Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

by Nat Segaloff

  “I can’t even begin to tell you what a crushing blow it was to have this mini-series aborted in the way it was. It sent me into weeks of destructive behavior. I went public. I announced — imagine, I, a lone writer without resources or power — that never again would I work for ABC until certain executives were fired. And I named them. Well, three years later I was back at ABC. All the guilty had been expunged; vengeance would have been sweet had their dismissals come as a result of my pissing in the wind. But, no, simple attrition did them in. They’re gone — and I’m still producing — so possibly there and there only can one isolate the triumph, meaningless as it may be. But the bitter bottom line is that what might have been a major contribution to the American psyche — airing the issues of the U.S. involvement in Indochina — never came to being.

  “I think the thing that haunted me the most was the fact that, for once in all my years of writing, I had actually written the last line of dialogue for a script which would have run 1,320 pages and covered a period of seven tumultuous years cross-cut between Vietnam and the States — and never got to use it. The line was to be spoken by the news cameraman, the part played by Bruce Boxleitner, as, remaining behind after the Americans abandoned Saigon, he is photographing the first NVA tank breaking through the fence at the Presidential Palace. He looks at the faces of South Vietnamese — faces without expression — a series of cameos which tell you nothing — and everything. And he says, more to himself than to anybody, ‘Won’t anybody say we’re sorry?’

  “Over and out. I never got to use the line. And to this moment nobody — no American I have ever heard, certainly nobody in either our government or in our military hierarchy — has ever spoken those absolving words: ‘WE’RE SORRY!’”

  Networks were not Silliphant’s only bête noir. On occasion, a star could assume the position, as a big one did on Over the Top. “As warming as was my experience with Clint Eastwood,” Silliphant said, “my experience with Sylvester Stallone represents everything I detest about Hollywood. Stallone has one talent: that is to have soaked up all the bullshit which has accumulated in La La Land over the years, coated it with an ersatz patina of culture and love of fine art, and created from his boot-straps a genuine, authentic Monster.”

  Over the Top (1987) is about a divorced trucker who wins his estranged son’s love by entering an arm-wrestling contest. “I have managed to expunge from my memory the where and how of my getting involved in this disastrous project,” Silliphant added, “but no matter how many sponges I pass over the blackboard, I can’t erase the underlying chalk which spells my own fucking fault. It was to be a quick rewrite of an existing script and the money was good and I was about ready to buy a new BMW in Munich — or some such nonsense — so I went along with the producer to the brick-walled house in which at the time Stallone was serving time. I was tempted to ask where are the Dobermans, but I didn’t. When I met Stallone, I was surprised to see how small he looked. But of course I am a person, not a special camera lens. I will tell you that I found him at this first meeting charming, respectful, and intelligent. I dismissed at once everything I had heard about him that had been negative. He told me a few ideas which he had which he thought might help in the rewrite, then encouraged me by saying, ‘It’s your ball, Stirling. I don’t have to tell you what to write. But if at any time you get stuck or want to bounce ideas around, call me.’

  “A few days into the rewrite, I did find a need to talk to Stallone. I was seeking his reaction to some Indian stuff I was adding to the mix. I called him. I found myself in a Kafka novel. There was no way I could get through. The entourage had closed in around their deity. What did I wish to talk to Mr. Stallone about? It’s about making him part-Indian, I explained; you see, before he goes to Vegas he needs to renew his strength — his soul. It’s much like the sun-dance performed by the Lakotah. But in this case I’m inventing a really weird sort of Apache ritual involving a lot of rattlesnakes. Click! Why is he calling our Sly about rattlesnakes? I persisted, however. I called the producer, I called a few art galleries where the rumors were he might be showing up, I called the restaurants he’s known to haunt (if that is the proper verb). No Stallone. So I went ahead on my own. Goddamn rattlesnakes and all. I finished the rewrite in short order, turned it in. The producer loved it. I got my money. But never a word from Stallone. Until a while later I get a letter from the WGA about writing credit and I discover that the screenplay is by Sylvester Stallone and Stirling Silliphant, based on a story by a couple of honest and innocent other writers. [258]

  “The term going ballistic came into being at that moment. I prepared an appropriate letter of protest to the WGA Arbitration Committee and sent along the supporting materials, story notes, research and finished script, and shortly thereafter Rocky was knocked out of the ring. He not only was not granted first position, he was granted no position. I was given sole screenplay credit.” (Not exactly; keep reading.)

