Gilliamesque Read online

  In my own defence, I was as caught up as everyone else in the innocent euphoria of the times. So if there was a lot of confusion and disappointment involved when I started to suspect that everything was being compromised, it wasn’t so much the naming of the animals that was the problem as the misuse of those names once we’d come up with them. Like when that ultimate symbol of automotive radicalism the ‘Dodge Rebellion’ was first unveiled – ‘OK, be wild, but be it in a Dodge.’

  Suddenly everything was being commodified, and once an act has to have a particular object attached to validate it, then it isn’t the same act any more. I think what it ultimately comes down to is not being able to be sure of the line between what you’re really experiencing and what has been programmed into you. These days I’d call this a ‘Philip K Dick moment’, but at that point I had yet to read any of the visionary books Dick was churning out at an astonishing pace just up the California coast in San Francisco. As it was, I’d just be walking along the beach in Venice or Santa Monica – hand in hand with the woman I loved, the waves lapping and gulls crying – not being sure if this seemed wonderful because it actually was wonderful, or because I had seen so many ads that said it was.

  The gimmick was that you didn’t have to add water to it, and we did some very funny radio commercials where people were calling up as if to Alcoholics Anonymous admitting they couldn’t stop sneaking down in the middle of the night to do just that.

  Working in the advertising industry is not conducive to the survival of idealism – with regard to advertising itself, as much as life in general. There was one huge campaign we did for a brand of split-pea soup, which Joel and I had a lot of fun with and put a great deal of creative energy into. ‘Save our Soup’ – that was one of the slogans.

  Unfortunately the whole campaign was a complete disaster, because the company had failed to get the soup onto the shelves of the supermarkets in the areas where the ads were running – it was like screening a trailer for a film that never actually came out.

  Another Carson/Roberts account I worked on, which put down useful markers for future trauma, was Universal Films. There’s nothing in the Cahiers du Cinéma about making ads for cheesy exploitation flicks being perfect training for the budding auteur, but it certainly worked out that way for me. Apart from encouraging you to break other people’s films down to their constituent parts in your mind, it also teaches you not to be too precious. I remember Joel and I being very pleased with a tag line we came up with for a Don Siegel (no relation) cop drama called Madigan – ‘Once he was happy . . . now he’s Madigan’ – and that was one of our good ones!

  I couldn’t find Madigan, but King’s Pirate and The Perils of Pauline occupy a similarly illustrions place in the cinematic pantheon.

  By the end of a year or so at Carson/Roberts, my standards were slipping. I’d arrive late in the morning – maybe 11-ish – then go out for lunch at 12.30, and not come back for a full three hours. In short, my inner malingerer was stirring into slothful life – it was just like being in the army, but without having to draw charcoal portraits of my boss’s fiancée – and it became a race to see which would come first: me quitting or being sacked. While the judges were still waiting to call that photo-finish, a sequence of three interlocking incidents was initiated that would irrevocably change my relationship with the land of my birth. America, the country I’d called home for the first twenty-seven years of my life, was about to become somewhere I visited rather than lived.

  The first heartbreaker was the end of my love affair with Disneyland. The beginning of the big break-up was when they closed down Tom Sawyer’s Island after dusk, which had been unchaperoned with caves that were open at night, where people used to have a much more interesting time at night than perhaps they were meant to. But the clincher was when Glenys and I went to Anaheim on a press trip to check out the new ride they’d just opened. Somewhat resonantly in terms of later relationships in the film business, the name of that ride was The Pirates of the Caribbean. My disillusionment with Disney bound together for all eternity with Johnny Depp’s lapse into big-budget self-parody – Boom! How the circles close!

  We were there with another couple who were covering the story for Newsweek, and the four of us were dapper young professionals who couldn’t have been any more legit had we been there on the express orders of Richard Nixon himself. But when we arrived at the special place where the special people enter, we were told that the head of security would have to come down and vet my hair, because the guy on the gate who looked like an FBI agent had put in an alarm call.

  As I waited, seething, at the gate, I became aware – for the very first time – of the barbed wire around the entrance. Of course it had always been there, but you didn’t see it when you came in with the normal people, and such was the bliss that place prompted in me that my imagination would have probably vaulted the barbed wire even if I had noticed it. It was only on the privileged fringes that the subliminal Auschwitzness of the place started to become apparent, especially when we were informed that we weren’t going to be allowed in because ‘the company has a grooming policy’. Apparently it was in place for our own protection – to stop the ugly short-haired deformed people inside from attacking us (or words to that effect).

  The idea for Brazil was born out of several different moments of extreme alienation (it was a breech birth) and this was definitely one of them. Another was the Century City police riot of July 1967 – a lesser-known but similarly brutal foretaste of what was to come at the Chicago Democratic Convention of 1968 and on the campus of Kent State University, two years later.

  Century City was the old backlot of 20th Century Fox and, apart from the Plaza Hotel and what was left of the studios, it was basically wasteland. But LBJ was on his way and the demonstration was in full swing by the time Glenys and I stopped off there, donning our newshound hats on the way to a party. Helicopters were circling ominously overhead, there were snipers all along the roof, it was just the right atmosphere for an anti-war demonstration. As usual, the police had been primed to expect commies, drug addicts and sexual degenerates, but the crowd was actually very sedate . . . there was the odd hippie accoutrement, but it was mostly just respectable people, expressing their opinion about a war that was spiralling out of control.

