How Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd & Jethro Tull Financed the Making Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail isn’t a big-bud­get spec­ta­cle, and nobody knew that bet­ter than the Pythons them­selves. Neces­si­ty being the moth­er of inven­tion, they turned the pro­jec­t’s finan­cial con­straints into one of its many sources of humor, fash­ion­ing mem­o­rable gags out of every­thing from coconut shells sub­sti­tut­ing for hors­es to the sud­den shut­down of film­ing that ends the “sto­ry.” But, as explained in the Canned His­to­ry video above, putting togeth­er even the mod­est sum with which they had to work was hard­ly a straight­for­ward endeav­or. Turned down by stu­dios, the Pythons sought out the only financiers like­ly to pos­sess both suf­fi­cient wealth and suf­fi­cient belief in an absur­dist TV com­e­dy troupe mak­ing their first prop­er film: rock stars.

This was the mid-nine­teen-sev­en­ties, recall, when a group with a few hit albums could find them­selves mak­ing, quite lit­er­al­ly, more mon­ey than they knew what to do with. Such was the case with Pink Floyd, for exam­ple, after releas­ing The Dark Side of the Moon in 1973.

Mon­ty Python, for their part, had put out not only three sea­sons of their BBC series Mon­ty Python’s Fly­ing Cir­cus, but also a vari­ety of pur­chasable goods like books and LPs. The lat­ter made them the music-indus­try con­nec­tions that they could use to enlist the likes of not just the Floyd, but also Led Zep­pelin, Jethro Tull, as well as record labels like Island, Charis­ma, and Chrysalis. As Eric Idle tweet­ed much lat­er, Zep­pelin con­tributed £31,500, Pink Floy­d’s com­pa­ny £21,000, and Jethro Tul­l’s Ian Ander­son £6,300: £627,000 in more recent val­ue, or near­ly $850,000 in U.S. dol­lars.

Alto­geth­er, Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail’s bud­get came to £282,035 in 1974 pounds: by no means a king’s ran­som, but just enough to put togeth­er a com­ic take on Arthuri­an leg­end. No more con­ven­tion­al investors than the Pythons were con­ven­tion­al film­mak­ers, the rock stars and oth­er music-indus­try fig­ures involved made no vis­its to the set, nor offered any “notes” on the work in progress. One sus­pects that they were hap­py just to sup­port a Mon­ty Python project, and even more so to receive the tax break offered for films pro­duced in the U.K. In the event, of course, they all made their mon­ey back many times over, with a cut of the Broad­way musi­cal adap­ta­tion Spa­malot to boot. The film’s imme­di­ate and out­sized suc­cess can’t have been far from the mind of George Har­ri­son — that great ene­my of the tax­man — when Idle called him up a few years lat­er, ask­ing for the mon­ey to make Life of Bri­an.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stream Online Mon­ty Python and the Holy Grail Free on Its 50th Anniver­sary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.