How George Harrison Saved Life of Brian: The Most Expensive Cinema Ticket Ever Bought
Updated: 2 days ago
In 1978, Monty Python had a finished script, a crew ready to fly to Tunisia and no money at all. EMI, the company that had agreed to pay for their biblical comedy, had finally got round to reading it and bolted. What came next is one of the oddest bits of film financing Britain has ever seen. A former Beatle put his house up as security so six comedians could make a film about a man mistaken for the Messiah. His reason, whenever anyone asked, was that he fancied watching it.
Quick Answers
● Who paid for Life of Brian? George Harrison and his business manager Denis O'Brien, through HandMade Films, a company they set up specially for the job.
● Why did the original backer pull out? EMI chairman Lord Delfont read the script shortly before filming and decided it was blasphemous.
● How much did Harrison put up? Most accounts say around $4 million, roughly £2 million at the time, raised against his Henley mansion Friar Park. The exact figure changes depending on who's telling the story.
● Where was it filmed? In Tunisia, between 16 September and 12 November 1978, largely on sets left over from Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth.
● Was Harrison in the film? Yes, for about 15 seconds, as a man called Mr Papadopoulos.
● Did the gamble pay off? Handsomely. The film took more than $20 million and the profits kick-started a decade of British films, including Time Bandits, Mona Lisa and Withnail and I.
A Beatle Who Was a Python Fan First
Harrison's Python habit went right back to the beginning. Michael Palin has often told the story that Harrison sent a fan note to the BBC after the very first episode of Flying Circus went out in 1969. It never reached the team. Palin's guess was that somebody at the BBC saw the signature and assumed it was a wind-up.
By the mid-1970s the fandom had turned into friendship, mostly through Eric Idle, who was going through a marriage break-up and found Harrison generous with his time. Harrison produced the single release of The Lumberjack Song in 1975 and the following year walked on stage with the Pythons dressed as a Mountie, sang in the chorus and walked off again without anybody announcing who he was. At Christmas 1975 he turned up on Idle's BBC2 show Rutland Weekend Television, where he was introduced as a serious musical guest and then launched into a daft pirate shanty instead. In 1978 he took a cameo in The Rutles, Idle's affectionate demolition of the Beatles' own story.
There was more to it than a shared sense of humour. Harrison told Terry Jones that Python had kept him sane while the Beatles were falling apart, and the people who worked with him later said the same thing when ITV made a documentary about his film company. He also had form for writing large cheques on principle. This was the man who'd pulled together the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971 in a matter of weeks.
EMI Gets Cold Feet
The film began as a joke. In Amsterdam in early 1976, on the promotional tour for Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Idle was asked what the next one would be called and answered with a spoof title about Jesus. The gag stuck, although the group soon dropped the idea of sending up Jesus himself. Over Christmas 1977 they took themselves off to Barbados for a fortnight to finish the script, and came back with the story of Brian Cohen, born in the stable next door and followed around by people who refuse to believe he isn't the chosen one. The final draft was done by January 1978.
Cleese, thinking ahead to the poster, wanted George Lazenby cast as Jesus. The part went to Kenneth Colley, later Admiral Piett in the Star Wars films, and the six Pythons shared 43 other characters between them.
EMI Films agreed to back it with a budget of around $4.5 million. Producer John Goldstone lined up the sets that Franco Zeffirelli had left standing in Tunisia after his TV epic Jesus of Nazareth. Then the script landed on the desk of EMI's chairman, Lord Delfont, who hadn't read it before the deal was done. In the Pythons' own telling, Delfont found it “obscene and sacrilegious” and cancelled the lot.
John Cleese has always suspected a family angle too. Delfont's brother was Lew Grade, the man who'd bankrolled Jesus of Nazareth, and Cleese reckoned Delfont didn't much like the idea of being the brother who paid for the send-up. Terry Gilliam remembers the news arriving on a Thursday, with the crew due to fly out that Saturday. The Pythons threatened to sue and EMI settled for £50,000, which covered the bills they'd already run up but didn't get a film made.
The Phone Call to California
Idle spent months hawking the script around and getting nowhere. Eventually he rang Harrison, who was in California. Harrison's answer was that he'd pay for it himself. Idle assumed he was being polite.
He wasn't. Harrison took the idea to Denis O'Brien, the man who'd been running his business affairs since 1973. O'Brien was an American lawyer turned Rothschild banker from St Louis who'd come recommended by Peter Sellers, another of his clients. Between them they formed a company, called it HandMade Films and went looking for the money. Harrison put up Friar Park, his Victorian Gothic mansion in Henley-on-Thames. O'Brien put up his London offices.
