DIRECTOR GILLIAM SPINS TALES WITHOUT STRINGS

“Brazil” director Terry Gilliam says his next movie, “The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen,” will conclude a spontaneous trilogy that began with “Time Bandits” and will end on such an upbeat note that even Universal Studios’ chief Sid Sheinberg might like it.

“Maybe Sid should stick with me for one more movie,” Gilliam said, punctuating the thought with a hearty staccato laugh. “He will find the end very satisfying.”

It is not likely that “Munchhausen,” a fantasy of tall tales, will be made with Universal money. Since Gilliam started his public campaign to force the studio to release his version of “Brazil,” Sheinberg has had few nice things to say about the maverick 45-year-old director.

But Gilliam, who went to Birmingham High School in Panorama City and once worked for an ad agency that did campaigns for Universal movies, said he isn’t too concerned. The money will come from somewhere.

“I know it sounds like wishful thinking,” Gilliam said, before returning to his home in London on New Year’s Eve. “Here’s a guy who wants a lot of money to make films without strings attached. But I just think somebody will give me the money.”

Gilliam, the lone American in Britain’s Monty Python comedy troupe, acknowledged that he is spoiled. There have been no strings attached to any of the things he has done before--the Python series for the BBC, four Python movies, the two films (“Jabberwocky” and “Time Bandits”) that he directed before “Brazil.”

Gilliam said that even if he never gets to make another movie, he won’t conform to Hollywood’s stifling rules. He won’t allow the studios, run by people he said would be middle management in any other industry, to participate in his creative process.

“There are two things I promised myself a long time ago: I won’t work strictly for money, and I won’t work on something where I have to give up control,” he said.

When Gilliam was graduated from Birmingham High in 1958, there were few signs of the maverick who would evolve. He was a cheerleader, a letterman, student body president and class valedictorian. He was, in the era of white sports coats and pink carnations, king of the senior prom.

“I could do no wrong then,” Gilliam said. “And I have no idea how it all happened, not a clue.”

Gilliam, who was born in Minneapolis and migrated with his family to Panorama City when he was 11, said he had never looked ahead to a career, except for a short period when he wanted to become a Presbyterian missionary. (“I was quite a little zealot for a while. But I became disillusioned when I realized the church had no sense of humor.”)

He went to Occidental College on church and academic scholarships where he minored in political science. He majored, he said, in having fun.

“I discovered something at Oxy. There was this whole other world where you could do almost anything and have fun.”

Gilliam ended up editing Fang, the campus literary magazine, which he turned into one of the West Coast’s hottest college humor magazines. As a disciple of Mad Magazine, he began sending copies of Fang to Harvey Kurtzmann, former Mad editor who was then putting out another humor magazine in New York.

“Harvey wrote back saying, ‘Good work,’ but when I told him I wanted to come to New York to work, he said, ‘It’s a mistake. Don’t do it.’ ”

A few months after he was graduated from Oxy, Gilliam said he read “Act One,” an autobiography by Moss Hart, who eschewed the same advice and became a successful New York playwright. Gilliam took the Big Apple route.

“When I got there, the assistant editor of Help (Kurtzmann’s magazine) had just quit. I walked right into the room and got the job.”

Gilliam worked for Help for three years, then returned to Los Angeles where he went to work as a writer and art director for Carson-Roberts Advertising Agency. Among his duties: designing posters and writing copy for ads for Universal Pictures.

“It was a really bad time for Universal; they were doing the worst pictures imaginable. I remember doing a line for ‘Madigan,’ a Richard Widmark movie. I wrote, ‘Once he was happy; now he’s Madigan.’ That’s how much I hated it.”

Gilliam said he became politicized in the mid-’60s and decided to leave the country after being among the crowd that physically got rousted by police during a protest of the 1966 appearance of President Lyndon Johnson in Century City.

“That was the first nightmare I had seen in reality. I knew I would have to get totally committed, start marching and screaming. I didn’t want to do that. I’d rather scream in cartoons. I took refuge within art.”

Gilliam chose England because the woman he was living with at the time was a reporter for the London Evening Standard. Thanks to John Cleese, an English writer and comedian whom he had met in New York, Gilliam ended up writing sketches for a TV show, “Do Not Adjust Your Set.” There he met future Python colleagues Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Eric Idle.

That led to a job as resident cartoonist for “We Have Ways to Make You Laugh,” another BBC comedy. Gilliam talked that show’s producers into letting him do an animated film, using an economical “cut-out” style he combined with illustrations.

“Overnight, I was an animator,” he said.

Three years after Gilliam arrived in London, Monty Python’s Flying Circus was formed, an insanely inventive group that included actors writers Cleese, Palin, Jones, Idle and Graham Chapman, and artist writer Gilliam.

“When we did the first show, people came expecting to see a circus. They had no idea what was going on up there. There was no laughter, just stunned silence.”

