Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (55 page)

At one point I go upstairs to the loo only to find my way barred by a huddle of people around the pig’s carcass. There is a flash of staple gun from one of the chippies, a sharp click and the brown detective’s hat is stapled to the pig’s head. Quite the most sinister thing I’ve seen in a long while.

Finish Buñuel [
My Last Breath
] – a delight of a book, especially the chapter on his likes and dislikes. He lived and worked most of his life in Mexico and Spain, but had a yearning to live in Sweden or Russia. Buñuel feels like Rembrandt – a warm, direct, flawed, life-enriching character. Reading the book makes you very glad to be alive – which is what I need as the seemingly endless day draws on in Briargarth.

We’re on the Bolton Abbey estate in very beautiful countryside up the Wharfe Valley. The drive here this morning left everyone speechless with appreciation – the road winds through woods and undulates gently beside the river. A carpet of bluebells in amongst the trees adds the icing to a rich and almost perfect English pastoral scene.

I, alone of the thespians, have a caravan – a mousey, small affair, parked right next to the props van where the drivers gather and talk loudly about fucking. I, prissy little bourgeois, trapped in the mind-improving expectations of my class, try to read more of
La Regenta
.

Walk some way along the road. Out of sight of the vehicles all is peace and tranquillity. A soft heat. Shirts off day. Walk up into some fields on the edge of the moor.

A herd of Friesian heifers takes a liking to me. They walk – first one, then the others – slowly after me as I cross a meadow. Then they break into a run and I have to make a rushed scramble up and over the high stone wall.

Arrive at the location just about the same time as the St John’s Ambulance lady. I tell her that we’ve got the wounded lined up against the wall, but she doesn’t have much of a sense of humour.

Nor, I think, does the lady who brings the 1947 Riley. She provides Alan and me with enormous pleasure as she corners Denholm Elliott with her autograph book. The book seems to consist almost entirely of Conservative politicians, a massive haul which she got from the party conference. She points them out proudly to Denholm, who is utterly bored … ‘John Nott … he’s quite famous … ’ ‘Yeees … ’ ‘Selwyn Gummer, of course he’s very famous now … ’ ‘Yeees …’

The weather is hot and balmy, a BBC unit from Leeds come out to film us filming and pick Alan and me off in separate interviews. They completely ignore the likes of Bill Paterson, who is likely to be very famous indeed after
Comfort and Joy
, but then these after-six programmes are never very good at spotting trends, only following them.

After a morning of what Gerry Paris [my stand-in] and I call ‘we might’ shots – ‘Michael, we might see you in this shot’ – I have a steady succession of scenes to do in the afternoon.

I do always enjoy myself when there’s some playing involved, some eyeball-to-eyeball acting – some exchange of mental energies instead of cycling, waving and reacting to people who’ve left three hours before.

Alan B shows us all a cheque from the BBC, for sales of
Englishman Abroad
in Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Belgium. £8.50!

It’s time to grovel in the pig sty. The pig mixes a few long, grey turds and a pee or two with the manure that lines the stall. Myself, Tony H, Preston and Tony P-R and Derek all squashed in there.
¹⁰⁴
Have to grab Betty’s back leg, which takes some strength as she shakes it violently. But she is immensely long-suffering as I grab her in take after take, and never becomes vicious.

Annie Wingate [production manager] is hovering anxiously about the sty as we edge towards 6.30 and still three shots indoors to do. Malcolm’s technique when she asks him to hurry is superb. He nods very sympathetically as she describes the situation, thinks hard and then manages to say, without a hint of sarcasm ‘But … if we don’t shoot this properly … ’ (long pause) ‘ … it won’t work.’

But at 6.30 it’s done. Wash off the shit and into the waiting Orion. At Doncaster by eight. There is a restaurant car on the train which makes the longish journey time – two hours 22 minutes – to London very bearable. A scotch, celery soup, roast lamb and cheese and a bottle of red wine as we head south, stopping everywhere. Sleep from Stevenage into London and have to be woken at King’s Cross.

