The Getaway Car

by Donald E. Westlake

  NUSSBAUM: No one has ever criticized anything about your books except their style and content, so there must be a few things coming up, right?

  WESTLAKE: Finished, and due out in the spring, is a nasty comedy called Two Much, about a guy who meets twins and pretends to be twins himself so he can score on them both. Then he marries them both, murders them both, inherits their millions and lives happily ever after.

  Unlike book agreements, movie deals never get completed. Sorry—finalized. There are, as usual, several of them snuffling around my leg at the moment. I mean deals for me to write something for the movies. Also, more of my books have been sold to the movies than have been made into movies. Like so:

  1. *The Fugitive Pigeon, Westlake—sold to Max Youngstein and Columbia Pictures in 1964, screenplay by Richard Maibaum, no movie.

  2. The Damsel, by Richard Stark—optioned by John Bennett in ’66 or ’67, option lapsed

  3. The Spy in the Ointment, by Westlake—optioned by somebody named Morris in ’66 or ’67, option lapsed.

  4. *Kinds of Love, Kinds of Death, by Tucker Coe—bought for Robert Mitchum by somebody, that’s all I know, no movie.

  5. God Save the Mark, by Westlake—optioned by Campbell, Silver, Cosby for Bill Cosby in 1967, option renewed, no movie, option lapsed. Also, screenplay done by yours truly with Buddy Hackett in, I think, ’69, nothing happened, no movie. (That wasn’t really a case of me adapting my own work; it was a case of me organizing Hackett’s flights. He’s a genius, by the way.)

  6 *Murder among Children, by Tucker Coe—bought by somebody, paid for, no movie.

  7. Who Stole Sassi Manoon, by Westlake—an early Cops and Robbers. I wrote an original screenplay for Palomar, no movie, but I’d retained publication rights and I novelized the screenplay.

  8. Somebody Owes Me Money, by Westlake—bought by United Artists, 1972, for Elliott Gould. Screenplay by Allan Dennis. In limbo at the moment.

  9. *Deadly Edge, by Richard Stark—bought by Hal Landers and Bobby Roberts, 1972, screenplay by Don Peterson, everybody hates it, probably no movie.

  10. *Help, I Am Being Held Prisoner, bought by Hal Landers and Bobby Roberts, 1973, screenplay by Carl Reiner, hated by everybody, probably no movie. (This and the other four marked with asterisks will now sit on the shelf. No movie, no turnback to me, no chance to do anything.)

  NUSSBAUM: Okay, you’ve told what you’ve done and what is on the horizon, but what do you see for yourself in the long, l-o-n-g view—like next month and beyond. Put simply, what do you want to be remembered for ten years after you’re dead that you haven’t achieved, yet? Take your time with this one. You have a full minute to answer.

  WESTLAKE: Several years ago David Susskind was allegedly going to buy movie rights to one of my books. It didn’t work out, but in the course of it he told me he’d checked into my other movie deals, including an option that Bill Cosby had taken on God Save the Mark. Susskind had wanted to know why the movie hadn’t been made, and when he’d questioned Cosby’s business partner the fella said, “Bill decided he only wants to make posterity pictures.” Susskind told me this, and we both laughed, and then I said something like, “It’s tough enough writing for the people alive right now. I thought Cosby was smarter than that.” And Susskind said, “Never expect brains from an actor.” I don’t know if this answers your question or not, but it’s the only paragraph I intend to put here.

  NUSSBAUM: All right, what do you think the people alive right now want?

  WESTLAKE: I have felt for some time, with growing conviction, that there weren’t any stories around to be written. I haven’t been able to do a Richard Stark novel in a year and a half, the comedy caper is dead, storylines are drying up like African cattle. Storylines reflect, refer to and attempt to deal with their period of history, and that’s why they become old and obsolete and used up. Another reason is that the same story gets done and done and done and done, and suddenly one day nobody wants to read or hear or see that story again. And another reason, come to think of it, is that all of the gold in that vein has been mined, and there’s nothing left; for example, the screwball comedy of the thirties, young lovers, one rich, one poor. The rich-poor thing was made obsolete by the end of the Depression, but the gags and situations and potentialities were wrung out of the story by then anyway.

