Halfway to Hollywood

Starred review from December 15, 2010

Renowned funnyman and world traveler Palin surveys the ruins of the British Empire and heads outward in the follow-up to Diaries 1969–1979: The Python Years (2007).

In 1980, following the release of the films Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Life of Brian, Palin and his fellow Pythons seemed poised to conquer the American film industry, with their representative asking more than $6 million for a mere treatment for Paramount. Eight years later, as this installment in the author's journal closes, the sextet has effectively stopped working together, and Palin is about to embark upon the global adventures that yielded Around the World in 80 Days, Pole to Pole and other travelogues. In between, the author writes about all manner of things connected to the film and TV business and the more learned reaches of entertainment. He kvetches about Hollywood's creative accounting ("The upshot is that not only will there not be a penny profit from America from a movie which was one of the top 40 grossers of the year in the US, but the earnings will hardly cover half the production cost") and about the conception of various projects such as Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits, which, despite the contributions of Sean Connery and the general merriment, Palin still wants to call Terry Gilliam's Greed. Throughout, Palin is sharp, literate, shrewd and sometimes harsh about the people he encounters. It will not please fans of The Songlines, for instance, to learn that Palin found Bruce Chatwin "rather sneery about things in a slightly aggressive, camp way which I don't awfully take to." Neither might Mel Brooks forgive Palin's description of their chance encounter, which would seem to demonstrate definitively that "Brooks has an almost pathological inability to accept competition—it's all a reduction of his own world."

Pythonophiles will find this essential, of course. But fans of good writing should dip into these pages, too, for Palin—Michael, not Sarah—knows his way around a book.

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February 1, 2011

In this second volume of diaries, actor and Monty Python alumnus Palin (Diaries, 1969-1979: The Python Years) continues the witty, highly observant, and piquant chronicle of his life. During this period, the Pythons gathered one final time to film Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983), and Palin spent much of the rest of the 1980s writing screenplays and acting in such films as Brazil (1985) and A Fish Called Wanda (1988). Palin has a novelist's eye for character and detail, and his observations of the entertainment world, filmmaking, his family relationships, and such external details as politics, current events, travel, and the weather are written with style and a distinctly subtle wit that gives this rich volume the drive of an epistolary novel. VERDICT These voluminous and copious diaries may be too detailed for a large general readership, but Monty Python and Palin fans will find them indispensable, and those with an especially Anglocentric taste in the arts and culture will be deeply rewarded.--Jim Collins, Morristown-Morris Twp. Lib., NJ

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