate.

RL and I have breakfast with Hannan at a South Ken café. We are preoccupied with what’s wrong with the film, rather than what’s right. What a long way we’ve come from the euphoria of the early rushes, five and a half months ago.

Drive down to Knightsbridge for lunch with David Puttnam. Large numbers of police are about, closing off roads in preparation for the TUC Day of Action march. Down an almost empty Pall Mall with policemen lining my route. Can’t help thinking how many police witnesses I would have if there were an accident. Probably two or three hundred.

Puttnam is already at a table in Mr Chow’s – eager, voluble, enthusiastic, but a listener as well as a talker. He’s been at a government-run committee this morning and is off to give a speech to Channel 4 this afternoon.
Local Hero
is coming along wonderfully and he thinks it may have as big an impact as
Chariots of Fire
. He has projects involving Rowan Atkinson, he’s bought the rights to
Another Country
, he’s produced a Channel 4 series,
First Love
, and has a new movie which starts shooting in Dallas in October.

We moan together about lack of time to read, be with the family (he’s 41 and has a 20-year-old daughter). He asks me how I manage. I say it’s quite simple, I just act as my own safety-valve. I don’t
have a secretary and an office set-up as he has; I take on as much as I can myself cope with, which is generally too much, but not half as much as the indefatigable Puttnam.

I hardly remember what we ate. I drank Perrier, he a bloody Mary. He told me of plans for filming the complete works of Dickens. He’d come up with the idea on holiday when, it seems, he’d read several of the books and a biography of Dickens himself. He’s costed it at £50 million and is keen to find out whether Shepperton has the space for a brand new Dickensian back lot. If the project happened on the scale Puttnam was talking of today it would be a rich prize for any studio.

He’s very pleased to know that I’m proposing an across-the-board percentage share-out for the crew on
Missionary
, as he did on
Chariots
and
Local Hero
. He gives me some useful advice on how to set it up. He estimates that on
Chariots
the crew will each get £1,500! His secretary, who is on something like half a percentage point, will get £75,000!

He doesn’t seem anxious to get away and we chatter on for a couple of hours – about a mill he’s bought in Malmesbury, where the mill-race will be used to generate electricity, about Jacqueline du Pré, in a wheelchair at a nearby table – and about the possibility of working together. He wants me to write one of the
First Love
films.

Return call to Ken Blancato in LA. They ‘love the concept’ of our latest poster and will be testing it at the weekend, but definitely using it for some of their smaller ads.

Spend the afternoon reading the six children’s books I have to review for the
Ham and High
[the
Hampstead and Highgate Express
– our local paper]. Very English all of them – and all printed in Italy. Alternate between moods of determination to criticise quite severely and general easy-going bonhomie. Hardest thing to write is the opening paragraph – my attitude to children’s books. Am stuck on this when the time comes for us to brave a prolonged downpour and drive down to the Aldwych to see some Indian classical dancing from our ex-babysitter Asha Tanha.

Asha dances her Arangetram – a solo display of various classical South Indian dances. She’s on stage for an hour and a half – and to see quiet, slight, soft, retiring little Asha dancing, miming and holding an audience of 150 for that long is a real eye-opener. She dances very gracefully and it’s a difficult combination of rhythm, balance, expressions and story-telling. Very beautifully done.

I feel the frenetic pressures of London life very satisfactorily loosening and, although the music is not easy for the Western ear, I felt very much better when we left at ten than when I came in at half past seven, rushing out of the rain and the lines of stopped traffic on the approach to Waterloo Bridge.

Changeable, tempestuous weather. Helen collects a kitten, which we call Denis.

I scribble a few notes for a speech at today’s cast and crew viewing of ‘
The Mish
’.

Conventional, but not over-enthusiastic applause. I suppose many of them have seen it before, or are looking at their own work. I can’t see why I should have expected this to be the best audience so far.

But almost before the ‘HandMade’ title has faded, Denholm is leaning over my seat, enthusing rapturously. He thinks it’s ‘marvellous, a little classic’, and both he and his wife go on for some time in this encouraging vein. Helen still loves it and Tom, who was there with his friend Jasper, is very pleased with it too. No rush of hand-shaking fans, but a solid majority of those who think it successful.

Stay talking until five o’clock, then home. Have not eaten and feel very lumpen with the wine. Tom and Jasper are thumping out jazz improvisations on the piano, Rachel and Willy are encouraging our new cat, Denis, to hurl his little body round the kitchen, so I take to bed for a half-hour, then sit rather sleepily and read the papers.

Down to LBC for a ten o’clock programme on which I am to be the Mystery Guest. Evidently one caller susses me out within two minutes, but they don’t put him through until 10.30. Meanwhile, I’ve been guessed as Danny La Rue, Larry Grayson, Melvin Hayes and Kenneth Williams.

Watch
Roseland
,
⁷⁶
and enjoy Denis going crazy. So nice to have another Denis in my life.

Columbia are postponing the opening of
Missionary
to November 6th. Reason given is that there are now four other ‘major’ movies opening on October 22nd.

Linda Barker from Columbia calls, presuming I’m coming out for the three weeks to October 22nd anyway. What’s the point of doing promotion which climaxes two weeks prior to the film opening? She reacts like she’d never thought of this one before and promises to talk to her bosses.

Conference call around ten from Antonowsky and Roginski. MA starts by saying that all my TV appearances can be taped and used later – when I protest that I’m not going to work my ass off on a publicity tour which doesn’t include the last two weeks before the movie opens. Compromise suggested – I do the college circuit as planned, starting next Monday, then return to the UK for two weeks and then come back for one week LA, one week NYC.

To bed a little grumpily with the TG/Stoppard script of
Brazil
to read.

Driven to Elstree. Work on some last-minute rewrites of the ‘Middle of the Film’. Then into a wonderful, off-the-shoulder, 1950’s style costume, supplied at the last minute by Vanessa Hopkins, which brings back all those images of my sister and
Heiress
magazine and her first smart grown-up posed photograph.

Work very solidly in a concentrated spell from eleven until two, without, I think, even leaving my armchair. As I give my final speech, I really do feel that at last it’s over.