Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [337]
Monday, June 4th, Los Angeles
I slept until four, then woke and stayed awake on a hard bed, streams of thoughts going through my mind – what to do with the Ripping Yarns, Saturday Night Live, what to say to Warner’s today … Then the birds started. It’s like sleeping in an aviary. Gorgeous trilling sounds, dozens of different voices – including one bird with a broad American accent calling ‘Doxeen! Doreen! Doreen!’
Well, it’s 8.35, I’m washed, dressed, bathed and going to meet John, Terrys J and G and Anne for breakfast at Schwab’s.
At the moment I feel as though I’m stuck fast in some awful enervating dream. Being slowly flattened by the insidious luxury of Hollywood life – and ready for some enormous creature to come and remove my brain and other vital organs. I must get home. It’s dreadful here. To add injury to insult my room smells of gas and I’ve been bitten quite severely by some maliciously hungry LA flea.
We drive out to Burbank Studios to talk to a small contingent (eight or nine) of Warner Bros marketing people. They are all now solidly behind the movie and have decided to give it the treatment.
Some of us, TJ especially, are concerned over the American fundamentalist Baptist backlash – after all, George Harrison, as producer, has already had letters threatening never to buy his records again – but Warner’s dismiss all this.
GC comes up with an excellent idea for Python movie No. 4 – ‘Monty Python’s World War II’. I think it could be a marvellous format for more of a sketch-type film – which everyone seems to want.
So Hollywood can be creative.
A bright end to a day that started for me in quite considerable gloom.
Tuesday, June 5th, Los Angeles
No further bites tonight and a much better sleep.
At Burbank we go first to Warner Records – a lovely, entirely wood and glass-framed low, long building.
Their marketing strategy, developed since we met yesterday, is to concentrate us all in New York for nine days – with all the press coming in from across the US to see the movie (which will have been running in NYC for two or three weeks) and climaxing with a big party.
But all their ideas and enthusiasms fuse into one great howl of approval when Eric suggests using Jeanette Charles (the Queen’s double) to spearhead a Royal 10th Anniversary of Python celebration in New York. They all absolutely love this, but, I must admit, using J Charles fills me with little enthusiasm. Eric’s used her on Saturday Night Live, and she is a rather easy, tacky option for us. Still, if handled quite straight it could be fun.
Back to Warner Records’ wooden shack for chats with Denis in an office walled with G Harrison’s gold discs. I remember, as I admire again this pleasant working environment, that this is the place which drove Derek Taylor back to England on the verge of madness.
Business chat with Denis – merchandising and the like, then out to the airport with a rather unpleasant cab driver, who admits to his dislike of black people. ‘They’re bad drivers and bad people and that’s that.’ He looks Mexican and drives appallingly.
Must get back to the novel. Eric says he’s writing a play which has turned into a novel, whereas I have a novel which has turned into a play.
Friday, June 8th
The idea of a full-length Ripping Yarn movie, based on the existing films, is crystallising in my mind. Must draft a letter to John Howard Davies and to Bryon Parkin at BBC Enterprises.
In the evening go with Helen and Willy to see Tom play recorder in the Gospel Oak concert. Large orchestra and choir; audience crammed in at the back. Fair share of laughs – someone sick at the back of the orchestra just after a child had announced that she would play’Variations on Theme of a Lark Song’.’Hava Nagila’ by the massed violins and recorders was wonderfully silly and reminded me to make sure that Python’s bagpipe version of the same song should not go unnoticed.
Tuesday, June 12th