(He liked it fine. As did we all.)
* * *
Talent Tends to Cluster
I think the '90s are by far the worst decade in Hollywood history.
Many reasons, starting with the possibility that, being an old fart in good standing, I hate anything new. Let me throw in a couple of other possibilities.
Talent tends to cluster. We know Aeschylus was not the only guy hacking out plays in Athens. We know that Balanchine had Robbins, that Placido had Luciano, that Chekhov and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and a bunch of other Russians all walked a similar earth.
And today, in every single art I can think of, is a time of low talent. When I took a modern novel course at Oberlin in 1951, we studied people who had published between 1900 and 1950 but who all had written something in the year 1927. So we read Dos Passos and Wolfe and Steinbeck and Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald--not, alas, the same today.
Not for painters or singers or writers or screenwriters.
But no discipline makes my point more than movie directors.
We had one great one until very recently--Mr. Kubrick.
What I came to town, in 1953, such was not the case. And remember, there are a lot of directors I am not counting, because they were not involved with Hollywood financing or Hollywood sensibility--Bergman, Bunuel, Clair, Fellini, Kurosawa, Renoir, to pick a quick half dozen.
And I am also not counting some old guys who were still capable of thrilling us--Capra, Chaplin, De Mille.
Following is a list of top directors and my favorites of their movies.
Cukor The Philadelphia Story, My Fair Lady
Curtiz The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca
Donen Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Singin' in the Rain (codirected with Gene Kelly)
King Twelve O'Clock High, The Gunfighter
McCarey The Awful Truth, Going My Way
Minnelli An American in Paris, Gigi
Reed Odd Man Out, The Third Man
Siegel Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry
Siodmak The Killers, The Crimson Pirate
Walsh High Sierra, White Heat
Pretty impressive. Ten terrific directors, all of them operating at the same time. Are we agreed? Hope so.
Now here's the shocker: none of these guys made my first team. I'm talking Ford, I'm talking Hawks and Hitchcock, Kazan and Lean, plus Mankiewicz and Stevens, not to mention Wilder and Wyler and Zinnemann.
All these brilliant guys turning out one film after another, some of them glories, some of them not--
--and don't you wish they were around today?
But they're not, and what we see suffers as a sad result.
It wasn't just the directors, either. Here is a list of a bunch of young performers who all were in the same acting class. New York City, 1947. Robert Lewis was the teacher and these were the faces he looked out on.
Marlon Brando E. G. Marshall
Montgomery Clift Kevin McCarthy
Mildred Dunnock Patricia Neal
Tom Ewell William Redfield
John Forsythe Jerome Robbins
Anne Jackson Maureen Stapleton
Sidney Lumet Eli Wallach
Karl Malden David Wayne
The talent in that room was enough to change the entire world of acting. To this day.
I would like to throw in one more reason why movies are what they are. If you were to ask me, more than anything else, this is the reason: studio executives.
Not that they are not bright--they are. Not that they're not hardworking--they are. But from my point of view, precious few of them bother to read screenplays. They are far more interested in saving their asses with a deal than with a quality flick.
Here's what's far worse than the fact that they don't read screenplays: precious few of them know how.
What we have is a world, as former studio head David Picker so wisely stated, where Hollywood is no longer making movies, they are selling a product. And the product they are selling only happens to be movies.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls ...
* * *
Sequels
In the summer of 1999, the most hyped art object in history (well, since Viagra, anyway) said "Here I am" to the world: George Lucas's money machine, The Phantom Menace. And the reviews were mainly two things: surprised and bad.
Lucas countered that the critics have never liked him, that Star Wars got unfriendly reviews, too. (This pronouncement was reported as fact, another reason to wonder about the hardworking entertainment media, since Star Wars was nominated for eleven Oscars, won seven. Personally, I would like to get hammered like that each and every time at bat.) I knew the movie would be bad, so I was not at all surprised. Why?
Because sequels are whores' movies.
And always will be. Understand, there is zero criticism of Lucas intended, nor should there be. Probably you didn't see the Butch and Sundance prequel. I was kind of the producer. And that, too, was a whore's movie.
Steven Spielberg, the most successful figure of our time, has six sequels to his credit so far: one Jurassic Park, one Gremlins, two Indiana Joneses, and two Back to the Futures.
With Phantom Menace, Lucas has tied him: one American Graffiti, two Indiana Joneses, and three Star Wars. But when the next two Star Wars sequels are in the can, he will have undisputed possession of the championship.
So the two richest film guys have the most whores' movies. Class, take a minute and think real hard: Is there maybe just possibly some teenie-weenie connection between those two facts?
Let me talk about beginners for a second, which we all were. When that is who and where you are, and your prayer is someday to be in the movie business, your fantasies cannot stop going into overdrive. You're going to meet Bergman or Fellini or Lean (or fill in your own master). And you're going to be loved by the critics and the public. And Cameron Diaz will fold herself into your strong arms. (Or Marilyn or Audrey or Kate. For me it was always Jean Simmons.)
Our talent will fucking stun the civilized world. And when we start out to write our screenplay, it must be so original and dazzling, so different and glorious, people will have no choice but to love us. And why?
