Sex & Genius

by Conrad Williams

  'I've done Shakespeare, Chekhov, Strindberg . . .'

  'You stand for a lot.'

  'Yeah, but you stand for more.'

  Adela caught his eye, saw him take up the challenge.

  'I've worked with him,' he said softly.

  'And what's the magic ingredient?'

  'Oh.' It came easily. 'I believe in the integrity of his work.'

  'You have a monopoly on integrity?'

  He wondered if Hammond was always upfront, or whether he was just irked by Michael's presence in his life.

  'I sincerely hope not.'

  'As in we're peasants if we don't agree with you?'

  Mahler intervened. 'With respect, Shane, Michael never said that.'

  'Where is James Hilldyard?' Hammond blew his nose. 'I want his blessing.'

  Michael's anger was rising now. Shane was overstepping the mark.

  'Tied up.'

  'He's tied up?'

  He hesitated. 'He writes for a living.'

  Hammond appreciated the dryness of the answer. 'So what are you? A quality monitor?'

  It was a dangerous moment.

  'Some kind of watchdog?'

  'I'm the producer.'

  'Who's never produced a film before.'

  He checked himself, thought for a second. 'No. But show me an experienced producer who's managed to get the rights to this book.'

  'I've got that.' Hammond shot to his feet, superbly volatile. 'But here we are talking about your combining with a team to whom Mr Hilldyard wouldn't sell the rights, and what I don't get is why you think you can do a deal with me when he wouldn't.'

  Michael swallowed. 'I hope I can deal with you.'

  'You hope so, eh?'

  He glanced at Adela. 'Yes.'

  'So what would you like to know? How may we satisfy you?'

  There was no help to be had from Mahler. Nobody wished to go against the grain of Hammond's ill-temper. If this was how he felt, then that was the issue, as ungainsayable as crappy weather. Michael, in the depths of his chagrin, saw very well that Hammond's benevolence was not stirred by Mahler's description of him as a white knight. His contribution would not be appreciated. His presence slighted Hammond's autonomy. He was an unwelcome reminder, perhaps, that Hammond's powers were not absolute. The actor had gone to Hollywood hoping to shake off this kind of literary middle-class Englishman.

  How arrogant of Hammond to assume he had no judgement because he had not produced a film!

  'Perhaps we should discuss the film,' he said.

  Hammond stood by the table taking a replenishment of his coffee from the waiter.

  'You want to vet the approach.'

  'Shay.' Mahler extended a hand, like some intervening biblical figure in a Renaissance painting. 'Hilldyard's last movie was a box-office stinker. A total flop-out dodo. Without any disrespect to you, the author is jumpy about adaptation. In appointing Michael to safeguard his interests he's making a gesture of trust. Michael wants to help us, not hinder us, and it's in everybody's interests to do a movie that squares not only with our goals and ambitions but with the author's. It's a question of mutuality, not compromise. We have to respect this very fine novel, and Hilldyard, through Michael here, must surely respect our concerns. For sure, the movie concept must have integrity by all our standards. See, Michael, Shane is so committed to this project. He will star, he'll direct, he will live and breathe this project for one year, eighteen months and understandably he's protective of his baby. And Shay, I know I'm right in saying that Michael wants to help you do this. He sees it as your vehicle, will work to your ends, and enrich your ambition with very valuable consultation and advice.'

  'Do I have to parade my vision of the film before you now?' said the actor.

  The insolence was so personal, Michael had to manage his restraint. 'I'd love to hear your vision.'

  Hammond came back to his chair, sat down and placed his coffee on the ground. His expression went serious, a shift of mode. He pulled his hand over his face, glimpsed around him with artistic pain.

