Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

by Robert Sellers

  Terry Gilliam agrees. ‘What always intrigued me was my mother who was a diligent churchgoer from year dot and she saw the film and didn’t understand what the problem was. She said, “Well, it’s not Jesus, it’s very clear, there’s the one born in the other stable, here’s the guy in the sermon on the mount. It’s not Jesus.” We were so careful about that.’

  Terry Jones remembers when they started doing the script actually saying, ‘Gosh, you know we might get religious nuts taking pot shots at us, it could be quite tricky,’ adding, ‘But I have to say, after Salman Rushdie’s experience, I think we might have thought twice about it.’

  Michael Palin observes, ‘What I’m proud of about Brian is it did actually force people to take up sides. Some people took up the wrong side and some people obviously thought a little more about it and took up the reasonable side. The wrong side was just saying, “This is a completely worthless film.” But I know vicars and religious people who’ve said since that they think it’s a really good film and they show it to their congregation because it tells you something about what real belief is — don’t be fooled by false messiahs, they can see it for what it is. So people who just dismissed it completely were made to look fairly foolish. The Bishop of Southwark was one of them... extraordinary! Malcolm Muggeridge, very intelligent man, another. Bernard Delfont, who refused to have anything to do with it. And the great thing is that HandMade was created by people’s inability to see that this was a reasonably well-thought-out, intelligent film. It was sort of born out of other people’s bigotry. So good for George. And George loved it, loved the idea that he’d taken on the forces of reaction and won. It was a very Beatle-ish thing to do.’

  What drew the most criticism, of course, was the gloriously tasteless finale which even Mel Brooks might have balked at perpetrating, that of Brian and what seems like the entire cast being crucified. ‘We thought, How on earth are we going to do something so serious and important to so many people?’ Palin says. ‘It was difficult to do it in a way that wouldn’t have so many people throw up their hands in horror because the crucifixion is the most intensely felt part of the Christian religion.’ In the end, Palin, writing with Jones, finally cracked it. The approach was to accept the historical fact that crucifixion was a common form of Roman capital punishment long before it was invested with religious significance. Gilliam admits, ‘I love the fact that the Christians wanted to claim the crucifixion as their own, nobody else got crucified. It’s kinda like the Jews claiming the Holocaust as their own, there weren’t any gypsies or homosexuals in there. Wait a minute, there were a whole lot of people in there, folks, let’s not forget those people. It just becomes kind of an industry, the church, that cross is theirs and nobody else’s.’

  It might have been an omen, but on the day the crucifixion sequence was shot fears were voiced whether it could be attempted at all after heavy storms overnight. Jones recalls, ‘What happens is that the wadis [dry river beds] flood and you get cut off. And as we were driving through this torrential rain about six o’clock in the morning to this location, lorry drivers were coming back the other way waving their hands saying, “Don’t go on because you’ll get cut off.” But we went on anyway, and when we got there the rain cleared up and we were able to get everybody up on the crosses to shoot it. But it was bitterly cold. You’ll notice John is wrapped in a blanket... everybody else is braving the cold.’

  In fact, Cleese was suffering from a bad chest infection and had been bed-ridden for three days. ‘When I had to get up to go on the cross, I remember thinking, Having bad ’flu and then having to be crucified on top of it — not ideal.’ Nor was it particularly comfortable for the others. Idle says, ‘We were up on these crosses and we had three ladders and if you wanted to piss you had to scream, “Hey, I need to get down quick!”’

  Blasphemous or not, this scene has entered film folklore, not least because of the foot-tapping ditty ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’ that the cast merrily sing as they dangle on a row of crosses. Idle explains, ‘We’d got to the point at the end of the movie where everybody is going to be crucified and we decided wouldn’t it be funny if we sing something. We realised it would have to be a very cheery song, ridiculously cheerful, and we started to giggle at the idea of people kicking their legs up and doing a dance routine. So I went straight home and banged it out; it didn’t take me very long. I used a lot of jazz guitar chords. I came back and sang it and people really liked it. And then I recorded it and I did it very straight, with a big jazz swing arrangement, but not a very convincing vocal from me. When I got to Tunisia, I thought, this is not really selling, so I got the sound guy to come with me and we took a room in the hotel and we put mattresses all up around the walls. I had a little bottle of wine and we had a drink or two and then I sang it live whilst the sound guy’s lying on the floor with the backing track. And I just made the vocal Mr Cheeky, and it suddenly changed the perspective of the song, sold it a lot better. So on the film that’s a live track recorded in the hotel.’