  My small contribution to the public debate was this poster of a notorious incident where a disabled man had been mistreated by the police during the riot.

  The hardy souls on the front line were handing flowers to the cops, and then a group of them sat down and starting singing, ‘We shall not, we shall not be moved . . .’ That was the only signal the police needed to activate their battle-plan. All these cops on Harley Davidsons just drove straight into the crowd, paving the way for another phalanx of whatever the cop equivalent of infantry is, who just charged in from behind the flower-bedecked front line, laying about them on all sides. It happened so quickly that all I remember was being hoisted by the hair and smashed down on the ground.

  Everyone’s trying to run and suddenly you’re in the middle of this maelstrom of bodies and shouts and screams. The helicopters are coming even lower to intimidate everyone with their whump-whump-whump noise, and when you look in the eyes of the cops, you can see they’re so hyped up they’re just crazed.

  Luckily, Glenys and I managed to scramble back up on to our feet and get the hell out of there, more or less unscathed and miraculously in time for the party. I remember us seeing ourselves on the TV later on, because the ginger-haired girl who’d been standing next to me was being pulled out of the mêlée on the news. But this does seem a little bit convenient, and my memory – like most people’s – has a tendency to tidy up around the edges of a story and smooth the occasional transition, so let’s say that whether this actually happened or not, it is narratively true.

  Either way, the media reporting of this event was even less reliable than my memory of it. For the whole of the next week the Los Angeles Times was full of bullshit abou
t this serious disorder that had been deliberately started by left-wing agitators. But people were out on the streets selling the Free Press – which Michael Douglas was one of the backers of – telling a completely different (and much truer) story, about how the demonstrators were lawyers, doctors and teachers who had been subjected to a systematic assault by the very people who were paid to protect them.

  This standard-bearer seemed to have lost track of exactly what he was fighting for.

  By the end of the week, the LA Times journalists were all in revolt and it was one of those rare occasions when the truth wins out because people at the top realise how bad their bullshit is making them look. That weekend, the full story of the police riot was finally allowed to come out, and it did feel like, ‘Yes, you can change the world – something was wrong here, and now people’s determination to make it right has actually triumphed.’ Enthused by my participation in this victory for the forces of truth and justice, I decided to leave the country more or less immediately.

  The sheer hypocritical stupidity of the Vietnam War – and the frustration of experiencing this wonderful new world of freedom at the exact moment that our political system was marching blindly down this other path – was driving me nuts, and Glenys was homesick and wanted to get back to London. So she and I got in a car with Harry Shearer (later to be well known as Spinal Tap’s Derek Smalls and the voice of The Simpsons’ Mr Burns, but at that point just a buddy of mine, as one of Joel Siegel’s fellow alumni of the UCLA humour magazine) and drove east to get a flight out of New York.

  If I’d needed any more evidence – which I didn’t – of the increasingly divided and inhospitable nature of the country we were planning to leave, that car journey would provide it. We opted to take a northerly route so as to visit the Expo 67 in Montreal on the way. And during a brief stop-off in one of those motel towns in Wyoming or Montana, we went into the drugstore to buy something, and suddenly it was, ‘Uh-oh, the long-hairs have arrived.’ The moon-faced, in-bred ones didn’t like us. It was like a chilly northern version of Deliverance, or a less druggy Easy Rider – neither of which film had been made yet, so the whole alarming situation was very prophetic, at least in cinematic terms.

  An old woman screamed abuse at us in the street for a while, so we took refuge in a café and were trying to have as inconspicuous a meal as possible when a group of menacing-looking guys came in and sat in the booth next to us. After a while, one of them got up and asked, ‘Who do you think you are – Jesus? Maybe we ought to have Christmas early this year . . .’ I think he probably meant to say Easter, but the disruptively long-haired presence of myself and Harry Shearer had caused him to get his Christian commemorations in a twist.

  Is it too much to ask you to believe that the song playing on the jukebox at the time was The Beatles’ ‘All You Need Is Love’? Because that is the way I remember it, and the dates do tally. There was definitely a black couple in another booth smiling at us a little sheepishly, as if to say, ‘It was our turn for several hundred years, and now it’s yours.’

  We got the waitress to call the cops, because it really didn’t look like we were going to get out of there any other way. By the time the sheriff and his deputy had arrived and we were giving them the whole ‘We’re just passing through and don’t want no trouble . . . ’ routine (to which they responded with a less than entirely reassuring, ‘We don’t see a problem, son’), a hostile crowd was starting to gather outside, and we had to run the gauntlet of a lot of bumping and shoving to get back to our car. After a short chase through the town we eventually got back to the motel, hid the car and piled all the furniture up against all the doors and windows before sneaking out of there at dawn. If America wanted me to stay, she had a funny way of showing it.

  here my first trip to London had been all about savouring an unfamiliar sense of security, coming back there in the August of 1967 was like arriving at a costume ball. People looked extraordinary – I didn’t understand how they could be affording it, until I went to Biba and saw what good value for money that place was – and the juxtaposition of the flamboyant clothes and hairstyles of the young with the enduring formality of their elders only made the overall effect more striking.

