Gilliamesque

by Terry Gilliam

  It wasn’t too long before I was on the move again. I loved the painting, drawing and sculpture classes, and the main professor – Robert Hansen – was a brilliant artist. He’d been to India and was what you might call an enlightened human being – there were certainly, I wouldn’t say religious, but definitely spiritual qualities to his work. He always liked what I did, but I could tell he felt I was spending too much time cartooning for quick laughs – ‘Showtime . . . Ta-dah!’ – when I was capable of doing something deeper. The art history teacher on the other hand was boring as shit. And I must’ve abandoned his course just in time, because now I’m very interested in art history.

  In the end – and benefiting from a large measure of tolerance on the part of both scholarship and college authorities – I found myself majoring in political science, which was useful, because there were only four required courses, and you could basically design your own liberal education by choosing elective subjects like drama, oriental philosophy and even Russian (if the commies 2 really were taking over, I’d better at least learn to say ‘tovarisch’). The head of department, Raymond McKelvey, was one of those great educators who are full of ideas and energy but can still appreciate a fool – someone who maybe doesn’t have time to study for an exam, but will fake it with panache, even if that means describing ‘hegemony’ as ‘a hedge made out of money’, which was leaping years into the future, as nobody even knew about hedge funds yet.

  From the moment I arrived at Occidental, I was constantly designing sets and costumes for theatrical productions, as well as appearing on stage – generally in the kind of that were all the pythons would ever trust me with later on broad supporting roles. I got huge laughs playing this slightly camp character in a college revue – or ‘fraternity sing’ as we called them – a triumph undimmed by either the subsequent discovery that what was really amusing the audience was the fact that my flies were undone, or the coining of the popular sobriquet ‘Sir Terence of the Open Fly’. I like to try to dignify this memory by suggesting that this photo could be a still from an early German Expressionism-influenced Orson Welles film.

  Before I settled on my third and final choice of major, I also had to go through a process of social transformation. One of the reasons media revelations about waterboarding and all those things never caused too much of a ripple in the mainstream of American public opinion is that so many people have been through something quite similar in the course of fraternity ‘hazing’ rituals. In order to become a member of the ‘Sig-Al’ family, there was a whole week where you were forced to wear sackcloth underwear and clean the toilets with toothbrushes – among other degradations. Maybe this was where the kind of people who ended up in the CIA got their ideas from.

  The fact that, as freshmen, most of you have probably just left home for the first time only adds to everyone’s sense of disorientation and vulnerability. The sleep deprivation you had to go through – where older students would come in and turn the lights on, and you’d all have to get up from the hard floor you were allowed to sleep on because one of you was talking – was certainly quite effective at making you want to kill the person they told you was responsible. And they’d do that night after night, so you’re going to classes the next day in your scratchy burlap underwear feeling totally destroyed.

  At the same time, you do get through it, and I suppose there must be a certain deadening of feeling involved. I know similar things used to go on in the English public schools that my fellow Pythons went to, and I’ve often heard it said that this process of brutalisation automatically produces brutal people, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. To me, it all depends on the way the brutalisation is administered. If it’s meted out with a sense of humour, and an awareness that this is just a gauntlet that has to be run as a prelude to some kind of social acceptance, then the cruelty of it can be a vehicle for creativity.

  No doubt many readers will have asked themselves how a fine figure of man like Terry Gilliam could have avoided modelling professionally at some point in his career. Here are the result of what – astonishingly, I’m sure you will agree – proved to be a one-off outing as clothes horse. The san Fernando Valley hot spot, the Munroe’s Mens & Boys Shop, was based in Panorama City, and my fellow mannequins were old school friends, Dick and Dave. We were just local college boys – innocents caught up in a misfiring campaign to lend credibility to a potentially incendiary combination of man-made fibres.

  That 100 percent high bulk cardigan is completely washable – just like Terry himself. I think our biggest problem here was that none of us know what to do with with our hands.

  By the time I got to my junior year at Occidental, the boot was on the other foot. I’d developed my own ideas of how the authority of these rituals could be put to subversive use. Oxy has a large Greek amphitheatre, and a group of us used it to stage a huge initiation ceremony for all the freshmen – first gathering them together for a torchlight parade, and then laying on this whole elaborate, solemn ceremony with music and chanting to indoctrinate them in the ‘traditions of the school’ – a series of outrageous fabrications, all of which we had come up with the day before.

  In effect, we were conducting a large-scale human experiment to see if Joseph Goebbels’ propagandist concept of the ‘Big Lie’ really worked, and somewhat alarmingly I have to report that it does (or at least it did). Our entirely fictitious notions of the college’s history and heritage persisted unquestioned by those freshmen for years but, much more disturbingly, also by many in the senior classes who should have known better. How I came to be in a position to warp the mind of an entire generation of students was through the operations of the Bengal Board – an organisation charged with custodianship of that rather nebulous-sounding resource of ‘school spirit’ (something Goebbels was also very big on). Basically, it was a step on from high school cheerleading, one which happily no longer required us to become honorary girls, but instead involved making huge and elaborate floats for parades using giant wire-mesh frames and huge quantities of papier-mâché.

