Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (89 page)

Talk with Jack Rosenthal, who is sitting next to Helen. He is a very amiable and sympathetic fellow and his high praise for
East of Ipswich
means a lot, for he is one of the finest practitioners of recollective comedy.

My first sight of
Wanda
, cut together.

And very good it is too. As I had expected, uncluttered, competent direction, no artistic gimmicks, and a pretty tight edit by John Jympson.
John C has made Archie work completely – his best all-round performance since Basil Fawlty. Kevin and Jamie are immaculate.

I find myself a little disappointed with myself. God knows why – maybe it’s just because so many people have built up what I’ve done: ‘star of the film’ nonsense. I think it’s not that I do what I do badly, it’s just that I’m not really called on to do much more than react to other people’s bullying. What I can do best of all is the subtler shading of character and perhaps that’s what I missed in Ken, except for a few lovely moments – two of the best being those I did on the very last day of filming.

Afterwards John has us all in for a session of thoughts and reactions. Thorough to the end.

Decide that I can wait no longer for messages from Jo Lustig, and I ring Anne Bancroft direct. Once again I find her good sense and clarity very attractive. She suggests I get the script to her via Mel (Brooks, her husband), who is travelling to the US on Concorde on Friday. She will read it as quickly as possible and will call the office – Anne or Alison – early next week with a reaction.

She thinks that the only reason for not wanting to talk in LA would be if there was
nothing
constructive she had to say. Even if she had criticisms, suggestions, etc, would it be worth my while coming? Yes, I agree readily.

With Anne to a screening of
Consuming Passions
. Perhaps because our expectations had been so low, we both react with relief to the first few scenes which are well played by Tyler Butterworth and full of well-executed slapstick jokes.

After that Jonathan Pryce and Freddie Jones and Vanessa Redgrave show that they had been given free rein and that it had worked. Though it all goes rather adrift at the end – ‘pantomimey’ as TJ put it – it is hugely enjoyable along the way. A real curiosity.

Back at Prominent Studios I have my first piece of luck for the day – Mel Brooks is at his hotel, before leaving for a dinner. Yes, of course he will take the script. ‘Love your work,’ he barks, by way of signing off.

Home by eight. Send off the script and at last I can afford to spend
time thinking seriously about going round the world. [To see Thailand with Simon Albury, then home via Los Angeles and Anne Bancroft.]

I set to reading
American Friends
with greater care than yesterday’s enforced rush. This time I have 13 hours and 45 minutes’ flying time ahead of me. I can luxuriate over every full-stop and comma.

At the end of my read I have to admit that it begs as many questions as it answers. Structurally it’s more confident and it has an interesting shape now that it’s seen through Miss W’s eyes. And yet expanding the Bancroft role has also put the spotlight on the other two main parts. It’s become a little more of a psychodrama than a nice, period, comedy-adventure drama and, now I have embarked on the course of examining the leading characters in more depth, I think I have gone forward, but into uncharted territory.

So I cannot lie back and enjoy the hoped-for luxury of knowing I had cracked
American Friends
. It will remain to nag me, to pull at the fringes of my attention all the time.

My night on the plane begins too early, and is interrupted with a stop at Bahrain, so I do not sleep, and by the time we ease down over the rice fields of Southern Thailand I’ve been awake for 22 hours.

4.25 a.m: Am about to shave, ready for a five o’clock departure to the airport and on to LA, when Anne J calls. Bancroft has rung. She has not been well – laryngitis or something worse. She does not see much interest in the character. Anne’s feeling is that she doesn’t want to do it.

Standing naked in a Bangkok hotel bathroom I receive the news philosophically. I shall have to speak to Bancroft at some stage. I am booked on a plane that leaves in two and a half hours and I have very little chance at this time of the morning to check out alternatives.

Financially I might, with a quick withdrawal to London, save on a few US hotel bills, but I would have cancellation fees and the possibility of no flights to London today and extra expense in Bangkok. Keep going forward, I feel.

At 5.45 in Bangkok Airport. When I ask if there is a First Class lounge, the girl replies ‘In February’.

