Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  The greatest virtue of the airbrush is its capacity to give softness to an image, but it has equally well-developed capacity to fuck up irredeemably at the very last moment. You’re doing all this beautiful work and then it sputters and you have to clean the head and start again. The other striking contrast is the one between the (in an ideal world) roundness and serenity of the finished painting and the incredibly noisy industrial process that creates it – it’s more like working on the Chevrolet assembly line than in the New York Public Library. The brush runs off a generator, so you’ve constantly got a noise like a small helicopter landing in your ears, and you’ve got to control the spray very carefully because the slightest mistake and the whole thing will be ruined. It creates quite an unpleasant atmosphere for anyone else who happens to be in the area, but the results can be spectacular so their suffering is more than justified. At least, I always thought it was.

  In terms of bread-and-butter employment, I was spreading myself thinly around as many different magazines as possible. Around this time Glenys was made editor of a weekly news magazine called the Londoner and briskly informed me, ‘Come on, you’re the art director.’ This wasn’t quite as brazenly nepotistic a move as it looks on paper, as she’d been brought in to apply her American experience in the hope of making the magazine a bit punchier and zippier, so having an actual Yank on the staff – especially one with such Help!ful experience in the field – kind of made sense.

  Form the safety of the UK, I was free to wreak vengeance on my old century city police riot sparring partner, Elephant B. Johnson.

  The office of the Londoner was aptly situated in a small square Samuel Pepys once lived in, just off Fleet Street – at that time still in its pomp as the epicentre of British print journalism. We’d get the trusty old Routemaster bus to work, and when you got off it, you really knew you were arriving somewhere. The trucks would be lined up outside the big newspaper offices with their great rolls of paper going in one end, and then the newspapers would come out the other. (OK, I realise I may be simplifying this process slightly, but that’s what cartoonists do.)

  I loved the bustle of it all – the pubs would be open all night long so the printers could slake their notable thirsts, and there was all this groovy modern stuff happening even as all these remnants of different earlier civilisations piled up around you. The shape of the streets and the scale of the buildings really spoke to me – where New York had been overwhelming, London was much closer to human size.

  I would walk into the City of London at the weekends and wander around in a Dickensian reverie, irrespective of the actual Dickensian significance of the location in which I found myself. Now the streets are crammed all the time, but then the City was a ghost town on Saturdays and Sundays – it felt like the whole place was yours. I’d go across the bridge to the house Christopher Wren lived in when he was building St Paul’s (near where the Globe theatre is now) and walk down to Shad Thames, which was still a working docks at that time and not just a bunch of cool little lofts.

  The places which are mostly just names now (or relocated miles out of town to grim new spaces between ring roads) – Billingsgate, Covent Garden, Smithfield – were all still vibrant hubs of street life. Floral Street was called that for a reason. And if you were feeling especially cultural and went to the opera, you’d come out picking your way through lorries unloading fruit and veg, and the streets would be jammed solid with hard-working porters.

  I realise that to those who are too young to have experienced it for themselves, this costermonger-tinted vision of England’s capital might sound like the nostalgic ramblings of a superannuated animator, but the London I live in now is not the place I was so excited to find myself in as 1967 rubbed itself lasciviously up against 1968. From the late sixties even into the seventies, London still functioned like an ancient city. Things were still being made here, there was a properly mixed economy. But then suddenly – and I suspect Margaret Thatcher had a little something to do with it – nobody needed craftsmen or factory-workers any more. It was all service industries with nothing to actually service.

  The same thing happened in Paris when Les Halles was demolished. Some developer presents the city council with a neat-looking model made out of cardboard, and all of a sudden the old fluid interplay of the market, the church, the cafés and the whorehouses is overthrown by a new tyranny of straight lines. Just as I willingly forsook my Americanness for an Eton mess of pottage (does anybody actually know what a mess of pottage smells or tastes like? I don’t know if I’ve ever stepped in one), so the great cities of Europe sold their souls for civic redevelopment.

