PLUME: Well, isn’t it true about the advertising business that the client really doesn’t know what they want to see until you run across it?

GILLIAM: Yeah. It was just a lot of silliness. It was the only time I really worked in a proper office, and I didn’t like it. It was as simple as that. I was also getting more and more frustrated with America. It’s interesting how as simple a thing as, like, letting your hair grow longer changed in the world in those days. I used to drive around in a little Hillman Minx convertible – I was an Anglophile even then – and almost every other night I’d be pulled over by cops because my hair was longer than it should have been, and it was “up against the wall” time. I started feeling, “Ah, this is what must be like being a black or a Mexican kid growing up in LA.” Those moments were eye-opening – it was like Alice going through the looking glass. I thought, “This is getting unpleasant.” I was living with an English girl at the time who was getting ready to go back to London, and I was getting more and more disillusioned with America. I mean, I was doing political cartoons and just generally getting angry to the point where I felt that if I stayed there I was going to have to start making and throwing bombs. I thought I was probably a better cartoonist than a bomb maker…

PLUME: Well, you never know until you try…

GILLIAM: Exactly. Basically, we just left in 1967. It was interesting, because I remember driving across the States with my then-girlfriend and Harry Shearer, who is one of my best friends. Harry, Joel Siegel, and I used to be a little group for awhile, trying to do children’s television, because it was the one area that nobody was paying attention to in those days – we thought there would be more freedom in that than in regular television. I’ve still got little 8 mm films and that I’d done with Harry doing silly things.

PLUME: To be used as blackmail in the future?

GILLIAM: Yeah, I think it is fine blackmail material – I have the negatives and he’s got the money… I think we can work something out. LA in 1966 was a very interesting time – it was quite extraordinary, because things were changing very rapidly.

PLUME: That was around the time that things were starting to get explosive in LA, wasn’t it?

GILLIAM: Well, it was more towards ’67. In late ’66, early ’67, I lived up in Laurel Canyon, and it was idyllic. It was before hippies were called hippies… a strange kind of Garden of Eden before all the animals were named. All sorts of new and interesting and wonderful things were happening, and it was exciting. And then I got my head bashed in at a demonstration against the Vietnam War during a visit that Lyndon Johnson made to the Century Plaza Hotel. My girlfriend was a reporter for the London Evening Standard and we were on our way to a party, and she said, “We should check this out.” So we arrived there, and soon it turned into a police riot. It was interesting to see police losing control, because they were up against a world they really didn’t understand – which was very non-aggressive, but they didn’t know that. There were two interesting things that came out of that – it was shocking to see police go completely out of control and, secondly, the LA Times‘ reporting of the story was completely biased and untruthful … and then seeing the LA Free Press taking to the streets and handing out free issues of the LA Free Press with the real story… real interviews with real people. By the end of the week, the LA Times journalist staff actually had a mini-rebellion within the organization and got the paper to retract what had said and write the true story of what had happened. I thought that was kind of extraordinary. So there were both really good things happening and then really bad things happening at the same time.

PLUME: I find it interesting how you mentioned the fact that the police – who found themselves at a loss to comprehend this social movement – would grasp onto one of the few things they could actually quantify, a person’s hair, to try and point out this – as they saw it – aberration…

GILLIAM: Yeah… Yeah…The musical, “Hair,” was, in fact – and I don’t know what it feels like or translates into now – but at the time it was a very smart musical, because it actually got to the very symbol – that basic element – of this dividing line in society… at least the symbol of the dividing line… which was hair. It was one of the weird things – again, it was another Alice in Wonderland moment. A friend of mine – a girl – and I got a Beatles album out and, without changing the length of my hair, but just cutting it like a mop-top cut, I slipped through the looking glass. Suddenly, I walk down the streets and old women are attacking me and truck drivers are shouting, “You a boy or a girl?” You just found this outrageous aggression in America that was flailing out at anything that looked different. It was quite extraordinary.

PLUME: And choosing such a senseless physical aspect to latch onto…

GILLIAM: At the same time, if you were black, you got a different set of treatments. It was very funny, because when Harry, Glenys, and I were going across the States on my exit from America, we were somewhere up in Wyoming and we got in this little motel town and we were basically chased from this restaurant by this gang of rednecks who were surrounding us and saying, “Hey Longhair! Who do you think you are, Jesus? Well maybe we better have Easter a little early this year…” While in this café we got the waitress to call the sheriff. The sheriff came in, and he refused to see a problem. Over in the corner the jukebox was playing the Beatles’ “All You Need is Love.” The funny thing about it all was that while we were the victims – that year – over in another cubicle were a black couple – who were last year’s victims – smiling rather ruefully at our problems.

PLUME: As the wheel turns…

GILLIAM: Exactly! That always struck me as extraordinary.

PLUME: That’s America for you… and you can look over and see who’s in the next booth…

GILLIAM: That’s right! So I left the States and went to England, and I really loved it and thought it was amazing. Very quickly, things started happening. I was selling my cartoons, working as an illustrator, and I was the art director of a news magazine. After about a year of this, I was wanting to get out of it, and I called Cleese – who was, by that point, pretty well known in television. I said, “Do you know anybody in television that I could work for?” He put me on to a producer named Humphrey Barclay, who was producing a show called Do Not Adjust Your Set – performed by Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. I met Humphrey – he was an amateur cartoonist – and he really liked my cartoons. I think, as a favor to me, he bought written sketches I’d done and forced them on the others – much to their chagrin.

PLUME: You must have really ingratiated yourself to them at that point…

GILLIAM: Exactly. Eventually, we got to know each other. Humphrey went on to do another show where he got me on as a caricaturist for the guests on the show – Eric was also on the show. They had some material that they didn’t know how to present, and I suggested they make an animated film. They assumed that I knew how to do animated films, and they gave me 400 pounds and two weeks to do something. With no money and no time, the only thing I could think of doing was using cut-outs. So I started doing this bit of animation and it went out on the show – and nobody had seen anything like that – and, literally overnight, I became an animator… and one that was well-known.

Continued below…

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