Midnight, and we’re approaching the Bay Area. Have crossed over the Date Line, so it’s Tuesday again, and it’s already nine o’clock in the morning. Can see the Golden Gate Bridge and can understand why Americans like coming home.

7.20: At the Beverly Wilshire.

The year of Living Dangerously continues: after ‘Troubles’, it’s clear that ‘
AF
’ will not go. Talked to Anne Bancroft, who sounds nicer and more sympathetic each time we speak. She says she doesn’t think I’ve yet made my mind up what it’s about. The latest draft showed I could write – the writing even better than the second draft. But it’s like a fine suit of clothes, without ‘the nakedness’, as she describes it, beneath. She says she’s a perfectionist, but it’s that sort of criticism which is worthwhile.

Read in the
LA Times
that TG’s
Munchausen
has stopped filming for two weeks and the completion guarantors want to replace TG. Will my December
Munchausen
work fall through as well?

Woken about 9.30, by a dreadful banging on the door, which turns out to be the air-conditioning having a trauma. Outside a very bright, clear, perfect day, a real advert for life in the Pacific South-west. Warm, dry air blowing out from the desert. Skies a deep blue, no smog.

Walk up Beverly Hills Drive, buy a paper, breakfast at Il Fornaio. The girl at reception is a ‘big fan’.

Ease slowly, luxuriating in this glorious weather, temperatures in the upper 80’s, back to the Beverly Wilshire. I take some sunshine, swim, then Michael Shamberg sends a slim young Virginian called Karen to collect and take me to Fox Studios.

Note: LA people always sit
by
the pool. Only foreigners seem to go in!

Shamberg looks mournfully delighted to see me. Takes me to lunch at the commissary.

First person we meet is Mel Brooks. Chunky, rack-like, barrel chest, with a firm, no-nonsense light paunch, he grabs my hand a lot – shakes it probably five or six times. ‘I forgive you guys everything … I want you to know … you’re so good, I forgive you for all those ideas you used.’ Is he joking? ‘Spanish Inquisition?’ he digs me knowingly. Not sure what’s going on.

(Chris Guest
¹⁶³
later tells me that Brooks has an almost pathological inability to accept competition – it’s all a reduction of his own world. Apparently he said, after seeing one of Allen’s early movies, ‘When Woody Allen was born, I died’.)

T Gilliam rings.

He’s home for a weekend before returning to Rome to take up the cudgels again. He thought two days ago that it was all over and he would walk away from it, but apparently Charles [McKeown] pulled him round and gave him a talking to and together they came up with a formula for cutting the script which could ensure survival. McK is in Rome rewriting at the moment.

Jake Eberts
¹⁶⁴
has emerged as TG’s latest hero. He has moved mountains to keep the film alive and apparently told TG that ‘Whatever happens, let me do your next two films’. So there are silver linings, but TG is not looking forward to returning. Whatever happens, he says gloomily, the next 12 weeks will be hell.

The personal postscript to all this is that it looks as if my part will be a victim of the cuts. Terry says he will have to give me something else – he can’t have a Gilliam film without me – but he sounds as though this is just another addition to his growing multitude of problems.

Stay homebound. JC calls in the evening. The film is down to 117 minutes. Larry Kasdan, ‘one of the brightest Americans I know’ saw it last week and raved – so JC is very pleased about that.

I ask him how
he
is. ‘I’ll tell you something that’ll really make you laugh,’ is the way he leads into it … ‘Are you ready for a laugh? I’ve moved
out.’ He says it hasn’t been working for two years, and he’s only leaving now because he feels confident enough of his relationship with his daughter that she’ll ‘understand that I’m not sleeping there, but can still see her each day’.

The King’s Cross Tube disaster is another nail in a dreadful year for the country.
¹⁶⁵
‘Herald of Free Enterprise’ tragedy, the storm of October 16th, a series of fatal motorway pile-ups – quite a battering.

Down to the T2000 office.