  How you dressed at this time sent a very clear message about who you were and what your attitude to life was. My clothing seemed very plain compared to the eccentric opulence of the natives, but I suppose like all island societies the Brits were desperate for novelty to insure them against their own insularity. Either way, for a craver after hierarchical clarity such as myself – ‘That’s a king, that’s a knight, that’s a peasant . . . ’ – swinging London was paradise on earth.

  It was also exciting to be free of accountability for all the destruction America was visiting on the planet. Occasionally someone would try to make me – Jesus-like – responsible for the sins of my people, but they knew I’d abandoned my country for a reason (I had decided I was better as a cartoonist than a bomb-throwing anti-war protester, thereby saving the lives of many rioting American policemen), so they never gave me a hard time for too long. The one person who didn’t seem too pleased to see me was Glenys’ husband – this was hardly surprising as they weren’t quite divorced yet, although it had obviously been some time since they’d been a happy couple.

  I was still sending cartoons like this pre-Nietzsche Jesus home to the US to keep myself in bus tickets. I am not yet me!

  He was a successful sports journalist who described me, rather unflatteringly, as ‘a monosyllabic Minnesota farm-boy’ – a verbal barb which I have managed to blunt over the years by repeating it constantly as if I’d thought of it myself. Under the circumstances, I couldn’t blame Glenys’ soon-to-be ex for taking a dislike to me – to him I was like some GI who’d come over and stolen his woman with a couple of packs of nylons and some chewing gum.

  It’s fair to say that my entrance into English society was not at the basement level. Glenys knew a lot of people, and they were a smart and well-connected crowd, one of whom let us stay for a while in an apartment they owned in South Kensington. For my first few weeks in England – before I could start to get some work together – I was effectively a kept man.

  The first place we rented together was in Ovington Square in Knightsbridge, just a couple of blocks west of Harrods. You walked in off the street, through the main house, and straight into an artist’s studio, which was wonderful. The only catch was having to share the place with a large extended family of fleas. We had to get the whole place fumigated, but our tiny squatters were horribly resistant to all the toxic chemicals we could throw at them. The only way to get rid of the fleas was to catch them individually and break their little backs – but then, who hasn’t had house guests like that?

  I had a bunch of artwork with me and ran around London knocking on people’s doors, showing them my portfolio and saying, ‘This is what I do – any chance of giving me a job?’ One of the first people I went to see was the animator Bob Godfrey – later best-known for the brilliant children’s TV series Roobarb, but at this stage he’d caught my eye by making a film about DIY animation. Any form of cartooning was interesting to me – from the primitive flip-books I used to mess around making, to the arty European animations I’d obliged my New York friends to sit through at the Thalia cinema – but I had no clear plan of action to move into that field.

  Like Harvey Kurtzman before him, Bob turned me down flat at first. But his studio – which was on Wardour Street in Soho, near where the Marquee Club used to be – was the only place I knew, and when years later I started renting his animation camera, we quickly became firm friends. It was quite a chaotic environment, but – again like Harvey – Bob was a magnet for a lot of talented people.

  This was a very exciting time for someone who was interested in animation to be hanging around in Soho. The Dog & Duck was the pub all the top guys used to hang out in (maybe they liked the cartoony name). If you were lucky you might see one or both of the two great British–Canadi
an animators of the time in there – Richard Williams (the man behind the cartoon sequences in The Charge of the Light Brigade, who later ended up doing Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and George Dunning (who did The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine).

  The key that opened the door to me masquerading as one of their number was the discovery of the airbrush. Airbrushes had fallen out of favour among illustrators in general and at that stage were most likely to be used for touching up pictures of vacuum cleaners in sales catalogues, but from the first time I held one in my hands, I knew they were for me. At the risk of trying to present myself as the Chet Baker of the airbrush, it was like being the guy who picks up a trumpet and finds he can play it straight away.

  I wasn’t working completely in isolation, airbrush-wise – a Miles Davis and a Dave Brubeck of the medium already existed. There was a guy called Bob Grossman who used to do cartoons for the left-wing San Franciscan magazine Ramparts – he did really wonderful stuff. Once I’d bought my own I taught myself the rudiments of airbrushing technique by working backwards from pieces I had spotted in various magazines – ‘the only way he can have done this is by drawing it, then cutting this out and spraying a bit here and a bit there . . .’ – it was pretty scientific stuff.

  Alan Aldridge was also famous at that time for his work with The Beatles and others on the London psychedelic scene. He was really good, technically, but there was something about his stuff that wasn’t quite to my taste, which was lucky, because it meant I could dismiss him airily – or airbrushily, in this case. At that time, he was thought of as the Great British airbrusher, but his work seemed to go out of circulation for a few years, until his daughter put on a really brilliant exhibition at the Design Museum a few years ago and then everyone saw it afresh.