I said I thought that ruined everything.
They wouldn't go away: Do you expect the audience to believe he's just going to sit there and watch Butch get killed?
I said Butch didn't get killed.
They wanted something--a wink, maybe, some indication from one hero to the other, anything that would make it clear: "I won't let you get hurt."
Director George Roy Hill was on my side and we carried the day. I can't articulate even now why I felt so strongly. The producers had an absolutely valid point.
But the spine of the picture was the two guys. And they had to be appealing, sure; but they also had to be different and special. They were all we had going for us. And I truly believe that Butch's not asking for help and Sundance not offering any was what cemented their relationship.
From here on, I hoped, the audience would be asking, "Who are those guys?"
Two quick remembrances, one of rehearsal, one from opening week.
In the middle of the movie is a twenty-seven-minute sequence where Butch and Sundance are chased and almost captured by the Superposse. As a result of their narrow escape, Butch decides it's time for South America.
In the middle of the chase is a short scene where they go to see an old sheriff, Bledsoe, to ask his help in getting them to enlist in the Army and fight in the Spanish-American War. Bledsoe, who is a friend, tells them they're crazy, it's too late, that they're both going to die bloody and all they can do is choose where.
During rehearsal, Newman was bothered not by the length of the chase but by the fact that it was misstructured. His contention was that the scene with Bledsoe should not be where it was but at the end--Bledsoe should be the icing on the cake, the one that finally makes them believe they must leave the country.
Newman is totally pro, always prepared, always giving. (During shooting when his people were upset that Redford was being given too much of the picture, too many close-ups, etc., etc., Newman couldn't have cared less.)
He is also, to use an image he says of himself, a terrier. When he gets hold of something, he simply will not let it go. And he was absolutely convinced that the Bledsoe scene was out of order.
George Hill was equally convinced that it was not; if the chase as it was didn't make them want to get the hell out, an old sheriff telling them wouldn't make any goddam difference. Hill, a Marine pilot who served in both World War II and Korea, is not known for giving ground easily.
We rehearsed for two weeks, and on the first day, Newman idly mentioned that he thought, perhaps, we might shift the order of the Bledsoe scene. Brief discussion, Negative decision. On to the next.
The following morning Newman appeared, having done a good deal of thought at night. The Bledsoe scene was definitely wrong. It was not wrong, Hill replied. More discussion, a bit more heated. (The rehearsals of Butch by the way, were as enjoyable as any time I've had in movies. Katherine Ross was achingly pretty and tended to be quiet Redford was funny, in a counterpunching way. The rest of us were nothing if not vocal. Such was our sound that an article appeared in a Los Angeles paper stating that rehearsals were so violent that the movie had been postponed.)
Logistically, we were alone, seared around a table in the middle of an enormous sound stage. Far across this basketball-court-sized room, a guy who I suppose might be called a gofer sat in a chair, waiting to be called on if anything was needed to help rehearsals along. He was old, and he dozed a lot. There wasn't much for him to do.
Every day now, the argument between Newman and Hill took up more and more time. The word Bledsoe began to lose all meaning, we were that punchy. Newman would not give up and Hill would not surrender. At one point Redford suggested we retitle the whole fucking movie The Bledsoe Scene.
On and on Newman and Hill would go at it. Each day Newman would bring in fresh arguments buttressing his position and Hill would one by one do his best to demolish them. Once they were into the Bledsoe scene, nothing could make them stop.
Almost nothing.
Toward the end of the first week, Newman and Hill were at it again, tearing into each other, back and forth, on and on--until we were all aware of this strange, new, and altogether remarkable sound.
The gofer, way across the room, in his sleep, had let fly with this whopper of a fart. Newman and Hilt registered the event, paused briefly, then went back into combat.
But the fart continued.
Now they paused a second time, all of us staring at this old sleeping guy. Newman and Hill turned back to each other again--
--the fart went on and on. (All true, I swear.)
Now we were all silent.
Still it continued.
Everyone was now aware of the fact that we were in the presence of a phenomenal physical feat. Amazing. We all had to break after that. The old guy slept on, eventually lapsing into silence. He never knew that he alone had the power to put the Bledsoe scene to rest, at least for that day....
Butch opened in New York to what might optimistically be called "mixed" notices The New Yorker, for example, entitled its review "The Bottom of the Pit."
I think all of us involved liked the film a lot. We thought we might have something, and Hill and I, I know, were both in despair. What helped change my mood was something that happened the first weekend it was in release.
A rotten October afternoon, drizzling and cold. A friend of mine was waiting in line to see it, and as the preceding show broke, a number of people piled out of the theatre. And one of them, a guy who'd just seen the movie, stopped and looked at the others waiting in the rain. Then he cupped his hands and shouted out the following: "Hey--it's really worth it."
And hey when I heard that story, I thought for the first time that we really might have something after all....