  THE LONDONER, 13 April 1968: The New York Times, The Times London, the Angling Times – we beat ’em all.

  The collateral damage to be incurred in the construction of these new tidied-up urban spaces was beyond the darkest imagining of my blissfully innocent late sixties self, as I savoured the gossipy camaraderie of a time when Fleet Street was Fleet Street and women (and men) were glad of it. In those days everybody knew the people they were competing with – it really was a different world to the glumly diasporic existence of what remains of the British national press today. El Vino’s was the place where journalism could really flourish – somebody would overhear a drunken conversation and say, ‘Wait, I’m working on a similar story . . . ’

  In those circumstances, it was much more difficult for politicians to play divide and conquer with the fourth estate. That’s why I think the break-up of Fleet Street – a historic event for which again we have Margaret Thatcher to thank, although her Australian friend Rupert was the instigator – has been such a disaster. Everyone is very full of how much more ‘connected’ everybody is in the digital age, but I’m not fully convinced of the value of that connection. OK, so you can read someone else’s article very easily on your laptop, but what was published might only be half of what they know, while the other half that you’ll never find out about because you’re not getting pissed with them in El Vino’s any more might’ve contained the solution to the problem you’d been trying to crack for weeks.

  The discipline of old-school print journalism certainly seemed to agree with me. Under the pressure of the Londoner’s weekly turnaround, I found myself gladly breaking off diplomatic relations with my inner malingerer, and instead embracing the protestant work ethic of the endlessly encroaching deadline – a template which would serve me well in the frantic and industrious few years that were to follow. I got a real kick out of the weekly rush on the train to get all the artwork up to Darlington where the magazine was printed, then staying there overnight to pick up the first finished copies, hurry back down to London and distribute them to the conveniently located desks of all the main editors in Fleet Street.

  When things worked out well – which they generally did – it felt as if the dramatic political events of the period were flowing through us, like the time the Washington rioters of 1968 were considerate enough to torch America’s capital at exactly the right moment for our press deadline, so we managed to get colour photos on the Londoner’s front page before anyone else in the world.

  My own next personal banner headline would be generated by another unlikely recruit to the realm of hard news. I’d stayed in touch with John Cleese since watching him alarm usually unflappable New York subway travellers with his maverick arm movements, and he’d gone on to work at Newsweek magazine for a couple of years before becoming an instantly recognisable satirical fixture on British TV. When I asked him if he could think of anyone in that seemingly impenetrable fortress who might be interested in inviting Gilliam’s Trojan horse in for a quick ride around, he suggested a producer called Humphrey Barclay.

  The WE HAVE WAYS OF MAKING YOU LAUGH team. Check out my jelly shoes – pretty groovy, I’m sure you’ll agree. Michael Palin’s wife Helen hated them so much she wouldn’t let me in the house with them on.

  Just like my other mentors, Messrs Kurtzman and Godfrey (a firm of solicitors you might think twice
about entrusting with a complex financial transaction, but boy, could they draw!), Humphrey took a while to see reason. I chased him for a couple of months, leaving messages that were never returned, and in the end I think he picked up the phone by mistake. I talked him into buying a couple of comedy sketches I’d written – which I don’t think he was even that keen on – for a subversively grown-up kids’ show he was producing called Do Not Adjust Your Set, starring some young comic writer/performers named Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle. I think Humphrey took pity on me, being an amateur cartoonist who liked what he saw in my portfolio.

  As fate would have it, he was also putting together a show that would prove to be the ideal outlet for my capacity to dash off a rough and ready caricature in double quick time. We Have Ways of Making You Laugh was a new TV panel show that – while not destined to foreshadow the longevity later achieved by Have I Got News for You – did provide me with a handy leg-up into the world of British small-screen comedy. The idea was that my fellow panelists, among them Eric Idle, Dick Vosburgh, Jenny Handley (daughter of the much loved war-time radio comedian Tommy Handley), Barry Cryer, Katherine Whitehorn, Benny Green and Frank Muir, the host, would say witty and erudite things, while I would finish off a series of caricatures (which I had generally prepared partly in advance, because it is possible to have too much spontaneity). These could then be displayed as the relevant guests entered to (hopefully) unanimous wonderment on the part of viewers and studio audience.

