Once Jaws opened, Spielberg knew what he had to do to get Close Encounters. “I marched in and shook those Jaws box-office receipts at them, and they gave in,” he recalled. “I said I want $12 million to do this picture. They agreed.”
Ten:
Citizen Cain
1976
• How Paul Schrader crawled over the back of his brother to become the new Towne, who in turn fell out with Beatty, while Days of Heaven turned into months of hell for Schneider and Terry Malick.
“Schrader is an original. I don’t have much respect for screenwriters. Most of them couldn’t carry my shoes. But I have respect for Paul.”
— JOHN MILIUS
Right from the beginning, guns were an important prop for the growing legend of Paul Schrader. Of course it was Milius who led him on, if, indeed, he needed leading. “Milius and I were like fire and gasoline,” says Schrader. Milius once took him to a sporting goods shop in Beverly Hills, in search of a pistol. The clerk showed him a.38 that felt good in his hand, cold and hard. He saw a girl over by the tennis racquets, sighted down the barrel at her head, and tracked her around the store as she moved, clicking the trigger a few times. “If there was ever a psycho you shouldn’t sell a gun to, Paul was it,” says Milius. “I told this story to Scorsese and he put it in Taxi Driver.”
Schrader kept a Smith & Wesson .38 on his bedside table, claiming someone was trying to break into his home, carried another in the glove compartment of his car, waved it around on appropriate occasions to make a point. One day Beverly Walker, his former girlfriend, came over with a script she had written, a Western about a female desperado, called Pearl of the West. According to her, Paul read it, reached for his weapon, waved it around, and said, “It needs more of this.” Some years later, he was having a party, and Kiki Morris, his assistant, was tidying up the house. She put the gun in a drawer. He entered the bedroom, missed it, and told her, “Put it back. It’s important for my image.”
Schrader rarely fired his weapons; he was probably more dangerous to himself than to anyone else. Both he and his brother, Leonard, had a thing about suicide. Recalls director Penny Marshall, who knew Paul from those days, “He was always talking about it. From an anal-compulsive point of view. He was going to put a gun in his mouth and pull the trigger, but wrap a towel around his head so that he didn’t make a mess.”
Leonard, two years older, had a different attitude toward guns, perhaps because he took suicide more seriously. “I was afraid of them,” he says, “for a very good reason: I was afraid of killing myself. I didn’t want it to be easy. I would be sitting alone in some room at three o’clock in the morning with a loaded gun, thinking about blowing my brains out. It was not, ‘I’m having a bad day, I want to kill myself; no, the desire, the need, felt as real as a fucking table. I want to do this, and I never want to do this. I’m three seconds away from it, and I’m three million years away from it. I felt the fever of two things inside me fighting. I was breaking out in a sweat, my temperature was going up from the intensity of it. Sometimes I would just stare at the wall, trying to quiet the heat down, but sometimes the heat kept building, and that’s when I was looking for the gun. Triggered by something physical, like I couldn’t sleep. I found out that if I stuck the barrel in my mouth, like some infant’s pacifier, I could fall asleep. It worked for two or three weeks, and all of a sudden, it didn’t work. I’d been sucking on an empty gun. I knew if I loaded the sonofabitch, I was gonna sleep tonight.”
Paul too slept with a loaded gun, “probably loaded,” he says. “That’s why I went into therapy.”
It was hard to know what to make of the brothers’ dark infatuation with death. It was strange, wildly anomalous in sun-baked Southern California, where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows. For Milius, guns were shtick. For the Schraders, they were more, rooted in something gloomy and self-destructive in their childhood. The family of their father, though not Dutch Calvinists like their mother’s, had its own peculiarities. Their father’s brother committed suicide while his wife was pregnant with their eighth child, when Paul was six. Five years later, the eldest son committed suicide on the anniversary of his father’s death. Five years after that, the second son committed suicide on the same day. Twenty years later, a third son showed up in Grand Rapids at their father’s oil company, looking for a job because he was afraid he was going to kill himself on the same day. “This is what we grew up with,” says Leonard. “We had Dutch Calvinism, which an expert told me is a permanent form of mild depression, just nudging us toward suicide, and then we had to keep this secret from everybody, that my dad’s only relatives were blowing their brains out all the time.”