  'What can I tell you? This book hit me like a rabbit punch in the kidneys. It went off in my head like a rocket. I'm not sure why. The sick wife. Well, OK, my mother died of cancer. Wham. That gets you. That was one of the worst years of my life, and boy, does he nail that bad trip to the mast! The impossible affair, beautiful, forbidden, self-destructive. Tell me about it. Those two things together . . . one fucking great way into a character. I liked the domestic backdrop. So muted and familiar, cluttered with reassuring things, completely sterile. Not the habitat of a hero. This is where a weak, prematurely middle-aged man is dying away his life. His soul's in the fridge with the fruit juice and bacon rashers. Then wallop, he's in love. Brief Encounter with a catch. He goes the distance and when he gets there he can't do it. Can't commit. Blows the gig and then the gig blows him. The set-up is over his head and then things go really wrong. That's a love story with a sting. And maybe I'm revealing too much about myself if I tell you it hit me here.' He punched his chest.

  Michael nodded.

  'Your man can write the arse off a donkey. He's telling us a lot about ourselves. Stuff we may not want to hear.'

  She was looking at him. Michael returned the look suddenly.

  'But stuff that happens everywhere. Love and death is here in Italy, there in Greenland, alive and well in some kitchen sink of an American backwater town. The core of this book will travel. And I want to make a film that gives audiences everywhere that core. On screen.'

  He cleared his throat, looked into the sky, tongue under lip. 'How to adapt?' Hammond seemed pained, as though bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders.

  Michael nodded.

  'The story drives a knife in and turns it. That's why I'm interested. What can I say? Either I connect with the material or I don't. Right now this story's preying on my mind. I want to lift that complexity and richness off the page and slam it on to the screen. How?' He bunched his fist. 'Is another matter. You've got to do things. Pull it apart. Knock it back together again. You got to strip out, add on, restructure. It's a fucking hassle. I've worked with screenwriters. These things don't write themselves. Forget that. That's donkey work. What counts is that we build it up in a way that's true to the novel. That's what I want. That's what I care about. That's why I'm sitting here.'

  His hands remained aloft, waiting for further inspiration, and for a moment Michael thought he would continue. His vibrancy had risen quickly, and there was still a tremor in the air. Hammond had no conversational inclination, no social élan when surrounded by men of business. What he carried with him was the handy volatility of the great thespian, the trained and channelled passion that could erupt at the press of a button, grabbing whatever rhetoric lay to hand, and impress executives and agents with the unquestionable thunder of talent.

  There was nothing wrong with what he said. He had testified to his deep response, and that was his bond. He was a person wired to his own emotions, used to running on the force of instincts, and after the manifesto shock-wave of his first speech would recompose himself and check what else it might be necessary to say.

  Mahler leaned forward. 'Does that make sense, Michael?'

  'Of course.'

  Hammond eyed him carefully.

  There was a pause.

  'How d'you see the adaptation,' he asked, 'from a director's viewpoint?'

  Hammond was not enlightened by the question.

  'I mean . . . do you think it needs opening out?'

  'Michael, I'm glad you mentioned that,' said Mahler.

  Hammond glanced at his hands, unready to commit further thoughts.

  'How did you describe the film to your financiers?' Michael asked.

  'Shay, d'you want to take this, or shall I?'

  Hammond shrugged.

  'OK,' said Mahler. 'Like you said. We've got to get this lovely book out of its covers and on to the screen. When we go to script, we'll go with a blueprint. We figure Shane needs to do t
his picture summer of next year. So there can be second drafts and third drafts, but we need to be on track with the first draft. To keep that schedule we've put Rick and the story department on to the project to brainstorm parameters prior to selecting our screenwriter. We've talked to the money. We've kicked ideas around with Shay, and we're trouble-shooting the problem areas down to a real tight brief. Can I be frank? It's a great book. But it's a book. To make this work as a Shane Hammond vehicle it needs opening out big time. Gee, the story department have come back with some very creative ideas. You know, the story's kind of bleak. It's grey-toned, almost noir. And the action is very talky, linear. We figure that to make this work you need to loop in a couple of extra sub-plots, and doctor the character arcs to make them less shallow-curved. Josh is a depressing guy, but it's his movie, so we need to shape up the backstory, and we need to surround this very domestic, private world with some parallel action.'

  'That,' said Hammond, 'is the sound of the American marketplace. Fifty per cent of the world market, ninety per cent of our money. We can handle it.'