  Astonishingly, years after Brian’s release, the song found a life of its own, much to Eric Idle’s delight. ‘It was re-discovered by the soccer fans in England who’d sing it on the terraces whenever they were being hammered five-nil, and my friend Gary Lineker said, “You know they’re singing your song.” And Lineker had a pal who was a DJ, Simon Mayo, who played it every morning on Radio 1 and then Virgin re-released it and it suddenly shot up the charts. It was amazing. There’s also a story that at the height of the Falklands conflict when HMS Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile, and because they had nuclear weapons on board, the entire British fleet steamed in the opposite direction as a precaution. The sailors had about four hours to wait and they sat on the deck singing ‘Always Look on the Bright Side of Life’, which is fabulous because, of course, that’s what the song is about, people facing death saying, “Oh come on, cheer up anyway.” The song has now become a standard, which is great.’

  Life of Brian ranks high in the Python universe. Cleese says, ‘That’s our masterpiece. That’s what I’d like to be judged by in the future.’ Gilliam agrees, ‘I think it’s my favourite, for all of its flaws. It’s dealing with really funny things, intelligent things. I think it’s number one. Holy Grail probably goes two.’ And Palin adds, ‘I think it really holds up almost all the way through. I would say it’s the most satisfactory of all the films we made. I think Holy Grail and Meaning of Life have some terrifically funny and much more odd and surreal moments, but Brian has a thought going through it; it holds together as a drama, it has a great unity to it. It actually holds together as a sort of philosophy, if you like, as well.’

  It was no real surprise when Life of Brian scored big with the public. And within the film industry, eyebrows were raised at how naturally George Harrison and, in particular, his business partner Denis O’Brien, took to film-making. John Goldstone says of this unlikely initiation in the world of film production, ‘I think they had fun on Brian, it was a real challenge. Both began to realise how interesting film-making can be.’

  Intended as merely a glorious one-off, Monty Python’s Life of Brian instead became the foundation stone of a company that was to find itself, reluctantly perhaps, at the forefront of the renaissance of British film production in the 1980s. Gilliam says, ‘So it was Python, Denis and George, that was the company, that was HandMade. Then Denis said, “We need a logo.” So I went away and quickly devised a logo. And we were off.’

  It was to be some ride.

  2

  THE BEATLE AND THE BANKER

  Eric Idle fondly refers to George Harrison and Denis O’Brien as ‘Bialystock and Bloom’, the characters played by Zero Mostel and Gene Wilder in the hit comedy The Producers. Michael Palin called them ‘among the most retiring film magnates in the world. They make Howard Hughes look like Jeffrey Archer. To look at them, you’d think they’d just had a pretty good year running a rubber goods shop instead of a film company.’

  Harrison an
d O’Brien really were among the most unlikely movie entrepreneurs the industry had ever seen. Yet, incredibly, their partnership seemed to work. What strange alchemy was at play here.

  George Harrison had already dipped his toe into the murky shallows of the movie business as a performer in those classic Sixties Beatles films. Richard Lester, who directed both A Hard Day’s Night and Help!, once told this author that Harrison might well have carved out some kind of future career as an actor. ‘On balance, I would say the person that was the most accurate of all The Beatles in terms of “give him a line and he will get the right elements in it without trying too hard” was George. In A Hard Day’s Night, if you watch George he just gets his lines right. Paul is all over the place, and John, sometimes it’s wonderful and sometimes it’s thrown away too much. George was just so wonderfully accurate.’

  The famous Apple Corps Ltd, The Beatles’ own company which managed their finances and was also intended to fund worthy causes — the ‘“non-happening” of the late Sixties’, Harrison once joked: ‘Come all ye faithful, and we’ll give you all our money’ — also had a film division and one of the first recipients was George’s mate, the then struggling and largely unknown John Hurt. Harrison saw Hurt in the play Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs and thought, Let’s do this as a movie! Noble indeed. ‘But we didn’t even get a distribution deal,’ Harrison recalled years later. ‘It was very depressing.’ Little Malcolm was Harrison’s first venture into film production and enough to put one off the movie business for life.