  And at this moment, everything is used up. Maybe the problem is that the times really are changing. None of the stories we now have properly reflect things anymore. Are you going to have a couple in your story? What’s their attitude about marriage? Are you going to have a rich hero? What’s his attitude about money, about poor people, about other rich people? We don’t know what the new myths are going to be because we don’t know what the world looks like right now.

  The result is a mis-named nostalgia. The movies are frankly set in the past. We can believe in Chinatown only because it doesn’t claim to be telling about us. That isn’t nostalgia, that’s re-runs. The book publishers and movie makers and TV factories have to produce something, but nothing contemporary feels right, so everybody’s treading water with Sherlock Holmes and the Orient Express.

  What will tomorrow’s popular fiction, commercial stories look like? What are the attitudes of today that call for mythologizing? What consummations would we like to see in parable form? What are the next stories going to turn out fifty years later to have really been about?

  You want to wrap your head around that one?

  The wily interviewee turns the tables.

  THE WORST HAPPENS: FROM AN INTERVIEW BY PATRICK McGILLIGAN

  This selection draws on an interview conducted by Patrick McGilligan that was originally published in the Autumn 1990 issue of Sight and Sound, then later republished in expanded form in Backstory 4: Interviews with Screen-writers of the 1970s and 1980s. McGilligan doesn’t include his questions, only Westlake’s answers. If you’re interested in Westlake’s film work, it’s worth your getting a copy of Backstory 4 to read the whole interview, but for this collection, I’ve selected a number of Westlake’s detailed analyses of the film adaptations of his books, with an eye toward covering topics, projects, and writers that haven’t come up elsewhere. I’ve included the whole of his commentary on each film I’ve selected except The Grifters, where elisions are indicated with ellipses. All other ellipses are in the original. Bracketed interpolations are McGilligan’s.—Ed.

  The Hot Rock

  Rarely has a screenwriter talked to me about adapting one of my books. The first time was William Goldman [scenarist of The Hot Rock], who holds the whole field of screenwriting in contempt. Either in spite of that, or because of that, he is, I think, the best living screenwriter. Nobody on earth could have made a movie out of All the President’s Men [1976], and he did.

  When he took the job of doing The Hot Rock, he called me and said, “I want to take you to lunch and I want you to tell me everything you know about those characters that you didn’t put in the book.” I thought, “What a smart guy this is!” We spent time together. The director [Peter Yates] and producers [Hal Landers and Bobby Roberts] didn’t give a damn, but Bill would send me portions of the script and say, “What do you think?” He was very forthcoming.

  He took out the only thing I thought of as a movie scene in the whole book, a scene where they have stolen a locomotive from a circus because they have to break into an insane asylum. It’s a complicated scene, but that seemed to me like a movie scene. Bill explained why he couldn’t use it and he was right. Every once in a great while—I don’t think in terms of movies if I’m writing a book and I think anyone who does is crazy—I’ll look back at something I’ve written and say, “That’s a movie scene . . .” And if the movie rights are sold, that scene is never used.

  The Outfit

  The Outfit is one movie made from a Stark book that got the feeling right. That movie is done flat, just like the books.

  John Flynn was the writer-director, and it was early in his career, and I thought he was going to
be a world-beater. He put together an incredible cast, everybody from Robert Duvall and Karen Black and Robert Ryan, to Elisha Cook and Archie Moore and Anita O’Day. He wrote it “period,” but then de-emphasized that. He had everybody moving fast. It was efficient but it was also thoughtful. I didn’t meet him at the time, but have met him a couple times since and he did not have the career I expected. It takes more than talent. It takes luck, and a genius at making choices. The Outfit is about the only thing he’s done that shows what he can do.

  The Bank Shot

  I saw one scene from The Bank Shot once, and it looked pretty bad. It was [Gower] Chanpion’s only movie [as director]. A friend who saw it said it was a farce in extreme close-up, so whenever somebody stepped on a banana peel all you knew was that they’d left the frame.