How much they raised is harder to pin down than you'd think. The figure quoted most often is about $4 million, or roughly £2 million at 1978 exchange rates. Palin has put it at $5 million, and £3 million and £4 million both turn up in print. Whatever the number, it was the whole budget and it was secured on Harrison's home. Cleese's verdict was: “What an act of generosity and utter, glorious madness.” Idle used to wonder aloud what on earth Harrison had said to his wife over breakfast the next morning.
Harrison's own explanation never changed. The Pythons were his friends, he said, and he did it “because I wanted to see the movie”. Terry Jones gave the deal the name it's had ever since: the world's most expensive cinema ticket.
Two Months on Zeffirelli's Leftover Sets
Filming ran from 16 September to 12 November 1978, with Terry Jones directing and Terry Gilliam in charge of how it all looked. Most of it was shot in the Ribat, the fortified monastery at Monastir, where Zeffirelli's sets were still standing. They'd been due for demolition. Gilliam's team rearranged and reused them, which saved a fortune and is a big part of why a comedy made on borrowed money looks like a proper biblical epic. The Kasbah at Sousse supplied the walls of Jerusalem, the Roman theatre at Carthage hosted the children's matinee at the colosseum and the crucifixion was shot in the hills around Matmata, where Luke Skywalker's home planet had been filmed two years earlier.
Graham Chapman, who played Brian, had given up drinking to make sure he got through it. He was also a qualified doctor and ran an evening clinic for cast and crew once the day's filming was done. His best-known scene caused the only real upset with the locals. When Brian throws open his shutters stark naked and finds a mob of followers waiting below, the mob was made up of Tunisian extras, and around half of them are said to have run off screaming.
The shoot had started under a cloud. In June the team had voted to give Keith Moon a small part as a wild-eyed street prophet, and Moon, who'd joined them in Barbados, had been delighted. He died on 7 September, nine days before the cameras rolled. Gilliam played the part instead.
Fifteen Seconds as Mr Papadopoulos
Harrison kept well out of the way, which is what the Pythons liked most about him as a backer. He flew out on 20 October for a 24-hour visit to see how his money was being spent, and the next day they put him in a robe and pushed him into a crowd scene. He's the bearded man introduced to Brian as Mr Papadopoulos, the chap who's letting them have the Mount for the weekend. He shakes hands, grins and says one word of greeting in broad Scouse. Even that wasn't really his. The line is said to have been re-recorded afterwards by Palin.
America Sees It First
The Pythons opened the film in America first, on 17 August 1979, partly to keep clear of Britain's blasphemy laws. It landed in the same week as Apocalypse Now. The posters cheerfully promised a picture destined to offend nearly two-thirds of the civilised world, and for once the advertising undersold it.
The first complaints came from rabbis, upset by the stoning scene. Within days the Rabbinical Alliance of America had called it “foul, disgusting”, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York had denounced it as blasphemy and the Lutheran Council had joined in. Cinemas were picketed. The film was pulled in parts of Georgia and Maine, and one South Carolina cinema dropped it after a phone call from Senator Strom Thurmond, who hadn't seen it. Gilliam had expected trouble and rather enjoyed it. What tickled him was the sight of rival faiths forgetting their differences to gang up on a comedy.
Banned in Harrogate, Norway and Ireland
The British release followed on 8 November. The censor passed it with an AA certificate, meaning anyone over 14 could go. Mary Whitehouse and the Festival of Light then ran a campaign urging local councils to use their own powers instead.
Plenty did. Of the 101 local authorities that looked at it, 11 banned the film outright and another 28 raised it to an X. That second group mattered more than it sounds, because the distributor refused to supply prints anywhere a council had changed the certificate. Film scholar Kate Egan, who went through the council records, found that Harrogate banned it without watching it, and that cinemas elsewhere happily advertised it as the film that was banned in Harrogate. In Dudley, teenagers formed SPAM, the Society for the Prevention of the Abolition of Monty. Kirklees banned it on 26 November, which simply meant Huddersfield's film fans caught the bus to Halifax or Bradford. One council banned it despite having no cinema to show it in.
