I Shudder

by Paul Rudnick

  If my feelings for chocolate bunnies seem near-erotic, I’m far from alone. I knew a woman who had nightmarish dating experiences, and she finally announced her engagement to a four-foot-tall bunny in the window of Li-Lac Chocolates, a Manhattan landmark. “Paul,” she told me, because she knew I’d understand, “I have finally found the perfect man.”

  Enter Trembling

  1.

  As a timid person, as someone who apologizes for bumping into inanimate objects, I’m often drawn to large-scale personalities, to people who refuse to behave themselves. This certainly describes the producer Scott Rudin, whose many movies include The Hours, The Truman Show, Clueless, and No Country for Old Men. All of the stories you might have heard about him are true. For instance:

  Scott was driving the two of us to a meeting in Los Angeles. As we sped along the expressway, Scott’s phone buzzed. He answered it, and his face became a mask of rage. He yelled, “How did you get this number?” and hurled the phone at the windshield. “Who was it?” I asked. “My mother,” he replied, instantly calm.

  While he was president of production at Fox, the door that separated Scott’s office from his main assistant’s outer office was wired to a button on Scott’s desk. When Scott pressed this button, the door would magically open, to admit visitors. There was a matching button on the assistant’s desk. Whenever Scott or this assistant were furious with each other, they’d use their buttons to slam the door dramatically. When they were both angry at the same time, which was often, they’d both push their buttons, and the paralyzed door would vibrate helplessly. Another assistant in this office was legally blind. When Scott would fire him, which was often, this assistant would stand patiently out on the sidewalk, waiting for the handicapped van, at a bus stop in full view of Scott’s office window. Watching this heart-tugging scene, Scott would always relent and send a lesser assistant out to rehire the blind one.

  Scott once fired another assistant while they were both in Scott’s car on the freeway. Scott made this assistant get out of the car in the middle of traffic, and left him there.

  I once saw Scott glance at an assistant with such disdain that the assistant actually burst into flames.

  Okay, that last story isn’t true, but that’s how rumors get started.

  Here are some even more shocking stories about Scott:

  He’s relentlessly demanding and also amazingly generous. After he makes an employee work through a holiday weekend, he’ll then send that employee on an all-expenses-paid two-week vacation to Hawaii.

  No one works harder than Scott. He once tried to go on a Hawaiian vacation himself. He got off the plane, sat on the beach with a pile of books for ten minutes, and then, bored to tears, got right back on a plane and flew home.

  Scott’s assistants know that if they can survive for six months, they’ll be considered so well trained that they can move on to just about any other job they want in the entertainment industry. Or the Taliban.

  Scott is secretly and genuinely caring. When any of his friends, his employees, or their family members are in real trouble, when someone gets sick, or a parent dies, or a writer or an actor or a director falls on hard times, Scott shows up and, very quietly, he offers everything: money, doctors, transportation, and hope. If people ever found out about this side of Scott, his reputation would be ruined. Because here’s Scott’s method: he knows that people are terrified of him, and he’ll even encourage this image in the press. Because then, when a newcomer finally meets him, Scott pulls a fast one. The newbie will approach Scott fearfully, expecting an ogre, or at least a lethally aimed coffee mug. Instead, Scott will be devastatingly charming, funny, and open to ideas. This technique is completely disarming. And evil.

  Scott often says that a producer’s job is “to make people do what they don’t want to do.” When Scott hired me to rewrite The First Wives Club, the screenplay, which had already been revised by several other writers, was the fairly dark story of three women who were cruelly dumped by their arrogant husbands, who lusted for young bimbos. One of the wives, a WASPy matron, had a retarded daughter. I was asked to push the script toward comedy, and to make the daughter a lesbian instead. At first I proposed, of course, that we cover all our bases and make the daughter a retarded lesbian. This idea was rejected.

  As I rewrote, and filming began, Scott saw that the interaction of the movie’s three stars, Diane Keaton, Bette Midler, and Goldie Hawn, was really cooking, and so he asked me to write a scene where they all go to a lesbian bar. I asked, “But why do they go to a lesbian bar?”

  “Diane needs to talk to her daughter,” Scott explained. “Write the scene.”

