Smarter Than The Average!

Life's Too Short To Keep Talking To Executives: A Decade of Unproduced Eric Idle Projects

“I’ve got lots of projects. I love thinking of ideas and coming up with the projects; I find that much more satisfying than just staying on, trying to sell a thing I wrote years ago. I just leave ‘em there, so people can find them.” - Eric Idle, Starlog #142, May 1989.

1981 - The Pirates of Penzance: Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson reports in Prevue #44, February/March 1981, that “Idle will script and star in a $12 million film version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance. It’s unrelated to the current Broadway production starring Linda Ronstadt. Shooting is scheduled for April”. On Page 20 of the Friday the 22nd of August 1986 edition of the Evening Standard Idle said that “I actually spent a long time on a screenplay of The Pirates of Penzance for Hollywood but which was actually to be shot in Cornwall. Then they went and filmed the stage show. That’s the film business - but at least I got the cheque” The Broadway version was adapted by Universal and starred the majority of its Broadway cast, including Kevin Kline in only his second film as the Pirate King, the role Idle would have played. A illustrated copy of Idle’s screenplay resides in the BFI Library’s Special Collection. In September to November 1986 and February to April 1987 Idle appeared at The Coliseum with the English National Opera Company in Jonathan Miller’s production of another Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, The Mikado, where he played Ko-Ko, The Lord High Executioner of Titipu. It was shown on British television on ITV on Wednesday the 30th of December 1987, and in America as part of PBS’Greatest Performances series on Wednesday the 28th of October 1988. An abridged album, recorded on Sunday the 11th and Monday the 12th of October 1986 at Abbey Road EMI Studios, was released on That’s Entertainment Records in Spring 1987.

1983 - The Rutland Isles: Various drafts of a screenplay for Paramount. Idle explained to Monty Python news source The Daily Llama about this script in an article uploaded on Sunday the 9th February 2003: “At some point in the early 1980s I got the idea of doing a documentary about a group of islands that don’t exist. What a terrific idea, I thought, a story of a place. Not just the story of a few people, but whole peoples, different cultures, different ways of life. They would be called The Rutland Isles and they would be a parody of a travel documentary with weird animals. We would visit strange places and use real documentary footage. I wrote quite a lot of material and then did outlines of a visit to six of these different islands - Poluçion, Paranoia, Amnesia, Contracepçion, Revoluçion, and Liberaçion. Nobody was interested. Not agents, not friends, not people in the media, not even relatives. Not even my dog. It was weird. The reaction was nada. Zero. Zip. Fairly early on my main character became clear to me. I always heard his voice as that gentle insistent civilized informative voice of David Attenborough whose immensely popular and entertaining series on Life on Earth and its various inhabitants were just beginning on BBC TV. I had just finished writing and directing The Frog Prince for cable and I would often sit around and play guitar with Ricky Fataar and Van Dyke Parks and Charlie Dore. I began writing songs for The Rutland Isles. I find this a great way forward in any project. About 1983 we went into a studio in Santa Monica and made some very nice tracks with this bunch of friends. I had spent a lot of time on the Caribbean islands of Barbados and Trinidad and the music we made then was heavily influenced by those great times. It still remains joyful and relaxed and this recorded music has always kept my love of these Rutland islands going. Imaginary music from imaginary places”.

1983 - The Road To Mars: Various drafts of a screenplay for Embassy Pictures, and Warner Brothers. Described on Eric Idle’s 1988 press release, Eric Idle (his life), as “a science friction look at the future of Showbusiness”. Interviewed by Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson for Starlog #142, May 1989, Idle said that “I love The Road To Mars. I spent years on it. In my dreams, it was always for Robin Williams, and either Dan Aykroyd or Bill Murray, playing two comedians in space. Bowie’s trying to pick it up at the moment for him and Bob Goldthwait, with Bowie playing the sexy robot who gets all the girls. I’ve always thought Robin should play a Bob Hope character, where he would be free to comment and be free within a character. The Road To Mars was actually finalized - we had based it at $11 million many years ago, and it finally went around. Hollywood at $19 million. I wanted it to be the first space comedy, though now Mel Brooks has done Spaceballs. I always felt there was room for a space comedy, and I didn’t want to do a Star Wars parody because I don’t think that’s real. I wanted to make it reality-based, a ‘Road Film of the Future’ - that was my idea. It takes place 100 years from now. People out in these boring space stations have everything they want on video and film - what they don’t have is live entertainment. So, there are comedians going around doing shows - that’s the premise. They tour these space stations, and it’s really the pits in show business, travelling by spacecraft to go to these gigs. There is a cruise ship in the script, with all these old women, and it’s based on something that my mother said. She told her friends, ‘I’m going around the world again. This is my third time. I wish there was somewhere else to go!’ And it was perfect. I figure that in the future, the only people with time and money are the retired, who can afford to spend three years getting to Jupiter. There would be huge space cruisers, like there are ocean liners, touring with lots of little old ladies! I love that project, and always enjoyed it, but life’s too short to keep talking to executives. I turned down Paramount. They wanted to do it, but change everything. It was a classic case. They wouldn’t touch the cast of Robin Williams, Dan Aykroyd and David Bowie. They thought it was really uncommercial at the time I was doing the deal. It’s a really mad idea. These people will never sell!’ Then they wanted to alter the basic premise from comedians in space to people who remove furniture in space. I decided, ‘I don’t need this. Life’s too short.’”. Years later, during his run in The Mikado, Idle was rewriting the Little List song nightly so as to comment on topical events. It received big laughs at each performance and launched Idle’s ambition to finally create a musical of his own. The first attempt was a reworking of The Road To Mars by Idle and composer John Du Prez into a musical called Outta Space! (or Out of Space, as it was called in the 1993 press release for Missing Pieces). Idle quoted some of the lyrics in a piece promoting Spamlot uploaded to the Daily Llama on Monday the 26th July 2004: “It was about a couple of comedians on the road in space but the best moments featured a chorus of quite possibly gay Welsh Robots singing to a Diva they adored: ‘Do we love Irena Kent?/Yes we do. Yes we do./Is she down from heaven sent?/Yes she be. You can bet your sweet butt she be’. Still the first white gay Negro spiritual. Nobody bought it”. It nearly made it onto British television when London Weekend Television bought the rights to another Idle-Du Prez musical production, but this too fell through. Idle finally managed to get The Road to Mars released when he reworked it into a a novel, published by Pantheon in 1999.