  “Now here we have a case of winning the battle and losing the war, because the finished film was about as embarrassing as most Stallone films — except that in this instance I stood clearly delineated as the dumb sonofabitch who had written it. I can’t possibly explain to you the hundreds of little cuts and jabs that were performed upon the screenplay I turned in. All the Indian stuff was out. Rattlesnakes? Forget it. The relationship between the truck driver and his estranged and dying wife had been turned into a comic strip. The ‘love’ scenes between father and son somehow were trivialized. Much of my dialogue was changed, not so much in its narrative sense as in its literary sense. Wherever I might have written a piece of dialogue which had at its center some kind of feeling or concept, it seemed to have suffered a sex-change. Or maybe it’s just that Stallone can’t get too far beyond ‘Yo.’ I’m simply at a loss to explain how it ended up so badly. Even if I just came right out and said, hey, I wrote a bad script, it still wouldn’t explain the depths to which the film ultimately descended.

  “My vehemence and distaste for Stallone is not personal, strangely enough. In person he can be, I understand, a warm and delightful friend. I believe my abhorrence is based rather on the fact that he has let himself become the ultimate example of Hollywood excess. It’s the stretched limo, the need for the number one table at the trendiest restaurant in Venice, the private jet, the expectation that this is the best suite in the hotel — all the trappings which have nothing to do with the World. Only with the business and all the thousands of remora who swarm around the sharks they create.”

  When informed that the film credits bear Stallone’s name following his, Silliphant responded, “The only explanation for my obviously having got the facts wrong here is that in winning the Guild reversal of Stallone’s attempt to grab credit, I was so pleased that I must have ‘rewritten’ the actual events. I doubt that I would have become quite so determined to seek a reversal of the producer’s credit claim if the submitted credit had read ‘Screenplay by Sylvester Stallone and Stirling Silliphant.’ What difference really does it make if the other guy puts his name ahead of yours when he’s the bloody star of the movie? Could it have been (I frankly don’t remember) that the submitted credit only listed one name as the screenwriter: his name? That would have launched me on Jupiter orbit. Then, if the Guild not only restored my name, but put me in first position, that would have signified the triumph. At least, now that we both know Stallone has his name on this garbage, I am no longer quite mystified about that happened to my script as I was when I was going around under the illusion I was solely responsible for it. So your news, dear friend, is good news.”

  One other train wreck presented itself on Silliphant’s track: Sam Peckinpah and The Killer Elite (1975), a spy thriller written by Marc Norman in which an Asian politician is spirited out of America for counter-revolutionary purposes in his homeland. James Caan played a CIA agent whose best friend turns on him in the course of the mission and he has to go after him. The picture also starred Robert Duvall, Arthur Hill, and Bo Hopkins, and was sho
t throughout Northern California during 1974, under conditions that were as dramatic as the story itself. Peckinpah had hit worse skids than usual following the failure of 1974’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and figured that an action picture would restore his clout. But he was incapable of hiding his disgust, and he took it out on everyone, starting with himself.

