by Joel Coen
A knock brings his look up.
LARRY
Yes – thanks for coming, Clive.
Clive Park enters the office.
… Have a seat.
Larry uses a key to open the top desk drawer. He takes out the envelope holding cash.
… We had, I think, a good talk, the other day, but you left something that –
CLIVE
I didn’t leave it.
LARRY
Well – you don’t even know what I was going to say.
CLIVE
I didn’t leave anything. I’m not missing anything. I know where everything is.
Larry looks at him, trying to formulate a thought.
LARRY
Well … then, Clive, where did this come from?
He waves the envelope.
… This is here, isn’t it?
Clive looks at it gravely.
CLIVE
Yes, sir. That is there.
LARRY
This is not nothing, this is something.
CLIVE
Yes, sir. That is something.
A beat.
… What is it?
LARRY
You know what it is! You know what it is! I believe. And you know I can’t keep it, Clive.
CLIVE
Of course, sir.
LARRY
I’ll have to pass it on to Professor Finkle, along with my suspicions about where it came from. Actions have consequences.
CLIVE
Yes. Often.
LARRY
Always! Actions always have consequences!
He pounds the desk for emphasis.
… In this office, actions have consequences!
CLIVE
Yes, sir.
LARRY
Not just physics. Morally.
CLIVE
Yes.
LARRY
And we both know about your actions.
CLIVE
No, sir. I know about my actions.
LARRY
I can interpret, Clive. I know what you meant me to understand.
CLIVE
Meer sir my sir.
Larry cocks his head.
LARRY
… “Meer sir my sir”?
CLIVE
(careful enunciation)
Mere … surmise. Sir.
He gravely shakes his head.
… Very uncertain.
CLOSE ON TURNTABLE TONE ARM
A hand lays it onto a slowly spinning vinyl record.
Through scratches and pops, an unaccompanied tenor starts a mournful Hebrew chant.
Close on the sleeve:
RABBI YOUSSELE ROSENBLATT
CHANTS YOUR HAFTORAH PORTION
VOLUME 12
Rabbi Youssele wears a caftan and a felt hat and has sad eyes that peer out, like an owl in foliage, from the dark beard that covers most of the rest of his face.
Wider, on Danny, in his bedroom, evening. He lifts the tone arm on the portable turntable.
He chants the passage.
He drops the tone arm at the same place; Rabbi Youssele chants the passage again.
Danny listens, eyes narrowed. He lifts the tone arm and chants the passage again.
He replays the passage again but before he can lift the tone arm to echo it once more, his door bursts open. Rabbi Youssele continues to chant.
SARAH
You little brat fucker! You snuck twenty bucks out of my drawer!
DANNY
Studying Torah! Asshole!
SARAH
You little brat! I’m telling Dad!
DANNY
Oh yeah? You gonna tell him you’ve been sneaking it out of his wallet?
SARAH
All right, you know what I’m gonna do? You little brat? If you don’t give it back?
We hear the thunk of the front door opening. Danny stands, calling:
DANNY
Dad?
FOYER
Larry is entering with his briefcase. As he stows it in the foyer closet Danny’s voice continues, off:
DANNY
Dad, you gotta fix the aerial.
Judith emerges from the kitchen.
JUDITH
Hello, Larry, have you thought about a lawyer?
LARRY
Honey, please!
Danny emerges from the hall.
DANNY
We’re not getting Channel 4 at all.
LARRY
(to Judith)
Can we discuss it later?
DANNY
I can’t get F Troop.
JUDITH
Larry, the children know. Do you think this is some secret? Do you think this is something we’re going to keep quiet?
Sarah enters.
SARAH
Dad, Uncle Arthur is in the bathroom again! And I’m going to The Hole at eight!
She hits Danny on the back of the head.
DANNY
Stop it!
LARRY
Sarah! What’s going on!
DANNY
She keeps doing that!
LATER
Larry sits in a reclining chair in the living room, head back, listening to Sidor Belarsky on the hi-fi. From somewhere, a hiss-sucking sound, and the sound of a pencil busily scratching paper.
We cut to the writing: Uncle Arthur sits scribbling into a spiral notebook, his free hand holding the end of a length of surgical tubing against the back of his neck. The tube leads to a Water Pik-like appliance on an end table next to him – the source of the sucking sound.
After listening to the music for a long beat, Larry speaks into space:
LARRY
Arthur?
Uncle Arthur does not look up from his scribbling.
ARTHUR
Yes?
Larry continues to stare at the ceiling.
LARRY
What’re you doing?
Still without looking up:
ARTHUR
Working on the Mentaculus.
Long beat. Music. Scribbling.
LARRY
… Any luck, um, looking for an apartment?
More scribbling.
ARTHUR
No.
The doorbell chimes.
FRONT DOOR
Larry enters, glances through the front door’s head-height window, and – freezes, one hand arrested on its way to the doorknob.
