by Steve Hely
But the way I figured, you have to be a certain level of famous to get into an argument in the bathroom with Russell Crowe. And coke-addled or not, you must take your scripts seriously if you’re willing to stab for them.
The Ethel Merman movie was good. Or at least, what was wrong with it wasn’t Miller Westly’s fault. I’d seen it in college with Polly. For many weeks afterward, when we were bored in my room, I would demand that she do the scene where Renee Zellweger tells the producers that she won’t change how she sings, “Not for nobody!” Polly would frump out her chin the way Renee did.
I tried to watch the movie again before flying west, but I got to the scene where Ethel finally tells Ernest Borgnine (Val Kilmer) she loves him, and I knew it would be just too sad.
According to IMDb, Miller Westly had recovered from his sabbatical. He’d sold a screenplay about Alaskan crab fishermen for $2 million. He adapted Sister Carrie for Martin Scorsese. As a sample, his agent had sent me his next script: “Black/White,” about Russian mobsters who extort a chess prodigy in Brooklyn. Russell Crowe was attached to direct.
It hadn’t been easy to set this meeting up. I’d had twenty-seven phone conversations with his agent’s assistant, Aaron. He took to calling me “baller” and told me that when I got to LA we’d have to “Scotch it up.” I think that meant drink Scotch somewhere, but, unsure, I didn’t commit.
Poolside at the Standard, Miller clinked my glass and sucked down his mojito. He started mashing up the mint with his finger.
“Not sure this was fresh.”
Then his Treo started rumbling through his pocket, and he ejected up to answer it.
This was exactly how it was supposed to be. Here I was, drinking a mojito, with a guy who wanted to make my book into a movie. I had some definite ideas for the film. I also wanted to hear about the Russell Crowe stabbing. But surely the best strategy for a novelist was to act aloof, slightly repulsed with the whole place and the whole process of turning my work, Art, into a movie, Commerce. The mojito should be treated as unsatisfactory.
That would be my presentation, anyway. Internally I was focusing on Which movie stars will I get to meet? and How much will I be paid?
Even deeper—I barely dared think it—What if I win an Oscar?
Miller hung up or pushed the End Call button or whatever and strode back.
“Listen, bro, I gotta bounce. I gotta e-mail a draft of the chess thing to one of the EPs before he gets on a plane to London, and my assistant’s up in Santa Barbara picking up a Modigliani. You got enough, right?”
“Enough? Enough for what?”
“Enough for your article.”
“What?”
“Aren’t you the kid from Entertainment Weekly?”
“No—I … I talked to your agent? To Aaron? I wrote The Tornado Ashes Club.”
“Oh, fuck!” he said, and he sat down. “The book! Shit!” He punched me on the shoulder. “Tornado Ashes. Hazel Hollis loves this shit, right? Crazy fucking bitch.”
He popped an ice cube in his mouth.
“Also a crazy-fucking bitch, from what I hear. Ha!” He slapped me on the shoulder. “Seriously. Charlie Sheen told me that. Anyway, your thing—thing was fucking balls-out genius.”
He took a copy of my book, with colored Post-it notes sprouting from the sides, out of his bag.
“I want to fuck your book. Literally. I want to cut a hole in it, smear it with lube, and fuck it. Is that intense? I’m a pretty intense dude. I have notes.”
MILLER WESTLY’S NOTES
• “Look, I’ve got a lot of gay friends—this is Hollywood, we all messed around in college, gay producers, gay dentist—but Silas needs to be butched up. If only to lure better actors.
• “The Vegas stuff, opening scene: Silas walks past a drunk, degenerate gambler. We establish that this guy is outside the hotel every day. He asks Silas for a couple bucks—and Silas gives it to him. Knowing he’s just going to gamble it away. That establishes the whole thing: inevitability, kindness, love, the whole deal.
• “Silas’s grandfather, the guy Grandma marries after Luke dies? He needs to have been a real bastard. Psychological abuse, slapped Grandma around, drank. We’ll have a scene in the car, where Grandma tells Silas about it. ‘Your grandfather was a son of a bitch.’ Cut to flashback, him slapping her, hard. You see what I mean?
