Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [198]
Dave Yallop, friend of Graham’s, and one of the few men I’ve seen tell Frost to shut up and sit down (when Dave was floor managing Frost on Sunday), wants to write a documentary about Python’s court experiences in the US. Dave has good credentials – he wrote a respected and hard-hitting documentary on the Craig-Bentley case, and he’s approaching the US case from the anti-censorship angle, which could and should be aired. It appears that Rik Hertzberg’s prestigious New Yorker piece has started a few balls rolling since it was reprinted in the Sunday Times.
G Chapman, whom I also spoke to, is well set in his new career of film producer (on The Odd Job). Only yesterday he’d tried to get hold of Jack Lemmon, through his agent, a Mr De Witt – only to be told by a secretary that he couldn’t speak to Mr De Witt, as he’d just died!
Thursday, June 10th
Work on a possible new Ripping Yarn – ‘The Wreck of the Harvey Goldsmith’, just because I like the title.
Squash with Richard1 in the afternoon and Ian and Anthea D and Michael and Anne Henshaw to supper. We watch Monty Python Series Four repeats. It’s ‘Golden Age of Ballooning’, a very rich show and I still can’t quite figure out people’s disappointed reaction to it when it first went out. Interesting to note in Stage today that after its second programme, Python was rated by Jictar1 No. 2= in the London area and 5 in the south (both times above Porridge). In the rest of the country, nowhere.
Sunday, June 13th
Finish the day, and Al Levinson’s Millwork, sitting outside my room in the gathering dusk with a glass of scotch. I liked the novel in the end, after a sticky start. It’s warm and friendly and sympathetic and generally full of Al’s humanity. Must write my review to him tomorrow.
Tuesday, June 15th
At five o’clock this evening to Neal’s Yard. Four or five builders working in Andre’s studio; they glower at me rather resentfully as I wander in, looking as if I owned the place, which of course I do. Terry Gilliam has summonsed me to my first piece of work on Jabberwocky – to do a scene with an American girl, Deborah Fallender, whom TG wants to screen test as the Princess.2
Upstairs, in Terry’s part of 14/15 Neal’s Yard, Julian has set up the camera. Terry Bedford, his small frame bulging a little in places, indicating incipient symptoms of the good life, which he must be enjoying as a highly paid member of the world of commercials, has already stuck a pair of tights over the lens to achieve his award-winning soft-lighting effect.
Deborah is very nervous, but quite sweet, and with a good sense of humour. We do the scene two or three times – unfortunately it reminds me so forcibly of the Castle Anthrax scene that I can’t tell how good or bad it is.
To meal at the Siciliano with the Walmsleys and Simon A. Jane W very fed up that ‘Kojak’ -Telly Savalas – has today won a libel suit of £34,000 damages at the Old Bailey. He sent each member of the jury a signed photo of himself with ‘Thank You’ written on. Now, as taxi drivers say, there must be a sketch there. Jane W has interviewed the said Savalas, didn’t like his pushy arrogance one bit, and finds it easy to believe the libel.
Thursday, June 17th
At 11.30 have to drive over to the Beeb to meet Fred Knapman, senior designer at the BBC, who’s going to show me a possible Peruvian village set for ‘Across the Andes by Frog’, out at Pinewood.
The set, on a back lot, is in quite a run-down state (T Hughes tells me it was made for Dirk Bogarde’s Singer Not the Song), but for that reason rather good for our purposes.
They are preparing for a new James Bond film at Pinewood – starting shooting in August – and a 300-foot-long, 40-foot-high steel-frame building is being erected there for one set-up! I feel very cheap, grubbing