BEFORE: Bob Hoskins carries over from "Mona Lisa", and so do the other stars of that film. This is very sneaky on my part, because this documentary about the studio Handmade Films naturally features footage from their most successful films, one of which was "Mona Lisa", and another of which is tomorrow's film. I couldn't manage to fit this film into my documentary block this year, though thematically it would have fit very well. I figured that since watching this film was going to cost me $3.99 on iTunes or YouTube, maybe the universe was trying to save me a few bucks - so I was willing to wait to see if it would run on PBS or BBC-TV, or maybe pop up on some streaming service, so I was willing to sit on it until next year's doc chain. But, then the need came to find some kind of link to Richard E. Grant because he's in a Christmas-themed movie, so the opportunity came to use it as a vital link, this year instead of next.
There are so many actors appearing in this documentary, it almost seems a shame to use it here, but I don't want to think of this as going to waste - it's more like it's performing a vital service, connecting my post-Thanksgiving chain, which essentially had run out (OK, not really) to my Christmas movies. If I'd known about "The Long Good Friday" maybe I could have gotten there another way, through Helen Mirren, but now that ship has sailed.
Sticking with the program enabled me to watch this film with my BFF Andy, who's been staying over this weekend. I was going to take a few days off after "Mona Lisa" and save this for later in the week, but since both Andy and I are big Monty Python fans, I'd rather watch it earlier with him. Andy and I once collaborated on a project to get the autographs of all the Monty Python members to sign the same book, which was one of his college textbooks. Andy kicked it off by meeting Graham Chapman on his college tour, then I had the opportunities to meet John Cleese and Terry Gilliam to get them to sign the book as well. I also met Michael Palin, but Andy wanted to meet him as well, so I only ended up contributing two signatures to the book - and by the time Andy met Eric Idle, word had spread among the Pythons about the book, and then Andy topped it all off by traveling to the UK, and arranging a meeting with Terry Jones in a pub so he could be the last one to sign it. Andy went above and beyond by then having the book signed by Carol Cleveland and Neil Innes, so that was a fun project to work on together. I was happy just to meet three of the Pythons in person, and I got my own books signed by Cleese, Gilliam and Palin - just three separate books and not the same one, but that's fine.
THE PLOT: Charts the early years of HandMade Films, seen through the eyes of the filmmakers, key personnel and the man who started it all: former Beatle George Harrison.
AFTER: Well, December started off with some very American movies, but it's going to end for me with a bunch of British ones, with a few Germans mixed in. "Lassiter" was about and American stealing from Nazis in London, so there's the pivot point. "Mona Lisa" was pure British, and now a documentary about a British film studio, Handmade Films. The studio was in business for 11 years, and produced more hits than misses - though they had some stinkers, too. Honestly, I'd never heard of "Checking Out" or "Powwow Highway" before, or even "Cold Dog Soup", which everyone seems to want to forget. And of course there's "Water" and "Shanghai Surprise", which are also terrible, but at least I'd heard of those.
The secret can finally be told - the financier behind HandMade was George Harrison, who had been in some films before as a Beatle, perhaps reluctantly, and was also a big fan of Monty Python's Flying Circus. (Who wasn't?). But George had a problem, he had too much money - so much that the "Taxman" was liable to take away most of it, unless he could find something to invest it in, preferably a losing operation, with enough expenses to offset his income, and then in a roundabout way, he might be able to keep more of it, thanks to the vagaries of tax law. Really, the only people who have this unique kind of problem are rock stars, a few of the top movie stars, and tech billionaires. But the tech guys can set up a foundation to combat a disease, or start a corporation that builds rockets to go into space, and Mr. Harrison didn't have those opportunities, so really, it had to be filmmaking. No other enterprise could possibly lose enough money to keep a Beatle from paying taxes. "Wait, you have an screenplay? Here's five million pounds, go and make that movie."