• “Grandma—see, this is a great role for your Ellen Barkin, whoever, one of these actresses who’s always complaining that there aren’t any parts for ‘mature’ women. Academy will love that. But viewers, they need to know Grandma was hot when she was younger. Maybe Renee. Maybe some new girl. Foxy, but elegant foxy.
• “Esmeralda—folksinger, great character, we’ll sell four hundred thousand copies of the sound track the first week. But she should be an addict. Recovering. She doesn’t tell Silas. Then on the road, when things get tough, she has a relapse. Great third-act complication. Silas nurses her back to health, beats the shit out of the guy who gave her the stuff.
• “The bounty hunter. He has to be sympathetic as hell. One of these Christian reforming guys, you know? He’s got a little girl at home. We see that in his bag of guns and grenades and shit, he’s got one of those drawings out of macaroni she made him at school. When he catches up to Silas, he gives him this great speech about redemption.
• “The stuff in World War II, Luke in the Resistance, all that—great. But get this: one day he’s on a mission with the Resistance guys, and they take him through the woods and show him this place—barbed wire, Nazis all around. What is it? It’s a concentration camp. You see that? ‘Here’s what we’re fighting for,’ that sort of thing.
• “Luke in Peru, when he’s dying—they bring in this old Catholic priest. Old guy. Gives him the last rites. And the priest tells him, ‘I had a long life, you had a short life, but soon we’ll be together in Heaven.’ Can you picture that? Awesome scene. Tension.
• “The ending, Grandma’s letting go of the ashes—great scene. Here’s the thing: she should be holding Silas’s hand, and she lets go and just walks right into the tornado. That’s the end. That’s your last shot. This woman walking into a fucking tornado. Huge impact.”
It’s difficult to convey the speed with which Miller Westly gave me all these ideas. In between he was taking sips of his Negro Modelo, and when he was done with the beer he was done talking. He took a dark glass bottle out of his pocket, and from it he administered three drops to each of his eyes.
“What do you think?”
What I thought was, This man is a genius. Maybe greater even than Preston Brooks.
He was so brazen! So unabashed! He didn’t try to pack his frauds into lyrical language. The literary con game was to write some bullshit and convince readers it’s good. But the Hollywood game seemed to be to tell its customers, “Here’s some bullshit. You’ll pay for it, and you’ll like it.”
I was humbled. I realized he was much better than me at this.
Miller looked up at me with a swaggery hint of a smile.
“You’re realizing I’m much better than you at this, right?”
“Yeah,” I said, quite stunned. From across the table he punched me in the shoulder.
“I have to be. Your book sold—what—thirty thousand copies? Something like that?”
It was significantly less than that, but I gave a modest shrug to suggest he was in the ballpark.
“And that’s a success for a book,” he continued. “But I deal in movies. I need to get four, five million people watching, minimum, or I’m on my ass in this town. I can’t afford to fuck around like you can.”
Miller picked up his Treo, looked at it, then slammed it back against the table.
“Shit. I gotta get to the Palisades, get the draft, and send this thing out in the next seventeen minutes. You wanna take a ride? We’ll talk in the car.”
*
Curbside, Miller tossed the Mexican valet a twenty, told him “rapidamente,” and the valet shot
off like an Olympic sprinter.
As we waited Miller took out his eyedropper again and reapplied. He offered it to me.
“You want some?”
“What is it?
“Distilled condensed liquid THC. Put it on your eyes. Full-body high without having to smoke weed. That shit’s terrible on your lungs.”
I declined, now terrified of getting into the car. But I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to seem uncool.
The valet brought the car around—a BMW 6 Series—we got in, and Miller floored it down Sunset.
Outside a row of boxy offices, we got stuck behind a slow-moving van and were blocked on the left by a Prius. Miller’s solution was to shift into reverse, cut into the right lane before an Escalade caught up to him, and then floor it. As he did this he reached across me and pointed at a road that bent up into the hills.
“I was at a party up there once—no idea how I got home, but I woke up and found ten eggshells on my bathroom floor. I’d eaten ten raw eggs. Shit.”