•
LIKE SCORSESE, Paul Schrader was raised in a God-ridden enclave to one side of mainstream American secularism. Instead of the priests and gangsters of Little Italy, Schrader was breast-fed on the fire and brimstone of the fanatical Christian Reformed Church, a Dutch Calvinist breakaway sect, in Gerald Ford’s hometown, Grand Rapids, Michigan, in the ’50s. His parents regarded movies, TV, and rock ‘n’ roll as the work of the devil.
Schrader’s family came from Friesland, in Holland. They traveled west around the time of the Civil War, until they found a place that seemed like home, the mucky shores of Lake Michigan, where they raised celery.
The cinema of the ’70s was a cinema of younger brothers—Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma, Rafelson. Like these men, Paul had a complicated relationship with his older sibling, affectionate, but bitterly competitive in an undeclared way. Since—unlike the other sets of brothers—the Schraders would work together trying to get a foothold in Hollywood, the result was more dramatic.
Paul was a sickly child, and Leonard’s mission in life, drummed into his head by his parents, was to take care of him, make sure he survived the vale of tears that was life on earth, particularly in Grand Rapids. “Leonard bore the brunt of my father’s personality and in many ways he was crushed by it,” says Paul. “But he helped me build up strength to confront my father. And I swore that when my time came to do battle with him, that I would not lose. And I didn’t.”
The Schraders’ father was strict even by the standards of Dutch Calvinism. He would make the family—the boys dressed up in their Sunday best, starched white shirts, suffocating and stiff as boards—arrive at church an hour early so he could be sure to sit in the same spot in the same pew. “No matter what you did, you made too much noise and got the elbow in the ribs,” recalls Leonard. “The third elbow meant you were gonna get whipped. I got whipped six, seven days a week. Just to be a normal human being for twenty-four hours, breathing, eating, going to the rest rooms, having a normal life, meant I was going to break twenty rules a day, and three of them were worth a beating. I took off my Sunday shirt, my father leaned me over the kitchen table, took the extension cord from his electric shaver, and he whipped my back with the plug so I’d get little pinpricks of blood, a nice little pattern of dots up and down my back. Like I’d been to the doctor for an allergy test.”
Mother wasn’t much better. In an effort to dramatize what hell was like for young Paul, she took his hand and jabbed him with a needle. When he cried out, she said, “Do you remember what it felt like the moment the needle hit your thumb? Well, that’s what hell is like, all the time.”
But she was an improvement on Dad. “What saved me was my mother was human,” continues Leonard. “My father was like a machine. Always told me the number ahead of time, related to how bad my offense was. If he said he was going to beat me twenty times, he beat me twenty times. My mother whipped me with a broom handle. In the kitchen. Sometimes she’d break it right over my back. But if you made my mother laugh, she couldn’t go on. I would save jokes for this occasion, not jokes that I thought were funny—some of them were the dumbest jokes I ever heard—but jokes that my mother’s group of friends in the church basement thought were funny, that she hadn’t heard yet. I’d always wait for the first blow, the one I could never stop. Then I’
d tell a joke, straining to remember the punch line. Once she started to laugh, it was okay, always with that Freudian little cap, ‘Don’t tell your father, it’s our secret,’ the S&M beatings in the middle of the kitchen.”
The brothers were not allowed to watch movies, of course, nor television. Paul didn’t see his first movie until he was seventeen. One day, his mother caught him listening to a Pat Boone song and hurled the radio against the wall. The brothers chafed under the constraints. “I wanted to see one movie in my life, as an act of sin,” recalls Leonard. “But I had no idea how to pick a movie. So I opened the paper, and I saw this ad, Anatomy of a Murder. It was about where I lived, a Michigan rape-murder trial. I was standing on the sidewalk in front of the theater, trying to bolster my courage. I’d been taught that Christ is your constant companion, so I was making jokes, going, ‘Well, Christ, if you want to wait here on the curb, I should be back in about an hour and a half.’ Finally, I bought the ticket, went in. I had also been taught that movie theaters, the buildings themselves, were dens of iniquity. I expected honey to be oozing down the walls. This one was like a Howard Johnson’s. A man in a monkey suit, and a candy counter, so I thought, Why has this been forbidden? Where’s the sin? I made a minimum commitment, sat down in the last seat, end, white knuckles, terrified. Terrified.
