Very Naughty Boys [EBK]

by Robert Sellers

  Once all the financial and legal matters were laid to rest, filming was allowed to proceed. Then, of course, Python went and spoilt it all by making Life of Brian a global smash hit. Idle says, ‘I think one of the real problems was when Brian started to make money. It was a classic Bialystock and Bloom... George and Denis really were like the classic Producers. This is not supposed to make money, it was a tax write-off. After that, I think Denis saw the potential tax advantages of losing money in the film industry.’

  Eric Idle had, in fact, been the first Python to experience a face-to-face encounter with O’Brien. ‘I met him once when I was hanging out with George and he had this model of a beach development thing he was trying to set up in the Seychelles shortly before it was taken over by an armed coup.’ Palin, too, met O’Brien through Harrison and was rather taken with him. ‘He seemed very affable, always laughing in a slightly manic way, and I thought, Well, that’s a good sign. He and George seemed such an unlikely pair, like some sitcom might have been written about the two of them, the rather straight international lawyer with fingers in pies around the world, and George there trying to be just the pal of the Pythons. I can remember thinking, because Denis wore quite well-cut suits, that our money was safe.’

  But it was Harrison and not O’Brien who made the first significant HandMade appointment, that of Ray Cooper, a musician and old mate from the late Sixties. Cooper remembers, ‘I was about to start a two-man tour of Russia in 1979 with Elton John, and George and his wife Olivia came to visit me many times, and George would bring me reports of what was going on with Life of Brian. One day he said, “It looks like maybe I’ve got a film company on my hands. What are you doing after you’ve finished this?” I said, “I don’t know.” And he said, “Well, you used to be an actor, you know about these theatre people, let’s see what we can do. Let’s work together.” It was as naïve as that.’

  Cooper hadn’t been so much an actor as a spear carrier, albeit alongside the likes of Laurence Olivier, Derek Jacobi and Albert Finney and on the august stages of the RSC and the National Theatre. But he’d carried his spear in exalted company, nonetheless, and hadn’t earned much money doing it, either. ‘So in the evenings after performances, I would shoot around to the jazz clubs to make an extra few bob or just literally to play, because I loved performing, it was what I was born to do, I think. My dear mother, who was from a very working-class background, with no support mechanisms, had managed to secure me a musical background. From the age of five or even less, I was stuck playing a piano and, by the age of 12, I was an incredibly adequate reader of most of the dots that you could put in front of me, something which was to be very rich in its rewards later on.’

  However, the smoky cellar rooms of the London jazz club scene of the mid-Sixties were unfortunately littered with pianists, so Cooper found himself gravitating instead towards playing percussion instruments out of instinct, for survival’s sake. ‘Music was taking over from my spear-carrying activity; I was actually earning more money, and I was still performing. And once you got into that jazz circuit, they were the core of the session musicians in those days, those were the guys that were on The Beatles’ and the Rolling Stones’ sessions. So I moved into session work where, with a modicum of talent but a great deal of luck, I managed to become quite successful and worked with The Beatles... and that’s when I first met George.’

  Now one of the country’s top session musicians, Cooper met another figure who was to loom large in his life — Elton John. ‘I was in Elton’s band from the early Seventies through to ’76 when he retired on stage at Wembley, much to the shock of his band, but certainly his management, and the world generally. He was very depressed and he just made a shock announcement on stage; that was it, this was the last performance. So I became briefly an independent record producer. And there was my association with George. Also, I worked on John Lennon stuff, with Paul McCartney and Ringo, but my mate, one-on-one, was always George. Why did we become such close friends? I think an understanding of some form of path that we were both on. He was generous in his heart... seeing someone with a like spirit and helping them on that path.’

  After working with Elton John on his comeback tour in London and Russia, Cooper returned to acting, filming Popeye in Malta for Robert Altman. It was on his return that he found himself employed at Cadogan Square and an integral part of the HandMade set-up as Head of Production. ‘That, in my day, was literally in the old producer’s sense of development. You saw something, you saw a book, you had a coffee with someone and you wrote some notes on the back of a fag packet, that was your storyline and you developed it and then you put it into production. For me, this was a dream coming true, because there are maybe two art forms left now that have the celebration of bringing all the arts together and film is one of them, and opera is the other one, because you get writing, dance sometimes, music, design, everything, whereas in the other forms, something’s missing, if not several component parts. So it was wonderfully embracing having all those great minds, to be sitting at a desk listening to those ideas churning around which end up on the screen.’

  Cooper also had special responsibility for creative control on advertising material. But most importantly of all he was George Harrison’s eyes and ears at Cadogan Square, responsible for reading the many scripts that poured into HandMade, a job Harrison hated doing. ‘I know I can rely on Ray being sensitive to the artistic side of things,’ Harrison told Film Comment in 1988. ‘There’s always a conflict between the “business”, what people see as the brutal business aspect, and the “artistic” side. Since I’ve been an artist and have Ray there all the time, it eases the problem a bit.’ The irony of being a Beatle and the person who derided the money men with lines like ‘What do they know?’ and now being in that position himself, of being ‘the money’, never left Harrison. Indeed, it amused him greatly. ‘I can see it from both sides now.’

