"Down an alley in Covent Garden, on a building that was once a banana warehouse, there is a blue plaque. Monty Python, Film Maker, Lived Here, 1976-1987, reads the inscription. It's easy to miss: the plaque is not at eye level as they normally are, but up on the first floor, almost as if the blue plaque committee lost confidence in their uncharacteristic joke. Or perhaps John Cleese put it up."
"The dates on the plaque are right, he thinks. After the success of 1975's Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which Gilliam co-directed (with Terry Jones), they had money. So he, Michael Palin and special effects whiz Julian Doyle rented this building. On the ground floor, they recorded the Monty Python albums. Upstairs was a studio where they did some of the effects for Life of Brian, like the spaceship crash."
"Terry Gilliam arrives. I like his jacket. It looks like it's been stitched together from bits of blankets. Me too, he says. I got it 30 years ago in a secondhand store in New York. We're going to wander around London, revisiting places that have played significant parts in his career, as he approaches his 85th birthday. The mother and son who worked the hotdog stall were filthy, totally Dickensian."
Terry Gilliam revisits London locations tied to his Monty Python career, beginning at a blue-plaque-marked former banana warehouse in Covent Garden. The building housed Monty Python recordings on the ground floor and a studio upstairs where effects for Life of Brian were created. Post-Holy Grail success enabled Gilliam, Michael Palin and Julian Doyle to rent the space and experiment with practical effects including exploding cigars and staged lightbulb blasts. Gilliam exhibits playful, giggling energy during the walk and frames the encounter as performance. The neighborhood has gentrified, yet memories of Dickensian vendors and a traditional armourer remain.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]