Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

  Why does it seem like he knows his way around?

  Why won't anybody talk to him?

  Omigod, it's a custody thing. These two awful brats are his progeny. And that beautiful bitch is his ex-wife and there's her grim, fortune-hunting fiance.

  Sure, do the tickets and the cook, and pre-visit nausea.

  Climber (man, I hate that name) doesn't want to be here. Kids don't want to be here. Everything sucks.

  And now, on page seven, you get your one decent surprise in this whole thing. You get the moment that sums up the whole damn story. You get something that might appeal to both kids and parents.

  They pull out and, holy shit!--it's all okay.

  The kids love their dad and they've all got a secret.

  Put the credits here.

  You want the marital backstory?

  You already have it--let Dad tell the brats before they go to bed. Let him change it every time he tells it. Break my heart all the way. All we need to know is that once it was perfect.

  Other stuff that sucks--splitting Trip's catching them into two beats is just a waste of real estate. Jimmy--use him--change him--or lose him. Since when is sketching the cornerstone of detective work?

  Okay, so now you want me to stop and tell you what I think comes next?

  Big, wild balls-out guess ...

  They get back together.

  I mean, come on, there're kids and you're being cute, and it's Hollywood and everybody knows you're gonna have a happy ending.

  You want a victim? You've got Jimmy with a heart attack in the middle of the rescue.

  I don't know. And you've got me thinking very formula here, which I'm always trying to fight, but this thing--and it's the damn tone that's screwing it up--this thing just doesn't get me excited.

  Okay, I can fix this, but I don't know if I can save it.

  So reset. I'm backtracking here.

  My first question--always--Where's the movie? Not the pitch or what goes on the one-sheet, or any of the rest of that crap, but where is it? Where does this thing live? So when I read this, at least the first half I've read so far, I'm thinking Bill is really walking past the movie here.

  Wrong opening. As evidenced by the credit sequence on, what is it, this page?

  The action sequence up top is a bore. Could Bill really do this scene right? Absolutely. But his heart's not in it, because he knows that the real thing he's got doesn't start for another many pages. So he hypes the hell out of it, and I don't know where I am, like I said, is this The Shadow or Spiderman or Serpico ...

  And what happens anyway?

  He saves the girl.

  Bore.

  And the walk through the mansion. Stock.

  The pictures. Stock.

  The beach.

  So for me, so far nothing ...

  And now you're gonna try and tell the story of their marriage through this montage? Wrong. And it's worse than that--it's worse than just bad storytelling, because the montage does nothing for me except muddy the emotional waters of this thing beyond redemption.

  If she's so great how does she turn into such a bitch?

  If he's so tough, how does he get dragooned into this marriage that is so clearly wrong?

  Every moment in a movie counts--I'm depending on what you told me about them up top. I'm in the audience, I've been to the movies before, I know that information means something. What you told me is this--he needs to turn off the television and get personal. She needs adventure and romance.

  Better to have told me nothing than this.

  Here's a miracle of storytelling. If you don't show them getting together--if you only show the result, the audience will write the best courtship ever, the best dialogue, the best sex--the worst fights, the biggest heartbreak--anything. All you have to do is get out of the way.

  I open the movie with him going to pick up the kids.

  I'm annoyed now. this Page of this manuscript [this page, above]. You've got all these questions about the characters. The acts and the rules and all this great theoretical pondering. You're asking me all these questions about the characters and most of it's based on a deep understanding of this marriage and as I said before, I don't know what this marriage was about.

  I don't have a clue about Climber. Or her.

  And now you tell me this is supposed to be a romantic comedy?

  Insight--this tone you're using buries character.

  Now I'm convinced.

  My opening is definitely, absolutely on the money.

  I skip the climbing and the beach. I get right to it. I let the past in as I need it. I get to work on these characters. I try and find a level of reality--tone again--that works best. I get Jimmy up and running so that Climber has someone to talk to about what the hell's going on with him.

  My beats?

  --Kids have a secret life with dad.

