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Friday, April 1st

All Fools’ Day. Begins badly. Mercifully brief, but poor reviews of Jabberwocky in The Times and the Telegraph and the Mirror, which calls it tedious. Doldrums for a while.

At two drive over to Notting Hill Gate to J Cleese’s rather sweet little cottage at the back of the Notting Hill Gaumont.

Much appreciation of a very good Guardian April Fool – a seven-page report on a totally fictitious island in the Indian Ocean called San Seriffe. Very well done – complete with photos and adverts and always just on the right side of probability. Eric suggests we send them one of our golden feet (originally made as a present for our US lawyer, Bob Osterberg). Anne is contacted and we send the foot to The Guardian ‘for services to San Seriffe’ on paper headed ‘Python Productions Ltd, Evado Tax House, San Seriffe’.

(It’s not the first time this week that Python has been moved to feats of appreciation by the newspapers. A Guardian report on Monday that Gay News are short of £12,000 funds to help them fight the blasphemous libel case brought against them by M Whitehouse for publishing a poem which suggested that Christ received some sexual favours while on the cross, moved us to send £500 as a Python contribution to the mag.)

Sunday, April 3rd

For about the fourth day running I have to buy every morning newspaper as Jabberwocky breaks over London. After Friday’s setbacks, I’m prepared for everything or anything.

Relief comes in grand style. Alan Brien leads his Sunday Times ‘Cinema’ column with a long, funny, appreciative review, and we get the photo too. Marvellous – the best review so far. We also get the photo in The Observer, which turns in a long Time Ont-ish review, quoting many of the funnier ideas of the film, calling me well-cast, but wasted, and lauding Max Wall, but ending by calling the film ‘forgettable’, which seems an odd adjective to use at the end of a long and detailed review. But the Sunday Telegraph is unequivocally favourable, as are the Sunday Express and the News of the World (‘loveable lunacy’!). So I settle down to my croissants reassured and revived.

Monday, April 4th

Spend the morning mugging up on latest financial reports, etc, etc, in preparation for a board meeting. Drove out to Shepperton – approved of the big new sign outside. Air of great activity about the place. Passed Brando’s caravan and drove on round to Graham Ford’s office.

Cheerful chat about Jabberwocky. Both Graham and his wife/secretary very enthusiastic but, as no-one had turned up after 20 minutes, I ventured to ask how things were with Superman. Then Ford quite casually dropped his bombshell. Superman is leaving Shepperton in a couple of months to complete at Pinewood. Ford blathers chirpily about some financial deal which Superman’s producers must have made with Pinewood and quite steadfastly refuses to get angry, anxious or even excited about the whole matter.

With this shadow hanging over us, we walk over to the restaurant. At a table are Richard Donner, tall, bespectacled, with a greying mop-head of hair and an intelligent face – director of Superman (and The Omen), Ilya and Alex Salkind, the producers. At another table is a quiet, regular-faced young man with a college boy look and a battered old sweater with a huge hole in it. This is Superman (Christopher Reeve). A man keeps looking over towards us rather nervously – as well he might. He’s the English producer, who got the production into Shepperton.

Clive H and Chas Gregson arrive, with them is Clancy Sigal, an American writer now working in England, who’s come to do an article on Shepperton and Superman. Oh the ironies of the day!

Clive has been to see the Salkinds, and his account of the meeting tends to Ford’s theory that the Salkinds have done some deal with Pinewood (which is empty, and yet fully union staffed). Superman has moved studios already – from Cinecitta, Bray and now Shepperton – it is running behind schedule and Pinewood is owned by Rank, who also own