1984 - Seaview Drive: Half-hour teleplay for ABC.

1984 - Hot Property: Screenplay for Paramount. A rewritten version of The Rutland Isles. As Idle told The Daily Llama, “one day I was sitting around in the South of France when my phone rang. It was Hollywood calling. Don Simpson, a famous movie producer, and partner of Jerry Bruckheimer, had somehow got wind of my script, read it and loved it. He went on and on about it. He talked about Jonathan Swift how it was the greatest piece of satire etc etc - on and on for an hour. Non stop. How could I be anything but bowled over? At last, everything I had always wanted to hear about my project. I got off the phone totally blown away. So, of course, this being Hollywood calling I had to fly immediately to New York to meet this man. Next thing I am in a smart hotel on Fifth Avenue ringing on the Suite door. A thin anxious looking man answers. This is Jerry. He looks kind of worried. ‘Don’s not up yet’ he explains and we have some coffee and bullshit until, from the wreckage of a nearby bedroom, Don finally emerges in a bath towel with wet hair looking kinda the worse for wear. But soon it’s all business as Don gets down to notes. He loves it, but of course things are going to have to be changed. To start with this is now a movie so we are going to need some characters. And a plot. I remembered an opening I wrote for The Meaning of Life, a long piece of prose about a plane crash in the open sea, where the hero ends up on the First Class Life raft. So that’s gonna be the movie. It’s now about a small group of people, a rock star, a TV journalist, a Bishop, a bimbo, and an angry politician, who arrive on the beach of a strange island”.

c.1984 - National Lampoon’s Australian Vacation: Uncompleted screenplay for Warner Brothers. After appearing in National Lampoon’s European Adventure, Idle and the film’s star Chevy Chase planned out a possible sequel. He told Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson for his book Life Before and After Monty Python: The Solo Flights of the Flying Circus (U.S.: St Martin’s Press, U.K.: Plexus, 1993) “it’s a little-known fact that I wrote a Vacation for Chevy - Vacation Down Under. We spent some time working together on it. It had some nice shark gags, but I can’t pretend it was in any way finished…”. Since there is no mention of it in National Lampoon chairman Matty Simmons’ detailed year-by-year autobiography If You Don’t Buy This Book We’ll Shoot This Dog: Life, Laughs, Love and Death at the National Lampoon - which fully describes the production of other aborted National Lampoon movies such as National Lampoon’s Jaws 3, People 0 and National Lampoon’s The Joy of Sex - it can be assumed this was never a serious contender to be the next in the Vacation series. In 2003 Simmons wrote and executive produced the direct-to-video National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation 2: Cousin Eddie’s Island Adventure, which boasted a special appearance by Idle.

1985 - Hamlet Prince of Dallas: Teleplay for Showtime.

1985 and 1986 - The Rutland Triangle and And Now This. Screenplays for Columbia. Both screenplays are reworkings of The Rutland Isles. Idle told the Daily Llama: “It’s now about a guy who joins a US TV station and whose TV van washes ashore after a violent storm sinks their ferry, with an obnoxious TV presenter called Maisy whom he hates. They begin to broadcast from these islands which no one can seem to find or identify. Something very weird is happening and at the end, after having been kidnapped, they escape by boat just in time as - get this - the islands take off. That’s an image I always loved, a whole island group lifting off and sailing away into space. Water dripping off as they lift away. They were aliens you see…. But that’s the problem. The Rutland Isles to me are real islands, inhabited by real people. They are a parody of the real world, a way of laughing at the ways we look at ourselves and our cultures. It doesn’t work to have plot and character shoveled in. Don moved on to his own private tragedy and I picked up a new producer and good friend in David Giler who took the project to several studios while we played that form of touch football known as development. Various studios seemed interested but no one committed, and it eventually sank back into that sand bank that is the graveyard of good ideas…”. Ideas from all drafts were adapted into a CD and calendar, both called The Rutland Isles, released by BMG in March 2003.