  The general perception of HandMade from the very beginning was that it was a straightforward partnership between Harrison/ O’Brien and Monty Python. It was one of The Beatles joining up with the enfants terribles of British comedy to make movies. These bonds were forged even closer when it was suggested O’Brien also become Python’s manager. Idle says, ‘I said to the other Pythons, “This guy’s good, he knows what he’s doing... Why don’t we get Denis to be our manager? He’s professional, EuroAtlantic looks rather superb.” So I was really responsible for taking us into Denis’s management in the first place.’ And the other Pythons didn’t need much persuading on the matter. Goldstone recalls, ‘There was a feeling that Denis could sort out their affairs in a way that their current management couldn’t. They were all rather taken by Denis’s style and ability to really do things.’

  To clarify and handle the financial affairs of Python’s money and to have in-house expertise that could deal with all the various business aspects that such a merger entailed, O’Brien hired Steve Abbott, a chartered accountant who’d recently qualified from Price Waterhouse. ‘At the time,’ Abbott comments, ‘the Python group was represented by Anne Henshaw [now Anne James], but as individuals they all had their own separate business managers, agents and accountants. Certainly some of them had top-class accountants looking after their affairs. The big problem was that some of them didn’t and, spectacularly, Graham Chapman was financially managed by a company which collapsed. So, if you like, the six spokes of the wheel sometimes didn’t co-ordinate because, by the late Seventies, with the exception of John and Fawlty Towers, Python really dominated the income of all of them, because of the success of the films it was the predominant factor in their companies. And clearly Denis’s plan to have them all under one roof made a lot of sense, no question of that, in terms of dovetailing deals, just for tax efficiency as much as anything else. So I suspect even the ones who had their affairs completely up to date, they all recognised it made a lot of sense. There was certainly no sense amongst any of them that they hated being processed in this way.’

&nb
sp; A huge Python fan while at Cambridge, Abbott’s ambition was always to work in the entertainment business rather than the stuffy confines of city institutions and, for a while, toyed with a career in music. EMI were particularly keen to snare his services. ‘I was relieving my boredom while being at a major accounting firm by going to a lot of punk gigs and I met a lot of the bands and some of them were thick, and it’s like, the music’s great but if I have to sit down and do someone’s tax return, do I want someone who’s puking lager all over me? I didn’t know the Pythons personally but I’d read interviews and I thought, Well, at least they’re sort of intelligent and erudite and maybe they’d be nice guys to work with. I think the reason I got the job working for Denis was that I had the balls or stupidity, however you look at it, to arrange the interview with him on the day my exam results came out, so in order to sell myself to them I was able to point out that I had a high pass rate because I had no relevant experience at all. I’d been doing major international company’s finances, I’d never seen film budgets or record royalty statements or anything like that. So, on the day I legally became a chartered accountant I walked out on Price Waterhouse where I’d trained and walked into a job with Denis O’Brien. This was in November 1979, the week that Life of Brian opened in Britain.’

  Abbott had also grown up loving The Beatles and never got over the buzz of working under Harrison. ‘He was just like an ordinary bloke, just very nice. I never had any responsibility for George’s business affairs; my professional worry as I spent more time in that office was that he was signing documents he didn’t properly understand. He clearly completely trusted Denis and the team at EuroAtlantic. George would go into financial and legal arrangements and, I suspect, at the time would ask Denis if they were all right, or ask the questions of Denis. I never really witnessed that, but it was a worry of mine. I encouraged the Pythons to ask questions about anything, particularly if I sent stuff out to them, and be comfortable. And certainly after I left HandMade, I would always say to my clients, “I want you to sign this document but first of all read it and ask me any questions before you do,” and I always suspected that that wasn’t the case with George in those days. But if you look at it from his point of view, who the hell do you trust, if you’re paying?’

  Harrison made no bones about the fact that he hated the business side of movies, all that wheeling and dealing, or, indeed, that he knew next to nothing about it. ‘Making films is sort of a hobby for me,’ he once said. ‘I can’t let it become too serious, otherwise it’d become work.’ Having got himself out of that star rat race once, he wasn’t about to get back on the same treadmill. The Apple group fiasco, which saw The Beatles locked in legal battles for years, had taught him one salutary lesson — someone with weight and experience was needed at the helm otherwise things could quickly get out of control. Going out making deals was never going to suit Harrison; that was solely the domain of O’Brien. That Harrison was perfectly happy for O’Brien to be, as he put it, ‘the business person’, was a decision that could have proved financially costly.

  HandMade as a film-making entity did not then exist. Cadogan Square was basically full of people working for EuroAtlantic and running various things like George Harrison’s publishing catalogue and his house in Henley. Cooper remembers, ‘The office was Dark Horse records and all that sort of stuff and HandMade squeezed in. HandMade had a little office, and then it got bigger. The key personnel in the beginning were obviously Denis, this sort of jolly giant, wonderful, you thought at that point, genius banker and lawyer, what a marvellous combination; George, who was not present in the office but would come in every so often, was always reported to, I’d go and see him; there was Derek Taylor who was The Beatles’ publicist and a dear friend. He was a wonderful man, a wit, an incredibly intelligent man who supported everybody. Then myself, the Pythons and a lawyer. So it was an interesting team, a fairly weird and wonderful mix, and it worked. And what a glorious, wonderful innocence there was to it all.’