12.30: In a spacious caravan in the car park of the Civic Hall, Barnoldswick – pronounced ‘Barnswick’ or ‘Barnslick’. The rain rattles on the roof. It’s very cold. Have done some cycling and parades shots this morning, which we got in before the worst of the rain.

This town has a Rolls-Royce engine works, but from the look of the people and the number of shops ‘Closing Down’, it seems far from prosperous, and certainly has none of the confident comfort of Ilkley. The ‘B’ in RB-211 stands for Barnoldswick.

At lunch most of the unit find a local café. A lady emerges from the rain-sodden throng and corners Alan. ‘I just want to shake your hand, Mr Blezzard.’

It’s Denholm’s birthday today and he’s having a lovely chin-wag with the ex-Lord Mayor of Bradford – a lady – who is a very strong, competent, articulate lady and is playing the Lord Mayor in the film.

AB has been unable to wriggle out of a proposed
South Bank Show
profile on him. He says he just can’t bear the thought of shots of him driving along moorland roads with his thoughts over. But whereas on Wednesday he announced firmly that he wasn’t going to do it, he’s now been persuaded by personal intervention from the young producer who flew up to see him. ‘Oh, I’m
such
a coward,’ he admits despondently.

Today Alan has an acting role in the film. He has the part of Man Coming Out of Toilet and looks like Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby in his evening dress, and blond hair brushed back.

We are rushed into the final dance sequence, as Richard (Allardyce) has to leave first thing tomorrow to play the lead in ‘Volp’ (as he calls
Volpone
) over the weekend.

We go on late and, after a day of heat and crowds, the band strikes up and everyone sings ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ to Denholm when we wrap about 9.15. Very moving as he stands in the middle of the floor acknowledging the applause.

In the car on the way back D and I fall to discussing how much time we need to get up in the morning when filming. I say 20 minutes. Denholm needs an hour. ‘I have to have at least five cups of tea and I
do
like to read.’ I say that all I really have to have is a good shit, but D says he can’t possibly shit in the morning – he’s far too nervous.

Teeming rain this morning. Alan is in a very gloomy state about the cuts and foresees that one of today’s scenes – the businessmen talking in the function room – could go in addition to the others already under sentence. No jokes from him today, just an atmosphere of near-desperation.

Malcolm elides shots and scenes in order to save time. My crucial ‘blow-up’ scene has to be done in one take, which is a pity, but inevitable,
I suppose. Not until about five do we even get onto what was first on the schedule this morning. I stay in my caravan or sit in the sun in the car park listening to Van Morrison on my Sony – anything to avoid the gloom indoors.

Maggie and I work hard in the first part of the day. She smiles at my attempt at sarcasm over the slow progress. ‘It just doesn’t suit you,’ and adds ‘Take a tip from the acid queen.’

After five the pace suddenly speeds up and the work goes on until 11.30. Everything bar one shot (the toilet) is completed.
¹⁰⁵
But will the crew survive late nights all week? And even if they can, will the scenes that are constantly being put on one side ever be caught up?

More time and money is still needed.

Maggie in a very sore mood for some reason. She’s tense, terse and seems to take every suggestion Malcolm makes as a personal insult. Very difficult, as her attitude affects the whole unit by degrees.

Unexpectedly, who should arrive on the lunchtime train at Ben Rhydding, but Ray Cooper, in spotty grey suit and black brogues.

Ray asks me to dinner at the Devonshire Arms at Bolton Abbey and I ask Maggie along. She accepts, to my surprise, and, apart from being very worried that she’s dressed only in jeans, is sweetness and light and charm and naturalness all evening. Ray, of course, treats her well with great courtesy and flattering respect. He remembers her from when he was at the National.

We talk of film acting versus theatre acting. Talk of
Way of the World
, which she’s doing at Chichester. I say that the reward of all the work must come when she steps out on stage in front of an audience. ‘Oh no, I can’t be bothered with that, rehearsing’s the only bit I like. Getting it right, working it out.’

At eleven drive Maggie back to the hotel we’ve today been shunted into – the Post House at Bramhope. There is Bill Paterson in the bar. He’s
now like a ghost, doomed to wander round Yorkshire waiting to be used. Very bad scheduling, but he is so tolerant.