  The fact that the show went out live made it quite a pressurised gig, and by the end of the first episode the adrenaline was really pumping. The audience seemed to have loved it, and we went out on a high with some kind of group song, only to walk off backstage and find out that no one outside the studio had seen the show, because the engineers had gone on strike without telling anyone. Since no copy was ever made, it is possible for me to assert without fear of contradiction that this show was a unique landmark in the history of British comedy. Strangely, the remaining shows in the series – the ones which were actually broadcast – did not attain quite the same exalted standards. But they did feature what would turn out to be the pivotal moment in my entire career.

  A selection of my drawings for WHWOMYL (from left) Bill Oddie as a frog, John Cleese as a vulture, old Frosty as am angel, and Radio IDJ Emperor Rosko and Jimmy Edwards. Willie Rushton, Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman were the contemporary illustrations I most admired, as may be painfully obvious.

  People were always coming into the office with half-finished material. So when Dick Vosburgh said he’d spliced together a sequence of Radio 1 DJ Jimmy Young’s slightly painful punning links (Radio 1 had only launched the previous year and the asinine patter of its DJs was still considered a bit of a novelty), but didn’t know what to do with them, nobody turned a hair when I said I’d like to have a go at turning them into an animation. They probably thought I’d done plenty of that kind of thing in America and was a highly trained operative in the field, rather than the speculative first-timer I actually was.

  I was given two weeks to do it – and four hundred quid. So I just got some head shots of Jimmy Young blown up, airbrushed a body on and made him speak by wiggling his mouth. When you’re trying something for the first time, you can sometimes achieve a wonderful blend of naivety and pragmatism – not really knowing what the obstacles are enables you to find a way around them by sheer beginner’s luck.

  Of course I wasn’t working completely from scratch. I’d had a fair amount of experience of appropriating visual imagery from various sources while working at first Help! and then Carson/Roberts. And the experimental animations I’d sat through at the Thalia cinema in New York had certainly expanded my ideas of what the medium could and should be. Having grown up in the Walt Disney orthodoxy of beautiful, ornate, meticulous cell animation, the starkness and even crudity of Borowczyk and Vanderbeek was a punky breath of fresh (or foul – depending on your point of view) air.

  These rapidly sketched-out storyboards-all that seems to remain of my Jimmy Young cut-out experiment – not only helped establish me in a new career as an ‘animator’, but also established the methodology for later adventures in live-action film-making.

  When I’m doing these little sketches, it’s almost like their, writing the film for me: it’s not quite automatic drawing, but a line will sometimes jump-start me in an unexpected direction.

  Faced with the impossibility of competing with Uncle Walt on his own painstaking and expensive turf, my logical next step was to get as far away from him as possible. But I wasn’t going to just slavishly copy the DIY daredevils of the animation avant garde either (or at least not consciously). What I ultimately came up with was a new kind of hybrid that spoke inarticulately to both traditions without the commitment to do either one properly. Of course, I didn’t realise this was going to happen when I was working on the Jimmy Young thing – at the time that was just a one-off, a bit of fun.

  As soon as my first animation was broadcast, things began to happen very quickly. The reaction (both publicly and professionally) was huge and – in terms of people offering me work – pretty much instantaneous. I wasn’t thinking, ‘At last, this is my big break.’ It was more a question of, ‘I seem to have found a way of doing this, so if everyone wants me to, then I might as well.’

  First, Eric Idle asked me to do some animations for the second series of Do Not Adjust Your Set. That was when I did Christmas Card, which was the first time I used Bob Godfrey’s camera. I’d come across this incredible collection of Victorian Christmas cards in the basement of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and basically all I did was copy a lot of them, cut them up and put them back together with a lot of jokes and a bit of a story.

