Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (43 page)

William and I stay for breakfast with Parky and Mrs Parky – a nice Yorkshire couple – in a rather narrow and cramped canteen which Parkinson complains about. He seems to be quite brisk with his working colleagues. I shouldn’t think he suffers fools gladly.

Off to the Classic Haymarket. The press show has run for about 75 minutes. Brian Rami is very enthusiastic about the whole thing. There is applause at the end (very rare in critics’ screenings), but only he and I know that it was Rami who started it!

Walk down across Pall Mall to the Turf Club. At least it’s a dry, quite pleasant day. Upstairs at the Turf, in two elegant, high-ceilinged rooms, there is a good crowd of pressmen, plus one or two of the Fallen Women and Phoebe.

Maggie S herself arrives about half past twelve. She still hasn’t seen the film and I feel that she will probably continue to avoid it, as is her habit. But she looks very bright and attractive and sparkles for the press she dreads so much.

Mr Chandler, the rather icily elegant major-domo, is all smiles and very obliging today. ‘All the gentlemen of the press seemed to have enjoyed the film …’

As I’m about to go, Mr Chandler appears up the stairs once more … ‘Do you know Medwin?’ And sure enough, Michael Medwin, looking very perky in what looks like an oleander-pink scarf, comes bounding up behind him and I find myself drinking a further couple of glasses of champagne with him at the bar downstairs.

Mr Chandler keeps saying ‘He’ll have to become a member, you know,’ in a generous fashion. And Medwin promises to propose me and says that ‘Chalky’ White
⁸¹
and Albert Finney will second me. We talk over the
film industry. He seems quite sanguine about ‘going into the city’ and getting money and most hurt that
Memoirs of a Survivor
⁸²
(much praised) did not receive the commercial attention it deserved.

To the City University to be the ‘guinea pig’ at one of Bob Jones’s press conferences at the Department of Journalism. After an hour of this, drink with some of the tutors there. I’m listened to with far too much respect these days.

I suppose it must have changed me somehow. I no longer have to look for an audience. They gather around me – even quite intelligent people – and wait for the oracle to utter.

Home to anonymity and abuse from children.

Missionary
opening day.

An equivocal review in the very influential
Time Out
, specifically criticising my role as being inadequate to support the film, is followed by a short, but very negative piece in
City Limits
. In the
Guardian
, Derek Malcolm has me casting the paper aside in disgust and sitting head in hands in that deep, sudden desolation that only a bad crit can bring. But when I read him again, I realise it’s quite a praiseworthy review, but rather obscurely written.

Terry J rings and suggests squash and lunch, which I eagerly accept. TJ has been at Technicolor labs doing last-minute work on the
Meaning of Life
print. It’s now a time panic as bad as anything that happened on
The Missionary
.

I’d forgotten about the
Standard
. Have a quick scan through Alexander Walker and it is very good – for me and the film. A big photo, lead story, headline ‘Mission Accomplished’, phrases like ‘The
Missionary
is very, very funny’ and a comprehensive relishing of the finer points of the movie which almost makes the piece look like an extension of our own advertising. This puts a new spring in my step and a quite different complexion on the day.

Drive into the West End to the Classic Haymarket. The acting manager,
Ken Peacock, is in the bar. He’s very pleased and reckons it could take £2,000 at the end of the day. The best Thursday for ages, he says.

Up to the projection room to say hello. My handiwork slowly unwinds from the longest spool I’ve ever seen. Rather exciting seeing it all through the small windows.

A rave review of
Missionary
in the
Mirror
and the
Daily Mail
and the
Daily Express
. I only come down to earth a little with
The Times
– but even that headlines its film column ‘Great Comic Acting’ and only attacks the script for not being better.

Helen returns with the
Financial Times
, which also says many positive things, but in the end wanted ‘a bit less caution, a little more anarchy’, whereas Coleman in the
New Statesman
called
The Missionary
‘unfashionably well-written’, which I don’t understand but like very much.