  'Rick is story-editing?' said Michael.

  'Rick's co-ordinating input.'

  He gazed at the short agent.

  'Shane's not a screenwriter,' explained Mahler.

  Hammond swung around. 'Michael, we need to lift this project.'

  'We have scenarios.'

  'We need to find,' said the star, 'some real out-there penalty for Josh's infidelity to his dying wife. These guys call it jeopardy. In the book it's psychological hell. In a feature film the hell must be concrete, life-threatening. And that ties into Adela's character. Their affair needs to be more than moral torture. She needs to be connected with some unexamined part of his past.'

  He was dumbfounded. The ideas were extraordinarily radical.

  'What d'you mean?'

  'I want Josh to have a dangerous past. Let's say MI5, counter intelligence, but a desk job. Other people do the dirty work. This is all way off backstory.' Hammond swished back and forth, shaving the air with his hand, as if paring out sections of the novel he did not want. 'The man did a desk job like Harrison Ford in Clear and Present Danger.'

  'Clear and Present Danger!'

  'Anna's father was killed in action. An old friend of Josh. In fact, Josh is Anna's godfather.'

  Michael could hardly believe his ears.

  'Anna is late twenties, say a journalist, and she wants to know how her father died and whose fault it was. Right.' He held the point like an invisible rugby ball, as though he would pitch it to Michael. 'She believes Josh holds the clue, even though he's retired and has nothing to do with the firm. Josh's wife falls sick. Anna hears about this and offers her services as nurse. After a decent interval of nursing she starts to probe Josh. What neither of them expect to happen is an affair. The affair starts and this sticks close to the book. Adela's character discovers she's fallen for an older man. So the motives are complex but the passions are real. Then the backstory kicks in. Anna forces Josh to make enquiries about her dead father within the service, opening a bloody Pandora's Box. Bad guys are put on alert. Josh is going through his wife's terminal illness, and then, I don't know, the IRA are coming over the garden hedge. Something like that?'

  'You mean a thriller?'

  'This is not an exploitation movie,' said Mahler.

  He glanced at Adela. He wondered whether she knew all this.

  'This frames the book,' said Mahler. 'A structural brace.'

  Time slowed down for him. The agents leaned towards him, Hammond gaped at the sky, Adela folded her arms and raised her chin, as if half distracted by the sun's warmth. He was totally stupefied. They were utterly changing the story.

  And then the pounding started. His heart resisting everything, pounding against the trap.

  'IRA is dated,' said Weislob.

  'Mafia, whatever,' said Shane.

  This was the moment to speak out. This was the moment to dig his heels in, and it terrified him that there was so much he wanted to say and could not say. Their ideas were alien, at odds with everything he had found in the book.

  'Whose ideas are these?'

  'It's a working plan,' said Hammond. 'Is it crap?'

  He looked at Adela.

  'What about setting?' said Mahler.

  'Try Michael.'

  'I'd keep the English setting.' His voice was light, powerless.

  'Agreed.'

  'Shay!'

  Hammond turned to Mahler.

  'Money's on New England. What did we say, Rick?'

  Weislob steepled his fingers. 'Josh is ex-intelligence. Now affiliated as an academic to Ivy League. He and his wife are Americans. Anna's the English Rose god-daughter. Finance really dug the transatlantic love story. For MI5 read FBI. For IRA, ah shit, Mafia.'

  'That's the American version,' explained Mahler.

  Michael could not conceal his reaction. Mahler picked it up.

  'What Shay's career needs, Michael, is an American lead. We all know too many top British actors who never hit top whack in the States because they could not play an American hero. Brits tend to be good villains, tongue-tied upper-class gooks, patrician charmers, and there's only so far you can go with mere good acting. Shay's already broken out of that. He's got the indefinable star quality and what we need is a vehicle to impact on a coast-to-coast American audience.'

  Hammond frowned. 'Can we Americanise this story?'

  'We need a character ordinary folks can relate to.'

  'Well . . .'

  'The story needs to position Shay as a loving man but a moral man.'