  The Stepfather, The Stepfather II, and The Stepfather III

  The credits on The Stepfather are rather weird. I’m the main writer, but the story is credited to Brian Garfield, Carolyn Lefcourt, and me. Carolyn Lefcourt was an editor at a publishing house in New York; Brian had published some books with that house. Carolyn Lefcourt gave Brian a clipping about this guy, John List in New Jersey, who killed his family and disappeared, saying to Brian, “A novel about his next family might be interesting . . .” Brian said, “Yeah, it might,” but didn’t do anything about it right away. A year or two went by before he told me about the idea, though he had lost the clipping. By then he thought he was a movie producer (it took him several years to realize he wasn’t). He said, “I’ll never write it as a novel, would you like to do it as a movie? My production company will hire you . . .”

  The story did connect with me in a very strange way. At one point during the Depression, my father lost his job and didn’t tell my mother that he had lost his job, and spent several weeks leaving the house every day as though going to work—but actually looking for work and not finding any. On Fridays he would take money out of his savings account and bring it home as though it were his salary. One day a woman friend of my mother’s blew his cover. My mother and father always had trouble comprehending each other. As far as my mother was concerned, the marriage was a partnership and she had been frozen out.

  The guy in the clipping had done the same thing: either quit, or been fired from, his Wall Street job, and then, for the next several weeks, he did the same thing my father did, except in his case it led to murder. I found that a little spooky. I decided not to turn away from that idea, but to take a look at how people have different viewpoints of what their communal experiences are.

  Early on [director] Joe [Ruben] and I were talking, and he asked me if I had any images of what the movie should be like. I told him about a movie that Alexander Mackendrick directed called A Boy Ten Feet Tall [a.k.a. Sammy Goes South, 1963]. Twice in that movie Mackendrick did something that I love: in one scene planes fly over and bomb the kid’s house. The kid is playing, he hears the sound and he looks up, and then there is a quick cut to the sky as the plane is leaving. You don’t get a chance to think about it . . .

  There’s another scene where one of the native bearers is standing on one side of a large bush and on the other side is a lion. The guide is aware of the lion, but the lion isn’t aware of the guide; yet the guide is afraid to move, he just stands there and calls for the white hunter with the gun, who is played by Edward G. Robinson, to come quick. As the hunter’s still running, we cut back to the guide and the lion, and the lion is already in motion, halfway around the bush . . .

  I told Joe, “That’s what I want for The Stepfather—not a long setup for the violence. There shouldn’t be a lot of violence, but when violence happens it should happen faster than you could know it.” So from the very beginning it was written into the script that when the stepfather hit his wife it would be the second half of a gesture with the phone. It’s scary because he can’t be reasoned with, and it just happens very quickly. That’s not far from comedy, and hitting ’em with a punch line. Comedy is simply another way of hiding and jumping out—you hide and jump out with the punch line. The whole idea of The Stepfather is that the punch line would scare you instead of making you laugh.

  My deal was with Brian, and since we are both writers we made an absolute sweetheart contract that was quite distressing to Joe Ruben at one point, when he wanted to bring in a friend of his just to do a little polish. Part of the contract said I could not be replaced without my permission. So The Stepfather stayed mine, more so than usual, just like The Grifters stayed mine, more than usual.

  The Grifters

  All of a sudden everything of Thompson’s that hadn’t been made was being put under option. His moment had come. It seems perfectly appropriate to him that his fifteen minutes of fame should have come so many years after his death. That’s a Jim Thompson irony. . . .

  . . . At first I turned Stephen [Frears] down, however. He asked why. I said, “The book’s too gloomy. These people are just too grim and depressing and I don’t want to spend all that time with them.” He said, “If you don’t think about it from the young man’s point of view, then it isn’t gloomy and depressing. If you think of the mother as the principal character, then—although it’s not a comedy—it’s a story of survival. It’s a story about someone who is going to survive, no matter what. And a story of survival is a little more upbeat.”

