Michael Palin

Halfway To Hollywood

Read extracts from the second volume of Michael's Diaries, 1980 to 1988 below.
(New entries added regularly.)

Halfway to Hollywood - available now in the Shop

A decade of new directions, away from television and into films. The Python collaboration comes to an end with The Meaning Of Life, but I continue to work with Terry Gilliam on Time Bandits and Brazil. I write and star in my own film, The Missionary, with Maggie Smith, and am re-united with Maggie in Alan Bennett's A Private Function, before taking on Ken in John Cleese's A Fish Called Wanda.

Then, out of the blue, television calls me back with an offer to front a new BBC series called "Around The World In Eighty Days" At the ripe old age of 46, I morph into a travel presenter.

Monday, March 24th, 1986

John explains to me his new film ‘A Goldfish Called Wanda’. I am to play a man with a stammer who kills Kevin Kline by running him over with a steamroller. John bemoans the fact that he’s written himself another ‘boring, uptight authority figure’, but otherwise sounds very enthusiastic and is anxious to plan ahead so it can fit in with my dates.

My ‘dates’ depend on a conclusion to ‘Explorers’, to which I attend later this morning, for the first time in several weeks. Can make little headway. Suddenly free from weeks of tight deadlines, I’m momentarily lost, and cannot work out my priorities.

John C (Archie Leach) trying some unsuccessful information retrieval.
John C (Archie Leach) trying some unsuccessful information retrieval.

Tuesday, May 8th, 1984 : Ilkley, Yorkshire

Feel remarkably together and well prepared for the day. Alan is at breakfast and hadn’t gone to sleep until two as he had the room over the bar. ‘It was like Christmas down there,’ he says, rather morosely.

He goes and I’m alone in this recently-refurbished, rather ornate dining room with ‘Adam’ pretensions and a giggly waitress who reports loudly my every word back to the kitchen.

I’m driven down solid, leafy roads to a cul-de-sac in Ben Rhydding and up to Briargarth, which is my home for the film. A long, detached, stone house of (probably) Edwardian vintage, with a porch and gables. Carpenters, painters, sparks swarm over it. Loud banging, shouts, and, amidst it all, actors –myself, Maggie and Liz – wandering gingerly, waiting to take possession.

Gradually the first scene creaks into action. Round the table, eating Spam. We reach around for our characters, absorbing all the clues and helps and hindrances of this brand new place in which we must act as if it were all too familiar.

Maggie, brittle and tense so often in non-acting moments, gives so much out when she plays the scene that it’s exhilarating to be with her.

With Maggie, enjoying a break from porcicide in the garden at Briargarth.

A hot bath and a lager. Then walk down into Ilkley – clean, ordered, respectable, with oriel windows above the shops, glass-canopied arcades and ornamental flower beds. It’s like the Garden of Eden after Gospel Oak. Choose Chez Franc¸ois – a wine bar – for a solitary meal. Read of Bun˜url and the Surrealists in Paris in the late ’20’s and ’30’s. Similarities with Pythons. Bourgeois against the bourgeoisie. Bun˜url sounds rather like TJ. Very interested in sex and the Middle Ages and blamed the media for all the world’s ills.

Monday, October 26th, 1987

My first sight of Wanda, cut together.

And very good it is too. As I had expected, uncluttered, competent direction, no artistic gimmicks, and a pretty tight edit by John Jympson. John C has made Archie work completely – his best all-round performance since Basil Fawlty. Kevin and Jamie are immaculate.

I find myself a little disappointed with myself. God knows why – maybe it’s just because so many people have built up what I’ve done: ‘star of the film’ nonsense. I think it’s not that I do what I do badly, it’s just that I’m not really called on to do much more than react to other people’s bullying. What I can do best of all is the subtler shading of character and perhaps that’s what I missed in Ken, except for a few lovely moments – two of the best being those I did on the very last day of filming.

Afterwards John has us all in for a session of thoughts and reactions. Thorough to the end.

Friday, September 26th, 1980 : Los Angeles

Drive down to Musso and Franks for a pre-show meal. TJ declares sensationally that this is the first time he’s ever eaten before a show. I remind him of last night. ‘Oh . . . yes . . . apart from last night.’

Back at the Bowl, five thousand paying customers. Denis has had to drop the lowest price from ten dollars to seven to try and fill up the extra seats. So there are about five and a half thousand folk out there for opening night.

The show goes well. The audience is reassuringly noisy, familiar, ecstatic as they hear their favourite sketches announced – and it’s as if we had never been away. A continuation of the best of our City Center shows. Thanks to the radio mikes my voice holds up.

