Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  It wasn’t so much him refusing to make me an Eagle Scout which really pissed me off – though that was bad enough – as the fact that these bureaucratic fuckers were effectively accusing me of lying. Didn’t they know that the lying skills would only come later in life (you can’t make films if you can’t lie), and you certainly don’t get a badge for them?

  At that far-off juncture in my life, the Christian ideals of justice and morality I had been taught in Bible school were still holding firm. So when the scouting bigwigs finally confirmed that they had no intention of admitting their mistake, my response was to say – not in so many words, as such foul-mouthed insubordination would come later, but this was definitely the underlying gist of it: ‘Well, in that case, I am no longer a scout of any kind. Goodbye, and fuck you.’

  It would be stretching a point to describe this moment as the beginning of my life-long struggle against injustice, but I do remember sitting in the scouts’ review board – which is sort of like a military court-martial, except you don’t get shot at the end – with my hands in front of me on the desk, imagining that I was playing the piano. It was an incredibly vivid sensation; related to later flying dreams, but not wholly overlapping, and less an out-of-body than an extended-body experience, as my hands felt like they were a million miles away and yet still connected to my arms.

  It took me twelve hours to get this Phantom look, using the same techniques as Lon Chaney. I’d read up all about Lon and his clever use of Collodion – which had previously been used for sealing wounds – and then built the layers up with cotton.

  A lot of kids my age would have been alarmed by such a strange feeling of bodily alienation, but I found it fascinating. It was probably no coincidence that in later life I would end up marrying a make-up artist, because from an early age I was very intrigued – in a Lon Chaney-esque rather than Liberace-ish way – by the changes in people’s appearance that could be effected cosmetically. Not just for the potential for mischief in putting on a disguise, or for the act of transformation itself, but more for the combination of the two. I suppose it was the idea of what you might get away with on the journey to becoming something different that excited me.

  I wore my creation to a Halloween party with a bag over my head like Lon’s MAN OF MYSTERY. One girl pulled it off and she just screamed and ran… That’s how I seduced women in those days, and to be fair to her (and me), I did look genuinely horrific. I suppose at seventeen years old it’s nice to be confident that you’re only getting that reaction because of the make-up. And thanks to Michael Crawford and Andrew Lloyd Webber, the Phantom of the Opera is now recognised as a great romantic lead, so maybe I was just ahead of my time.

  This biblical character took even longer to sort out. I can’t remember if he was meant to be Moses or John the Baptist. Either way, it was a role Charlton Heston would have relished. I know what you’re thinking: ‘How on earth did this fine upstanding young man grow up to be in Monty Python’s Life of Brian?’

  The funny thing was that my single-minded dedication to achieving those effects probably – in terms of mischief at least – closed far more doors than it opened. My mum’s diary captioned her photographic record of my most phantasmagoric transmogrification as follows: ‘This is Terry as the Phantom of the Opera . . . he had all the girls screaming and afraid to get near him.’

  It’s possible that there was subconscious method in my Lon Chaney madness. As keen as I was to extend my as yet woefully limited (come on, this was the 1950s – and as the great reproductive historian Philip Larkin pointed out, sex wasn’t properly invented till 1963) portfolio of erotic experience, my mum’s diary also mentioned me reassuring her that I had no intention of becoming ‘seriously involved with a woman’ for the foreseeable future because I had ‘too much left to accomplish’.

  With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that looks a little pompous, but as high school drew towards its close, there was definitely a sense that nesting time was at hand. Girls were getting themselves knocked up and guys were getting themselves trapped.

  I understand how when you’re eighteen years old and wondering what you’re going to do on leaving school, getting married and having kids (not necessarily in that order) can look like a short-cut to becoming a grown-up, but I saw a lot of really smart people get stuck up that particular cul-de-sac, and I was always adamant that this sorry fate would not be mine. I wouldn’t say that I was actively keeping myself pure, more that girls were helping me to achieve that goal, despite my best efforts.