On 9 November, the day after it opened, Cleese and Palin went on BBC2's Friday Night, Saturday Morning to defend it against Malcolm Muggeridge and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark. The host was Tim Rice, who'd written the words for Jesus Christ Superstar. It was a bruising hour. Stockwood called the film tenth-rate and signed off by telling the pair they'd get their “thirty pieces of silver”. The popular memory is that the comedians came out of it rather better than the clergy, helped along by a Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch in which Rowan Atkinson turned the whole argument on its head.
Abroad, Norway banned it for blasphemy, which let Swedish cinemas sell it as the film “so funny it was banned in Norway”. Ireland held out for eight years. The Irish censor, Frank Hall, said it made Christians and Jews look like “a terrible load of gobshites”.
Some of the British bans lasted absurdly long. Glasgow didn't lift its restriction until 2009. The same year Aberystwyth held a celebratory screening after its mayor was told the town had never rescinded its own ban. The mayor was Sue Jones-Davies, who'd played Brian's girlfriend Judith in the film, and Palin and Jones came along for the evening.
None of it hurt business. Life of Brian took more than $20 million and was the fourth biggest film at the British box office in 1979. Harrison got his money back and then some. The Pythons couldn't resist a parting shot at EMI either. Listen closely as the closing song fades and there's a voice grumbling that he warned Bernie they'd never make their money back.
The Accidental Film Studio
HandMade was only meant to exist for one film. Then Bob Hoskins cornered Eric Idle at a party. Hoskins had starred in The Long Good Friday, made in 1979 for £900,000 by a subsidiary of Lew Grade's ITC, and Grade's people had taken fright. They worried the IRA storyline would get cinemas bombed, prepared a cut-down version and had Hoskins's voice dubbed by another actor in a Wolverhampton accent so that Americans could follow him. Hoskins sued, with Alec Guinness, Richard Burton and Warren Beatty lined up as witnesses. HandMade stepped in and bought the film for £700,000 in November 1980.
That made it twice in two years that one of the Grade and Delfont brothers had handed Harrison a classic. Not that he'd watched it closely before signing. Harrison admitted afterwards that “if I'd have known it was that violent I wouldn't have taken it on”.
Next came Time Bandits. Every studio turned Gilliam's $5 million children's fantasy down, so Harrison and O'Brien went back to the bank and mortgaged their office again. It was a hit in 1981. Harrison wrote the closing song, Dream Away, and Gilliam only worked out later that the words were a list of complaints about him. As he put it: “I had no idea it was George writing his notes to me.”
The run that followed is the reason people still talk about the company. A Private Function won three BAFTAs. Mona Lisa got Hoskins an Oscar nomination. Withnail and I got its Beatles needle-drop because Harrison personally allowed While My Guitar Gently Weeps to be used. In roughly a decade HandMade put out more than 20 films, finishing with Nuns on the Run in 1990, and most of them were projects nobody else would touch.
How It All Went Wrong
The turning point was Shanghai Surprise, the 1986 Sean Penn and Madonna vehicle, which cost about £10 million and took less than half that. The shoot turned into a tabloid circus, and on 6 March 1986 Harrison sat beside Madonna at a London press conference to face the reporters himself. A run of flops followed, the films were increasingly financed on bank loans and an audit ordered by Barclays turned up a deficit of around £20 million.
Harrison had always assumed he and O'Brien were equal partners in the risk. An accountant's investigation concluded that he alone was liable for the company's debts. John Reiss, the accountant, gave his view in Robert Sellers's history of the company: “I think he was taken advantage of horribly.” By Reiss's account, only the money from the Beatles' CD reissues kept Harrison from going under.
HandMade was sold to Canada's Paragon Entertainment in 1994 for $8.5 million. At the signing Harrison was handed 20 separate contracts and refused to touch any of them until the lawyers had boiled them down to one.
He sued O'Brien for $25 million and in 1996 a California judge awarded him a little over $11 million. He never collected it. O'Brien filed for bankruptcy in 2000, and Harrison's attempt to block that was thrown out because he'd missed court-ordered depositions. He'd been having cancer treatment at the time and wouldn't put his medical records on the public file. He died on 29 November 2001. O'Brien died in Swindon in December 2021.
The friendship with the Pythons outlived the company. A year after Harrison's death, at the Concert for George at the Royal Albert Hall, the surviving members lined up and sang The Lumberjack Song, the single he'd produced for them 27 years earlier. Tom Hanks was in the chorus.
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Sources
6. Watch George Harrison and Neil Innes perform The Pirate Song on Rutland Weekend Television, Far Out