  “And the daughter doesn’t have a phone?” I protested.

  “She left her phone at home. Write the scene.”

  “And without asking her, Diane somehow just knows that her daughter’s at a lesbian bar. And Diane somehow knows exactly which lesbian bar.”

  “It’s the daughter’s favorite bar, she talks about it all the time. Write the scene.”

  “And Diane brings her two friends because…”

  “Because she’s nervous about going to a lesbian bar. Write the scene.”

  “And the friends agree to go with her because…”

  “Because they’re her friends, and because if you ask one more question I’m going to take you to a lesbian bar and ask all of the lesbians to kill you. Write the scene.”

  Very grudgingly, I wrote the scene; Diane found her daughter, while Goldie, who was playing an actress, danced happily with her lesbian fans, and Bette got propositioned. And Scott, as he almost always is, was right; it turned out to be one of the most popular, and least expected, scenes in the movie.

  I first met Scott when we were both in our early twenties and Scott was working in Manhattan. He was tall and bearded, with a Talmudic intensity; when my aunts first met him, years later, they swooned.

  “That is a very bright guy,” said my Aunt Hilda.

  “And he’s so nice,” said my Aunt Lil. “I thought he was supposed to be mean.”

  “Just like you,” Hilda told Lil, then adding quickly, “I didn’t say that.”

  Scott’s weight has fluctuated over the years, but he’s refused to age a day. It’s not that there’s a portrait somewhere, withering in an attic; I’m convinced that sometime around age twenty-three, Scott simply glanced toward heaven and barked, “Stop it!” Even God takes Scott’s calls.

  I worked with Scott on a few unproduced scripts, and then he had a meeting with the head of Paramount, where he pitched a big-screen version of The Addams Family by singing the first four notes of the familiar TV theme song and snapping his fingers twice.

  Months later, Scott called me in to rewrite a draft of the movie’s script by a team of other writers. The original Charles Addams cartoons featured America’s most macabre clan: the wickedly smoldering Gomez and his swiveling, satanic wife, Morticia, who were doting parents to the pudgy, amoral Pugsley and his ghostly-pale, pigtailed child-demon sister, the unflappable Wednesday; Wednesday has remained my ultimate role model. These characters had been translated from single-panel delirium to a popular half-hour sitcom, but filling ninety minutes of screen time was another matter entirely.

  Thanks to Scott, the film had been impeccably cast, with the dashing Raul Julia as Gomez, the winsomely vampish Anjelica Huston as his bride, and the fetchingly deranged Christopher Lloyd as that hapless, hulking man-island, Uncle Fester. The first-time director was Barry Sonnenfeld, who up until then had been an extremely sought-after cinematographer on movies like When Harry Met Sally and Raising Arizona. Hiring Barry had been Scott’s inspiration, and he’d met his match.

  Scott and Barry were, as their first names might suggest, both nice Jewish boys from New York, and were therefore perfectly suited to collaborate on a story of comic horror; they both insisted that, as some sort of barbaric childhood trauma, their fathers had sold their coin collections. Barry had also been humiliated when he was on a date, and the
public-address system at an Earth Day concert had boomed, “BARRY SONNENFELD, CALL YOUR MOTHER.”

  Barry was the most talented, endearing and perverse three-year-old adult imaginable. He tested everyone on the movie, including me, by immediately sharing a tale of his early days as a cameraman, shooting porn. This was called the Double Penetration Story, and Barry would tell it, in his bubbly urban whine, as if it were The Night Before Chanukah: “Okay, so I’m shooting this porn flick, right, and there’s this actress, and she’s, okay, she’s getting, you know, fucked, from both the front and the back, by these two guys. And I’m thinking, okay, fine, I need the money, but then, as the guy who’s, you know, fucking her from behind, he pulls out, and I guess that the actress hadn’t taken all of the proper precautions, because suddenly there’s a fountain of human excrement, gushing right toward me. And I’m so upset that I run off the set and out into the street, where I vomit. And as I’m standing on the curb, vomiting, I look down at my shoe, and stuck to my toe, there’s this little piece of shit. So I vomit all over again. Isn’t that incredible?” Now picture Barry telling this story to Anjelica Huston, who, to her credit, didn’t flinch. Like almost everyone else, she responded by smiling and saying, “Oh, Barry.”