  Looking at the way me and my friends Met Metcalfe, Richard Lotts and Bob and George McDill, the sons of the minister Rev’d McDill [far right], the man who would eventually help me get a Presbyterian college scholarship, are standing in this photos – in a kind of arrowhead – you might be tempted to think ‘Gillison the Leader!’ I probably was the nominal head of the church youth group we all belonged to, but that didn’t cut too much ice with lois Smith, the girl (standing, appropriately enough, in the centre) we all had the hots for. I wasn’t a sensualist in those days – I think Mel and Richard had made more progress than I had in that direction. They’re both much more tanned than me, and Mel was quite smooth and ended up being a sound mixer in Hollywood. I presume the book we’re all holding might be a prayer guide for young people wanting to know how to keep clean and pure – I certainly needed one.

  Mel and Richard aside, most of my best friends in high school were Jewish. They tended to live up in the slightly more well-to-do town of Sherman Oaks, and their parents were often involved in the film business, either as editors, or working on the accounting side. But much as the voice in my head was honing its heady mantra of ‘Hollywood! Hollywood! Hollywood!’, the question of how my own mundane reality could somehow be made to intersect with that impossibly glamorous realm – so physically close, yet so practically distant – was no closer to finding an answer.

  My dad still stubbornly refused to find work in the movie industry, inexplicably choosing to spend his working life constructing pre-fab movable office partitions. It never once occurred to me that he might find this occupation as tedious as I did – an oversight on my part which can probably be ascribed in equal parts to my dad’s dignified, craftsman-like approach to the need to put food on the family table, and my own adolescent egotism.

  The one upside of my dad’s job was that he’d come home with these giant 8-foot by 4-foot cardboard boxes that his pre-fab partitions came in, which were great for making stage sets with – you’d have this huge slab of a thing that took paint beautifully. All you had to do was stick a frame on it and it was practically a canvas. I was constantly laying these things out on the patio at the back of our house, rushing against the clock to finish some ludicrously over-ambitious school project or other. My parents would always be there to help me through when I needed more hands to get a job done. Far from resenting me for these demands, they seemed to really enjoy it – marvelling at the fact that there was this kid living in their house who was so excited about having all these ideas and making all these things.

  By the time my junior prom came around, I was building this huge castle out of cardboard boxes for the set. Inevitably, the project fell behind schedule – though luckily there were no studio executives on hand to pull the plug – to the extent that by the time my classmates were arriving with all their tuxes and corsages immaculately in place, I was still rushing around the hall covered in paint.

  A year later, the famous jazz musician Stan Kenton played at our senior prom, which probably wasn’t where his ambitions would have lain at the start of his career.

  This not-remotely embarrassing appearance in a local newspaper’s ‘Teen of the Week’ spot reassures those who might have worried about me appearing insufficiently clear-cut that my cartooning is only a ‘hobby’ and I ‘do not plan a career in the art world’, preferring to focus my energies on higher-minded philanthropic goals of the kind with which my name is now rarely, if ever, associated.

 
How did I come to be trapped in such a suffocating web of civic virtue? Sporting mediocrity probably had something to do with it. I was reasonably athletic at school and had always remembered myself – perhaps encouraged by the local print media’s wildly inaccurate description of me – as a ‘pole vaulting star’. Sadly, mediocrity had a firm grasp on my skinny legs and I never rose above the ‘B’ team. Still, I sported a cool ‘Balboa’ hairstyle (crew cut top, Fonzie-like back and sides) to distract from my failings.

  Obviously sporting achievement has a much higher social value at school than academic excellence. I think that is one truth that holds good equally on both sides of the Atlantic. And if I wasn’t going to be in the forefront of the action on the field of play itself, there was one other option, a strategy to which any red-blooded American adolescent male could not help but feel himself drawn: I became a cheerleader, inserting myself between the crowds in the bleachers and the ‘jocks’ tens of yards further out on the playing field.