  --Secret life drives family apart for good.

  *

  On to the back end ...

  And here's the worst of it. Two kidnappings.

  What kind of generational crime vortex has this poor family stumbled into? And like a fool, I'm thinking there's some point to this--that maybe it's the same guys who grabbed the mother years ago have come back for the kid. Maybe that's why you left things sort of unresolved at the opening. Maybe it's the father again ...

  Something.

  But no.

  Obviously this can be fixed.

  I did it already with my opening. I don't need the climbing up top, so it wasn't a kidnapping he saved Echo from. Maybe it was her gambling debts from college that needed straightening out. Maybe she ran away from home and he had to track her down.

  *

  Anyway, my spitball version.

  It's a completely real film. Feet on the ground.

  Climber has some real problems. He's kind of a nut. Who else but a nut would let Echo go? What kind of father encourages this kind of bipolar behavioral life for his kids? He loves the kids. Desperately. Loves them so much he's gotten more and more isolated. Maybe he used to be a lively outgoing guy. Maybe he loves them a little too much (if that's possible)--loves them so much he can't take any job that works over the weekends. This has crippled his career recently, because detective work is anything but regularly scheduled.

  So this once-dazzling detective is on his ass because he loves his kids so much.

  And it's more than sketching he's teaching them. I mean, I'd really go for it here. They know it all. Phone tracing and stakeouts and how-to-do-this and how-to-do-that.

  He and Jimmy arguing about old-school vs. new-school techniques.

  And Echo has hired a series of private detectives to try and monitor these weekend visits. And Climber has managed to know/persuade/ threaten all of them to file a phony report.

  Until now.

  Okay, so the bodega or something like it. The bottom line here is that Echo finds out what's been going on and the kids are inadvertently but unconscionably put into real jeopardy.

  Climber can't see the kids no more.

  Now what?

  The boy is kidnapped.

  Here's a big gift for you in any version ...

  Echo thinks Climber had something to do with it.

  I mean, come on, you've got her calling him first. I don't think so. He's so nutty. He's so desperate. He's so capable. He's got to be a suspect, doesn't he?

  Make it hard.

  Cops don't want him working the case. Cops hate him. Echo doesn't want him around the scene. Daughter is his only ally and she's going crazy to talk to him, because she's got info that's crucial ...

  *

  Okay, so that's as far as I'm going, because the next question is who are the bad guys and I'm not so sure that the landscaping crew is worthy of my time, but who knows?

  And I've got my own deadline here this week and this is probably way more than you ever wanted to hear anyway ...

  *

  In summary.

  My version is real. Much more ch
aracter. Nobody's close to perfect, including the kids.

  I dump your whole opening.

  Acts, I know nothing about. I have three beats.

  --Kids have secret life with dad.

  --Secret life drives family apart forever.

  --Secret life is the only thing that can save them.

  Aren't you glad you asked?

  * * *

  Callie Khouri studied landscape architecture at Purdue, which led naturally to her longtime employment as a music-video producer. She wrote Thelma and Louise, her first movie, in longhand. And she may well go down in history as the last Oscar winner (1991) to do so.

  Hello Bill,

  Here it is. I'm going to do this in a random, haphazard sort of way, so you will get the unfortunate experience of seeing how my mind works, and then you'll understand why writing is almost impossible for me.

  First, I love the setup, the kidnapping, although I don't know how you demonstrate visually a lot of the things you tell us about Climber. In that sense the script is padded, and the audience will have to just assume a lot of this Bogart persona from the casting, but as intelligent as audiences have proven themselves to be this summer, why should you give a shit? They don't.