That “shit” was directed at a traffic light.
“Here’s the fucked-up thing—the party was on Saturday. When I woke up, it was fucking Wednesday.”
I suspected Miller might be the kind of guy who’s a better driver if he’s maintaining a steady rant. So I tried to keep him going.
“Did you always want to write for movies?” I asked.
“When I was a kid my dad took me to see Dr. Strangelove. Fucked-up movie to take a kid to. But my dad was a fucked-up guy. I was twelve when I saw that movie, and it just clicked: Yes! I gotta be a part of this! I wanted to be a screenwriter ever since I learned Arthur Miller was fucking Marilyn Monroe. She wasn’t fucking John Updike, was she?”
I conceded the point.
“Look, I’m a competitive Type-A intense guy. You get one spin on this planet. Nobody knows that better than me. I wasted a lot of time. I blew most of the midnineties up my nose. But think about this: no society, ever, has been better at anything than America is at making movies. The Ming Chinese made vases. The Renaissance Italians made frescoes. We are the best at making movies. We’re fucking geniuses at it. In Iran they stomp on American flags and then they go see Shrek 3 and X-Men. In a market in Mongolia you can buy a DVD of Pirates of the Caribbean. It is our cultural fucking genius, dude, and we are spreading like seed across the entirety of the fucking globe.”
We were zipping now through vegetated curves.
“You’re a smart kid, wrote a good book. Let me tell you something. In a generation, novels are finished. ‘Film is twentieth-century theater. It will become twenty-first-century writing.’ Ridley Scott said that. He ought to know—you ever read a book that shook you up more than Alien? I mean, primal shake-youto-your-core. That movie shook flecks of poop out of my intestines, I mean specks of steaks that had been up there for decades.
And we’re still figuring out this form. We’re getting so much better. Eighty years ago, movies were piano chords over title cards, and fainting women, and villains with mustaches. Eighty years from that to Alien. You think the novel’s had a pace like that? You think the novel can keep up? Let me tell you something. Novelists are gonna figure this out. There is no greater thrill for a writer than hearing your words boomed out in THX. You’re a writer. Think about what that’s like. Your scenes, sixty feet across. Fucking Shakespeare never felt anything like that… . Shit.”
That last “shit” was directed at the clock in the BMW, not at Shakespeare.
Miller put in a focused three minutes of driving before breaking to say, “Half of them already were screenwriters! Dickens, Tolstoy, Twain, Dreiser—these guys were writing cuttos and cold opens and pan shots and battle scenes. They just didn’t have the technology. When F. Scott Fitzgerald died he was under contract at MGM. Imagine what Shakespeare could’ve done if he’d known Brando. Or Dickens with Julianne Moore. Fuck, give Dickens Rob Schneider and Jennifer Tilly and it’ll be a fifty-million opening weekend. If those bastards were alive I’d be living in fucking Downey and working at Blockbuster.”
Miller left me to figure out how that follows as he dialed his phone.
“How we doing? … I’m passing Will Rogers … It’s gonna be close, maybe I should call you in a bomb threat … she’s in Santa Barbara picking up a Modigliani … dude, I’m maybe seven minutes out … nice.”
As he was talking, I wondered if I would die in a fiery car crash. On the plus side, if that happened, sales for The Tornado Ashes Club would skyrocket. I’d be back on the bestseller list for sure. And an air of mourning would ruin Polly’s wedding.
On the downside, I wouldn’t get the money.
I joke, but I was nearly wetting myself from fear.
“But the key is this.” Miller hung up his phone, and this was to me. “It’s not about talent and sound and special effects and camera work and lighting. It’s about economy. I don’t mean movie writers getting paid more than novelists, because that’s so fucking obvious I don’t need to point it out. It’s about storytelling discipline. Which sounds crazy, because discipline? Everybody out here’s getting blow jobs from Estonian models during a five-hundred-dollar deep-tissue massage and eating sushi flown in from the Aleutians, right?”
Here Miller took a hard right at a stoplight, onto a narrow snake of a street. He accelerated as though trying to find a flaw in his German suspension.