Because we are so wonderful.
The pulse of what we write then is always this: creative. The pulse for a sequel is always this: financial. So they are never of a similar quality.
Are there exceptions? I was on the Cannes jury a decade back, wandering with the Australian director George Miller, the doctor. (So designated because there were two Australian directors named George Miller and the other one didn't go to med school.)
Forgetting his credits, I gave him my whore theory just as I have to you.
Such a cry of outrage you have never heard. I had forgotten George had done Mad Max as his first flick, Mad Max 2 (Road Warrior here) two years later. "I had no money for the first one," he said. "I did the second one because I wanted, hopefully, to get it right this time."
He did--it's the one sequel that's better than the original. A lot of people will argue for the second Godfather, terrific, but I think the first is the one that echoes.
In Lucas's case, I think there are precious few on the planet who preferred Return of the Jedi to Star Wars. Well, why, pray tell, should The Phantom Menace be any less boring and flawed than the last of the first trilogy?
People will come up with all kinds of bullshit for whoring. I remember telling people, Well, there was just so much great stuff about Butch and Sundance I couldn't fit in the first one. Wonderful interesting new material.
Bullshit. That was a whore talking.
And whatever Lucas tells us today about why he did the deed, whatever excuse he comes up with, it will be bullshit. If you disagree, then answer this: Why didn't he finance a sequel to Howard the Duck?
* * *
The Year of the Comet (Alas)
[1992]
* * *
One of the moments that screenwriters can never obliterate from our
memories is when we realize that, now and forever, we have written a flop.
And when I say "flop," I am not referring, not even remotely, to a "succes d'estime," i.e., a film that maybe doesn't make back all its money but has its passionate admirers. And I don't mean an effort, however worthwhile, that has perhaps "come a cropper." Not an effort that "falls short," that "misses the mark," that "runs aground." Not the "ill-judged," or its cousin, the mighty struggle that went "in vain."
No, lads. I am talking about the whiff, the stiff, the stinker, the all-out fucking fiasco.
I am talking, alas, of my original screenplay, The Year of the Comet.
If you write screenplays for a living, there are really only three choices. The adaptation of someone else's writing is one, and I think the easiest, because someone else has done the brute work, made the people, invented the story. The adaptation of your own work is much harder--I've done it several times--Magic, Marathon Man, The Princess Bride (also Heat--no, not the Pacino-DeNiro one, the Burt Reynolds one; and the reason you will not learn more about this baby in these pages is simple: to my knowledge, lawsuits are still flying). What makes this kind of adaptation complicated is that we have gone through so much failure trying to get the novel to work, we tend to cling to our favorite scenes and sequences when we come to make the movie. "Oh, no, I can't cut that sequence, it almost killed me to write that."
We have forgotten, in other words, Faulkner's great dictum: in writing, you must kill all your darlings.
But I doubt anybody doubts the original is the hardest of all, presents the greatest problem. Simply because you are, duh, making it up. What saves you in this kind of enterprise is this: your passion. In Butch, I needed to try and tell that story of the two guys, moving through decades and countrysides, who become legends a second and glorious time. In The Ghost and the Darkness, the lions were my passion. I wanted to write about brute power and horror and fear, and at the heart of it, the existence, even for nine months, and even in Tsavo, of evil moving among us.
What made The Year of the Comet possible was this: my passion for red wine.
Now, what kind of tale could I try? Answer: anything. There are no rules when you start in. I could have written a heart-wrenching drama--Ray Milland deux, if you will. A Jimmy Cagney gangster flick, set in Prohibition, about who owns Chicago. I could have made it a George Lucas job, set in the future when scientists have discovered that if you substitute blood for Bordeaux, people will stagger around a lot but they'll also live forever.
One of the things you probably aren't aware of is that Easy Rider cost Hollywood hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh, not the movie itself. That was a tremendous success. I am talking about all the idiots who decided to rip it off and capture the suddenly exposed "youth market."
Charade was another money-loser. A great success by itself, it unleashed a stream of other idiots who decided to do their own romantic-comedy-thrillers. Forget that they didn't have Peter Stone's wonderfully stylish script, Stanley Donen's equally stylish direction. Plus those two ugly clods toiling in the vineyards, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.
I was one of the leading idiots, and for my sins I decided to write a romantic-adventure-comedy-thriller about a bottle of red wine.
The settings were pretty much preordained by the nature of the material. Sing Sing somehow seemed wrong. Devil's Island, too. So I wrote it to take place in the most romantic places I knew--London, the Scottish Highlands, and the French Riviera.
Now, those places pretty much dictated that the story be a chase. I had to get from one to the next. With at least some semblance of logic.
My movie would be a chase, then, after a bottle of wine.
But it couldn't be Hearty Burgundy. Had to be a wine worth the travel. So I invented what surely would have been, had such a thing ever existed, the most valuable wine ever. 1811, known in Europe as "The Year of the Comet," is generally thought of as being the greatest year for wine, if not ever, certainly of that century.