It's really genius if you think about it, because if the movie bombs, then George Harrison has a write-off, assuming the director and film crew kept all their receipts. So his music royalties would be offset by the film production costs, and therefore he's got less income, and pays less taxes. Keeping half of $100 million is better than keeping 10% of $200 million, right? Look, I don't know how the numbers work exactly, but I know it's better to have a corporation with expenses if you can't have a charitable foundation. But I just know in my heart that Bill Gates and George Lucas wouldn't give so much to charity unless it benefited them in the long run to do so - at their level they bring in so much money that the majority of it goes to taxes, and the charities they choose to support benefit, for sure, but so do the billionaires who donate at that high level.
So George Harrison finance the making of "Monty Python's Life of Brian", which unfortunately became a smash hit, and a cult classic - it almost sounds like a real-life version of "The Producers", because they accidentally made too much money. But fortunately they'd formed a studio with a large payroll and before long they were back in the red, fortunately. Then "Time Bandits" became another international smash hit, so the studio had to quickly release films like "Tattoo", "Venom" and "The Burning" just to balance the books. Films like "The Missionary" and "A Private Function" also turned profits, though, so it wasn't until the 1985 film "Water" that the company really succeeded at failing. Wait - no, that's right.
Don't get me wrong, I loved "Time Bandits" as a kid, that was probably the gateway drug for me to get into Monty Python movies, I'd heard a few sketches on the Dr. Demento show but I wasn't allowed to watch their TV show, and I CERTAINLY wasn't allowed to watch "Life of Brian", because my parents only let me watch Disney movies and films that were approved by the Catholic newspaper in Boston. If they deemed a film sacrilegious, forget about it. But I got to see "Time Bandits", and I watched the hell out of it. I watched it so much as a teen that I couldn't watch it for maybe 20 years after, I have it on DVD but the shrink-wrap is still on it. Some films are like that, you've seen them so many times that you have to walk away for a time, right? Like "The Wizard of Oz" or "Raiders of the Lost Ark", or "Brazil", those are some of mine. You know every word, every beat, and it's better to leave them be, you can just watch them in your head any time you want. Wait a couple decades and then maybe you can go back.
We learn in "An Accidental Studio" that the song that closes "Time Bandits", which is called "Dream Away", was written by George Harrison as a secret message to Terry Gilliam, the film's director. It's a great song, I've loved it since I first heard it, but if you really look at the lyrics, it's the ultimate form of passive-aggressive behavior. The songwriter, as the film's producer, was telling the director via the lyrics that he wasted too much time and money making the film. "Greedy feeling wheeling dealing / Losing what you won / See the dream come undone" which is followed by "Lucky you got so far / All you owe is apologies / Measure the mystery and astound / Without taking up time." Sure, it's a beautiful song about traveling through the centuries, but it's also saying, "Hurry up and finish the film, you god damned hack."
But "Time Bandits" got me to "Brazil" and "The Fisher King" and "12 Monkeys", also "Monty Python and the Holy Grail", and "A Fish Called Wanda", and so many others. Good times. But anyway, back to HandMade films. I also watched "Mona Lisa" this past week, that's one of theirs, and so is tomorrow's film "Withnail and I". I tried to block out the clips from tomorrow's film shown in "An Accidental Studio", because I didn't want to spoil anything. So I'll fill in those gaps tomorrow.
By 1986 HandMade had become as much of a boutique distributor as an independent film studio, so some directors were bringing finished films to the studio, while others were seeking financing. While much of the company was struggling with the disaster that became "Shanghai Surprise", Neil Jordan snuck in there and quietly made "Mona Lisa" on a tiny budget, and damn, but it's a work of genius by comparison. A couple of American movies like "Five Corners" and "Checking Out" just needed distribution, after being turned down by every other Hollywood studio, and Handmade was happy to scoop them up for their slate. The studio would go on to have one more minor hit, "How to Get Ahead in Advertising", and one more major hit, "Nuns on the Run", but by this point the writing was on the wall, most of the Pythons had moved on to make movies elsewhere, and the studio was set to close up shop. Mission accomplished, I guess?
