Gilliamesque
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Now is probably as good a time as any to make a full confession. . .
Telling his story for the first time, the director of Time Bandits, Brazil, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – not to mention co-founder of Monty Python's Flying Circus – recalls his extraordinary life so far. Featuring a cast of amazing supporting characters, including George Harrison, Robin Williams, Jeff Bridges, Robert De Niro, Brad Pitt, Uma Thurman, Johnny Depp, Heath Ledger and all of the fellow Pythons, Gilliamesque is a rollercoaster ride through late twentieth century popular culture. Packed with never-before-seen artwork, photographs and commentary.
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This is not the book that my daughter, Holly, and I intended. The plan was to produce a large, expensive, high-class coffee-table book of my artwork for the Cognoscenti of Fine Art. It would include a choice selection of historical tidbits for those who could read. Unfortunately, once the tape recorder started rolling I couldn’t stop babbling, and we have ended up with something closer to a Grand Theft Auto-biography: a high-speed car chase through my life with lots of skids and crashes, many of the best moments whizzing by in a blur. As a result, I have had to insert handwritten or typed notes to adjust the story, apologise for the egocentric nature of the reminiscences, name the ignored, fill in the glaring gaps, or just try to get control of my story-telling self. The Cognoscenti will have to buy something else for their coffee tables.
Unlike my good friend Michael Palin – who knew where the real pot of gold was buried from the very beginning – I have never bothered to keep a diary and, as my wife Maggie never tires of reminding me, such memory as I do have left is dangerously – if not actionably – selective. On top of this, as the years have passed, more and more of those I’ve relied upon to be custodians of our shared but forgotten experiences – wonderful warm slabs of my life – have been sadly laid out on cold slabs of their own.
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It’s the same with the radio, which was all-powerful in America at that time. There was a children’s radio show called Let’s Pretend, which was one of my very first gateways to the fantastical. It might seem a strange thing for a cartoonist to say – that radio was the medium that first taught him how to conjure up visuals – but it’s certainly true in my case. Even later on, when I started to get actively interested in animation, the name of a voiceover artist like Mel Blanc still probably meant more to me than Chuck Jones’ did. And once I started making films of my own, I loved doing the voices and sound effects every bit as much as the images.
We didn’t have a TV during the time we lived at Medicine Lake, but I do remember going round to a neighbour’s house to watch Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows. Caesar was the one commanding your attention, but I realised when I went back to that show years afterwards that it was the less prominent Carl Reiner who was truly breathtaking.
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