“Since puberty, I had had these hallucinations. I would see things and hear things that I knew weren’t there. So all of a sudden the screen peeled back, and it was the Last Judgment Day. I saw the Lord God Jehovah and hosts of angels coming down, and I was gonna burn in hell forever, because I went to the fuckin’ movies. I knew it was not real, yet I saw it, and I heard it. I ran out of the theater, two blocks, five blocks, till I calmed down, furious at myself. This is your first movie, and you’re havin’ these fuckin’ visions, you freaked yourself right out of the theater. How you ever gonna get outta this town if this is how you’re gonna be. I still had the stub in my pocket, so I went back, and watched the whole thing. That was my first movie!”
Paul planned to be a minister. But by the time he entered Calvin College, it was the ’60s, and the rumblings of the antiwar movement were audible in Grand Rapids. Paul’s parents were right: film was the snake in the Calvinist garden, the last temptation for someone like their itchy son. “I fell in love with movies because they were forbidden,” he says. He was introduced to Pauline Kael at the West End Bar when he was taking film courses at Columbia in the summer of 1966, after his sophomore year. They talked film far into the night. “The first time I met her, referring to some movie, a comedy, she said, ‘The laughs are as sparse as pubic hairs on an old lady’s cunt,’” he recalls. “I was shocked. I didn’t know women talked like this.” After he graduated in June of 1968, she helped him get a job reviewing films for the L.A. Free Press. Better yet, she got him into UCLA Film School. “Pauline plucked me out of no-where,” he says. “There was no way I could have gotten into UCLA without her. She was my only connection to a career. I was terrified that suddenly she would get hit by a car. What would I do?” Schrader lost his job at the Freep for panning Easy Rider.
After Beverly Walker left him, Schrader was devastated. He had abandoned his wife for Beverly, and now she had cut him loose. “I felt shit twice over,” he recalls. His personal fortunes at a low ebb, he considered leaving L.A., but decided he would never forgive himself if he didn’t try to write a script. The result was Taxi Driver, which he feverishly wrote in ten days (seven for the first draft, three for the rewrite), in the late spring of 1972, while he was staying on in Walker’s apartment in Silverlake.
Schrader recalls, “These violent, self-destructive fantasies that one normally holds at bay started to prey upon me. I had this old Chevy Nova. I drove around at night drinking scotch and going into the peep shows—those damn 8mm loops where you threw a quarter in to keep the loop going. You passed the point where there’s pleasure involved, and it just became a kind of abnegation. Then I started getting sick. I finally went to an emergency room in enormous pain. I had an ulcer. While I was in the hospital, I had this idea of the taxi driver, this anonymous angry person. It jumped out of my head like an animal. It was like, ‘Oh, this is a fiction; it isn’t really you. Put it in a picture where it belongs and get it out of your fucking life where it doesn’t belong.’ So I wrote that script and left L.A.” He hit the road in his beat-up car on one of those suicidal, my-career-is-over-what-am-I-gonna-do-with-my-life trips around America.
WHILE PAUL WAS IN HOLLYWOOD, Leonard was in Japan. He had left the country in 1968 when he had gotten his induction notice. He ended up teaching English for four years at what he terms the Berkeley of Japan. As soon as he got there, radical students calling themselves the Red Army Faction armed with sticks and iron pipes dragged him out of his classroom and closed down his university. He had nothing to do, so he hung out in bars and got a taste of the Japanese underworld, the Japanese mob, called the yakuza. He came back in the early fall of 1972, when he turned twenty-eight, too old to be drafted. He had no idea where Paul was, and went back to Grand Rapids, where he stared at the wall of his parents’ house for three weeks, lost, broke, and depressed.