His point-of-view: framed by the window, yellowly lit by the stoop light, a human head. A middle-aged man, a few years older than Larry. A fleshy face with droopy hangdog features, a five-o’clock shadow, and sad Harold Bloom eyes.
Larry opens the door.
LARRY
Sy.
Sy enters, thrusts out a hand. His voice vibrates with a warm, sad empathy:
SY
Good to see you, Larry.
He is a heavy-set man wearing a short-sleeved shirt that his belly tents out in front of him. In his left hand he holds a bottle of wine.
LARRY
(tightly)
I’ll get Judith.
SY
No, actually Larry, I’m here to see you, if I might.
He shakes his head.
… Such a thing. Such a thing.
LARRY
Shall we go in the …
He is leading him into the kitchen but Sy, oblivious to surroundings, ploughs on with the conversation, arresting both men in the narrow space between kitchen sink and stove, invading Larry’s space.
SY
You know, Larry – how we handle ourselves, in this situation – it’s so impawtant.
LARRY
Uh-huh.
SY
Absolutely. Judith told me that she broke the news to you. She said you were very adult.
LARRY
Did she.
SY
Absolutely. The respect she has for you.
LARRY
Yes?
SY
Absolutely. B
ut the children, Larry. The children.
He shakes his head.
… The most impawtant.
LARRY
Well, I guess …
SY
Of coss. And Judith says they’re handling it so well. A tribute to you. Do you drink wine? Because this is an incredible bottle. This is not Mogen David. This is a wine, Larry. A Bawdeaux.
LARRY
You know, Sy –
SY
Open it – let it breathe. Ten minutes. Letting it breathe, so impawtant.
LARRY
Thanks, Sy, but I’m not –
SY
I insist! No reason for discumfit. I’ll be uncumftable if you don’t take it. These are signs and tokens, Larry.
LARRY
I’m just – I’m not ungrateful, I’m, I just don’t know a lot about wine and, given our respective, you know –
Sy startles him with an unexpected hug.
SY
S’okay.
He finishes the hug off with a couple of thumps on the back.
… S’okay. Wuhgonnabe fine.
SKEWED ANGLE ON PARKING LOT
We are dutch on a slit of a view through a cracked-open frosted window: the Hebrew school parking lot.
The last couple of student-filled buses are rolling out of the lot. It is late afternoon.
A reverse shows Danny in a stall, standing on a toilet seat, angling his head to peer out a bathroom window opened at the top.
The bathroom outside the stall: Ronnie Nudell leans against a sink waiting, taking a long draw from a joint.
Danny emerges from the stall. Ronnie Nudell offers the joint:
RONNIE NUDELL
Want some of this fucker?
HALLWAY
The bathroom door cracks open and Danny peeks out.
His point-of-view: the empty hallway ending in a T with another hallway. A janitor crosses the far perpendicular hall, pushing a broom. He disappears. His echoing footsteps recede.
Danny and Ronnie emerge from the bathroom.
RABBI MARSHAK
The photo-portrait on the wall of Mar Turchik’s office is lit by late-day sun.
We hear a scraping sound.
Wider: Ronnie Nudell looks over Danny’s shoulder as Danny, hunched at Mar Turchik’s desk, jiggles the end of a bent hanger in the keyhole of the top-center drawer. The hanger turns.
The boys open the drawer. In it: squirt guns, marbles set to rolling by the opening of the drawer, a comic book, a Playboy magazine, a slingshot, a small bundle of firecrackers. Hands rifle the gewgaws: no radio.
RONNIE NUDELL
Fuck.
SANCTUARY
We are behind the two boys, who sit side-by-side in the last pew of the empty sanctuary, gazing off. The stained-glass windows further weaken anemic late-day light. In deference to the location, the boys wear yarmulkas.
A long hold on their still backs.
At length, some movement in Danny’s back, his head dips, and we hear him sucking on a joint. He holds it, exhales, and passes it wordlessly to Ronnie Nudell.
SUBURBAN STREET
We pull Danny, eyes red-rimmed, walking along the street, still wearing his yarmulka. It is dusk.
The front door of a house just behind Danny opens. A husky, shaggy- haired youth emerges on the run.
The sound has alerted Danny. Seeing Mike Fagle, he too runs. He reaches up and grabs his yarmulka and clutches it in one of his pumping fists.
Pursued and pursuer both run wordlessly, panting, feet pounding.
Mike Fagle is closing. But Danny is already cutting across the Brandts’ front yard, approaching his own. He plunges into the house and slams the door.
Mike Fagle draws up, panting, gazing hungrily at the house.
PUFFY WHITE CLOUDS
A shockingly blue sky hung with picture-perfect clouds.
The top of an aluminum extension ladder swings in from the bottom of the frame and comes toward us.
We cut side-on as the ladder clunks against an eave.
The ladder starts vibrating to the rhythmic clung of someone climbing.