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Pythons in Hollywood. MP, Terry J, Eric I, Graham C, Terry G and John C. Behind us, the Bowl. September 1980

Afterwards an extraordinary clutch of people in the hospitality room. I’m grabbed, buttonholed, introduced, re-introduced, in a swirl of faces and briefly held handshakes and abruptly-ending conversations. There’s: ‘I’m Joseph Kendall’s nephew . . . ’ ‘I’m Micky Dolenz’s ex-wife . . . ’ ‘We made the T-shirts you got in 1978 . . . ’ ‘Do you remember me . . . ?’ ‘Great show . . . Could you sign this for the guy in the wheelchair?’

Finally we free ourselves of the throng and into the big, black-windowed Batcar, signing as we go, then smoothly speed off to a party, given for us by Steve Martin in Beverly Hills. His house turns out to be an art gallery. Every wall is white, furniture is minimal. The rooms are doorless and quite severe in shape and design. There’s a soft pile carpet and it’s all quiet and rather lean and hungry. In fact just like its owner.

Martin is very courteous and straight and loves the show. He isn’t trying to be funny and we don’t have to respond by trying to be funny. But his girlfriend does have a tiny – as Terry J described it – ‘sanforized’ poodle called Rocco, which pees with both legs in the air. This is the comedy high spot of the evening.

Thursday, March 27th, 1980 : Paris

Interviews – for Le Figaro, La Revue de Cin ́ema and finally a cartoonist called Gottlib, who has a Gumby fascination and gets me to enunciate clearly and slowly the exact words for ‘Gumby Flower Arranging’ into a small tape recorder. The more seriously I try to oblige, the more ridiculous the situation becomes. Eric doesn’t help by constantly cracking up and when I finally make it through to the moment of flower arranging the doors of the room open to reveal an enormous bunch of flowers being carried through. The interviews draw to a close by seven.

Terry J and I go off to eat at La Coupole. I have ears and tail – and TJ is most impressed. We talk, for the first time, about the Time Bandits script, which TJ has half-read. He wasn’t impressed with it until the Greek scene!

Monday, July 5th, 1982

To Python rehearsal, to find that Neil Simon had been on the phone and wants to meet me – he has some film project.

After a costume fitting I drive up to Britannia Row Studios in Islington to record ‘Every Sperm’ track. Ring Neil Simon. He professes himself to be a fan, says he is halfway through ‘one of the best things I’ve written’ and there’s a part in it for me. Arrange to meet him on Wednesday.

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Telling the children the facts of life. ‘I will say “sock” instead of “cock”…and the dastardly substitution will take place in the dubbing theatre’ Elstree Studios, August 10 1982

The recording session is delayed while they find a piano tuner, so I sit in the big and comfortable games room and watch England start their vital match with Spain. They must win and by two goals to be certain of going into the semi-finals. Our defence is unshakeable, mid-field quite fast and controlling most of the game, but we can’t score. 0–0 at half- time.

In between play I’ve been singing ‘Sperm Song’ to Trevor Jones’s rather solid beat. Eventually we find a combination of takes we’re comfortable with and I drive home to watch the second half. England fail to score and slide out of the World Cup. It’s a hot evening.

Tuesday, August 3rd, 1982

See assembly of ‘Mr Creosote’ at lunchtime (instead of lunch). Evidently 9,000 gallons of vomit were made for the sketch, which took four days to film. It’s been edited rather loosely at a poor pace and dwelling too much on TJ’s actual vomiting, but the costume is marvellous in its enormous surreal bulk, and Mr C’s explosion is quite awful and splendid.

Wednesday, July 4th, 1984

To Don’s for 9.15 haircut appointment. The extraordinary mixture of Brazil and Private Function has left my head looking like a hairstyle exhibition site. Don notices the silvery threads. I’m going grey, gently but alas irreversibly.

This evening I go to catch my first glimpse of a Brazil cut at the Baronet viewing theatre – a full house with 30 or so people crammed into a very small space. The film is two and a half hours long. As expected, each frame an oil painting. A garden of visual delights. Dream sequences puzzling but unfinished.

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Rehearsing with Terry G and Jonathan P in the lobby of Information Retrieval

Jonathan’s central performance is masterly. He holds all the disparate pieces together. Manages to react 600 different ways to the same sort of situations and carries you along, explaining by expressions what we are required to think and feel. Detail as usual of design, costume, props, etc, marvellous. Definitely a film for two or three viewings. Doesn’t have the naive charm of Time Bandits – in fact has no charm at all – but is a spirited, inventive, enormously intriguing work of imagination made celluloid.

Tuesday, June 23rd, 1987

I have had the bright idea of having my character’s hair curly, and Barry the hairdresser goes over my scalp with the curling tongs. Much too hot to start with, and a puff of smoke and violent smell of burning hair don’t exactly bode well. But Barry has ‘done’ Ann-Margret and others, so not to worry. The result is quite effective. It certainly changes my usual ‘boyish’ look and the usual line of my haircut too. Show it to John, Charlie and others and, apart from Kevin, who reacts against instant decisions anyway, it finds general approval.