Susan has been much in demand by the media over the last 36 hours. She bemoans the fact that it takes a major accident for the press to show any interest in transport. Jonathan [Roberts] has been the man of the hour, for he issued a report on the Underground for some users’ group after the Oxford Circus fire of ’85. Full of suggestions for safety improvements (which were not taken up) and prophetic words about only luck that there has not been a major disaster ‘ … and luck has a habit of running out’.

We talk over tomorrow’s AGM, at which I will officially step down as Chair after 21 months – or 22 if you count my pre-press-launch work.

To Brixton for the AGM and conference of T2000 – my last day as Chairman. The
Independent
has front-page coverage of Earl’s Court Underground – damning photos of rubbish, inflammable grease, empty fire-buckets, and fire equipment locked in cupboards.

The Brixton Recreation Centre is a brand new building which looks committee-designed. A cluttered interior with escalators, lifts and staircases everywhere. Impossible to find one’s way around. Eventually, having asked a cleaner, I’m directed to the ‘Social Rooms’.

The AGM goes briskly along, with no problems, unlike last year. I am
presented with
Jane’s Urban Transport Systems
by John Gregg, who makes a short and kind speech, referring specifically to the fact that throughout my chairmanship meetings ended on time!

Then Hugh [Bishop Montefiore] makes a crisp, funny speech – wondering at one point whether he had been chosen for his knowledge of ‘vertical rather than horizontal transport’. I reply.

As I reach the climax of my speech – and one of the few serious bits – a booming metallic voice comes over the Tannoy: ‘Julian to the poolside please … Julian to the poolside.’ A fitting climax to my two odd years as Chairman!

The rest of the day is taken up with a T2000-organised conference on disability and transport.

A blind, or partially-blind, man from Sheffield – John Roberts – is quite excellent. Funny, clear and compelling. He it is who makes a plea for the Swedish attitude to public transport – that it should be designed and run so that it is accessible to everybody, including the ten percent of all travellers who are, in effect, disabled. He wants no special buses, specially-adapted trains – just the awareness in the first stages of design that 99.9% of the country’s travellers must be able to use transport, not 90%.

Terry G rings from Rome to confirm that my part as Prime Minister of the Moon is no more, but offers me the consolation part of a man who is discovered in a corner singing a mournful song, prior to falling dead from his seat. ‘It was going to be my part,’ he admits. Being a great admirer of Terry’s parts and conscious of the fact that De Niro wanted Jack Lint and TG stuck by me, I assure him that I’m happy to sit this one out.

Tom has had his injured finger diagnosed as a fracture (a Hap-Ki-Do injury) and the surgeon wants to put a pin in it. He’s booked Tom into the Royal Free today. So Helen and Tom are preoccupied with getting him to the hospital and I’m preoccupied with packing for Belfast. Three bulging bags – T-shirts, costumes and my own stuff.

Leave home at midday.

In the Arts meet Jimmy and Paddy again – my faithful stage staff.
Paddy has lost weight and seems to be very short of breath. We all look older. It’s getting dark now and I notice people lined up at the windows looking down into the street. There’s rumour of a security scare.

I carry on running through the sound cues with Joe, who is a new man. Young. He apologetically tells me that he broke his arm three weeks ago and still isn’t quite himself. He is in charge of all the lighting and sound cues! Very Irish.

Malcolm, the general-technical manager comes up to us. ‘We’ve been asked to leave the theatre.’

Outside in the street a couple of the grim, colourless army Land Rovers are parked. White ribbon is being unwound across the pavement and Malcolm hurries us as far away as possible. We walk to College Gardens and wait at the office. I desperately need some rehearsal time tonight, but it becomes clear that I’m unlikely to be going back.

The general impression from reports and rumours is that the whole of central Belfast has been sealed off. Then we hear that the M1 motorway has been closed.

The Europa Hotel is evacuated. Michael [Barnes] reacts calmly, puffing a little more fiercely on his cigarette and forgetting that he has one already smouldering in the ashtray. It looks as if the security alert is big one, though there are no reports of any explosions.