  The idea of taking images out of their original contexts was at the heart of what I was doing, and the new technique I’d hit on more or less by accident quickly began to generate its own momentum. In the seventeenth century, Puritan iconoclasts used to painstakingly snip out representations of God or the Holy Spirit (which they considered sacrilegious) in pre-Reformation religious artworks. My approach was – you will not be surprised to hear – a good deal more frivolous. I’d find people in serious situations – soldiers in war-time, politicians on the campaign trail – and liberate them by putting them in a dress or making them do something ridiculous.

  I’m not sure that I could ever have got started in a world where everything is copyrighted and you’re got to pay for all of it.

  The more solemn and even humourless the original character, the more potentially funny he or she was. I’d always be laughing if I could find a picture of someone and put them in such an incongruous setting that you’d forget who they actually were. That’s how I ended up with formidable ‘Rivers of Blood’ demagogue Enoch Powell selling ‘whiter than white’ washing powder in Beware of the Elephants – it was the perfect way of bringing the brash commercial language of Carson/Roberts to bear on the political situation in my newly adopted homeland. Harold Wilson also turned up in the same cartoon – these are historical figures who aren’t thought about too much now, but I like to think I immortalised them in an appropriately respectful spirit.

  Alongside Harold Wilson, and Enoch Powell, Beware of the Elephants also featured these, headless footballer’s. As opposed to a 100-yard-long pitch, the size of the field I was working in was about 32 inches across, so the extent of the physical task involved was to corral and manipulate all these little pieces of paper beneath a 2-foot, 8-inch piece of glass. The essential tools of your trade are tiny pieces of Sellotape folded over themselves to make little circles so they´re essentially double-sided, but with the bulk of the stickiness padded off with your fingers first so the adhesive isn’t too strong. You want just enough to hold everything in place without so much as to actually stick it. Beyond that, the key to everything is carefully edging round every individual bit of paper in black, because obviously all the pieces you’re using are cut-outs, and that little bit of white edge which
catches the light beneath the glass will give the game away. That’s the one useful thing I’ve told all the animation students I’ve ever spoken to – ‘Get your marker pen and black out those edges.’

  The sole-ful street from THE ALBERT EINSTEIN STORY was a blatant instance of cut-and-past shoe – booting – ‘For each piece of foot wear, there is an equal and opposite place of foot wear…’

  It was also around this time that I started doing some work with Marty Feldman, the break-out star of the BBC’s hit satire series At Last the 1948 Show (some of the other cast members also went on to do good things, they just needed to find the right collaborators first). On the strength of that, he got first his own BBC show, It’s Marty – which I did a couple of animations for – and then in 1971 his own big American series for ABC, of which more later.

  In the meantime, I had transatlantic concerns of my own to deal with, as the draft threatened to come back to haunt me. With the Vietnam War still stubbornly refusing to be over by Christmas, the army began closing down the European National Guard control groups and sending them back to the States.

  Suddenly the epistolary distance-keeping strategy which had worked so well for the last few years no longer seemed to be equal to the task. Cool Hand Luke was out in cinemas at the time, and that film ends – spoiler alert – with Paul Newman dying, a tragedy I was very keen to stop befalling me at that time (although by a neat twist of fate, in later life Paul and I would end up going on a number of fiercely enjoyable but potentially life-threatening car and boat rides together).

  It was nip and tuck for a while as to whether I’d have to return to America and be shipped off to become cannon fodder, but luckily for me, this crisis point was reached just as I’d begun to make a bit of a name for myself in Britain. So I got myself a lawyer, and we persuaded a series of the people I was working for – from Nova magazine to Rediffusion – to write letters to the US army saying that not only was I essential to the well-being of their organisation but also that, if forced to return to the United States, I would instantly become indigent and a burden on American society.