  It’s true: Thompson is hard to take because he isn’t upbeat and the best you can hope from him is “We can survive.” I had read most of his books, of course. The only book of his I ever had trouble with—which I didn’t like—is the one that everybody thinks is the greatest: The Killer Inside Me. That one I’ve never warmed up to, but some of the others are good, and The Grifters is very good. There’s always quirkiness and surviving against odds and an off-kilter view of life in Thompson’s work.

  I think Thompson, because of the Depression, because of his personality, because of his drinking, because of his own family and other stuff, he was always writing too fast, slogging away. Still he managed to do, almost exclusively, stuff that came from “within.” In The Grifters he’s really telling a story about the tangled emotions between a mother and a son, but he puts the characters both in the mob. That’s for the market, but the story is for him. I think he thought of himself as a seriously intentioned and talented novelist who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Depression robbed him of the college education he needed. He came out of Anadarko, Oklahoma, and was in the wrong place to have literary confreres. He was a lost figure out in Oklahoma, which is what his characters are.

  He always wrote from his guts—too fast, but from his guts. He was usually doing stuff for too little money in secondary markets. Every one of his books was published at least one draft too soon, so there’s lumpy, undigested stuff in them, because he wouldn’t have the time or impetus to go back and redo parts, smooth things out, and get it right. In that situation you’ve got to get it done, send it in, get your $2,000, and pay the rent.

  I did some of that in my early days of writing, so I know how it happens. You’re going along until you get to a point in the story where you say, “Oh, my gosh, this story isn’t going to work unless she was married before . . .” You can solve it two ways: you can go back and put the marriage in where you should have put it in the first place, or you can just stick it right in: “She was married before . . .” and keep going. That’s what Thompson does. So my first job with The Grifters was to untangle all the knots and lay the story out.

  The difference between a movie and a novel is that a movie is just the surface of things, and the meanings and emotions can only be implicit. Even if somebody stands on screen and says, “I’m in terrible pain at the moment,” you’re simply seeing someone who says, “I’m in terrible pain at the moment,” whereas a novel can convince you that you’re really in the presence of someone feeling terrible pain at this moment. It’s a different intensity, a novel. Even a shallow novel is “inside” somewhere.

  Since a movie is dealing on the surface of th
ings, it’s easiest to start scripts in the instruction manual mode, as if you are doing an instruction manual from which somebody is making a film. Start with basics—like in painting, where you put the colors on a canvas to convince somebody to get an emotional response—that’s what a basic script is. You then put on top of that as much meaning and emotion and reality as you can, but what a script really is basically is a set of instructions. I would never do a novel in the same way.

  One thing Stephen and I agreed on right away was updating the book. A story shouldn’t be done “period” unless it is about the period. There’s no problem with updating Thompson because his people only live in a very narrow world, with each other. Their whole interest is the emotional struggle between them. To update it, all you have to do is take their hats off. . . .

  Le Jumeau (France, 1984) and Two Much (USA-Spain, 1996)

  I have never seen either version [of these two films based on the Westlake novel Two Much], having been warned away by friends who cared about me. Both versions make the same simpleminded, totally destructive mistake. In both versions, the main character doesn’t kill anybody. So what’s it about? A guy screws twins? People shouldn’t be handed a camera until they reach the age of reason.

  Mr. Ripley’s Return

  Mr. Ripley’s Return is one of the odder episodes. Let’s see if I can do it justice without meting out justice to the participants.

  In 1992, I was hired by an indie prod [indie production company]—one American LA-based, nice guy; one Frenchman, Paris-based, charming guy; one German, never met, I think he was the money guy—to do the second Ripley novel, Ripley Underground. I’ve always loved the deadpanness of [Patricia] Highsmith, and I thought it reached a peak in that book. The guy Ripley is tormenting, in his passive-aggressive way, suddenly turns around, smashes Ripley’s head with a shovel, and buries him in Ripley’s own garden. Ripley survives, comes up out of the grave later that night, takes a nice hot tub, patches his cut parts, and then what does he do? Call the cops? No. Shoot the guy? No. He haunts the guy for the next one hundred pages of the book, appearing and disappearing in windows, stuff like that.