  “Yeh, Sam was into the Scotch malts at the time,” Silliphant confirmed. “His heart wasn’t in The Killer Elite because he had a script of his own he wanted to shoot instead, but he was alone in this desire, and so was forced to do The Killer Elite. He had little input on my rewrite because I didn’t accept any and, since we had reached the point where I refused to come on the set, there was no need for either of us to be too polite to each other, nor for me — since I was working for the producer Marty Baum and fuck the director — to be even courteous. My changes in Marc Norman’s draft were to change London to San Francisco and an African political figure into an Asian political figure. It was basically a location rewrite. I added the martial arts stuff. I was able to obtain employment for most of my karate buddies by bringing ninja into play.”

  He also masterminded the casting of Tiana in the key role of Tommie, the politician’s daughter, but he kept his machinations to himself and let the System run its course. “I’m happy to report,” he told writer John Corcoran, “that Sam and Marty tested Tiana for the lead opposite James Caan and hired her for the part before either knew she was married to me. With Tiana in the film and Sam directing, I saw a chance to write the definitive martial arts film. Originally, when I rewrote, I wrote Tiana’s part as the daughter of an important tong leader in San Francisco, a female Billy the Kid, a great martial artist, an absolute killer, and a tough little Chinese cookie who was appointed to be one of the bodyguards for this politician and to work with some snappy ex-CIA guys… . What happened was that Sam simply didn’t like what I did with the script. But United Artists did, so he accepted the script. When we got up to San Francisco, everyone started changing everything. I got so disgusted by the changes and the direction everything was taking, I walked off the film and refused to have anything to do with it… . They totally changed Tiana’s part, then cut out everything that she did.” Added Tiana, “The Sam Peckinpah experience still counts deeply in my battered psyche. It was my dream to act. First there were no parts for me, then I got an Oscar-winner to create them, but no acceptance!”

  According to Silliphant, he not only wanted to give Tiana a plum role he wanted to take a stand for her people. “I had taken the assignment because essentially it gave me a chance to say something about Asian points of view,” Silliphant later elaborated to a panel at the 1983 Manila International Film Festival. “And, as they got to the shoot, they began to change it around to kid Asians and make all kinds of racial slurs. I felt the film had become very racist. I was absolutely embittered about it and wouldn’t go to rehearsals and began to yell and scream. I tried to get my name off, and I couldn’t. Before you accept a contract, you specify that in the event the film is changed and dissatisfies you, you have a pseudonym that you can substitute, then it can be done. But when the studio hires you, they’re really hiring you too, for your name, and if you then say to the public, ‘I hate this picture,’ you’re damaging the film and they have a cause against you,. So it becomes a very interesting legal issue. The only way you can protect yourself is, in front, you say, ‘I have reservations about this. If it doesn’t work out, then I have the right to use a pseudonym.” I didn’t know that at the time.” [259]

  Despite strife on the picture, the Silliphants were so taken with the Northern California setting that they bought a house and moved there after the film wrapped. It was a bad choice; the house, purchased from real estate developer and philanthropist Mark Taper, was built on a land appendage overlooking the Bay called Strawberry Point. It turned out that it had been erected in violation of local environmental ordinances, and the Silliphants spent the next seven years in legal battles over zoning, access to water, the unhealthful condition of the house, and the sale itself. Eventually they sold it at a loss and moved back to Beverly Hills.

  The rewriting of The Killer Elite, perfunctory or not, rekindles the question of why Silliphant was offered so many novel-to-screen adaptations in his prime years when his reputation had been built by writing over one hundred television originals. He constantly pondered this, particularly whenever he had to tackle massive, big-budget mini-series projects Pearl (1978, three hours), The Brotherhood of the Rose (1989, four hours); like Mussolini: The Untold Story (1985, seven hours); and Space (1985, thirteen hours).

