Book review: Gilliamesque, Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam (front right) with his Monty Python colleagues (from left), Eric Idle, Terry Jones, John Cleese, Michael Palin and Graham Chapman.

Terry Gilliam is the odd man out of the Python squad, the warm and loose American among uptight Englishmen. Yet he may be the team's secret weapon. He gave Monty Python's Flying Circus a visual identity that similar shows with overlapping writers lacked.

Gilliam arrived in London in the summer of 1967, abandoning a promising career in advertising and a covetable house in Laurel Canyon to follow his girlfriend, journalist Glenys Roberts, to England. In effect, Gilliam found a way to "brand" the Pythons, by co-opting the distinctive 60s-era Victoriana seen on the Beatles' Sergeant Pepper cover. Gilliam's carnivalesque lettering and his animated cut-outs of stomping feet and bathing beauties tied the sketches together.

Gilliam also brought professionalism and ambition to the Pythons, but without any trace of slickness - a neat paradox that underpins all of his later work. By far the most driven of the team, he was director of 13 feature films, as well as shorts and documentaries. His characteristic mix of passion, infinite care and ham-fistedness is evident in Gilliamesque, a handsome memoir that manages to combine beautiful design with an often infuriating jumble of repetitions, off-hand comments and bewildering mistakes, such as his criticism of Spielberg's direction of Back to the Future (it was directed by Robert Zemeckis).

Gilliam was born in Minneapolis in 1940, but the family relocated to LA when he was 10. His father worked as a carpenter: he built partition screens for the new open-plan offices. Gilliam is a product of Eisenhower's America. A sober Christian kid who pulled off the trick of being loved by students and teachers alike, he was the school's valedictorian and a male cheerleader. His church awarded him a missionary scholarship to a good university, where he continued his popular balancing act as editor of the campus newspaper, swiftly turning it into a fun comic. After graduation, his ambition led him to New York where he took over from Gloria Steinem as assistant to the editor of new satirical magazine Help!, the template for Private Eye.

Somewhere inside Gilliam, there are still traces of the Eisenhower-era conservative. He gauchely tells us that Steinem was "good-looking. Men loved her but women didn't seem to be threatened by her, which is quite an unusual combination." He believes everyone should know the Bible, and that physical discipline is important for boys. Yet he is also emblematic of the change in the 60s: he heard Martin Luther King speak, he employed Woody Allen and John Cleese in the photo-romances he oversaw for Help!, and he was at both the Monterey pop festival and the Century City police riot.

As the decade progressed, his anarchic exuberance became increasingly anti-establishment, ending with his voluntary exile from the US to settle in London, where he met the Pythons.

In the mid-70s, the Monty Python team fought a legal battle over the ways the series could be edited and broadcast, which ended with the BBC surrendering the rights to the six Pythons. This has acted like a trust fund, giving Gilliam the freedom to pursue his film career on his own terms.

He has a visual signature that sets him apart from any other director, and is stubborn enough to ensure this vision appears on the screen. Perhaps his independence has been a double-edged sword, for while his oeuvre has something great about it, it is difficult to say that any individual film quite works. For my money, the one indisputable masterpiece is The Life of Brian, for which he served only as the designer for the director Terry Jones.

Gilliamesque is beautiful in itself, recalling the two books he designed for the Pythons in the 1970s. It also helps Gilliam explain his films. In contrast to Tim Burton, whose films are whole and underpinned by their own fantasy logic, Gilliam argues that his own films are tethered in observation: "What I do is all about the messy, weird, unexpected things that only come out of the way reality works."

Gilliam is a true original and it is reassuring to discover that he knows exactly why he is: messy yet realistic and, like the Spanish Inquisition of his Python days, always unexpected.

Gilliamesque
by Terry Gilliam
(Canongate $69.99)