How Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd & Jethro Tull financed the making Monty Python and the Saint Grail

by Finn Patraic

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail is not a big budget show, and no one knew it better than the pythons themselves. The necessity being the mother of the invention, they transformed the financial constraints of the project into one of her many sources of humor, by shaping memorable gags of everything, coconut shells substituting horses for the sudden closure of filming which ends “history”. But, as explained in THE Canned story video aboveGathering even the modest sum with which they had to work was hardly a simple company. Rejected by studios, the pythons have sought the only financiers likely to have both sufficient richness and sufficient belief in a troop of absurd television comedy making their first appropriate film: Rock Stars.

It was the mid -1970s, a reminder, when a group with some successful albums could find themselves to win, literally, more money than they knew what to do. This was the case with Pink Floyd, for example, after release The dark side of the moon in 1973.

Monty Python, for their part, had extinguished not only three seasons from their BBC series Monty Python flying circusBut also a variety of goods purchased like books and LPs. The latter made the musical connections to the industry they could use to enlist not only the Floyd, but also Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, as well as record companies like Island, Charisma and Chrysalis. As Eric Idle tweeted Much later, Zeppelin contributed ÂŁ 31,500, the Pink Floyd company ÂŁ 21,000 and Ian Anderson from Jethro Tall 6,300 ÂŁ: ÂŁ 627,000 in more recent value, or nearly $ 850,000 in US dollars.

Quite, Monty Python and the Holy GrailThe budget of ÂŁ 282,035 in 1974 pounds: in no case a ransom of the king, but just enough to organize a comic version of the Arthurian legend. No more conventional investors than pythons were conventional filmmakers, rock stars and other characters in the musical industry involved have made no visit to the whole, nor offered “notes” on current work. We suspect that they were happy just to support a Monty Python project, and even more to receive the tax relief offered for films produced in the United Kingdom in the event, of course, they all brought their money back several times, with a Cup of the Broadway musical adaptation Spamalote To start. The immediate and disproportionate success of the film cannot be far from the mind of George Harrison – this great enemy of the taxman – when the idle called him a few years later, ask for money to do Brian life.

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Based in Seoul, Colin MArshall Written and broadcastTS on cities, language and culture. His projects include the substack newsletter Books on cities And the book The stateless city: a walk through Los Angeles from the 21st century. Follow it on the social network formerly known as Twitter in @ColinmArshall.

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