  Like so many of his generation, George Harrison fell in love with cinema not so much because of the movies themselves but the actual physical act of going to see them. He remembers the first picture he ever saw, aged four — Bambi, and particularly recalls ‘the horror of the forest on fire’. Entering those majestic picture palaces was an event, not just another night out. ‘I spent most of my schooldays in the cinema,’ he told Time Out in 1988. ‘In Liverpool in the late Forties and early Fifties there were all these fabulous art deco cinemas with marble floors and goldfish in the foyer and a nice glow with the lights and just to go there was a turn-on.’ In the mid-Eighties, Harrison wrote an article in his local newspaper attacking Henley Council’s plan to demolish the Old Regal cinema in the town’s high street and replace it with a supermarket. He won his campaign.

  As for Denis O’Brien, a graduate of Washington University Law School and the Faculté de Droit in Paris, he was a gifted accountant, business adviser and lawyer. Between 1967 and 1969 he practised Law in Paris before moving into merchant banking in London with Rothschilds. Subsequently, he went solo as a consultant, establishing a reputation for himself as a very tough operator indeed. A very intelligent man, almost a Wall Street banker type, he knew his way around the financial and legal communities on both sides of the Atlantic. He was also a keen sailing enthusiast with a passion for owning yachts... expensive yachts.

  Both men were to a large degree naive in the way of movie enterprise, their amateur status reflected in the name they chose to christen their fledgling company — HandMade. Actor Denis Quilley thought it was a name that perfectly complemented their ethos, their attitude. ‘The very title HandMade is very endearing, as opposed to machine-turned.’

  The name actually started out as a bit of a joke. Harrison had recently visited Wookey Hole in Somerset and been intrigued by its historic paper mill. Unable to resist buying a few rolls, he noticed an unusual watermark — ‘British Handmade Paper’. ‘I said, “Let’s call our company British HandMade Films,”’ Harrison told the Sunday Times magazine in 1983. ‘But when we went to register it, we were told, “You can’t call it British!” You can only call things British if everybody is on strike the whole time and it’s making huge losses. So we said, “Sod it — we’ll just call it HandMade Films.”’

  The man Eric Idle dubs ‘the strange O’Brien’ was first introduced to George Harrison by Peter Sellers, whose own life was a cracked montage of surreal episodes. The year was 1973, not long after the dissolution of The Beatles. Denis O’Brien was a man of Cleese-like vertical proportions, bespectacled and the owner of a laugh reminiscent of a hyena having an orgasm. Gilliam says of him, ‘Denis was tall, I mean really tall, but with a very small head. All of his extremities were tiny — tiny head, tiny hands and tiny feet — and this big, long body in between.’

  O’Brien’s first brush with showbusiness came in 1971 when Peter Sellers, at the suggestion of wife number three Miranda Quarry, hired the American to put his increasingly desperate financial situation in order. Subsequently, O’Brien became Sellers’ business adviser, agent and lawyer, negotiating film deals on his behalf, notably the last few Pink Panther vehicles, until an acrimonious split in 1977.

  Sellers had known Harrison since the heady days of Beatlemania and, by the early Seventies, was very much under the influence of the musician’s Eastern-style philosophy. He habitually wore kaftans, practised yoga and took to chanting. Sellers informed Harrison how O’Brien had rescued his professional affairs and suggested he may be the man to sort out his own finances after the costly and messy collapse of Apple Corps Ltd.

  The two men met in Los Angeles and, despite their contrasting personalities — O’Brien decisive and forceful, Harrison vague and retiring — rapport was instant. ‘George is an absolutely extraordinary individual,’ O’Brien said in 1988. ‘When we met, some kind of synergy occurred between two opposites. George was very centred and I walked away from that meeting thinking, This is the most powerful person I’ve met in my life. I’d do anything for this guy.’