The silence was soon broken, and Monty Python--though many Americans still haven’t figured it out--became the international comedy hit of the ‘70s.

None of the Monty Python films have been commercial hits in the United States, but Gilliam said the group never had trouble getting them financed, and never had to compromise while making them.

The first Python movie, “And Now for Something Completely Different,” was a series of its best TV sketches and was put together to introduce Python to the lucrative U.S. market. It didn’t make any money, so there was no interest in Hollywood for backing other films.

Let’s say, there was especially no interest in a spoof of the Arthurian legend (“Monty Python and the Holy Grail”) and a comedy about a Nazareth low-life who is mistaken for Jesus (“The Life of Brian”).

Those movies, as well as Gilliam’s medieval comedy “Jabberwocky,” were were financed by pop groups who were fans of Python in England. When England’s EMI film company pulled out three days before production was to start on “Brian” (“Someone over there read the script and decided it was blasphemous,” Gilliam said), former Beatle George Harrison, and Beatles manager Dennis O’Brien, stepped in to form Handmade Films and put up the cash.

Gilliam said that after “Brian,” he was asked if he had any movies he wanted to make. There were two: one about a man in an Orwellian world who takes refuge in romantic daydreams (“Brazil”); the other about a child who hopscotches through history with a gang of dwarfs (“Time Bandits”).

“Something about a horse leaping out of a wardrobe appealed to him (Denis O’Brien), so that was it,” Gilliam said.

O’Brien went to Hollywood and tried to hustle studio backing for “Time Bandits,” but was rejected at every turn, Gilliam said. The reason: It was a family film and family films are dead.

They made the movie anyway, and after putting up $5 million to cover prints and advertising, Handmade got Avco Embassy to distribute the film in the United States. It grossed an astonishing $48 million, despite a release date in the theretofore unadvisable pre-Christmas period. Gilliam was suddenly a bankable name.

When he turned down 20th Century Fox’s offer to direct “Enemy Mine” (“They said whoever directed it would be bigger than Spielberg and Lucas,” Gilliam said with a laugh), he was asked, “Well then, just what do you want to do?”

During the 1983 Cannes Film Festival, when Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” was copping a major award, Gilliam was passing around his script for “Brazil” and getting approving nods everywhere.

Fox and Universal, both of which had turned the script down before, now wanted it, Gilliam said. Eventually, he and producer Arnon Milchan agreed to split the rights. For $9 million, Universal would get the United States and Canada; for $6 million, Fox would get everything else.

“I was amazed,” Gilliam said. “This was a movie I couldn’t get to talk about for nearly 10 years; now, I’ve got $15 million to make it.”

Gilliam said that if at any time one of the studio heads suggested participating in the creation of “Brazil,” beyond their investments, he wouldn’t have made it. The nice thing about Monty Python, he said, is that the six members chose to work together. He doesn’t know of any studio executives he’d want to share the stage with.

Now that “Brazil” has been released (it has been playing in Los Angeles since Christmas Day and will open around the country Feb. 14), Gilliam said its future--and to some extent, his--is in the hands of moviegoers.

“I have always felt that ‘Brazil’ would play best in the United States. It’s an American movie; that’s what I do.”

Gilliam said he also thinks the movie, contrary to studio reasoning, will play in the hinterland.

“The smugness that exists in New York and Los Angeles that the rest of the country is too unsophisticated for unconventional material, drives me crazy. When we were in New York talking about Monty Python years ago, we would hear, ‘Well, of course. We on the coasts can appreciate this but it won’t work anywhere else.’ I hate that attitude, and it’s wrong.

“Python did work in the hinterland; that’s where it got started here. People out there are just as bright, just as informed and just as curious. They may be an even better audience. At least they’re not corrupted by the prevalent wisdom accepted in New York and Los Angeles.”

Gilliam said that one reason he has settled in England (he and his wife and their 9- and 5-year-old daughters live in a 300-year-old house there) is because he thinks Hollywood’s “career-is-everything” attitude undermines art.

“It’s odd that the word art is taken as pretentious and elitist in this town. The managers running the studios don’t understand art, and they don’t want to deal with the people who think movies can be art. That’s the trouble element. So they pretend they can makes films without it.

“That’s what ‘Brazil’ is really about: the loss of passion.”

Despite everything, Gilliam said he is neither a cynic nor a pessimist.

The central characters in his movies--the child in “Time Bandits,” the dreamy bureaucrat in “Brazil” and the old storyteller in his planned “Munchhausen” fable--are ultimately optimists, he said.

“They are dreamers caught in the age of reason, where there is no room for magic and the extraordinary. In the end of ‘Munchhausen,’ there is a triumph of the extraordinary. The fantastic and the impossible become real.

“In my darkest moments, when I can only see greed and nastiness, I feel like giving up. But things occasionally happen. I can’t explain it, but there is magic out there.”