The protests didn’t faze Monty Python, either. Life of Brian was the UK’s fourth highest grossing film in 1979. Again, the long-winded condescension of a pair of ageing grandees didn’t deter audiences. Or rather, Cleese and Palin did the debating, while Muggeridge and Stockwood sneered at them and their “10th-rate film”. In November 1979, Cleese and Palin appeared on Friday Night, Saturday Morning, a talk show hosted by Tim Rice, where they debated their work with Malcolm Muggeridge, an evangelical journalist and satirist, and Mervyn Stockwood, the Bishop of Southwark. Some local councils banned the film, a measure which did it no harm at all: people would simply flock to the nearest city where it was showing.
In Britain, opposition wasn’t as fierce, but there was plenty of it.
#BLASPHEMOUS GOOD ENDING MOVIE#
But in Very Naughty Boys, Terry Gilliam noted one positive aspect of these protests: “I thought at least getting the Catholics, Protestants and Jews all protesting against our movie was fairly ecumenical on our part. In New York, there were picketers outside cinemas, with placards proclaiming that the troupe’s name gave away its diabolical nature: ‘Python = Serpent = Satan’. A friend of Idle’s and a fan of the Pythons, he volunteered to remortgage his house and chip in the £2million ($4.1million) the team needed – a bail-out which has become known as ‘the most expensive cinema ticket’ ever issued. The project’s unlikely saviour was George Harrison, the ex-Beatle. Terry Jones was about to start directing the film in Tunisia when the Chief Executive of EMI, Bernard Delfont, finally got around to reading the script, and declared that there was no way his company could fund such an atrocity. It seemed, though, that they hadn’t been quite good enough. “We’d avoided being specifically rude to specific groups.” The Pythons’ satire wouldn’t target Jesus or his teachings, instead caricaturing political militants, credulous crowds, the appeal of throwing stones at people, the complexities of Latin grammar, and the difficulties of being a tyrant when you’ve got a speech impediment. “I thought we’d been quite good,” said Idle in Robert Sellers’ behind-the-scenes book, Very Naughty Boys. “Jesus was a very straight, direct man making good sense, so we decided it would be a very shallow film if it was just about. “It was quite obvious that there was very little to ridicule in Jesus’s life, and therefore we were onto a loser,” said Michael Palin in 1979. Initially, they planned to lampoon Jesus himself, but the more they read up on him, the less keen they were. Eric Idle joked that their next project would be called “Jesus Christ: Lust For Glory”, and his team-mates realised that no one had ever made a comedy about the Messiah. The idea for Life of Brian came about when the team was promoting its previous film, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The subversive messages hidden in The Wizard of Oz “I feel we should send them a crate of champagne or something.”
“They actually made me rich,” said John Cleese of the protesters on one American talk show. The comedy team’s irreverent Biblical romp had been due to open on 200 screens across the US, but after various religious groups protested against it, the number of screens was tripled. It may not be true that all publicity is good publicity, but in the case of Monty Python’s Life of Brian, which was released 40 years ago, some of the bad publicity was heaven-sent.
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