  Michael could not contain himself. 'Who screws around while his wife is dying?'

  Mahler shrugged. 'Shay, we need to talk about this.'

  'That's the film, Tom.'

  'Michael's put his finger on something.'

  'The film is dark,' shrugged Hammond.

  'You can't throw away sympathy for your character!'

  'We'll fix it.'

  'Easy,' said Weislob. 'The man's wife is bitch-city. Our hero has stuck in there through shit. Has tried to make the marriage work. But in his heart he's starved of love. The rest is bad timing.'

  'This is what I'm up against,' said Hammond to Michael, as if he were no part of it.

  'Does he reconcile with his wife before she dies?' asked Mahler.

  Hammond referred to Michael. 'Does he?'

  'Not in the book.'

  'You know. That's kind of bleak,' said Mahler.

  'These are just ideas,' said Hammond. He came back to his chair, sat down squarely. 'I'm not interested in making a Brit movie for the art-house circuit. I've done all that, paid my dues. I want a film that can open on fifteen hundred screens which isn't popcorn additive. Half the material's in the novel. Maybe more. The rest we have to find.'

  Hammond had changed, Michael realised. At one point he must have been an artist, pure and simple, a man with a gift. Now he was an executive of his own career. His proposals were as pragmatic as his tone. And now he had relaxed Michael wondered if his initial touchiness were not the defensive pride of a man who knows he has sold out.

  It was time for him to speak and yet, still, he had nothing he could say. There was nowhere to start. Their premises were incompatible, the Americans' too fluid, Hammond's too commercial. Anything he might say about the moral ambiguity of the book, its inconclusiveness and thwarted romanticism, its irony, its unhappy ending, its reality in his own imagination, would be meaningless to them.

  He stood up. He felt dizzy. The light had got to him. The Americans' voices confused him. He looked across at the film star squinting back at him. He could not fathom how they expected Hilldyard to agree these suggestions. If Hilldyard would not agree them, how could he?

  To deny Hilldyard's voice in the matter was to deny his own. He had denied Hilldyard and therefore had no voice. There was no part for him to play. He had no interest any more in these curious proceedings. He stood for absolutely nothing.

  'What d'y
ou say, Michael?'

  He was a non-contributor.

  'Any comment?' said Hammond.

  He hesitated. 'I think we've got a lot of common ground.'

  'Are we on the right track?'

  Michael sat down. He wanted to say goodbye to them all. He needed but lacked courage.

  Adela was waiting for him to speak. He looked at her blankly, wondering if she read his mind. This was what she wanted him to go through with.

  Hammond caught Mahler's eye. 'Approval clause.'

  Mahler nodded.

  There were some whisperings. Mahler touched Gloria's sleeve. 'Contracts.'

  Michael held his hands together and looked at the terrace flagstones. He would have to dig into himself to find what he wanted on the screen, and perhaps he wanted nothing more than the book.

  'Are you happy, Michael?'

  She was looking at him now.

  He would not be producing this film, he thought. It would be happening around him, over him. Control would be meaningless unless he dug in now, and he could only dig in to say No, to say Ridiculous.

  Weislob approached with his mobile. 'Need to call your adviser?'

  Gloria sat at the second table, amending the assignment contract with her pen.

  'One thing James Hilldyard can be sure of. If this film works, the book's going to be huge.'

  Modesty was not Hammond's forte. Or maybe he knew enough to know that all great men are egotists, and that Hilldyard's egotism would take care of itself. It depressed him not to be able to speak his mind.

  'Michael, you look fazed.'

  He held the mobile phone.

  'Press Call and then dial.'

  It was outrageous, he thought, that they were so fearless of the book, so breezy about dismantling and dismembering it, as though stripping one art form for the benefit of another were a casual necessity, taken for granted. Their approach had no tact, no caution.

  Mahler drew a chair across, sat near him. He laid a tanned, manicured hand on Michael's arm. It was a private beat, an inside-track moment for deal-makers.

  'Shane has raised a very important point which we should address.' He spoke quietly. The others could not hear. 'He needs to have approval now.'