Chapter Six
The Thing of It Is...
The Thing of It Is... was the screenplay I wrote following Butch Cassidy. It's a movie that never got made. Not remotely unusual. What made this experience unique for me is that this was a movie that not only almost but didn't happen--
--it didn't happen twice.
The first time began with Robert Redford. Butch had been shot but was months from being released, and his career was still in the scuffling stage.
Someone, I think Natalie Wood, had given him The Thing of lt Is..., an unknown novella of mine. He'd read it, liked it, wanted to do it as a movie (assuming he reacted positively to the screenplay). But since there was no studio interest in the project, and neither of us was remotely bankable, the suggestion was to get a director and a female star and then approach a studio. In other words, if we could pull it off, we could beat the system.
The initial step, of course, was that I write the screenplay "on spec." In other words, without a contract, do it for free. I said I would immediately, for three reasons.
One: Writing "on spec" was something I'd always done. I wrote my first novel, The Temple of Gold, in 1956, and it was not until Magic, twenty years later, that I had a contract for an un written book. The reason I worked that way was probably neurotic: I had (and still have) the wild fear that I'll get halfway through a book and then want to stop. But if you're under contract, you can't.
Two: I knew Redford a little, had had a wonderful experience with him in Butch.
Three: He was perfect for the part. Briefly, The Thing of It Is... is a tough romantic comedy. It concerns a young couple who go to Europe with their only child to try and save their marriage. The wife is a stunning-looking WASP type who has married Amos, the husband, against her family's wishes. She is rich, and he, when they married, wasn't.
Worse, he was in the arts. A songwriter. When the story opens be has become enormously successful, having written a "Hello Dolly"-type smash with a title song that is the number-one hit in the country.
Except it's a rotten song and Amos hates it. But he is a secret-keeper, Amos is, and that's one of his secrets. Another, more important, is that even though his last name is McCracken and he looks gentile as hell, he
is, in fact, half Jewish. Not only was Redford the right age and all the rest, he was also, at this time in his career, a sensational comic actor. As I mentioned earlier, he had scored a tremendous success as the male lead in Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park on Broadway, a role he repeated in the somewhat less-well-received film version. For the part of Amos--quirky, funny, secretive--I couldn't think of anyone better.
Now, in order to "beat the system," what was necessary was a male star, a female star, and a director. I wrote the screenplay. Redford liked it.
One down and two to go.
For director, I went to Ulu Grosbard, whom I knew, who I also knew had read and liked the book, and who had just done the lovely film for Frank D. Gilroy's Pulitzer prizewinning hit, The Subject Was Roses. Grosbard said yes.
Two down, one to go--
--oops.
Strange things began to happen. The movie of Butch had opened by now, and Grosbard began having trouble getting together with Redford to discuss the script. Grosbard was perplexed--we all lived in New York, we didn't need plane tickets to get together. Time dragged, as it does, on, and nothing was happening. It didn't make sense for Redford to avoid Grosbard, because not only had he okayed Grosbard before I ever went to him, Redford was the one who wanted to do the movie in the first place.
Then Redford called me one day from a pay phone in the Salt Lake City airport. What he said was basically that since Butch was now a huge hit, he didn't think "his fans" would accept him as Amos, since Amos was "kind of weak." So good luck with the project, but he was out.
I don't know what happens to people when it happens, but it sure happens fast.
I called Grosbard and told him. We now needed not just a female star, but a male star as well.
By the end of the week, literally, we had Elliott Gould, who at this time, in 1970, had gone from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to M*A*S*H and was rated one of the five biggest stars in the business.
Two down, one to go. Again--
--oops.
I met with Grosbard and he told me that he was now leaving the project because he felt he had a moral obligation to direct Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things About Me?
But Gould really wanted to do our project, and his agent, David Begelman, famed in song and story, wanted him to get it done. Begelman also represented Faye Dunaway, got the script to her. She said yes.
Now all we needed was a director.
I met with Begelman to talk about who would be good for it. I said my first choice in all the world was someone I'd never met, Stanley Donen. Donen, an American living in England, had directed or codirected some of my favorite films: On the Town, Singin' in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and most recently a wonderful tough marriage comedy, Two for the Road.
"Stanley would only be perfect," Begelman told me. "Except he's crazy."
I explained I'd already dealt with some pretty whacko people on this project already, one more wouldn't bother me.
"You don't understand," Begelman explained. "I don't mean Stanley's difficult. I mean he's insane. He cracked up over in England. Total nervous breakdown. He'll never be able to direct a movie again,"
So much for Stanley Donen--or so I thought.
Enter Mark Rydell.
I didn't know Rydell. But he was then (he'd just finished The Reivers with Steve McQueen) and is now (most recent work: On Golden Pond) a gifted director, skilled with actors and possessed of a wonderful eye. We met in New York, discussed script changes, etc. Good standard meetings. And after they were over, he agreed to do the movie.
