Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [65]
Wednesday, December 20th
An interesting piece of work could come our way. This morning I was rung by Memorial Enterprises – who have made films like Charlie Bubbles, If and Gumshoe – in short, some of the best British films of the last few years. Michael Medwin wanted to speak to me. I was quite excited, but it turned out that he wanted to talk over the question of our writing a 20-minute promotional film for the States to put out as advance publicity for O Lucky Man, the latest Lindsay Anderson film, with Alan Price and Malcolm McDowell. Alan had suggested that I might have some better ideas for a promo film than Warner Bros’ own publicity men.
I met them at the editing rooms of De Lane Lea in Wardour Street. The film was likely to be very prestigious, and clearly they are gambling on a big commercial success. It has been edited down to three and a quarter hours, and is due to be first screened as the official British entry at Cannes. They are a very pleasant group of people – Lindsay, serious and mock-serious by turns, the kind of person who seems to invite you to make jokes about him, Alan, as self-deprecatingly gloomy as ever, and Medwin, very like the cheerful Cockneys he used to play in 1950s British war films – though much less over the top. He was pleased to hear that Helen and I enjoyed Charlie Bubbles,1 he said we were members of a select club – not of those who enjoyed it, but of those who saw it, for somehow it never found favour with the big distributors.
1 Drugs were a source of great interest at the time. It was quite respectable to have experienced them in some shape or form. Simon had worked on a research paper on drug use for the Home Office.
1 Directed by Carl Reiner (Rob, his son, and director of Spinal Tap, appears in a minor role). It starred George Segal and Ruth Gordon.
2 As Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary, tried to defend the British Army’s killing of thirteen civilians on what became known as Bloody Sunday, the MP Bernadette Devlin, 21 years old and the youngest woman ever to be elected to Parliament, crossed the floor of the Commons and punched him in the face.
1 Luigi and Dino Vercotti, two hugely ineffective Mafiosi, created by Terry J and myself.
1 Donald Stokes, Chairman of British Leyland Motor Company.
2 Emanuel ‘Manny’ Shinwell (1884—1986), socialist peer, the longest-lived politician of his times.
1 Barry and Marty Feldman were the two writers who welcomed me when I arrived for the first script meeting on The Frost Report. Barry and I and Terry J later wrote and performed for Late-Night Line-Up, from which we were eventually sacked.
1 Rectified two months later, when Terry J and I made our first trip to America for three weeks of sightseeing from New York to New Orleans, the Grand Canyon and San Francisco.
1 Directed by Joseph Losey, script by Harold Pinter. Set in East Anglia, close to Fakenham where my father was born and brought up.
1 Helen’s mother was on the Huntingdon and Cambridgeshire county council as an Independent, specialising in education.
1 Rugged Welsh actor who was also a shrewd businessman and founder member, with Lord Harlech (former British ambassador to Washington), of Harlech TV.
1 Large-screen television projector devised by Dr Fritz Fischer. Last used in 2000. From the Greek eido: image and phor. phosphor/light-bearer.
1 Footballer (Brentford, Fulham), administrator (credited with invention of 3 points for a win system) and panellist (Match of the Day).
1 André Jacquemin had engineered several sessions with me, going back to 1966. His committed, efficient, no-nonsense skills impressed me and he became Python’s engineer of choice.
2 The Fred Tomlinson singers had played, among other things, the original Mounties in ‘Lumberjack Song’ and the original Vikings singing’Spam! Wonderful Spam!’
3 Where we