May/July 1986 - The Legendary Syd Gottleib: Teleplay for Showtime. Idle’s 1988 press release describes it as “a Hollywood mockumentary about the Lost Tycoon”. Idle told Kim ‘Howard’ Johnson for his Starlog interview that the title character is “this awful Hollywood producer who made endless films like Lunch at Tiffany’s. It’s aRutles-type documentary on this guy who has just died, a tribute to him”. This interview also spells the film’s title differently to the press release, calling it The Legendary Sid Gottlieb.

c.1987 - Taxi To Hell: Screenplay for Prominent Pictures. Idle says in Starlog that “it’s about an ordinary guy who gets possessed by the devil. The devil comes out of the guy’s stomach and starts ruining his life, for various reasons of his own, and we end up in hell! It’s a mix between the Faust and Orpheus legends, and is good fun”.

1991 - Behind The Crease: Musical teleplay for London Weekend Television. In his 1987 Starlog interview, Idle mentioned he was working on a musical production called The Back Page, and that it was set in the West Indies and “is about cricket, sex and royalty - the three English obsessions!”. It was written with John Du Prez shortly after their collaboration on Outta Space! and, over a few years of alternate drafts and new titles (one of which was Sticky Wicket), the show became a seventy-five-minute BBC radio play called Behind The Crease, starring Idle and Gary Wilmot and produced by the late Harry Thompson. It was recorded in front of a live audience at the BBC’s Paris studios, Lower Regent Street, on Friday the 27th of April 1990 and broadcast on Radio 4 on Sunday the 28th of July 1990. According to the second issue of short-lived comedy magazine The Heckler, June 1991, Behind The Crease was commissioned for development by London Weekend Television. No visual version of the musical was forthcoming.

BONUS UNPRODUCED ERIC IDLE PROJECT:

In 1993 Eric Idle and John Du Prez wrote the story and songs for what they hoped Hollywood would turn into a theatrical animated musical based on Edward Lear’s The Owl and the Pussycat. In an article on PythOnline.com Idle talked about one of the pitch meetings he had a year later: “I had a pleasant meeting with a Mr. Steven Spielberg, who listened politely to my pitch (with a streaming cold) and kindly declined because he said ‘Animations with animal leads don’t make money.’ I was encouraged to discover that even the greatest of names can be mistaken when The Lion King opened a few weeks later! He then cast me as Dibbs in Casper to prevent my writing anything further…”. Obviously, after seeing him in Casper Spielberg must have been enamoured by Idle’s acting abilities as on pages 1 and 2 of the Sunday the 22nd of May 1994 edition of the Mail On Sunday the following was reported:

Dr Who’s flying circus

By PAUL NATHANSON
Media Correspondent

MONTY Python star Eric Idle is to play the world’s most famous time traveller in a Steven Spielberg version of Dr Who.

He will enter the Tardis with Baywatch actress Pamela Anderson as his assistant and Peter O’Toole as his father in the multi-million-pound television series The New Adventures Of Dr Who.

Spielberg approached Idle, 51, who enjoyed huge success in America with the film Nuns On The Run, thinking he would appeal to audiences on both sides of the Atlantic.

Idle, who appears in Spielberg’s new film, Casper The Friendly Ghost, is expected to earn £34,000 for each episode of the £20 million series. Filming is due to start in California in July.

The British director of Thelma And Louise, Ridley Scott, has been asked to handle the pilot programme.

The BBC axed Dr Who in 1989 after 26 years. Ratings had slumped from 16 million to four million. It was the world’s longest-running science fiction series and had a maximum audience of 110 million in 70 countries.

Spielberg’s original choice for the role was British actor Alan Rickman, who stole the show from Kevin Costner when he played the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. But Rickman did not want to commit himself to 30 episodes in America.

Idle will become the eighth actor to have played the Doctor. The BBC character was portrayed by William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy.

Dr Who Magazine assistant editor Marcus Hearn admitted that Rickman was the favourite candidate among the publication’s 31,000 readers because ‘he could have brought out the darker, mysterious side of the Doctor’.

But he said last night: ‘Eric Idle could be a great success. Jon Pertwee was one of the most successful actors in the role and he came from the radio comedyThe Navy Lark.’

Scarf

Michael Palin, a fellow ex-Python said: ‘Eric would be a spiffing Dr Who - he has a youthful quality though he’s middle-aged. He’s mischevious like Dr Who, and he’d look great in a scarf.’

The series is a co-production between the BBC, Universal Television and Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television. The BBC expects to reap a significant advantage from the expected £66 million merchandising sales. It will retain ownership of the Dr Who character and benefit from a follow-up Dr Who movie.