Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [251]
GC definitely gives the impression of someone anxious to convey seriousness of purpose. The very summons itself is for business – but that crumples quickly and I am able quite easily to talk him out of most of his peripheral worries. GC just seems pleased to have a fellow Python to chat to.
His film, The Odd Job, has still got money problems, and the revised shoot is now February/March 1978. If GC is also going to play Brian in April/June ‘78, he is cutting it a bit fine. I think the prospect of this mammoth thespian effort is what is behind this latest attempt of his to find a level of non-drunken respectability and to restore a little of his natural seriousness to his affairs. I hope upon hope he succeeds, for I am fond of him – and the old Chapman warmth came through today despite his underlying anxieties.
As I left he told me that he was thinking of taking the whole of December off, to go away somewhere and prepare – maybe on his own. Just walking round the Highlands on his own. Brave words. But Keith Moon was coming round in a half-hour, and I notice that Graham now helps himself to gin from a bar-style dispenser – so I don’t think all that much has changed.
Friday, October 21st
Four thousand words this week. I’m as bad as Leyland Cars in the constant failure to reach my production target.
Jim F tells me that Spear and Jackson1 are suing the BBC for libel in the ‘Eric Olthwaite’Yarn!! What’s more, it sounds as though the cowardly Beeb are settling out of court.
Monday, October 24th
A letter from Eve Levinson. Evidently my spontaneous response to the news of her suicide attempt had contained the right things – and she touchingly said that I had said things that other, closer friends of hers found themselves ‘unable to say’. I’m glad the strength of my feelings worked, expressed as rudely as they were.
Arrived at Shepperton at 9.25 for a 9.30 Annual General Meeting in the wonderful, mirror-panelled boardroom of the Old House.
I was re-elected, Clive signed various bits of paper, and we talked for a while about Shepperton and memories of the men associated with the place – especially, of course, Alexander Korda. This is the 43 rd Annual General Meeting, so the place must have been going since at least 1933.
Much talk over catering. At last this has become the main problem we have to face, and Paul Olliver, the tubby troubleshooter from Vavasseur, who has been given the job of investigating the frightfulness of the catering arrangements, has now expressed a wish to run them himself!
Paul Olliver and I are booked to visit Pinewood for lunch and a look around, as I have often felt that we should know more about the opposition.
We are not offered lunch – it now being 1.30 – and are taken round by a late-middle-aged gent, who personifies all that is wrong with Pinewood. He’s getting on, is rather shabby, and yet talks to us from Olympian heights about Pinewood being the greatest studio in the world, blah, blah, blah.
Pinewood seems to have set its face into the past, favouring the traditional and the conventional. It remains Britain’s biggest studio, but not its brightest. Shepperton, with its mix of commercials, pop group influence and movies, feels much more fresh, alive and relevant to the ‘70s.
Tuesday, October 25th
Mostly business, and have no time to write any of the novel. Instead, spend an hour reading what I have so far. It’s patchy. Some sections I am pleased with, but at the moment it’s like an inconsistent car engine – good in some gears, jerky in others and not, as yet, getting me anywhere.
Up to Elstree by 12.30 for the second visit to our Shepperton competitors in two days. John Skinner, our contact, is much less concerned than the Pinewood mogul with trying to pretend that everything in the garden is lovely. A realist, not a bullshitter.
Elstree, of all the major studios, was the one which committed itself most of all to TV series in