Then after lunch there is quite suddenly a great anti-climax. The film is out and running. The radio and television shows will be looking for new celebrities and different shows next week.

At this very moment I have nothing to do – no problem to solve, no crisis to defuse, no-one to hustle … just a grey, wet day coming to an end and some writing which I can’t settle down to. This evening Helen and three of her badminton chums are going to see my film. I shall stay at home.

Have supper with the boys and, feeling very weary, go to bed early.

A marvellous
Sunday Times
piece by David Hughes ending ‘Here is a serious humorist trying his comedy for size. Not yet finding a visionary focus. Lacking edge. But your bones tell you that he will soon make a real beauty of a film, as exciting in achievement as this lark is in promise.’

The
Telegraph
, the
Mail on Sunday
, the
Express
and the
News of the World
are all highly complimentary. Castell in the
Sunday Telegraph
concludes ‘Beautifully tailored and consistently funny,
The Missionary
is bound to convert you.’

We should publicise these reviews as quickly as possible. No time for
faint hearts. We have stolen a week’s march on
Local Hero
, which will be shouting about its success very soon, but it will be a similar sort of critical response and I want as many people as possible to know that
The Missionary
was there first.

Take Helen and the children to La Cirque Imaginaire, a lovely, gentle, funny circus-style entertainment performed by Victoria Chaplin, her husband and their two children. A real family circus with no animals more dangerous than a rabbit, a toucan and two ducks.

To L’Escargot to meet Mike Fentiman and Robin Denselow’s girlfriend Jadzia to discuss my making a half-hour documentary in their
Comic Roots
series. I liked him and they warmed to my ideas and it looks like we have ourselves a show. In June, probably.

I aim to start work on a new screenplay in April and May, break in June for
Comic Roots
, and complete at quite a leisurely pace during July and August. Rewrites in September and October, by which time ready either to begin setting up filming or to write something with TJ.

Drive down to the Classic. Traffic at a standstill in St Martin’s Lane as the teachers and students are marching in protest against education cuts. Eventually reach the bottom of the Haymarket. My silly vicar looks quite striking above the marquee.

Nikki [from HandMade] calls to tell me that Cannon Classic will be taking an ad in
Screen International
to announce that
Missionary
has broken the house record! And a projectionist at the Barking Odeon has been arrested by the police for taking a print of
The Missionary
home with him in the boot of his car – with intent to tape it!

To the Odeon Haymarket to see
Local Hero
. Apart from reservations over the Houston interiors – where both design and direction seemed less sure and the jokes, about American psychiatrists, more familiar – the film quite captivates me. Forsyth is remarkable in his ability to recreate on screen the accidental quality of humour – the way things that make you
happy happen so quickly, spontaneously, that try as you can you never quite remember afterwards.

Princess Margaret is coming to see
The Missionary
at the Classic Haymarket tonight. Brian Rami is in an advanced state of excitement. ‘She is one of your greatest fans,’ Brian relays to me, and urges me to come down if I can.

I speed down to the West End, arriving with about five minutes to spare. Brian R is, of course, immaculate, and looks my faded jeans and windcheater up and down with alarm. In the end Princess Margaret arrives with such speedy precision that I don’t have a chance to see her as she moves quickly, but hastelessly, up the stairs behind a phalanx of very tall people. She
does
want to meet me, Brian confirms, so could I come back at a quarter to nine.

At a quarter to nine I stand clutching my signed copy of the ‘
Mish
’ – should I have written to ‘
Your
Royal Highness Princess Margaret’ in it? – waiting for the performance to end. Martin, the projectionist tonight, is very excited, as are the predominantly Asian and African sales staff.

Down the stairs comes the little lady, almost gnomic in the relative size of head to body, and clad in black. She shakes my hand easily and talks without formality. I can’t remember much apart from apologising that I should be there at all at the end of the film – waylaying cinemagoers! But she says she thoroughly enjoyed it and asks about the Scottish location, so I am able to tell her that it [Ardverikie House] was nearly the Royal Residence once. We chat quite easily and she introduces me to her very tall friends and they all laugh and endorse her opinion. Then she is taken out and past the queue – clutching my signed book.

