Halfway To Hollywood: Diaries 1980-1988 (Volume Two) Read Online Free Page A

thinking how nice it would be to do a small-budget film just for the fun of it – keeping our own control and making money in the way Grail , with its modest budget, did, and Brian , with its Hollywood campaign, didn’t. Denis is anxious to set up all sorts of production and syndication deals in the US, and he’s talked to CBS about two Python TV specials, for which we would be paid 700,000 dollars each.
    No-one wants to do specials for the US, but there is still the German material. Suddenly it all gels. We will use the German material, plus some old sketches, plus anything we wrote in October/November and reshoot as a quick, cheap movie. The mood of the group is unanimous. Fuck Hollywood. Fuck CBS. Let’s do something we enjoy in the way we want to do it – and so economically that no-one gets their fingers burned if a Hollywood major does turn it down.
    DO’B seems unable to respond at our level and talks business jargon for a while. I like Denis, and I think he likes us, but he is only in the earlystages of finding out what everyone who’s ever dealt with Python has eventually found out – that there is no logic or consistency or even realism behind much of our behaviour. No patterns can be imposed on the group from outside. Or at least they can, but they never stick; they crack up and the internal resolutions of Python are the only ones that last.
    From international film business to the waiting room of the Mornington Foot Clinic. Mr Owen uses a ‘coagulator’ on my corn today. I have to have injections around my little toe, which are rather painful, then a sharp, electrified needle burns up the capillaries. All this counterpointed by Mr Owen’s extraordinary views about the evils of the world and socialism in particular. I’m getting worried – I think that he is a character I’ve invented.

Monday, February 25th
    Spent much of the weekend, unsuccessfully, trying to finish Smiley’s People . Also trying to find time to organise the house, spend time with the children and other worthy hopes doomed to failure!
    Rachel pottered around me with her Junior Doctor’s Kit, taking my blood, giving me blood, thrusting toy thermometers in my mouth, whilst I tried, hopelessly, to assimilate the mass of opinions, facts, thoughts, figures and ramblings which make up the insidiously attractive substitute for experience that is the Sunday papers.
    Collected Eric from Carlton Hill and we drove on to JC’s. A talk through material. Eric and John have searched the archives, Terry J has been away, GC doesn’t appear to have done much, but I saved my bacon by writing an extension to ‘Penis Apology’, 9 which produced an outstandingly good reaction. Near hysteria. I think Python is definitely working out all the repressions of childhood – and loving it!
    Lunch with the French translator of Holy Grail and Brian at the Trattoo. A wonderful-looking Frenchman with a very special face which could not belong to any other nation. White hair, eyes droopy with a sort of permanent look of apology, a long, curved nose which never goes far from his face at any point. A lovely, squashed, humorous, used feel to the face like a Gauloise butt in an ashtray.
    Home by six. Have promised TG that I will read the new, shorter version of ‘Time Bandits/The Film That Dares Not Speak Its Name’, so I spend most of the evening on that. Poor Terry is being given a hard ride by the doubters and the pessimists. On reading I feel that the movie, which is, after all, an act of faith in TG, is, on balance, do-able by May. But only just!

Tuesday, February 26th
    The weather has sharpened a little, but most of February has now gone, with no weather that wouldn’t have graced an average April. In short, no winter at all here. But I don’t feel any benefits. Wake up feeling like a piece of chewed rag. I have a sore throat, a mild coolness of the blood and a general enervation. There are so many loose ends to be tied up. I feel old for a few