George Harrison ended up being the executive producer on 23 films, three of which received Oscar nominations. Harrison also frequently made cameos in those films, like in "Life of Brian" he was in a crowd scene, and in "Shanghai Surprise" he played a nightclub singer, and in "Water" he played - get this - a guitarist in a band! In the film "Checking Out" he played a janitor, and you wouldn't even see him if you weren't looking. You can do all this and probably have a fun time, if you're the one funding the whole production.
The general consensus is that Handmade Films was lucky to stay in business for 11 years - perhaps this is because there was usually more money going out the door than coming in, I'll bet. But this makes me feel a little proud of myself, because I've been managing an independent animation studio for almost 30 years now, and so I'm going to just take a moment tonight and pat myself on the back. Now I've jinxed it, the studio could fold next week. But still, I've kept it going for nearly three times longer than Handmade Films - apparently our secret is we've never had a huge success, that's the kiss of death apparently. I'm kidding, to a certain degree - I produced one animated feature that was in the Dramatic Competition at Sundance in 1998, that film was called "I Married a Strange Person". That's a pretty big deal, and three years later I was back at Sundance with a film titled "Mutant Aliens" that was in the Midnight Madness section. Still counts as a Sundance film. Now a new feature that I was the studio manager on is called "My Love Affair with Marriage", and it's currently burning up the festival circuit, though I'm no longer employed by the production company that made it. But it's won 9 awards already in France and Norway and Romania, and it played in the Tribeca Festival here in NY. It's not qualified for the Oscars this year, but maybe next year, we'll see - you better believe I'm putting that film on my resumé.
Also starring Steve Abbott, George Ayoub, Ralph Brown (last seen in "Gemini Man"), Dick Clement, Ray Cooper, Julian Doyle, Mike Edmonds, Terry Gilliam (last seen in "Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain"), Richard E. Grant (last seen in "Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard"), Terry Ilott, Terry Jones, Neil Jordan, Barrie Keeffe, Ian La Frenais, David Leland, Richard Loncraine, Jonathan Lynn, A Martinez, Denis O'Brien, Michael Palin (last seen in "The Death of Stalin"), Bruce Robinson, Cathy Tyson (also carrying over from "Mona Lisa"), Brenda Vaccaro (last seen in "You Don't Know Jack"), Ernest Vincze, Jonathan Wacks, Stephen Woolley,
with archive footage of Kenny Baker (also carrying over from "Mona Lisa"), Michael Caine (ditto), Robbie Coltrane (ditto), Jack Purvis (ditto), Alan Bennett, Humphrey Bogart (last seen in "The Many Saints of Newark"), Jim Broadbent (last seen in "Einstein and Eddington"), Pierce Brosnan (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Jim Carter (last seen in "The Good Liar"), Graham Chapman, Eric Clapton (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), George Harrison (ditto), Elton John (ditto), John Lennon (ditto), Valerie Perrine (ditto), Gene Shalit (ditto), John Cleese (last heard in "Trolls"), Sean Connery (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Billy Connolly (last seen in "The Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day"), Jeff Daniels (last seen in "Howl"), Bernard Delfont, Malcolm Dixon, Shelley Duvall (last seen in "The Portrait of a Lady"), Denholm Elliott (last seen in "The Boys from Brazil"), Gary Farmer, Richard Griffiths (last seen in "About Time"), Ian Holm (last seen in "The Last of the Blonde Bombshells"), Eric Idle, Jon Lord, Joanna Lumley (last seen in "She's Funny That Way") John Mackenzie, Madonna (last seen in "Weird: The Al Yankovic Story"), Paul McCartney (ditto), Paul McGann, Helen Mirren (last seen in "Berlin, I Love You"), Sean Penn (last seen in "The Gunman"), Pete Postlethwaite (last seen in "The Constant Gardener"), Randy Quaid (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), David Rappaport, Tiny Ross, Peter Sellers (last seen in "The Last Blockbuster"), Maggie Smith (last seen in "Nanny McPhee Returns"), Ringo Starr (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Michael Tucker, Craig Warnock, Frank Whaley (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor")
RATING: 7 out of 10 religious protests
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