Posts tagged ‘Imagine’
Michael White and The Holy Grail
I’ve just been watching The Last Impresario on Imagine (BBC1), a film about Michael White, the theatre and film producer. Michael was the exec producer of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and he invested 50% of the budget. I liked Michael very much, and we worked well together. We eventually went on to do other things. such as a production of Woody Allen’s The Bluebird Of Unhappiness. He was incredibly helpful on the Holy Grail, because when we had a terrible preview of the film, Michael didn’t panic but helped to put up the additional money to redo the soundtrack. He was cool in the face of seeming disaster. Here is how I describe it in The 7Th Python:
The Disastrous First Screening
It was one of those evenings when Python flopped. – Terry Jones
Back in London, we worked hard to produce a cut of the film that we could show to the other Pythons and the investors.
The preview took place on October 1 1974 at the Hanover Grand Preview Theatre in central London. We had invited about 200 people, including most of the investors. This screening was one of the worst film experiences of my life.
Every screening has a certain mood that you can feel in the theatre, and the mood at the end of that screening was certainly pretty grim. People weren’t responding, they weren’t laughing the way they should have been. There was laughter at individual scenes, but no sustained build-up. The main problem was that the sound effects were too prominent. Because the comedy is quite slight, the jokes need to have a context in which they work, and if you overwhelm them with sound, they will just get drowned, which I think is what happened.
This was the first time that either of the two Terrys had ever done this kind of film sound mixing, so it’s very easy to try something which doesn’t work, and at that point it can all be thrown away, can all be redone. But someone who doesn’t know the technical side, might think looking at it, “God, this is it, and we’ve got to live with what we’re currently seeing,” which of course is not the case. A certain amount of inexperience may have led people to think it was a disaster which couldn’t be repaired.
Afterwards, there was a feeling of “This is a mess, what have we let ourselves in for?” I think there were people who probably felt the film was a lost cause. And it’s
very easy, when you’re in a position like this, to panic.
Eric Idle walked out halfway through the film; everyone else stayed to the bitter end. There was polite applause at the end. (Michael) White and (John ) Goldstone (executive producers) didn’t speak to the Pythons.
Here is how everyone remembered the event, in David Morgan’s book, Monty Python Speaks:
TERRY JONES: Terry G. had done the dub, and you know what it’s like when you’re making a film: you’ve got two or three sound editors working away for months and months building up wonderful, incredibly thick soundtracks. It started off everybody laughing at the beginning and then after a while just nothing; the whole film went through [with]
no laughter at all. And it was awful, I was sitting there saying, “It
just can’t be unfunny.”
JOHN GOLDSTONE: We’d already spent all the money by then and couldn’t quite go back to them and say, “Can you put up some more because we’d like to refinish it?” So we had to go to a bank and borrow money against personal guarantees to make up the difference.
TERRY JONES: So we went and redubbed it and as soon as anybody started talking I just took all the sound effects out, all the atmosphere, everything. I went through the entire film doing that, and that seemed to help, it was something about the soundtrack filling in all the pauses.
TERRY JONES: Neil Innes’ music sounded quaint, it didn’t have an epic
feel to it. And we’d run out of money by that time, so I went along
to De Wolfe Music Library in London and just took out piles and
piles of disks and just sat here at home trying out music to it, trying
to get something to work. So it felt like what you needed was really corny, heroic music.
NEIL INNES: The Arthurian themes were too thin with the instruments we had available- two French horns, two violins. Terry rang to say we can’t use the music because it’s just not strong enough. The 12 piece orchestra couldn’t cope with the 120 piece orchestral sound that the film required. Artistically it was a better solution to go to a library to get epic music. We would never have had the money to record that size score. I wasn’t that disappointed. I understood it. If it was my film I would have made the same choice.
We had some very heavy meetings over the next few days, a post mortem to see if we could bring this dead film back to life. Michael White was very supportive; he didn’t panic and I was glad that I had kept him involved in the production. In the end we remixed the film, bringing down the level of the sound effects to let the dialogue punch through, and added the mock heroic library music score. We knew there was a good film buried there, and if we went back and remixed it, we’d have a funny film. The next screening was very positive. Now we knew the film was very good, it was very funny, it was working well. I think everyone was very happy with it. So it was really night and day.
If the Pythons had not owned the film, the director (or directors) would probably have been replaced at that point, or at least told to stay out of the cutting room. But the structure I set up meant that even through a disaster, the two directors had the time (and we had to find the extra money) to let them correct their initial work.
Everyone benefited from the great success of the film, and thirty years is plenty of time for memories to blister and fade so that some of the Pythons seem to have had a bout of amnesia concerning who raised the money – and much else. The two Terrys, Graham and Michael all knew what my role had been, but Cleese and Idle had no involvement with the setting up of the film, so had no idea as to what I had done for them. This became a real problem when their management changed, and (their former manager) Anne Henshaw was no longer there to keep alive that memory.
visit http://www.the7thpython.com
Follow us on Facebook
Creative Advice for Creatives
Vivian Maier Self-Portrait
I watched Alan Yentob’s excellent Imagine documentary (BBC) about the work of Vivien Maier, a nanny (now dead) who took 150,000 photos of things she liked, or which interested her.
Her photos are excellent, mindful of the work of Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, and the story behind them is quite extraordinary. Because it seems Vivien never studied photography, never knew any photographers, never showed anyone her work, and printed only a few of her photos. She stored her negatives in 5 storage lockers in Chicago that she continued renting for years. But when she got too ill to pay the rent, the contents of the storage lockers were sold to auctioneers, sight unseen. At this point all the work could easily have been trashed, except the buyer of the job lot realised they must be worth something and sold the entire lot to another dealer. From there, a spiral of buying and selling, and a growing admiration for her work brought serious acclaim. Now her vintage prints sell for $ 8000 and new ones for $ 2000.
A great post mortem success story, like Van Gogh’s. But the part of the film that impressed me most was a comment by photo gallery owner Stephen Kasher, about how she ‘created’ her style. Vivien Maier has a distinctive visual style, all her own. How did she create it ?
Kasher said she is one of the few photographers with no (photographic) outside influences. She never exhibited, published or sold her work. Because she had a day job she did not have to take photos to please anyone but herself. She didn’t sell them or show them. They were private, and so she could take photos of whatever interested her, and over time work out the best solution for obtaining the images she wanted. This best solution was to solely satisfy her creative urge, to get the best shot she could.
So Vivien Maier had Freedom (capital F) to do what she truly wanted. She took photos only of what interested her, and she took them at as high an artistic standard as she could achieve. So her style comes partly through technique (the type of camera and film she used), her vision – what she wanted to shoot and the feelings and ideas they conveyed to her – and her self-effacing persona, which could be unobtrusive and capture people ‘acting’ naturally. Or should that be acting ‘naturally’?
So the essence of Vivien’s style did not come from the outside- from her equipment or other photographers- but came from the inside- from her thoughts and emotions, from the way she saw the world. Writers are always told, “Write what you know about.” And I suppose Vivien did photograph what she knew about- kids playing on a beach, street people in Chicago, the life of a flea market. But maybe a better way of saying this, and one which can be imported by other creative artists is “Write or work about what interests you. What interests you is something you will be able to express for yourself. ” Just like Vivien.
And her great posthumous fame tells us that the more freedom we can give ourselves. the better the work we will do, whether others recognise it or not. Leaving money aside (and I know that is not easy), what Vivien’s story says about creative work is that if you can work at your art or craft without deviating from what interests you, not trying for recognition or fame, not trying to make money, but only trying to perfect your abilities, then you may make something that lasts.
Mark Forstater's Blog 