  Jumping around and getting everyone enthused is something I’ve always been pretty good at – it’s certainly a knack which has served me well in initial funding meetings with Hollywood studios – and this was my first taste of how much fun you could have by subordinating an established institution to your own more playful agenda (which was pretty much what Monty Python ended up doing at the BBC). The kindred spirits I met up with through the Bengal Board – Art Mortimer and the two Johns, Latimer and Massey – would be my partners in crime throughout my time at college and beyond.

  Everything we were doing was for laughs, and we became kind of cool – everybody seemed to want to be worker bees to help put our various schemes into practice. I’m not saying the power went to our heads, but on one occasion where there had been some kind of infraction, I remember sitting looking out of the window with my back to the perpetrator, knowing the backlighting would serve me well. At the moment I swivelled around in my chair, like some college boy Dr Evil, the poor guy was shivering with social anxiety.

  These are the ‘words of year’ from a graphic in an old college yearbook. We were just looking for funny things to get people to shout out during a football game, and at one point, when I was on the microphone and trying to get everyone to ‘Give me a “Fleck”’, my bad enunciation somehow got 1,000 people shouting ‘Fuck!’ It was wonderful, although I did have a bit of explaining to do afterwards – after all, this was only 1960 and such robust Anglo-Saxon language had yet to become publicly acceptable.

  It would be stretching a point silghtly to say that after an adolescence characterised by socially responsible community endeavour, Occidental saw my creativity being set free by the idle rich. But the students there did basically fall into two categories – they were either smart (hardworking scholarship kids like Dick Hallen, the minister’s son who was my freshman roomie), or they came from the kind of wealthy backgrounds that meant they could buy their way in.
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  The bulk of the students in Swan Hall, the dormitory where I laid my head for whatever brief interludes of sleep occurred in my second year, fell into the latter category. And although the disadvantageous impact of privilege on character has been well documented, I found myself drawn to the confidence with which these scions of the American establishment carried themselves. Practical jokes were the ultimate expression of their habitual ease, and from the simpler ones – medical students leaving a naked cadaver sitting in one of the quads, or toilet-papering all the trees – to more complex conspiracies to fill a room with crushed newspapers or reassemble a dismantled Model T Ford car inside someone’s room and have the motor running when they came in, I marvelled at the jokers’ comedic inventiveness and chutzpah.

  If they got themselves thrown out, they could always go to another school, that was kind of the attitude. I wasn’t willing to take risks on that level, but I did find my energy and enthusiasm increasingly drifting away from my academic studies towards extra-curricular activities, such as orchestrating a huge campaign to get our little gang’s candidate Art Mortimer elected as president of the student body. I remember feeling especially happy about the banners proclaiming ‘The People Want Art’, and, as if to deliver on that four-word manifesto, we got hold of these huge rolls of butcher’s paper and wall-papered the Student Union building with cartoons and slogans and other manifestations of our ungovernable spirit of youthful mischief.

  This did bring us to the attention of the dean, but the disciplinary process never had to go further than an uncomfortable chat in his office. And in my last year at Occidental – when Art, John, John and I took over a previously quite serious art and poetry journal called Fang, which under our guidance was rapidly transformed into a showcase for scabrous gags and unfettered cartooning – we finally found the right vehicle for our collective sense of satirical joie de vivre.

  In the years since I’d been caught red-handed ‘reading’ Mad in the garage, my comic book super-hero Harvey Kurtzman had fallen out with its publisher and left in high dudgeon with the bulk of the magazine’s best artists in tow. After a couple of false starts, Help!, the new satirical magazine he started in New York in 1960, rapidly assumed the same dominant position in my early-twenties consciousness that Mad had occupied during my teens. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, it seemed our only responsible option was to try to copy it.

  Other less blatant sources of inspiration for what we tried to do with Fang included the (then) fertile landscape of American kids’ TV and the many voices of the great mimic and improvisational comedian Jonathan Winters – who we all loved impersonating. I suppose there’s a fairly obvious correlation between a broad comic accent and a cartoon – both take recognisable features and expand them into something else, and both offer you a way of escaping from yourself without having to reveal too much of the real you.

  Here are a couple of my Fang covers – the first was a kind of Hansel and Gretel thing, with evil dwarves killing rabbit. The other one found me doctoring an old photo to come up with Fang’s new tooth-inspired logo, which was much less work and therefore obviously the way to go in the future.

  By the same token, one reason students tend to like watching kids’ TV shows is probably because even though you know you’re technically too old for them, they offer you a link back to the reassuring world of childhood. Thus at five o’clock in the afternoon the whole dorm would settle down to enjoy the many custard pies of Soupy Sales, or repeats of Albert Einstein’s favourite handpuppet show – Stan Freberg and Bob Clampett’s Time for Beany. It wasn’t just televisual comfort food either – kids’ shows often tended to be the most interesting, because the adults at the networks weren’t likely to be paying attention, so you could get away with murder . . . just as the proto-Python children’s programme Do Not Adjust Your Set would do when I came to England a few years later.

