First the Beatles did it, then the Rolling Stones.
Now, legendary British comedy troupe Monty Python has released its own gargantuan oral history called “The Pythons” (St. Martin’s Press, $60). In addition to musings on censorship, intergroup relationships and infamous movie musical numbers, the Pythons detail the production of their most famous film, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” Here are excerpts from their reminiscences:
Michael Palin: When we were writing in the late ’60s, the Beatles were producing their albums and as far as I was concerned those were the greatest and most exciting examples of pop music around. . . . The Beatles ruled the world, they were multimillionaires, we were struggling away as comedy writers. Then I heard during the first series Paul McCartney would stop his music sessions when “Monty Python” was on so that everyone would look at the show, and then they would go back to recording. . . . Then gradually one began to hear more and more stories about bands and musicians who loved Python and felt a kinship with Python for some reason or another. . . . I think they thought it was somehow quite cool, a cult thing.
When it came to financing “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who came in but Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd as investors; the label on which we did most of our albums was basically a rock and roll label, so we were closely intertwined with rock music early on.
Terry Gilliam: Once we decided it was going to be about King Arthur and the Grail, it seemed the perfect vehicle — you gather the knights together and you’ve got a structure that most people can understand: a quest. Terry [Jones, co-director] and I were great medievalists and couldn’t wait to get in there. What was interesting about the start of the movie was how traditional we wanted to be. We wanted to make real movies, not Python movies, not the crap we did. Real movies. If we’d had the money, we would have had real horses.
What was wonderful was the limitations put on us by the budget. We couldn’t do all those things, so we had to get clever, and thank God, because the coconuts saved our ass. We would never have got through the movie with real horses. It makes a wonderful leap because with that opening shot, you accept the kind of lunatic logic that’s there. Arthur is incredibly serious, never a blink, and then in the background you’ve got all this stuff going on. It’s one of those things that’s, in retrospect, brilliant.
Jones: We’d chosen all these castles in Scotland, then suddenly a week before Terry [Gilliam, co-director] and I were going to go up to go over the filming, we got this message from the Department of the Environment for Scotland saying that they wouldn’t let us use any of their castles, because we were doing things that were not consistent with the dignity of the fabric of the buildings. These places had been built for torturing and killing people, you couldn’t do a bit of comedy? It was so ridiculous. So Terry and I ended up going off to find new locations a week before filming. And then we found Doune Castle and Castle Stalker in the end, but it was very close.
Gilliam: Graham [Chapman] was a drunken sot! He couldn’t say his lines as Arthur. He’d get through a sentence and then he’d blank out, that’s what was going on with Graham. This great, dignified character is actually blotto and he’s struggling to get through his lines . . . .
Chapman: I remember on the first day of filming “Holy Grail,” seven o’clock in the morning on a Scottish hillside, and nothing to drink — I suddenly had DTs. I was playing King Arthur in a cold drizzle, and I realized I was letting my friends down, and letting myself down. I stayed more or less on an even keel, not drinking too much, but I resolved to stop as soon as I could.
John Cleese: We always knew that there would be some people who wouldn’t like the Black Knight sequence because of what appeared to be its violence. I never had any problem with our more violent things. Sam Peckinpah had just made “The Wild Bunch” and there were a lot of people going on about the violence in that, so on the show we did that sketch called “Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days,” which was obviously making fun of violence. Yet a woman I knew, a perfectly sensible one, an old girlfriend of mine called Pippa, said, “How could you have done it?” You suddenly realized that some people cannot take that step of seeing it as funny in an abstract way. . . . Of course some of the producers wanted to cut the Black Knight, and it’s the funniest thing in the movie. You usually find that it’s the thing that a small number of people most object to that makes the large number of people laugh the most.
Eric Idle: “Grail” is a bit like “A Hard Day’s Night,” it’s got this energy, this “let’s make it up, let’s just do it,” it’s got a joie de vivre that’s very infectious, it’s very hard not to like.
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Reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Press.