  As for Harrison, he was quietly impressed with O’Brien’s financial acumen and prudence and had no qualms in hiring him as his business manager. Within a year, O’Brien was handling all Harrison’s financial and tax affairs. Gilliam observes, ‘The way I was told it, the reason Denis had actually got George was that he showed him that there was all this money out there that had never been collected from all the songs and records. So Denis set up an operation to collect the royalties from all over the world, and suddenly George was in the money again.’ A handy situation to be in when the Python’s Life of Brian begging bowl came round.

  Harrison was by no means the first rock star to bail out Python. John Goldstone confirms, ‘The film industry didn’t really recognise the potential of Python as a crossover from television to film. It was always Python’s ambition to make movies. When they did Holy Grail, the budget was, I think, £150,000 and even that was not available to be raised in normal areas so we had to put this consortium of backers together, these rock ’n’ rollers — Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Jethro Tull.’ A beneficial arrangement, being artists themselves, the rock stars granted Python the same freedom they themselves would have wanted. Similarly, Harrison and O’Brien barely interfered in the production of Life of Brian. ‘We could not have made this film anywhere in the world with as much artistic control as we had with George and Denis,’ Cleese said at the time.

  O’Brien’s company, EuroAtlantic Ltd, resided at 26 Cadogan Square, just off Sloane Street in London’s fashionable Belgravia area. Set up in the early Seventies by O’Brien to look after the business affairs of Sellers, Harrison and other lesser-known clients, it was a small management company employing (as it continued to do so throughout the HandMade years) lawyers and accountants, basically financially adroit people who could give sound business advice, with Denis ensconced at the top.

  To raise the necessary funds to get the Python movie launched, O’Brien put up as surety his business premises, while Harrison did likewise with Friar Park, his ornate Victorian mansion in Henley-on-Thames that had been his home since 1970. They showed remarkable courage, but it also displayed utter naïveté on their part because nobody, then or now, finances a movie in the way Harrison and O’Brien financed Life of Brian. O’Brien himself would, in retrospect, call the move ‘absolute insanity’. If some rich benefactor is willing personally to bankroll your movie, any producer worth his salt wo
uld scream, ‘No!’ Conventional wisdom would be to get some distribution deals in place first; don’t make the movie before you’ve got yourself a distributor otherwise what you could see for your money is absolutely nothing, except five cans of celluloid (scrap value about ten quid), and if no punter will pay to see light shone through them, then you’re well and truly buggered. But if you’ve done the stupid thing and made a hit, you’ve got the best thing possible, a finished film that distributors would fight like dogs over a bone for, leaving you to ratchet up the deal and make a fortune. This is precisely what happened with Life of Brian. It was a colossal piece of beginner’s luck.

  Just how many people knew about this mad gamble is unclear, though it couldn’t have been very many if Terry Jones himself, the director of Brian, was left in the dark over it. ‘I didn’t really like to think about how much money was on the line. I know Denis was incredibly nervous when we were editing the film, and once or twice I had lunch with Denis and I could see he was terribly twitchy, hoping things were going to work and I was just keeping cool about it. I only learnt years later from George that to raise the money he’d put his house on the line and Denis had put the premises of his offices up as collateral. So if I’d known that, I would have been a lot more worried about the outcome of the thing, but at the time I just thought, Oh, they’ve all got tons of money and it’s all right. I’m glad I didn’t know.’

  Like Harrison, O’Brien was a big Python fan. He loved the Brian script but there did follow days of hard thinking before finally agreeing to rubber stamp so risky a bail-out proposal; after all, his knowledge of the film industry was seriously lacking. Goldstone’s perspective was that ‘Denis didn’t have a great experience of the whole range of the film business. Because he managed Peter Sellers he had a certain amount of experience in terms of performance contracts and so on, but I think the whole gamut of production and distribution, he admitted that he didn’t know a huge amount but was willing to learn. I told him about the EMI situation, that we had a structure of a deal there, and he said, “Well, OK, I’ll do the same deal.” So we took the draft contract that we got from EMI and handed it over to him to adapt for his own company which was EuroAtlantic. What O’Brien knew he would have to do was structure the deal in a way that would be tax-effective for George and that what would have to happen would be something in the nature of a partnership that would enable George to off-set the investment in Brian against his ongoing income from other sources, and that it would need to be a separate entity from EuroAtlantic. So the idea was to set up a new entity and they came up with HandMade. There was no talk about doing anything else, it was just this one film.’