  As a pole vaulter, I made a pretty good physical comedian. The worst thing that can happen to you in that athletic discipline is to come down straddling the crossbar. It is as painful as it looks, and I suffered this indignity, all too often, invariably (or so it seemed to me) with a large crowd gathered watching in the stands. On those occasions, I found the secret was to round the humiliation off with a nice little showbiz flourish – ‘Ta daah!’ That way you could win the public over and turn the whole situation in your favour, much in the same way as (say, for the sake of argument) an incompetent magician might redeem themselves by getting a laugh out of the failure of a trick.

  I had always sung in the church chow - following my mother’s and grandmother’s leads – and how better to adapt and expand that primal impulse to collective music-making than to surround myself with the pom–pom waving cream of Birmingham High School’s pulchritudinous crop of senior cheerleaders? Naturally there was an element of emotional awkwardness involved, in that however much we fancied the girls, they were only ever interested in the jocks who were actually on the football team, but at least we could lurk yearningly in their midst.

  Observant readers may well have found their eyes being drawn to the good-sized Bs adorning the alluring frontage of my fellow cheerleaders. In case anyone was wondering, the ‘B’ stood for ‘Braves’. Birmingham High School was one of many US institutions to include Native American imagery as part of the rich stew of iconography upon which mid-century sports fans were invited to dine. Lurking at the left-hand edge of the yearbook (page 33) – as if about to be edged out into the margins of history – you can see the beautiful ceremonial head-dress that was brought out on grand sporting occasions. This was later banished to the back-rooms by a new kind of McCarthyism – one which deemed such powerful and aesthetically meaningful historical images ‘derogatory’. The ‘Brave’ in this case was none other than Larry Bell, who went on to become a famous sculptor in the 1960s and ’70s, and interestingly is one of the cut-out figures on the cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

  Cheerleading in animated form via the school newspaper. These ‘trophies’ are pretty basic, but there is some character in them. As you can see, I’m still refining my signature at this point – the big V in the middle was an experiment I soon dropped out of a prudent desire not to emphasise the fact that my middle name was (and is) Vance. Why do you think I blessed my own progeny with the middle names Rainbow, Thunder and Dubois? I’d suffered for my parents’ thoughtless disregard for naming convention, so why shouldn’t they?

  Pondering my collection of high school badges, it’s interesting how large the kind of heraldic imagery I would later explore on film loomed. By the time I was an American film-maker in Britain some years later, people found it strange and anachronistic that an upstart colonial would have such an interest in the knights of the round table. Yet this stuff was actually the common currency of my education – and once you got to college, with all the fraternities vying for your attention with their fancy Greek names, things would get even more classical.

  The Tiger actually came from college a little later on, but check out the natty blue chariot on a pink and grey background, which was the beermat-like insignia of my senior class, The Phaetons. The original Phaeton, as the classical scholars among you will already know, lost control of the sun chariot in a bid to prove himself the son of a deity – not an example I would be following in any way.

  By the time I was in my final year of high school, a complex overlapping network of school, church, sporting and charitable organisations seemed to be forming a kind of protective cocoon from which a grown-up, responsible Terry Gilliam – at once a man of action and a pillock of the community – would inevitably emerge. One day I was approached by several girls, who turned out to be the behind-the-scenes kingmakers, asking if they could put me forward as a candidate for student body president. I had no ambitions along these lines, but I find it hard to say ‘No’ to lovely ladies, so I agreed, and before I knew what hit me I was banging a gavel and pretending to be in charge. Again, I had no knowledge of what was required to lead the student body and had to learn as I went along while pretending I knew exactly what the job entailed.

  Here I am with the Knights of Birmingham High School – committed to the preservation of high school law and order but secretly itching to work in conjunction with ‘Ladies’ My friend Steve Geller is the one holding the left-hand end of the banner.

