How George Harrison rescued 'Monty Python's Life of Brian' and launched a film producing career
Once upon a time, a couple of desperate English filmmakers embarked on a quest to find a champion, and to their everlasting surprise, discovered one where they might have least expected it.
It was the late-1970s, and producer John Goldstone and Monty Python’s Flying Circus founding member Eric Idle trekked across the Atlantic with caps in hand to scramble together the money to make “Monty Python’s Life of Brian.” EMI Films had summarily backed out of the project, leaving Goldstone, who also was executive producer of the troupe’s debut feature film, “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” and the Pythons flummoxed about what to do.
“Eric and I came to New York, and then we came out here and started going through everybody we knew,” Goldstone, 76, said this week from his home of more than a decade in Oxnard. “We went to Mike Medavoy, at United Artists at that time, and he said he would put up half the money, but that we’d have to get the other half from others.”
Source: Randy Lewis/latimes.com