  But, I have a big, big problem with Echo. I don't believe that a woman who willingly runs through a closed window sixty feet up and saves a guy from drowning ends up as this tight-ass bitch married to a guy her husband has already punched out. I don't believe that she'd want her kids to be the uptight little bastards they pretend to be. I do like that the kids know that the parents want different things from them, but I don't know how to do it without making me hate this woman. I don't know enough about her to begin with. You set her up as both beautiful and brave and then you screw her on the brave and leave her with just beautiful. Certainly not enough of a reason for me to understand why Climber still loves her. Give her something, for Chrissake! (By the way, anyone who names their son Shirley and doesn't expect him to be beaten to fine paste every day of their lives is a fucking idiot and I don't believe for a second that Climber would ever go along with it. And as much as a prig as she is, it is too preposterous for me to believe a woman who would marry a guy like Climber wants to have an effeminate son.) In any case, I just need more to understand why and how this marriage, which I'm assuming was born out of an impossibly white-hot chemistry, didn't last. I don't know enough about either one of them to really care that they're not together anymore, and the way it's set up now, I know to the core of my being that they will just as impossibly get back together and I'm asking myself what's playing in the theater next door. Why did it fail? What's the real reason? Perhaps, and this requires giving Echo a little credit, she was just unprepared and ultimately wearied by worrying about him almost dying every time he walks out the front door. He doesn't even have to work if he doesn't want to! The father has offered many times to set him up, let him run a big security business if he's so hell bent on staying in the business, but for gods sake does he have to keep putting his own life on the line? What about her? What about the kids? Doesn't he care enough not to want her to be widowed and the kids to be half-orphaned? Most cops' wives probably feel that way, only they don't have the hundreds of millions of dollars that would allow their husbands to quit. Maybe it just got to be too much for her. Why does she hate him so much? Because he wouldn't give up his stupid cop job for her and his family? And don't you think that the kids know "That she hates you so much because she loves you, idiot"? They would know that. I will say here that there is nothing sexier to a kid than the idea that their parents will get back together. Parent Trap is still my favorite movie and those kids are way too on the ball not to realize that their parents still have the hots for each other, Tripp or no Tripp. I am adding a "p" to Trip because it looks more like a name to me that way. As much as I dislike Echo in the version that you have, I don't dislike her enough to hope she'll marry this guy.

  Maybe Tripp is the guy that her family thought she would marry in the first place until she threw them the curve ball of marrying way beneath her (something I think that secretly thrills her father). Maybe he's not a bad guy, just a tame guy, or maybe he is a bad guy, maybe he's in on it somehow, I doubt it, but I said I would let my mind wander. I wish there was some way of coming up with somebody doing the second kidnapping that no one would ever, ever expect. I wasn't totally bowled over by the gardeners because they look so unsuspecting. I also thought that Echo would stop herself when she said that Phoebe was sound asleep, that she would realize as she was saying it that something was wrong! That they both would run upstairs, knowing that the kid had been chloroformed or something because she's the mother and she's never seen the kid asleep. (Just an aside; I was an insomniac as a child and my mother always said that she never actually saw me asleep until I was about twelve.)

  Okay, Bill, here it is. I think that somehow, someway, I don't know how, and I don't know if it's possible, but I think that the kids have to have planned their own "Big A."

  They did it. They're the only ones with a motive. They can't have this Tripp guy as their father. They can't stand being separated from Climber anymore and they know that they are supposed to be together as a Family, all four of them. I would also make sure that it was absolutely genius, foolproof, and that the parents never ever find out that it was them and that the audience does at the very very end. I don't know how I would do it, but it would be elegant and elaborate, and both parents would have to be together to solve it, which they never will, but they will realize that they are still passionate about each other. I don't know how I would do this, but I would spend every waking moment trying to figure that out and then I would hire Scott Frank to write it. That's all for now.

  P.S.: Just in case you think I've totally lost my mind, I think it's important that if the kids did plan it, that it reaches a point that it goes crazily out of their control, that there should be real danger, and that the little bastards were lucky to get out with their lives. Again, the parents have to never know that they had anything to do with it. Oh, and now that we're on the subject, I can't stop thinking of this and have lost track of my own script completely.

  Scott read me his letter to you and I couldn't believe what a bunch of sourpusses we are. You said be brutal, but aren't you a little bit sorry you asked? If I was too harsh, it's because I'm bitter. That's the only reason. You know I love you.