  Barry also told of how, when shooting another studio film, he had wanted his crew to wear adult diapers under their clothes to cut down on bathroom breaks. Barry of course volunteered to test the diapers, in his shower. “Ya know, they don’t really work that well,” he recalled, sadly. “They’re just designed for minor leakage.”

  Maybe as a result of these memories, Barry was phobic about cleanliness. He loved those breath-freshening strips that dissolve on your tongue, and he was a huge fan of Tucks, the premoistened pads used mostly by hemorrhoid sufferers. For all-purpose fun, Barry kept cases of Tucks in his office, filling every cabinet and desk drawer. As Scott would exit a meeting, Barry would leap to his feet, sliding packets of Tucks into Scott’s pockets and begging, “Please, honey, just take a few. For me.”

  Scott and Barry would feud, but they enjoyed each other enormously. One morning Scott was furious at Barry over whatever, and he summoned me to the inquisition, as a witness. We were in a private, nondescript studio office. While Scott yelled at him, Barry methodically took apart a sectional sofa and used the cushions to build a fort in the middle of the room. Then he disappeared from view, crawling deep inside the fort. Scott was now haranguing a pile of foam rubber, which made him burst out laughing, as Barry’s smiling head emerged. Barry was married to the loveliest, most unfazable woman alive, whom he worshiped and called Sweetie. “I asked Sweetie if I was juvenile,” he proudly reported, “and she said no. She said—infantile!”

  In addition to his unrestrained entertainment value, Barry’s background in cinematography was a blessing. Barry not only understood comedy, but he could make the most complicated visual gag feel swooping and effortless, as he also proved later in the Men in Black films. The Addams Family script, however, remained challenging. As the movie opens, Uncle Fester has vanished for years, to points unknown. He returns, sopping wet, explaining that he’s spent his lost decades in the Bermuda Triangle. The rest of the film tries to determine: Is this the real Fester, or a look-alike con artist after the Addams gold-doubloon fortune?

  While I polished individual lines and scenes, no one could settle on an appropriate ending. Finally, the cast rebelled, and appointed Christina Ricci, the ten-year-old playing Wednesday as their spokesperson. Christina was then, and remains, an extraordinary actress. Most child performers have been signed up for way too many kiddie acting-and-tap classes, where they become adult-pleasing wind-up toys. Christina was the opposite: she had some inexplicable, direct bond with the ghoulish Wednesday, and she’d quickly and flawlessly mastered the necessary comic deadpan. When asked how the movie should end, Christina explained why the returning Fester had to be a true Addams for the story to be emotionally satisfying. We took her advice, and after the filming was over, Barry asked Christina how she’d understood the Addamses with such finesse. “Well,” she replied, “it’s because everyone in the whole family, we’re all dead, right? So I just thought, well, how would a dead person act?”

  The Addams Family was a hit, and so the studio demanded a sequel. I was delighted, because I revered Charles Addams and I was eager to work on the next movie from scratch. Barry had been offered many subsequent projects, so he wasn’t sure about continuing the Addams cycle. Scott and I met Barry for dinner to persuade him, and because Scott was after something, he poured it on, telling Barry things like, “You look great!” and “I would love to have you do the movie, but if you can’t, I will completely understand, with no hard feelings,” until Barry looked at him and asked, “When does Scott get here?” Matters were settled only when Barry unrolled the blueprints for his dream home, to be built on many acres of prime Amagansett bayfront. The house was clearly going to be deluxe, and therefore expensive. As Barry pointed out the locations for the screening room and the many fireplaces, Scott smiled. “I own you,” he told Barry.