“But you know why screenplays are tighter? They have to be. Because when the director’s shooting, he’s burning money every second. You cannot have waste. Imagine if every sentence in a book cost two grand. Are you sure you’re gonna leave it in? You sure you need those adverbs? Best writing school in the country is watching daylight burn on a shoot and just hearing the expenses tick up.”
We pulled up in front of Miller’s house. From the driveway I could see only two rectangles of white wall split by a glass door. But I followed him inside, and the back of his cavernous living room was a pane of glass, and over dots of roofs I could see the Pacific. On the right the floor opened up to a black-tiled pool, with a waterfall that dropped into another pool.
“Fix a drink. I gotta send this shit.”
There was a tidy bar under a giant framed poster for Nosferatu. Original, it looked like. A German Expressionist vampire loomed over me as I tried to decide what kind of vodka to have.
I realized the back of my shirt was soaked with terror sweat from the drive with a THC-fueled mad genius. Worried I might stain the white couch, I just stood there and looked at the pools. Miller was on the phone in the other room.
“Boom! I just sent you gold. Go in the Elite Class Lounge or whatever and print that … Have the pretty stewardess get you a nice Johnnie Walker, double, rocks, read that, and by the time you’re over Newfoundland you’re gonna be wondering what picture you want them to use on the cover of Variety … nice safe flight.”
Miller came back into the room, stared me in the eye, and pointed behind me.
“Thomas Mann used to live right down there.” Then he turned and said, “How many novelists you know have two fucking pools?”
Liquefied THC must have a sedative stage, which kicked in by the time we drove back to the Standard. There was less swearing at traffic lights, and I had to exert less energy exerting the muscles in my sphincter to keep from soiling myself.
“I’ll tell you a story about novels,” he says. “I went to lunch at Campanile with Sam Mendes. And we got to talking, and he says [here Miller did a very good British accent] ‘Miller, there’s something I’ve been just itching to take on, and I want you to adapt it.’ It’s Madame Bovary. So he makes me an offer, I take it, I go up to Vancouver for a couple weeks and take a look at it. Mark up the thing, pull out scenes, sketch out dialogue, he doesn’t say anything but I know he wants to put Kate in it—Winslet. So I think I’ve got a take. There’s affairs, there’s botched surgery, Paris, death, stuff to work with. I start writing.
“Here’s the thing. I get through ‘Interior—Rouault’s farmhouse, no
rth of France, 1850s, et cetera, he’s working on the broken leg, Emma enters. But then I realize I’ve got nothing. Because here’s the problem: it has to be internal. You can’t dramatize it all. And there’s no actress, not even Kate Winslet, who’s that good. There never will be. There’s always going to be that distance. You can watch a movie. But you can’t live it. And Madame Bovary, you need to live it.
“So I call up Sam, tell him I took a swing and couldn’t connect, he says we’ll find something else, et cetera.
“Just to clear my head I wrote a movie about a biracial car thief who gets caught up in a gang war in prison. It’s in turnaround at Paramount.”
We drive on through the green that hides the houses in Bel-Air.
“You know, I probably could’ve done it, Madame Bovary. Could’ve pulled something off, Sam and Kate would’ve made it look good. But you know what? It wouldn’t have been true. I couldn’t have made it true.
“And let me tell you—I’ll lie about just about anything. But I couldn’t make myself turn Madame Bovary into a lie.
“Flaubert,” Miller said. “That guy deserved two pools.”
After I left LA I never heard from Miller Westly again. I traded a few calls with Aaron, who acted mock resentful that we had failed to Scotch it up, and through odd evasions over several months I eventually understood that Miller had lost interest or gotten too busy or somehow given up on TAC.
Which was too bad. Some of the things that happened to me later I would’ve liked to discuss with him.
15
The hot-tub jets still whirred, blowing indifferent fountains of water against the slumped face, bobbing it about like some awful buoy, or a horrible children’s pool toy. The face of Heavenli D’Jones, who’d danced on her last bachelor’s lap—in this life anyway. A single gunshot, like a red wax seal on an antique document, was centered in her forehead.