Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [177]
It has the run-down air of a half-deserted RAF camp. There are suggestions of over-grown roads and pathways – the buildings are stark, functional and presumably cheap brick and concrete constructions without any refinements. It used to be the Crown Film Unit Studios, where ‘chin-up’ patriotic films were made to boost the nation’s morale in wartime. Ironic, really, because it wouldn’t do the nation’s morale a lot of good to see it now.
Terry and I are there as part of a week’s seminar on comedy. Winston told us afterwards, rather glumly, that there wasn’t really anyone there who wanted to, or could, make comedy films. They were all too serious. We talked for almost two hours to about twenty students. They had watched Tomkinson’s Schooldays in the morning and discussed it in terms of social relevance, criticism of authority, etc. I think they were a little disappointed when I told them that the choice of public school for the story was made simply because its absurd rituals and closed formal world were a very good area for jokes. Even Brian Winston, who was trying hard to defuse any pretentiousness, still referred to the nailing-to-the-wall joke as the ‘crucifixion’ sequence.
Friday, January 16th
Anne had had quite a traumatic meeting this afternoon with Arthur Cantor (who is over in England for two weeks) and Jim Beach1 to try and finalise the Live Show deal for New York. The outcome was that Cantor has at last backed out. Cantor is a cautious, kindly theatre producer who likes to get to know the people he’s working with and is temperamentally quite unsuited to the world of big advances, limousines, $75,000-worth of publicity – mostly to be spent on ‘Sold Out’ kind of advertising, and general image-building, which Nancy and Ina’s people have been insisting on. Ina’s office lose yet more popularity points by having apparently on our behalf been thoroughly unpleasant to A Cantor – who may be a little over-cautious and vacillating, but is a decent man.
So now Anne is having to fix up Allen Tinkley [another American producer] and yet another rather shoddy chapter in Python’s American adventure is closed.
Saturday, January 17th
Took the boys out in the morning to a Journey Through Space exhibition at the Geological Museum in South Ken.
Afterwards Tom and Willy pressed buttons in the How the Earth Began exhibition and we watched a film of a volcanic eruption, with a truly fantastic shot of a wall of lava just slowly enveloping a country road. Even better than the Goodies.
Late afternoon, and T Gilliam comes round. He now has a typed script of his Jabberwocky film, which runs at two and a half hours! He has seen Jaws! and was impressed – he’s decided to try and make the threat of the Jabberwocky as frightening as the threat of the shark.
Wednesday, January 21st
I sat and dug deeper into Something Happened after supper. Joseph Heller is another important and original American humorist, but Something Happened doesn’t make you laugh like Catch-22. It’s a bleak account of modern American materialistic man and the extraordinarily bad state of his personal relationships and his ability to communicate. The portrait of Slocum, surrounded by family and friends, is nevertheless of a man as apart from his fellow beings as Meursault in Camus’ L‘Étranger. But Heller has a good, perceptive eye, and the joy of the work comes from catching a glimpse of yourself in a mirror – a moment of recognition of yourself – and of yourself in relation to other people.
Finally, watched The Glittering Prizes – a ‘major new drama series’ as the BBC call it. Scripts by Frederic Raphael (who wrote Darling, Nothing But the Best, etc), six 80-minute plays about a group of Cambridge students of the early ’50s. I rather admired this first one – ‘liked’ isn’t quite the word – it was cleverly, neatly written, it bore all the trademarks of the Cambridge