Hands enter. Larry’s head enters.
He climbs onto the roof.
He takes a couple of hunched steps in from the edge before cautiously straightening, making sure of his balance. He looks around.
His point-of-view toward the front: an unfamiliarly high perspective on the street and the neighboring houses, almost maplike. Very peaceful. Wind gently waves the trees.
Larry gingerly walks up to the aerial at the peak of the roof. He straddles the peak and, reacting to a rhythmic popping noise, looks down toward the back.
Foreshortened Mr. Brandt and Mitch are playing catch in their back yard. With each toss the ball pops, alternately in father’s mitt and son’s.
MITCH
Ow.
Precariously balanced, Larry reaches up for the aerial. He tentatively touches it. He grasps it. He twists the aerial.
Something strange: as it rotates the aerial creaks – a high whine like the hum sounded from the rim of a wineglass.
MITCH
Ow.
Faintly, under the wineglass sound, and clouded by static, a ringing tenor sings in an unfamiliar modality. Cantorial music.
Larry drops his hand. Inertia keeps the aerial rotating slowly till it dies, the sound drifting away into the sibilant shushing of trees.
Larry reaches out again to turn the aerial. The same crystal hum … cantorial singing … and now, layering in, the theme from F Troop.
Music. Crystal hum. Wind.
MITCH
Ow.
Larry’s look travels: his point-of-view pans slowly off the steep angle on the neighbors’ game of catch, travels across his own backyard, and brings in the white fence that encloses the patio of the neighbor on the other side.
MR. BRANDT
(off)
Good toss, Mitch.
On the enclosed patio a woman reclines on a lawn chaise of nylon bands woven over an aluminum frame. She is on her back, eyes closed against the sun. She is naked.
MITCH
(off)
Ow.
Larry reacts to the naked woman: startled at first, he moves to hide behind the peak of the roof. But as he realises that the sun keeps the woman’s eyes closed he relaxes, continu ing to stare.
She is attractive. Not young, not old: Larry’s age. Peaceful.
After a still beat one of her hands gropes blindly to the side. It finds an ashtray on the table next to her and takes from it a pluming cigarette. She puffs, and replaces it.
MITCH
(off)
Ow.
F Troop. Cantorial singing.
Blue sky and white puffy clouds.
The sound of a pencil scratching paper.
NOTEBOOK
A pencil writes equations into a lamplit spiral notebook.
Sidor Belarsky comes in at the cut. So does the spluttering suck-sound of Uncle Arthur’s evacuator.
Wider on Uncle Arthur, in his pyjamas, propped up on the narrow fold-out sofa, writing with one hand as he holds the evacuator hose to his neck with the other.
Squeezed into the living room next to the fold-out sofa is a camp cot of plaid-patterned nylon stretched over a folding frame. On the camp cot is Larry, lying half-in, half-out of a rumpled sleeping bag. He stares at the ceiling, a damp washcloth pressed to his forehead. His face is flaming red.
Arthur speaks absently as he scribbles:
ARTHUR
Will you read this? Tell me what you think?
Larry continues to stare at the ceiling.
LARRY
Okay.
Uncle Arthur glances up, focuses on Larry.
ARTHUR
Boy. You should’ve worn a hat.
LATER
The lights are out. Very quiet. Uncle Arthur lightly snores.
Larry still stares at the ceiling. He shifts his weight. The cot frame squeaks. He shifts again. Anoth
er creak.
Larry fishes his watch from the jumble of clothes on the floor: 4:50.
KITCHEN
Larry, in his underwear, spoons ground coffee into the percolator. Uncle Arthur snores on in the other room.
From outside, a dull thunk.
Larry pulls back a curtain.
Next door, Mr. Brandt goes down the walk, wearing camouflage togs and a billed camo cap, a rifle bag slung over his shoulder. He is carrying an ice chest, its contents clicking and sloshing.
The boy Mitch, also wearing camo clothes and cap and also with a rifle bag, has just closed the front door. He now lets the screen door swing shut behind him and follows his father down the walkway to the car in the drive.
The twitter of early morning birds. Mr. Brandt’s voice, though not projected, stands out in the pre-dawn quiet:
MR. BRANDT
Let’s see some hustle, Mitch.
CLOSE ON THE NOTEBOOK
Its top sheet, densely covered by equations, has a heading:
The Mentaculus
Compiled by Arthur Gopnik
After a beat Larry’s hand enters to turn the page. The second page is also densely covered with equations.
VOICE
Larry?
Larry’s look comes up from the Mentaculus. We are in Larry’s office. Standing in the office doorway is Arlen Finkle.
LARRY
Hi Arlen.
ARLEN FINKLE
Larry, I feel that, as head of the tenure committee, I should tell you this, though it should be no cause for concern. You should not be at all worried.
Larry waits for more. Arlen, though, seems to think it is Larry’s turn to speak, and so, after a beat, he does: