Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) (92 page)

TG rings from Rome. The latest is that I cannot be the King of the Moon as I am not bankable enough. Film Finances have drawn up a list of Connery substitutes and my name isn’t on it. Gene Wilder is the current favourite and then Walter Matthau.

At seven o’clock by cab to Gloucester Crescent to pick up Alan, with whom I am to see
Lettice and Lovage
.
¹⁷⁰
News that the appeal on behalf of the Birmingham pub bombers has been flatly turned down worries Alan.
¹⁷¹
He feels it’s not just that it’s been turned down, but that the uncompromising and complete rejection of any fresh evidence sounds like a show-trial.

Maggie is effortlessly brilliant and keeps me smiling – sometimes weeping with laughter – throughout the first act. Alan has doubts at the interval. ‘What do you think the play would be like without her?’ He says that the lines in
The Weekend
are much funnier than those he’s heard tonight.

The second act leaves Maggie on hold and brings Margaret Tyzack to the fore. She’s a good actress, but the role is full of tired old lines and attitudes and her conversion to Maggie’s theatrical games doesn’t begin to convince. Both of us are rather silent in the third act and, as we get up at the curtain to go backstage, Alan breathes ‘This is where the acting comes in.’

Jonas Gwangwa comes in for a glass of wine. Talk over things in South Africa. Jonas says morale of the black people is very high. Hints at strikes against foreign company bases in South Africa. On a lighter note he says
that the one thing the government can’t understand about the ANC and the African resistance is that they laugh a lot.

Jonas says that some of the apartheid laws are so silly they should be laughed at. Blacks and whites can marry in some places, but they cannot live together in the same township. But there are one or two de-segregated coaches on the railways now. The only place that those enjoying a mixed marriage can actually procreate is in certain coaches on the 7.15 to Johannesburg!

Up at eight. Tired. Dragging myself into another important week. Fierce weather outside. Wind, sometimes very strong, and occasional deluges. Look again at ‘
AF
’ in light of Tristram’s recent comments. Bolstered by a call from Irene Lamb, who finds the script delightful. She thinks Ellen Burstyn a good choice and will send videos over.

Will Wyatt calls with ‘the good news’. All is to go ahead on the
80 Days
trip. I must disappoint him with my reaction, for he asks ‘Do I detect a note of caution, or is this your natural state?’

To an Eric Clapton concert at the Albert Hall, for which Ray has secured us [tickets]. He has two spares, so Will and his friend Raffi, who cannot believe their luck, come along too.

The concert is well received. Ray, of course, mesmerising. He doesn’t just play, he performs; an extraordinary ritualistic, stylised, eye-catching performance it is too. Just a tap on a bongo drum from Ray is a piece of consummate showmanship.

After the concert, a wallow, in the Elgar Room, with the celebs.

Bob Hoskins says he would love to do a film with ‘you lot’, as he calls us.

Phil Collins also very keen. Says that after doing
Buster
his appetite for acting came right back.

William and Raffi, having shaken the hands of the likes of Clapton, Starr, Collins and Bill Wyman, say they’re going to cut their hands off and keep them.

Put down some ideas for my appearance on a Comic Relief eight-hour bonanza this evening. Think I’ll play my Manager – chance to re-do Dino Vercotti.
¹⁷²
As I write I have the feeling that Dino’s world-view is quite a good vein of humour. Rather like Edna Everage – once the character is there the material is inexhaustible.

My head is thick, my nose streams, but I take a couple of Honduran lagers and a taxi to the BBC.

Then upstairs to the sixth-floor hospitality, where the new men of the BBC – Jonathan Powell and John Birt – are hosting a night-long ‘reception’. Yentob of Two is there, and much the jolliest and most approachable of the three wise men.

Talk to Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French and Adrian Edmondson, and I can’t help noticing how nicely they’re treated by the BBC, these enfants terribles of alternative comedy. They stand comfortably and confidently at the centre of things, the new establishment. Still, there could be much worse establishments.

In the ‘Most Popular Sketch’ section, ‘Parrot Shop’ is voted No. 1 and ‘Lumberjack’ No. 3. So not a bad night for an ailing comedian.

Irene comes back with the first intelligence on Ellen Burstyn (born Ena May Gilooly!). She’s free in the summer. But she’s with heavy agents CAA.
¹⁷³
A fellow casting director in New York gives her bad word of mouth – not much sense of humour, self-centred, fussy. Irene dismisses all this as the sort of talk which always surrounds very good actors or actresses who are difficult when doing run-of-the-mill work because they want to make it right. We decide to send her the script ASAP.

Meet with Ron Eyre to discuss his thoughts on
The Weekend
. He lives up the modest end of Ladbroke Road, if there is a modest end, in a sensibly-sized terraced family house. Ron has no family and has just let off various flats in the house.

Our hour or so ends inconclusively with Ron saying that there’s not much to do, but there’s a lot, and hedging further on whether he would be interested in directing it. He reminds me that he turned down the chance to direct the early Michael Frayns
and
the early Ayckbourns. Is this to demonstrate the frailty of his own taste or just to let me down gently? But I leave with a clutch of very good suggestions for further work to be done.

To lunch at Hilaire to meet the putative second director of
80 Days
, Roger Mills.
¹⁷⁴
I like him and feel comfortable with him straight away. Maybe it’s because he is drinking gin, which he then spills over the menu, but he reminds me, in spirit, of Ian MacNaughton.

He further endears himself to me by telling me that
East of Ipswich
has won a BAFTA nomination for Best Single Drama. This couldn’t have come at a better time for the Palin-Powell partnership.

We discuss attitudes to the journey, the programme and the BBC and reach near-unanimity on all of them. I do feel we have to be seen to take the rough with the smooth in this – the days in dingy hotels in Djibouti will add immeasurably to the audience’s cathartic appreciation of the Taj in Bombay.

Out to dinner at Meridiana with John C, Jamie and Kevin.

Paul Simon arrives; Kevin has asked him along. He glides softly to the table, he smiles softly, he speaks softly; a well-modulated man. Easy and amusing company, though one feels that there is part of him kept carefully hidden.

Later Kevin is very complimentary about my performance – ‘In the scene with me I was watching
you
.’ he admits incredulously.

Patrick C [Cassavetti] arrives at nine. He has some reservations about the script, but they don’t seem substantial. His feeling for the spirit of the piece is much the same as mine. I like his enthusiasm for film and he has a distinct preference for the tightly-budgeted quality picture than for anything big and expensive.

He still has
Paris by Night
to see through post-production and is still not sure if he can commit to ‘
AF
’. Rather as with Ron Eyre yesterday morning, I’m left with the impression of cordiality and sympathy and evasion.

Car collects me at 2.30 to go down to Roger Cherrill for some more
Wanda
post-synch. This time it’s for the US TV version! I have to say ‘flaming’ instead of ‘fucking’, but draw the line at ‘bashing’ instead of ‘buggering’ and change it to ‘brutalising’, which still has some bite to it. Kevin C has re-voiced about 40 lines! John is there. I thank him for his uncontrollable hospitality in funding meals for us all. He gives me the old twinkle. ‘You should do commercials, Mickey.’

To the Bush Theatre to see Dervla Kirwan’s play [Dervla was Charles Sturridge’s recommendation for Brita in
American Friends
].

Dervla is nervous. I hope I’ve not made her so. She’s intriguing. A face that it’s impossible to sum up in a word. She can look different from every angle. She has long, dark hair and would be perfect in period costume. I find her interesting and appealing and she reveals clearly in this play that she’s a natural actress. At times her maturity shows well beyond her 16 years.

We shake hands afterwards. She’s obliging, friendly and with just enough shyness. Don’t stay long as have a full day tomorrow and shall be meeting her again. But am excited and know that we’re on to something good.