  As far as Abbott was concerned, his wages were paid by EuroAtlantic and, although he might be asked if someone had a technical question concerning Harrison’s affairs, 99 per cent of his efforts were devoted to looking after the Pythons and their finances. ‘It was very friendly at Cadogan Square, very happy. All I’d been subjected to in three years at Price Waterhouse, because our clients were so massive, was seeing big multinationals and people who were bored. People’s idea of fun was getting up to japes by the coffee machine. It was very, very intimate at EuroAtlantic. There were maybe eight to ten staff, no more than a dozen maximum, there wasn’t enough room. As for Denis, there was such awe of him by people in the office. Everybody in the building was like, Denis was God.’

  And it was O’Brien rather than Harrison who caught the filmmaking bug big time, so it wasn’t long before he began to bask in the glow of Life of Brian’s success. Idle recalls, ‘So now he’s a film producer and he’s got friends in Hollywood saying, “Hey, I like your movie.” And he says, “Yeah, I’m a film producer now.” One of his friends was John Calley, who was head of Warner Brothers at the time, and Denis wanted to show him that he could be a film producer, too; it was like, my dick’s as big as yours, and so there was ego involved. I think George went with it; he felt it was a good thing to be sponsoring people’s dreams, he’s always had that sort of Apple desire to help other people. George was a very good man like that.’

  Harrison took justified pride and enjoyment from his involvement in Life of Brian. Like Denis, he’d found it a stimulating challenge that had proved satisfactory on both a personal and monetary level. But even this early on in their relationship, a clear defining line was emerging between how George would operate within the framework of HandMade as opposed to Denis. In spite of his closeness and fondness for the Pythons, Harrison paid only the briefest of set visits during the making of Brian, one that was remembered by Terry Gilliam. ‘He was down in Tunisia just for a few days. George never interfered. On Time Bandits he came on the set once, I think. He just sort of let us get on with it. He’s smart. With any creative things you make your choices at the beginning, you choose the right people, then you’ve got to trust them generally.’

  It was Denis who was much more involved in the actual production side of it, while at the same time happy, for the moment, to play backseat driver to producer John Goldstone, conscious that such matters were presently beyond his scope of experience and that the film was safely under control. Goldstone comments, ‘I guess this is something that didn’t happen in the later films. I didn’t work with Denis again, but he’d clearly felt he’d learnt a lot and therefore could apply that learning to other people’s films.’ Often with disastrous consequences.

  O’Brien was a willing convert to the wheeler-dealer world of film finance, spurred on by the realisation that if he financed a picture himself and then sold it territory by territory, sometimes flying out personally to countries to arrange local deals, he could potentially do better than if he went to just a single major distributor to handle worldwide sales. This part of the business truly fascinated and captured O’Brien from the off, appealing as it did to the born banker in him, this whole gambit of separating off parts of the globe, of bedding down individual deals. So having taken the risk in the first place over Brian, through Harrison’s money and protecting the possible losses by a very clever tax shelter scheme, he’d then negotiated killer distribution deals which, when the Python movie became a hit, started yielding money in untold quantities. John Goldstone also played his part by introducing O’Brien to those distributors he’d entered into business with on Holy Grail, contacts that were to prove invaluable. The experienced film producer had nothing but admiration for his modus operandi: ‘Denis did an awful lot himself, he was a deft negotiator. He did have experience of the music business and began to see that there were similarities and even applied some of his knowledge of music deals to the film deals which made them more interesting.’

  So what started life
as a one-off rescue bid now metamorphosed into something bigger, and while Harrison was certainly happy to go along with it, O’Brien was the real driving force behind the launch of HandMade. Abbott says, ‘It all came from Denis, that’s the way it was run, it was all very autocratic. It was the money, I’m sure. It was the tax deal more than anything; he’s always had a good nose for money, Denis. George was absolutely straightforward in this; from his point of view, it was nothing more than wanting to help his mates out. From Denis’s point of view, it became a very clever tax deal which worked; there was a good tax write-off from it. And it worked for George’s tax planning... at that time he was paying tax at a maximum rate of 98 per cent, so tax shelter was important. It was also possibly the fact that Denis’s management company could get new and established clients. It brought into the fold a very quiet Beatle, who was basically the raison d’etre of that company in Cadogan Square, and all the Pythons, and suddenly there was energy and activity. More to the point, it’s like a printing factory for pound notes... you’ve got this film that’s just unstoppably making money. Denis was good at business, he could make shit-loads of money, and I’m sure what drove him at the beginning was the ability to make money and the tax advantages of making British films. I don’t think he had a love for celluloid. I think he was what he was trained to be, an investment banker.’