And if it was great then, and in a sufficiently large bottle, it might be drinkable in 1978, the year I wrote it (or indeed, 1992, the year the movie got released). So I decided on a bottle of the most famous red, Chateau Lafite Rothschild. And I made up a celebratory bottle--Napoleon had been having some good years in that era--that was bigger than any ever made, a bottle equal to two regular cases of wine.
I liked that for a lot of reasons. The bottle would have been worth many millions, so its breaking might be useful. It would still possibly taste as good as anything yet found on Planet Earth. And it would be heavier than shit, helpful if I could figure out how to use that for comedic moments.
For my lovers I thought it might be wonderful to write a role for Glenda Jackson as my wine lady. (We are a quarter century back when I am fiddling with the idea.) Can't remember who I thought of for the man, but Cary Grant must have been in my heart.
Remember, this was the second of a three-picture deal I had signed with Mr. Levine, following A Bridge Too Far and Magic. It was finally released by Castle Rock in 1992--and if you think that time leap is unusual, well, it isn't. You only need one person who has the wherewithal to make your movie to make your movie.
Nothing had happened to the notion--it was still a romantic comedy about a chase after a legendary bottle of wine. Wine's still around and there is some evidence that romance has survived too, if you look hard enough. But no one wanted it back in the '70s. Castle Rock, just starting out, did. If God wanted to punish me and made me take a job as a studio head, the first thing I would do is hire all the bright young film-school students and movie nuts I could find and have them read every script my studio owned. I am guessing, but thousands is probably low. And since the studio heads are what they always have been, hardworking and imperfect, I am betting I could find a bunch that slipped through the cracks. All that it takes for the worst screenplay of all time to become the best screenplay of all time is the news that Tom Cruise wants to do it.
Anyway, the wine picture disappeared for over a decade. And then, suddenly, it was a movie. What I want to talk about now was our first public screening.
I don't think even a phenomenon like Mr. Spielberg knows for sure what he has until he sees it in front of strangers. Oh, sure, he has the most amazing commercial track record of all time. And sure again, Jurassic II probably was not much of an angst-maker. But for the rest, he is like the rest of us, at your mercy.
There is an amaaaazing amount of bullshit that you read in the print media or hear on the tube about why movies are hits or flops. Titanic was this, that's why it turned out the way it did. The Postman was that, that's why it turned out the way it did. Everybody wanted to see the young lovers on the big ship. Nobody wanted to see Kevin Costner in a movie about an apocalyptic mailman.
Well, that's only true after it opens.
I was with one of the top executives at one of the studios that was involved with Titanic and this person said to me, with fingers very much crossed--this is the week it opened, remember--"If it just does a hundred million at the box office, we'll be okay." Now this is a very bright fellow. And had seen the screenings and pored over the results. He had heard and seen the audience reaction--
--and he had no idea what it would do.
Here is the truth about Titanic: people wanted to see it.
Here is the truth about The Postman: people didn't want to see it.
Everything else is mythology.
I felt pretty good about The Year of the Comet. I mean, I felt pretty good for me. I mean, I wasn't slashing my wrists. Any number of reasons, but chief, I think, is that I had been around the shoot. Peter Yates, the fine English director, is a friend, has been for many years, and he runs a very pleasant set.
I knew we were not Bergman, but I also knew we had delivered what we set out to do, a romantic-adventure-comedy-thriller, this one about a legendary bottle of wine. How big a hit we might be, of course I had zero idea. We could fail, too.
But no way we could
be a disaster.
I remember the evening of the sneak very well, still, almost a decade later. I sat where I like to sit, all the way back, rear corner, left or right. I watched the audience come in. They were young Californians, and kind of excited to be there in the test audience. Usually, people at these test screenings are excited. It's something most of them have never done before, never will again.
And they can be, at least I think they can be, wonderfully helpful. Especially when they are confused about something. Very often those of us involved with the effort think we have made something clear, when in fact, we have not. I love test screenings for that kind of help.
By far the best screening I ever saw or will see--not a test, but the first time the movie was shown in New York--was Jaws. A lot of people do not remember what a disaster it was in the making, but it was comparable to Godfather I and Tootsie. No one remembers what disasters those two were, either, before they were released. But they were. Nightmares the media glommed on to, ridiculed constantly, only to shut up when the final product was shown.
Jaws went wildly over budget, had a director in diapers who was clearly helpless, unable to deal with those pesky little problems that cropped up, like disastrous weather and a monster that didn't work. Then it went into the silence all movies enter--postproduction. (Not a lot of famous funny editing-room stories.) Anyway, there we are in the theater, a thousand people maybe, some famous, most not, all curious.
Lights down, time to fish or cut bait.
I never remember any music hitting an audience like those first guttural notes of John Williams's great score. There were gasps two seconds in. And nobody spoke for two hours. Laughed a little. Screamed a lot. And 124 minutes later, when the lights came up, we all knew something remarkable was about to go out into the world.
I was there because Richard Zanuck and David Brown, the producers, had been heads of Fox when Butch Cassidy was purchased and made. And if Jaws was the best, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid was the worst.
Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade Page 6