Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [349]
Up the length of the island, swing round over the point and then down onto the gravel pathway right outside Denis’ front door.
In the evening, after dinner, George and Eric bring guitars out, and we sing the oldies – including many Beatles songs which George can’t remember.
Monday, September 17th, White Caps, Fisher’s Island
A leisurely breakfast – banana bread and corn bread and nut, honey and cream spreads, and good, fresh fruit and tasty coffee – discreetly provided by the two girls in the kitchen.
Then to business. Denis had softened us up the night before, when we had a pre-meeting meeting to discuss agendas, etc, so it was no surprise to us when he began his pitch this morning by strongly advising a sooner-rather-than-later schedule on the new movie. The argument being that he would like to strike while Brian is hot and likely to get hotter with the 600-cinema release this coming Thursday.
Warner’s want a deal, and Paramount too. Denis reckons at the moment he can, with a few trimmings, go to Warner’s and get a percentage of gross deal. Something like 10 or 15% of gross – which means 10 or 15 cents of every dollar paid at the box-office. (Usually this would be a percentage of distributor’s gross.) He would like to try and prise Grail away from Cinema 5 and and give it to Warner’s together with our German Film as a double-bill pot-boiler for next summer.
Enthused by Denis’ evangelical approach, and in good spirits because of Brian’s success here, there is little opposition to a tighter schedule to the new movie than that discussed at L’Etoile in mid-August. In fact, by the end of the morning session we have agreed to a delivery date for the finished movie in November 1981. Shooting would be in March/April 1981.
Before lunch we held a Monty Python Walking on the Water competition in the swimming pool. I got slightly further than Terry.
Tuesday, September 18th, Fisher’s Island
After breakfast we spread out on Denis’ impeccably well-chosen sofas and armchairs and begin our first group session on the fourth film.
It’s rather a desultory affair.
I think that JC brings up the same sequence that he did when we first began Brian. In which a spacecraft with alien beings looking just like us lands. The beings emerge, give a stirring message of hope to the world, turn to re-enter their ship and find they’ve locked themselves out.
Other suggestions are a sci-fi movie of a vision of the future where everything’s almost exactly the same. Or a state of war – but a war which is always in the background. Or a vision of hell, or Monty Python’s ‘Utopia’.
Denis, walking by the pool, looks anxiously at us for signs of A Great Breakthrough or A Hugely Commercial Idea, or at the very least some outward and visible sign that genius has been at work.
After lunch we desert the sun reluctantly and listen to Denis describing the ‘structuring’ of our future earnings.
In a scenario which is more like what one reads in the back of Private Eye, Denis tells us of the bizarre odyssey that some of our earnings will make, via Holland, Panama and Switzerland. Denis speaks of all this with the zeal of a fiendishly clever scientist who cannot help but be light years ahead of governments and bureaucracy and officialdom.
Not that Denis is sensational as he tells us of this wonderland of vastly-increased wealth. He is dependable Denis – with his reassuring eyes, balding, domed head and affectionate bear-like presence. But occasionally John and I have to laugh when he strays into the satirisable. He talks of a company called Ganga Distributors: ‘An old-established company – a company which we have representatives with … and … and I would gladly let the world know that.’
When we re-emerge into the dwindling sunlight around the pool at 5.30 this afternoon, we have all become accomplices in something most of us don’t understand.
Terry J and I bathe in a brisk, bracing, choppy sea below Henry Luce’s house. There’s a fine sunset.
Drinks are a little quieter. After dinner there is Calvados, but no sing-a-579