Brian R and I drink a coffee afterwards. This film has already given him much pleasure, but tonight surpassed anything.

The telephone goes. It’s Richard L. Richard has left home.

‘Where shall I go? What should I do?’ As if I know. Nothing in my experience quite prepares me for this. The enormity of the split he’s now admitted clearly frightens him. I tell him if he needs help, or a bed, or company, that I shall be here.

Write letters and prepare stew for supper. Then, just as I’ve served, Richard arrives. His normal behaviour is so near to hysteria that it’s difficult to tell how abnormal he is at the moment.

He eats the stew (later, when I’m trying to explain to Rachel that Richard’s behaviour is because he’s very, very unhappy, she philosophises ‘Well, at least you got rid of the stew’). When I come downstairs from reading
The Secret Garden
to Rachel, he’s asleep on our sofa.

There’s not much more I can do and, feeling quite weary myself, I go to bed and to sleep at eleven.

A wet, dull Sunday. Helen [back from skiing in Austria] unpacks and very gradually begins to readjust to life at sea-level.

Potter around at home, unburying No. 2 from the builders’ dust and debris of the last six weeks. It’s quite exciting – like a new house emerging from hibernation. Tom P will move in here after Easter.

Watch and delight in
Betjeman
– the final episode. Full of gems – he’s such a warm, kindly, generous but cheeky presence. On top of a cliff in Cornwall he’s wheeled into shot clad in a black bomber jacket with a ‘Guinness’ tag inexplicably obvious over the left breast. His mouth senile and droopy from the effects of Parkinson’s (that I know so well), but his eyes alive, alert and mischievous.

He’s asked if there’s anything in his life he really regrets … He considers a moment, the Cornish clifftop wind untidying his hair and making him look such a little, isolated, vulnerable figure … ‘Yes … I didn’t have enough sex …’

We have used up most of our £80,000 launch budget, but Denis has agreed to about £5,000 extra to continue support over the upcoming Easter weekend. I hear from Ray that Stanley Kubrick wrote to Denis congratulating him on the
Missionary
campaign, which he had noticed, admired and envied. For an apparent recluse he keeps in touch, it seems.

To lunch at L’Escargot. Colin Webb of Pavilion Books is at another table. He tells me that the
Time
critic, Richard Schickel, who has given ‘
MOL
’ such a good (and important) review, really
did
like
The Missionary
, despite his dismissive piece. He had been in a ‘very depressed state’ when he wrote it and has since seen it again and thinks it ‘a gem of its kind’.

Home about six. The phone rings instantly. It’s Tim Brooke-Taylor conveying to me an offer to direct a new Gounod opera at the Buxton
Festival. We have quite a long chat and he tries his best to persuade me to do something that both of us agree is tantalisingly out of the ordinary. But I end up turning it down and inviting Tim and Christine to dinner.

Terry Gilliam appears. He looks rather careworn. America was awful, he says. He was unable to sell
Brazil
to Paramount or Universal and is extremely bitter about Hollywood studios all over again.

Exactly one year since I began filming
The Missionary
I leave the house to catch the 10.30 Concorde to New York. The flight (all £1,190 of it) to New York is being paid for by Universal Pictures for my work on behalf of the second film I made last year –
The Meaning of Life
.

A limousine takes me into New York, past the burnt-out tenements of Harlem to the discreetly comfortable Westbury Hotel at 69th and Madison. It’s a fine, clear, cool day – the buildings stand out sharp against piercing blue skies.

Visit Al and Claudie on my way to the first interview. They have been through a bad four weeks – awful journey back from Paris and Claudie recently very ill and worried at one point that her bronchitis was cancer. Also a new property company have taken the block and want to make Al an offer to sell his lease, so they may contemplate a complete move to Sag Harbor in the early summer. Their little daughter Gwenola delightful, smiling, full of beans.