Begin the morning in good heart, but gradually the lack of reaction to ‘
AF
’ grinds me down. The last call I had from Steve’s office was on Friday late afternoon to tell me that none of the MGM heads would be in London or New York in the next few weeks. So to see them I must go to LA.
The Weekend
– silence on all fronts, apart from a good chat with Irene Lamb, who has been enthusiastic throughout.

I try to tinker with the script. But I feel I am working in a vacuum and inspiration dries to a thin trickle. Worse still, because I’m expecting ‘significant’ phone calls, every one that comes in and isn’t about the film hits a raw nerve of expectation and jars it into irritation.

Hear from Steve that he’s read in the trades that Burstyn is on the Berlin Film Festival jury which is sitting at the moment. The fact that her agents (CAA) allowed us to go ahead and courier the script to her in LA has inexplicably lost us at least a week.

To a BAFTA screening of Tarkovsky’s
The Sacrifice
. It’s one of the four nominations for Best Foreign Film and I’ve agreed to be on the judging panel.

A scattered audience of about a dozen people, none of whom I know. They all look frightfully serious, knowledgeable and intellectual. Bump into Mark Shivas in the lavatory. He’s very pleased to hear I’m a juror – ‘Brighten it up a bit.’

The Sacrifice
is not a bright film. It’s a carefully-paced, Bergmanesque piece about a man who’s so intelligent he has nowhere to go but insane. Solemn and serious, full of marvellous images and brilliant lighting by [Sven] Nykvist, but ultimately I find it a rather tiresome muddle. It ends, suitably I think, with two men in white coats coming to carry off Erland Josephson, who’s taken two and a half hours to go barking mad.

 

 

 

Taking advantage of a
Wanda
screening there, I had decided to go to LA and try and drum up interest in
American Friends
. Alan Ladd Jr, CEO of MGM, who had made
Wanda
, had shown interest in my project.

Wake and worry about the LA trip. The film can no longer be just ‘a project’, a chance to prove myself or any indulgence like that. I shall be going to sell it. I shall be looking for a commitment. Is it really, absolutely, what I want to do? I lie there and occasionally the scale of it all washes me with fear.

Steve and JC are at the new TWA check-in, being brown-nosed by the VIP staff. Lots of jokes, broad smiles and we’re even taken from the
lounge to the gate on a sort of motorised golf buggy. Whilst seated on this silly vehicle, JC solemnly gives an interview to a lone press hack, whilst three cameramen snap him from all angles. ‘Yes … the separation is amicable’
¹⁷⁵
and so on.

About one o’clock a minor triumph – I actually prize out of the agent Burstyn’s number in Paris and at last we talk. She likes the script – finds it ‘very well written’ and ‘charming’ – but feels that she and I should meet ‘before you cast me’. This is the call I had hoped would come before I left London, but at least it’s encouraging.

To an enormous new polished marble skyscraper to meet our lawyer who is doing the MGM deal – David Nochimson. His law firm also represents clients such as Michael Jackson.

On our way in we meet a short, combative man called Tom Hoberman, who is Eric’s lawyer. He talks to us for a while in his office, which is fashionably anti-corporate. For such as Tom – men at the top – informality is the order of the day and the office is full of old wood high-backed chairs, Persian carpets and a general anti-institutional arts and crafty feel. I’m reminded of how we used to decorate our studies at school.

Hoberman clearly loves all the competition, the fight, the struggle, the deal (America’s fastest-selling book at the moment is called
Making the Deal
by Donald Trump, the property billionaire from NYC). When he hears of Ellen Burstyn his reaction brings all our delusions down to earth … ‘She is a good actress, but she wouldn’t open up a picture any more … you could pull her in for around 300 (thousand dollars) … ’.

Back to the hotel and dinner with JC, Michael Shamberg and his wife Megan. JC, fresh from his masseuse, is sharp, funny and marvellous on things like American inability to appreciate cricket, ‘or any game not directly based on greed’.

Steve and I repair in our little Toyota Tercel to Island Pics, to meet Russell Schwarz. He indicates that there are changes afoot in the financing of
Island Pictures
¹⁷⁶
and makes it fairly clear that we would not be in their price range.