Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [321]
What makes it worse is that the train is full of Python devotees, who cannot believe that this crumpled ruin, with a once-fresh Concorde label on his bag, is to be the host of their favourite TV programme of the week.
Finally we reach Grand Central Station – it feels like rounding Cape Horn – but there is one final twist. Before we all split up we find that one of the cases we have been dragging around for the last nine and a half hours does not belong to any of the four of us. And it’s the heaviest.
Wednesday, January 24th, New York
The read-through slowly fills up. There are thirty or forty people packed in the room to get the first inkling of what the show may be like. Belushi, as crumpled and unkempt as Aykroyd, is given ‘Happy Birthday’. He’s 30 today – and has a No. 1 film – Animal House – and No. 1 record to celebrate it. He’s a big, fat boy made good. He eats like a Bunter and grunts and sniffs and emits continuous breathy groans.
The material is plentiful – the result of a three-week lay-off for the writers. There is one quiz game – ‘Name the Bats’ – written by Brian McConachie, which has one of the best receptions of any sketch at a first reading that I’ve ever heard. Myself, Belushi and Gilda can hardly read it. An absolute winner. A masterpiece of absurdity.
At the end of a read that lasts over two hours, Lome declares that he thinks this is some of the best material he’s heard for a show, and hastens to add that he never says things like this on a Wednesday. So everyone goes away pleased, apart from the few whose material died, and possibly Laraine and Jane1 and Gilda, who never have enough material to suit their talents.
Thursday, January 25th, New York
Spend the morning working on the monologue and take it in with me to NBC at a quarter to one.
Bill Murray drops by the dressing room. He’s making a movie (his second since I last told him he should be doing at least as many as Danny and John), in which he plays Hunter Thompson, with Peter Boyle as Thompson’s lawyer, who hasn’t been seen for five or six years. They were the narrators of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – a twentieth-century masterpiece.
He knows Hunter quite well now. A dangerous man, says Bill, in the sense that he loves to live on the brink of excitement and the limits of human stamina and ingenuity. His wit and humour works even better, Bill maintains, because one’s response to it is in part sheer relief that he’s still alive.
Friday, January 26th, New York
Sleep until 8.30 – an eight and a half hour stretch or more, punctuated only by an early morning alarm call which wrenches me awake at six. It’s for a Mr Malone. Wrong number, I protest.’You sure you don’t have a Mr Malone with you?’ Her tone is such that I have for a moment to think very clearly as to whether I might have a Mr Malone with me after all.
To NBC at two.
Reading the sketches there are some real gems – including a long ‘What If Superman Had Been a German’, in which I play Hitler.
We start blocking about three and make slow progress until eleven when we have to stop, with one and a half sketches still untouched. One encouraging thing is that from all around I’m picking up good word, not only on this show, but on the last we did together. Bill Murray, over an hour’s supper break at Charley O’s, still reckons it was the most consistently funny show they did last year.
Bill is very flattering in his serious, downbeat way, which makes cynical Englishmen, unused to accepting praise, worry a little in case they’re being sent up. Still, he’s very surprised that I have had no outside offers after SNL – he thinks I would be a cert for American movies!
I must say, one feels a very poor cousin hearing of all the movies these people are doing. Belushi and Dan A are both in Spielberg’s lg^i and return to LA Sunday to continue shooting.
Saturday, January 27th, New York