  More later.

  --Callie

  * * *

  For me, John Patrick Shanley is one of the leading playwrights of the decade. No play has rocked me as much as Beggars in the House of Plenty. And Four Dogs and a Bone is as good a comedy about Hollywood madness as any. If you do not know his theater work, that may well be because Shanley is insanely perverse, not caring about either Broadway or Off-Broadway. He does his stuff for limited runs, then they get printed and spend half their life in productions about the country and the world.

  He is equally perverse when he doctors, as you will see, in that he does the brute work before any meetings. If his attack is not welcomed, fine; if it is, there won't be any surprises when he hands in his version of the screenplay.

  Oh yeah, he also won an Oscar for his first film, Moonstruck.

  Dear Bill,

  Here are my suggestions with regards to your screenplay.

  1. I think Climber should save Echo from the kidnappers, only to have her save him in turn. Within the same situation. Our villains could be somewhat more upscale, and be held up at a hotel in Miami let's say. Climber crashes out the window with Echo, they fall, fall in love, and land in a swimming pool. As it turns out, Climber can't swim and she has to save him. Including the mouth-to-mouth bit. His reaction upon coming to is Will you marry me?

  2. Cut to the Wedding Scene. Her wealth and class is established. The father of the bride says to him, "You must be thinking: How in heaven did I break into this world?" Climber says "I think the question is: How do you break out?" Trip is a wedding guest, well thought of by Echo's pare
nts. He gets in a conversation with Climber's dad, Jimmy, and insults him. Climber clocks Trip, setting their mutual rancor in motion.

  3. Could the kids be twins? Another reason for them to like The Parent Trap. And one trip to the hospital. In any case, Climber and Echo could fight over what to name them. Which is really a fight about which world they belong to. The world of privilege, or the world of rough and tumble. While Climber tries to decide whether to concede the name thing to Echo, she makes a second request: Could Trip be the godfather? The two families have always been close, and a gesture like this would close the rift that opened at the wedding. Climber makes to respond, hesitates, and ...

  4. Cut to: The Christening. Trip is holding Climber's babies, and he's already acting like they're his. Echo looks at Trip fondly, then at Climber. Climber's face says it all. The marriage is over.

  5. The marriage is over. Climber picks up the kids, on screenplay this page [see this page, above]. Trip has become Echo's intimate. The reason for all the subterfuge on the kids' part is that they are already working what Climber calls: Safe Cases. The current case, a matter of infidelity, goes wrong when the client, that is the husband of the woman with the dark glasses, shows up. And he is Italian and crying and very upset and he has a gun and he misses everybody because he is crying so much but he does fire it several times. The kids are endangered. And Trip has been having Climber followed and this is just the stuff he has been looking for.

  6. Climber loses custody. He can fight it in court but it will take years and money he doesn't have and, meanwhile, he can only see the kids in a supervised setting.

  7. He shows up for the first such visit drunk, is busted by the not uncompassionate court-appointed supervisor, and loses the right to see his children in any way for 90 days.

  8. The kidnapping. Climber shows up. Trip threatens to have him arrested for violating a court order until Echo announces that she asked him to come. He's good at this kind of case, she observes. Echo, Phoebe, and Climber set off in pursuit.

  9. Phoebe describes the kidnapping in detail to the assembled group of Climber and Jimmy's friends. One guy latches on to Phoebe and asks several questions and then tells Climber: I know these guys. Gives him the info.

  10. Cut to: A Japanese gambling parlor set up on the rooftop of a ten-story industrial building. Climber instructs Phoebe just to take a peek, see if she sees the kidnappers, and then they'll quietly go downstairs and call the police. As soon as Phoebe sees that everyone's Japanese and about eight guys are missing a finger, she announces that they are the victims of very bad information. Climber takes a look and finds a gun pointed at either temple of his head. A polite but firm Yakusa asks the three of them what they are doing there. Climber's about to answer when Echo jumps in: I'm like a major gambler, I heard about you guys, and I'm here for the action.