One day, Paul called, told him to meet him in Winston-Salem, where he had been staying. Nixon was running for reelection against George McGovern, Jesse Helms was running for the Senate for the first time. Leonard borrowed a couple of bucks, bought a Greyhound ticket. “I traveled all night through these dogshit little towns in West Virginia, and all the while the idea for The Yakuza was getting clearer in my head,” he recalls. “I got off at dawn, at this tiny bus station on the edge of town. And there was my brother playing pinball. I hadn’t seen him in four, five years. I walked over. He didn’t even look at me, said, ‘I got another ball.’ Finished his game, we got in this car, drove onto the freeway, which was empty, because it was so early. Two hotrod guys came flying along, cut us off. My brother hit the gas, we came up behind their car, touched them, then he floored it, we were pushing them over a hundred miles per hour down the freeway. I put my feet up on the dashboard, thinking, We’re gonna die here, which was fine with me, I’d been looking at my parents’ wall for three weeks. We came to an exit, my brother had had enough, let up on the gas, and that car took the exit, just went bam! My brother and I still hadn’t spoken. He turned to me, said, ‘That’s how I feel, how do you feel?’
“ ‘About the same. ’Cept I got an idea.’
“ ‘Idea for what?’
“ ‘ A novel.’
“ ‘Like what?’ I told him. By the time we got to our friend’s house, he had said to me, ‘Novel, fine, first we write the screenplay. And I’m gonna call a guy right now, and get the money.’”
Leonard’s idea, simply put, was Japanese gangsters. Paul made the call to his agent, Michael Hamilburg, said, “This is The Godfather meets Bruce Lee. It’s gonna sell for sixty grand. You get a third of the money, I get a third, and Leonard gets a third.”
Hamilburg gave them $5,000 on the spot. The brothers arrived in L.A. around Thanksgiving and rented a tiny apartment on Bicknell in Venice, a block from the beach, for $90 a month, which Hamilburg paid for. They took the bedroom doors off the hinges, stole some cinder blocks from a construction site, set up two desks, one in each bedroom, facing each other. The only other piece of furniture was a massive butcher block coffee table with wrought iron legs. It was scored with knife marks, made while Paul was writing Taxi Driver. They rented two electric typewriters, wrote three drafts in about eight weeks. They wrote around the clock, twenty, twenty-two hours a day, worked ten hours, slept one, very little food. The walls were so thin the German woman downstairs continually threatened to call the police until the brothers put blankets under the typewriters to deaden the clacking. Toward the end, around Christmas of ’72, they were running out of money, even though they were spending less than a dollar a day, $7, $10 a week for food, stealing plastic envelopes of ketchup from restaurants, making tomato juice.
“We sat down, took a good lo
ok at the script, and said to each other, ‘We gotta write it one more time,’” recalls Leonard. “We were just wiped out, needed to find the energy to write one more draft. For us, the only surefire source of that big a jolt was guilt. We talked about, ‘How we gonna get’—you didn’t wanna go out and rob somebody—‘the guilt?’ My brother said to me, ‘We’ll go to Vegas, lose all our money, we’ll feel so guilty, so pissed off, we’ll come home and finish the script. Or, we’ll get rich, and we won’t care if we finish the script.’ So we drove to Vegas. We each had forty bucks. We each played blackjack, we each won, I had about two hundred bucks, my brother had about three hundred bucks. He said, ‘This is nuthin’, I don’t feel guilty enough.’ I said, ‘Neither do I. What’re we gonna do?’ We decided that we’d keep enough money to buy gas to get home, and take the rest of the money, which was almost $500, and put it on one number in roulette. We lost, started back to L.A. On the outskirts of Vegas, this car we’d been driving the crap out of broke down. It was the middle of the night, no gas stations open, and besides, we couldn’t afford to get it fixed. So we locked it up, left it there, and hitchhiked into L.A.
“We rewrote the script in ten days, right over New Year’s, and by January 5 it was finished, BAM, we got meetings, but we got no car. We had to hitchhike and walk to these meetings, and we had to hide that we got no car. ‘Can we validate your parking?’ ‘No, we parked on the street,’” I said.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Page 43