Up at eight. Papers and radio all full of D-Day’s 40th anniversary. Once more the noble art of war celebrated and minds taken for a while off present discontents. Reagan the film actor is here and the D-Day remembrance is ideally suited for his and Thatcher’s particular brand of ham.

This is positively our last day at Gilbert’s House. On the original Hugely Optimistic Schedule this was to have been May 22nd.

I run upstairs in my underwear pursuing the pig with a knife, then a halting unsatisfactory day of much waiting and very short bursts of activity. Around me the house is being cleared away and by the evening it has become rather sad and lifeless.

I leave the house and my dressing room with the half-peeled wallpaper hanging in strips and the little rooms we got to know so well and the book called
Instantaneous Personal Magnetism
, with only a twinge of sadness. I expect I shall miss it more as time goes on.

It’s 11.15 after a dour drizzly day, the location caterer’s moussaka was very strange and I had to secrete it in a black bag, and there’s an extended day tomorrow. Being an optimist I’m sure it will come out all right, but I feel at the moment something is wrong in the mixture, something quite important – the ingredient of space – scale and sense of location – may be lost in this continual concertina-ing process.

It’s with resignation rather than eager anticipation that I finally prepare to lead the pig into the car. The car is a meticulously preserved Wolseley Hornet. The owner, fortunately as it turns out, isn’t present, but his father, an Arnold Ridley lookalike, is.

The attempt to film a single take of me leading Betty down through the groves of wild garlic and into the Wolseley founders, as Betty can in no way be persuaded to enter the car. Various methods are tried as time ebbs away and the pressure begins to rise. Huge insects, drawn by the arc lights in the woods, thud into the reflectors.

The two cameras are moved, we try again. Then suddenly the pig is in the car and, not only that, she’s nuzzling at the windscreen, sitting up in
the front seat. I get into the car and, moving Betty’s massive bulk, am able to switch on the headlights, release the brake and slip out of shot.

But in all the attendant confusion, the first assistant has been caught in a reflection and we have to set it up again. On the next take Betty panics and lunges desperately for the driver’s window. Her trotter is bearing down on my genitals and her underbelly is slimy with something or other and the smell of fresh pig shit has replaced the pleasant woody-leathery aroma of the car’s interior.

I’m released and Betty’s released, but the car is a pig sty – shit on the back seats mingles with old food and scraps of apple and pig saliva smears the inside of the elegant windscreen. Says our car owner ruefully: ‘I could have written this better – I’d have written it without a pig in.’ He indicates Alan – ‘He’s no Ibsen, is he?’

Roy drives me back over the dark, silent moors. I’m back at the Post House just after half past one. I tell the receptionist I’ve been trying to get a pig in a car. She obviously thinks I’m completely drunk. But I have witnesses.

A depressingly run-down location in Exmouth Street, across the road from Mount Pleasant Sorting Office.

My dressing room is the small bedroom of the assistant barman of the Exmouth Arms who’s away for the week. Racing cars, John Player Grand Prix of the World racetrack passes,
Sun
and ‘Daily Starbird’ calendars, and other pictures of sexless blondes bearing mammarial mounds as if displaying the latest racing car accessories.

‘Who’s in it then?’ I hear asked with imperious Cockney sensitivity just behind me as I await the cue to start the scene …

‘Michael Palin, Maggie Smith, Denholm Elliott …’

‘Oh, no-one we’ve ever ’eard of then?’

Alan arrives with a crisp new paperback edition of Carlyle’s selected writings (he’d found Vol. 3 of Carlyle’s
Frederick the Great
in a set-dressed bookshelf in Ilkley and was quite hooked). Looking through the intro Alan finds to his concern that Carlyle had, in later life, been author of a pamphlet on ‘The Nigger Problem’ and, even more disconcertingly, one of Carlyle’s books was discovered in Hitler’s bunker.

End the day carrying a half-carcass of pork downstairs.

My last chiropody scene – and the most jolly, Sue Pollett being a very good subject. Alan arrives on his bike.