  Fang’s most blatant steal from Help! were the fumetti. That lovely-sounding word – go on, roll it round your tongue – is Italian for ‘puffs of smoke’, which in this context is a more poetic way of saying ‘speech bubble’. The idea came from a wonderful Fellini film starring Alberto Sordi called Lo Sceicco Bianco (a.k.a. The White Sheik) – which made lustrously cinematic hay out of the Latin vogue for romantic photostories – and Harvey Kurtzman’s stroke of genius was to apply the medium satirically.

  He’d always wanted to make films, and this way he could mirror the ambition and scope of a major Hollywood production on only a tiny fraction of the budget. As we soon discovered when we started doing them in Fang, fumetti were effectively stop-motion movies: a great cinematic training ground, not only in storytelling but also in making sets and costumes, and finding locations and actors. I loved creating these films in still form so much that I almost didn’t graduate.

  I abused my editorial power by giving the lead role in our fumetti to Susan Boyle – not the singer, but the girl in my year who I was mad about. But she never seemed to get the message, even when I made us a joint ‘electrical’ plug costume for a fancy-dress party. Everyone else was quite – ahem – shocked that I would do something so blatant. (I was the male plug, and she was the socket: who said true romance was dead?) The symbolism didn’t elude her, it just didn’t translate into action.

  Alert readers who have speculated that the sexual revolution had yet to reach the campus of Occidental College have certainly put their finger on it (which wouldn’t have been allowed in those days). The single-sex dormitory doors clanged shut at ten, and it was a real adventure just to sneak out and get a snog. As frustrating as this was at the time, I don’t think it was a bad thing. I went back years later to get an honorary degree, and by that time all the dorms were co-ed. Of course everyone was getting laid, but a lot of clever people were throwing their lives away by getting hitched too early too. I said to the students in my speech that if I was running the place, I would make it so Victorian that they’d all hate me . . . but in the end having to outwit me in order to give in to their basic instincts would make them stronger, cleverer people.

  ‘Homo-side Story’ was John Latimer’s idea – it was all good, gentle fun in a way you probably couldn’t get away with now. We’d be out on the streets of LA shooting with all the paraphernalia of actual filmmaking (including as many extras as we could talk into it) except the movie camera and the sound.

  The area around the old downtown site of the Angel s Flight funicular railway – as seen here – was one of our favourite locations, because we could get on with what we wanted to do in the reasonable expectation that no one would bother us. It’s subsequently been redeveloped out of existence, so good luck to anyone planning to make a mildly homophobic remake of West Side Story there today.

  As sheltered and carefree as my four years at college must sound (and do feel) in retrospect, I wasn’t living in a Brideshead Revisited bubble. I think one of the reasons my parents were so tolerant of my plummeting academic grades was that I never came whining to them for extra money. And the lessons I learned in the course of the motley assemblage of holiday jobs that helped me pay my way through college would prove just as enduring as the things I was being taught at Occidental.

  My dad got me work humping stuff around on building sites, and I also worked in a butcher’s shop for a while, inevitably at the very bottom of the food chain – when you found yourself cleaning out the big barrels of salt beef (from the inside), you knew the only way was up. I also used to have to go into the walk-in freezer, which was always tricky because if you didn’t pay attention you’d find yourself impaled on one of those spikes that the meat hung from. A job in a restaurant posed more danger to the diners than to me, as I was basically there to swab floors and clean up messes, but when the salad boy was off, they’d make me do his job as well, so one minute I would be down on the floor, scrubbing away with some awful disinfectant, and then somebody would say ‘salad with vinaigrette’, and I’d leap up and with my filthy hands scoop up the lettuce, throw it into
the bowl, and put the dressing on. I’ve often wondered how many customers died from that.

  I also found gainful employment at the post office, where the game was to see how far away you could stand from the sorting cubicles and still throw the mail into the correct section, and as a shipping clerk in a factory which made beauty- salon furniture, packing huge lounge chairs and hoisting them onto the trucks (I loved the fact that – Archimedes-like – I could lever these wooden behemoths into their motorised receptacles single-handed). At this time I was also becoming a real freak for Russian literature in general and Dostoevsky in particular, so I’d sit there huddled among the crates with my little packed lunch reading The Brothers Karamazov – when the Soviet invasion finally came, I was going to be first in line to welcome them: ‘Comrade, I know your books, as well as your language.’

  While the long-promised communist takeover stubbornly refused to materialise, the job that would impact most explicitly on my subsequent creative endeavours was on the assembly-line night shift at the Chevrolet car plant – going in at eight in the evening and working through until five the next day. The nightmarish production lines that often cropped up in Monty Python animations were certainly inspired by this experience. Not so much because the repetitive and regimented nature of the work itself gave me any particular problems – Sisyphus was always my favourite classical character – but more because the pressure to keep up with the pace of the line did interesting things to your mind.