  In my new position of unasked-for authority in my final year at Birmingham High School, I began to feel the tug of some of the dark undercurrents swirling beneath the supposedly still waters of the late 1950s. As student body president, you were inundated with reams of right-wing propaganda from conservative lobbying groups like the John Birch Society, whose logo incorporated the Statue of Liberty with the word ‘communism’ as a snake entwining it. If we didn’t all change our ways, America would be under communist control within the decade, there was no doubt about it. And as for the threat black men posed to decent white women . . . well, it was no wonder all those guys were getting lynched in the South.

  I used to get into big arguments about all this ridiculous bullshit. A sense of injustice seemed to be bubbling under everywhere you looked, and when you think of what was going on in the cinema around that time – from High Noon to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory – it was basically all these lefties and commies showing how much more humane they were than the people who wanted them to stop making films.

  If only my high school valedictorian’s speech has been recorded for posterity, you wouldn’t have to take my word for just how politically revolutionary it was… Not!

  ith the help of a Presbyterian church alumni scholarship specifically designed for golden children like myself, I attended a very fine university. Occidental College was as Ivy League as you could get on the West Coast; they used to call it ‘the Princeton of the West’. Barack Obama would study there a few (oh, alright then, twenty . . . ) years later – which may or not be a recommendation, depending on your point of view. Either way, with only 1,200 students it was a lot smaller than my high school, and the campus in Eagle Rock – just forty-five minutes away from Panorama City, but there was no reason to go home except during the holidays – was a beautiful place to be.

  It’s a testament to what a great job Occidental did for me that I arrived a ferociously well-motivated, high-achieving eighteen-year-old, on what was technically a missionary scholarship, and left four years later as a directionless ne’er-do-well with an academic record of stunning mediocrity. I’m not being remotely sarcastic when I say that, because the opportunities I was given to broaden my understanding of the world and experiment with different ways of looking at it are still standing me in good stead to this day. It saddens me greatly that so many twenty-first-century students are too hemmed in by career worries and pressures of debt to enjoy the kind of liberating academic experience that my time at college brought me.

  There was an amazing se
nse of freedom involved in escaping from everything I’d known before and throwing myself into a totally new environment. What I’d initially thought I was hoping to get out of Occidental was a career that would give me a legitimate reason to see the world while feeling fairly confident that I was doing something to make it a better place. Becoming a missionary was one possibility, as I’d arrived at Oxy with the full weight of the church behind me, but diplomat would have done me just as well – I wasn’t talking to Jesus every day, so it wouldn’t be essential for me to work for him directly.

  What I ended up leaving with was something much more valuable: the ability to question some – if not all – of the assumptions I’d grown up with, and to carry on questioning them if I didn’t like the look of the answers I was getting. If this sounds like a process of disillusionment, that’s not quite right. It felt more like an expansion of possibilities, and one that was historically aligned with a broader opening out within American society.

  In the more restrictive atmosphere of the 1950s, all the most powerful forces around you – family, science, design, the church – seemed to be ushering you in the same direction as far as the future was concerned. But at some point in the next decade, all the signposts suddenly seemed to be pointing to different destinations, and for me, college was the start of a feeling – not so much of alarm, more of excitement – that I was going down a new road, which my education up to that point hadn’t really prepared me for.

  This mood of flux initially expressed itself in a series of rapid shifts in my educational focus. I arrived at Occidental as a physics major, maths and science being the kinds of things we studied in America after the war. It was all about building the technology of the future, and patriots had to step up to the plate as escaped Nazis couldn’t run our space programme on their own for ever. But within a couple of months I’d realised that college-level physics was a different animal to the one I was used to. It was just too abstract and difficult for a simple creature like me, so I switched horses to fine art in midstream. (I always preferred the practical and physical, yet have never stopped being seduced by ideas and ideals that are utterly abstract; ideas like freedom, democracy, truth, God; ideas that people are willing to do the most physical of activities to defend – namely killing those who disagree with them – so it’s lucky I’ve not been the man of action I once wanted to believe I was.)