  “If it’s based on somebody else’s novel,” he told TV host Mike Douglas in March of 1975, “you read it, you absorb it, you try to find his intent. As you know, writing a novel and writing a film are two separate things. A novel has introspective passages, it has flashbacks when the guy was two years old that you can’t have in a film. So you have to extract from the book that central part of it which you think is the film that you and the producer want to make. If it’s an original, he doesn’t have to read anything, it comes out of himself. It’s much easier. Writing adaptations is the most difficult thing to do.” [260]

  As the ‘70s yielded to the ‘80s, the politics of TV mini-series — all of them inspired by the immense success of Roots — got to be as screwy as features, yet Silliphant mastered it. Novelist David Morrell, who had written him the Route 66 fan letter, recalled reconnecting with him by phone after Rambo had become a hit. “He said, ‘What are you working on?’ I said, ‘Brotherhood of the Rose.’ He said, ‘I’m going to go over to NBC’ and then next thing I know, I had a deal there.” Morrell wrote three drafts of the script from his novel, then Silliphant wrote one, and then Guy Waldron did the one that was shot and aired in 1989 as a two-part mini-series. “It was the only mini-series ever to be broadcast after a Super Bowl,” Morrell said, “making it another television ‘first’ with which Stirling was associated. The ratings were huge.” Nevertheless, both he and Silliphant were disappointed with the results. “They develop and develop until they exhaust themselves and the material,” he added, “but they’ve spent so much money by then that they film the last one they have. Stirling said, ‘They’ve spent so much that if they don’t make it, they’ll lose their jobs.’”

  The shift from originals to adaptations continued to gnaw at him. “In television, I’m guessing, I had a high rate of success with originals because, except for mini-series and an occasional MOW [Movie of the Week], networks seldom buy source material as the basis for their scripts When he started, best-sellers were gobbled up for movies, not TV. “For one thing, TV couldn’t afford it. For another — and far closer to the truth — it is my theory that few people at networks have the capability of reading, let along making a judgment call on, something they may have been forced to read. These are not literary folk. Hence the ‘original’ works, because the writer pitches a story concept and, since these stories are all the same story, just reworked, the buyer is familiar with the product and, feeling comfortable, he green-lights the freshly regurgitated pap.

  “I can recall no writing assignment which took more out of me than adapting James A. Michener’s massive body of research, disguised and presented to the American public as a novel, the work called Space. The screenwriter is forced to plow through pages of space data, NASA reports, virtually everything except computer print-outs to seek the central storyline and to find the human beings. The characters all seem to have been invented out of their service to the research. Say you need a rocket scientist in order to expound the thousands of words in the book on rocketry — okay, coming up — one rocket scientist. Does he have prostate trouble? Does he tremble at the sound of thunder? What are his fears? His fetishes? Can he satisfy a woman? Can he satisfy himself? What kind of a child was he? What has he read? Did he throw the shot-put in high school? All the trillions of things one must know about a character before you can have him say ‘Hello,’ I found missing in S
pace. Or at least badly obfuscated by all the data.

  “How much easier would it have been had Dick Berg, the producer — and a very talented writer — simply decided to write a thirteen-hour original for CBS based on the idea of covering the period between the first rockets fired against Britain at the end of World War II up until Man’s landing on the moon, creating his own characters, told his own story. [261] Or let me do the same thing without having to spend weeks trying to digest Mr. Michener’s elaborate and massive account and then to find the sparse thread of humanity buried within the print-outs. Of course, we all know that a Dick Berg or a Stirling Silliphant original wouldn’t have got CBS to put up the millions they paid out for this prestigious novel and its transfer to the electronic medium. I do not decry this favoritism. It is totally justified. It is the way the system works. Neither Dick nor I have achieved the international reputation achieved by Mr. Michener and in no way do I, by this example, mean to denigrate either his success or his ability to build up a book through research so that it bristles with facts for all one thousand or more of its pages. I am simply trying to show how much easier it would have been for Dick and me to have started on our own, from scratch, and do probably a more powerful, personal and memorable mini-series than we ended up doing having to follow the pre-set and pre-determined course laid down by Mr. Michener’s book. And so — lest I exceed the thousand page count myself — I rest my case in the matter of ‘originals’ versus adaptations. For me, give me always and until the last day of my life, the writing of the original.”