  The second film, Addams Family Values, was a pleasure to write, for two reasons: it was a big-budget studio offering which wasn’t expected to be in any way wholesome or life-affirming, and, because the first movie had made money, we could get away with a lot more. For example, when Morticia gave birth, I christened the baby with the name that Charles Addams had originally intended for Pugsley, but which The New Yorker, the publisher of the Addams cartoons, had rejected. The forbidden name? Pubert. In the sequel, Pugsley and Wednesday hate and fear their new brother and try to kill him; as Barry told Sweetie in a gleeful call from the set, “Guess what, honey? Today we threw a baby off the roof!” Pubert was actually played by twin baby girls, with the addition of tiny, Gomez-like mustaches; female infants, I was told, were better behaved, and the use of twins extended the shooting day. The film’s first cast returned, along with the heavenly addition of Joan Cusack as a black-widow killer.

  Addams Family Values was my first unaltered script to be produced, which was sometimes unnerving. Alone in my apartment, I wrote the lyrics to a song for a summer camp Thanksgiving Day pageant, and then, months later, I arrived on the set to see a batch of flesh-and-blood children, dressed up as turkeys and pumpkin pies, singing, as the number was called, “Eat Me.”

  The movie’s soundtrack was originally intended to include a dance track by Michael Jackson; Barry and Scott had met with the King of Pop at his Neverland Ranch, where he’d kept them waiting for hours, but had served them a bowl of M&Ms. As they waited, Barry also had the caretaker activate the full-size merry-go-round, and Barry and Scott both rode painted horses. While the movie was in production, the first of the alleged child-molestation scandals broke, and the Jackson tune was shelved, although His Oddness did shoot an extended video of the song, for release in Japan, in which Michael lives in a haunted mansion, where he’s befriended by the neighborhood kids but hounded by grown-ups waving torches and pitchforks. There’s an onscreen moment in Addams Family Values where Wednesday and Pugsley are imprisoned in the summer camp’s Harmony Hut, to learn about friendship and decency; they spot a framed photo of Michael on the wall and shriek in terror. While I’d written the joke prescandal, by the time the movie was released, audiences went berserk.

  There were Addams-style auditions throughout the filming of both movies. The first film needed actors to play Gomez and Fester in flashbacks, as seven-year-olds and as teenagers. I sat in on the casting calls, particularly for the young Uncle Fester. The room was filled with hundreds of boys for whom looking like Uncle Fester was finally a plus. There was one twelve-year-old who finally couldn’t be hired because he was just too disturbing, and Barry referred to him as “The Drooler.”

  Raul Julia was an expert, nimble, dementedly romantic Gomez. In life, Raul was equally irresistible, with his own point of view. I shared a car with him one morning, and on our way to the set he described the following event: “Paul, you will not believe this, but
it is true! Last night I was at the bar, at my hotel. And I dropped a coin, and as I bent to pick it up, my eyeball fell out! And it rolled onto the floor! I was astounded! And before anyone could see, I plucked up my eye and I popped it back into my head. And it was fine! Tell me, is there any redness? Can you tell?” I couldn’t, and as far as I know, Raul didn’t have a glass eye.

  2.

  A few years later, Scott called me with another idea. When Tom Hanks won his Best Actor Academy Award for playing a lawyer dying of AIDS in Philadelphia, he thanked his high school drama teacher, calling him “a great gay American,” and thereby outing the teacher on global television. Scott thought this incident might be the springboard for a movie.

  At first I said no. By the time of the Oscars telecast, Tom Hanks’s teacher, who was by all accounts a terrific man, was happily retired, and equally proud of Tom. I couldn’t see where the story would go, after the initial outing. Then it occurred to me: Scott had never intended to base the movie on the real teacher’s life, so what if our fictional guy was outed during the week when he was about to get married, to a woman?

  Coming out has been seen as an essential gay rite of passage, and some people experience terrible rejection from unsympathetic friends and family members. I was lucky because, as a child, I was so appallingly egocentric that I assumed everyone was gay. I didn’t divide the world into categories of straight and gay, but into people from New Jersey and people from New York. And while my parents were concerned about me, I was still encouraged to create elaborate Magic Marker drawings, to design and hand stitch a huge felt banner of the pharaoh’s head for a junior high school production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and to decorate my room, including the high-gloss wallpaper and the shag carpeting, in taxicab yellow and Sunkist orange. Years later, when we finally talked about it, my mother asked me, “So you’re gay, right?” just to make sure she wasn’t crazy.