So at last we had the three crucial elements: Gould, Dunaway, Rydell. I won't attempt to describe my relief, but it was considerable. What had begun as a request from one acquaintance to another to try and beat the system had now become draining. (This whole process, from Redford's request to Rydell's agreeing, had taken maybe eight months.) And with the many shifts of personnel, the project had become obsessive. I found myself unable to do any writing of my own. The monkey was unquestionably on my back, and until the movie was under way, it wasn't going to leave me. But now, at last, we were set.
Oops--
Rydel1 called from California, said he'd had second thoughts, and didn't feel he wanted to direct the picture.
Panic in New York. Phone calls were made, entreaties, assurances were given Rydell that it really would all work out. Please would he think about it.
He thought about it, decided he had acted perhaps hastily, and agreed, again, to do the picture. With all the elements again intact, Begelman made a deal with a distributing company to take on the picture. (I don't want to get into the technical details of The Deal here--primarily because I don't understand them myself--but the arrangement was that the company would give us the money to make the movie but that we would only get paid upon completion of the film. Which was fine with everybody.)
Then Rydell called from California again to say finally and irrevocably that he had made a mistake when he changed his mind to do the picture and had now changed it again. He was out.
Hysteria in New York. More phone calls, more entreaties. Wouldn't he please reconsider one more time?
He did. He at last definitely and irrevocably said yes. He would direct the picture.
With one small proviso: I was no longer to be involved. He had someone he wanted to fix the script. It was my screenplay based on my novel but I was forced out.
What I know now that I didn't know then was simply this: I was having my first experience with a "writer killer."
There are a lot of directors in Hollywood who are writer killers. Some of the best directors in Hollywood are writer killers. I don't mean to indicate that these men don't like writers. In point of fact, some of their best friends are writers.
But what writer killers do is they work with you on a project, and they ask for apples and you try and give them apples, then they say no, pomegranates would be better, so you try and write pomegranates. Then that doesn't satisfy them and it goes on, rewrite following rewrite, until your mind is fucked around. You are frustrated, confused, maybe useless. Now, it's conceivable they're just such perfectionists that they never stop second-guessing themselves. It's also conceivable they wanted to bring in a friend all along--I don't know.
Many, maybe most, of the Hollywood community has a certain contempt for screenwriters. And they're not necessarily wrong: Most of us are not very good. But writer killers are the worst, because usually they are talented, usually they are bright, and I don't think that consciously they always know their objective.
Which doesn't mean they don't achieve it.
Perhaps the best example I can give of the subconscious contempt concerns an experience I had with Sydney Pollack on another project that never happened. We were talking one day and as usually happens in meetings, you drift away from the subject, circling awhile, and Pollack told me how much he loved Boys and Girls Together--he had been one of the directors who had tried to lick the problems of the book. David Rayfie1--his closet writer, the one he usually brings in--had done the adaptation.
We were so faithful to your book, Pollack told me. We treated it with such care. God, we were faithful.
And then he found a copy of the script.
Let me just read you a scene, he said. To show you how faithful we were.
I didn't want to hear it--I don't like my writing, don't reread it myself, and the thought of having someone else reading my lines to me was something I wanted to avoid.
No no, Pollack said, you'll really love this. You'll see how faithful we were.
I couldn't stop him.
He found a scene, started to read it--and it was a scene that wasn't in the book, between two characters who never talk to each other in the book.
I asked him to stop.
He wouldn't. He kept reading on and on, reading this terrible scene that had nothing to do with my novel. All on the pretext of showing his faithfulness.
And he simply would n
ot stop.
I don't know to this day if he realizes the contempt in what he was doing. Maybe if I could have shown him some scenes I'd redirected from Jeremiah Johnson, for me his best film--maybe if I'd forced him to watch stuff I'd done to his work, with different locales and different actors and different camera shots--maybe he might have understood.
But only maybe.
When I was forced off The Thing of It Is... I guess I snapped. I am not, by nature, Homeric, but I had some kind of rage building. I didn't care about the movie, I didn't care about anything.
So I self-destructed the project.
Okay--if they were going to force me off my own movie, fine. Do it. But I insisted on being paid first. I was told that would explode the deal, which was based on no one being paid till the movie was done.
I didn't care. I just didn't care. I demanded payment immediately. Then I took my family and we fled on vacation. While we were gone, the explosion took place. The Thing of It Is... was dead.
Dissolve, as they say Out There.
A year later, my telephone rang. It was Stanley Donen, whom I'd still never met, and he was in New York, could we talk. We did, and I told him how much I'd always wanted to work with him and he said much the same to me, and then he wondered did I have any ideas?
Now, Donen was the director who Begelman had told me had gone insane in England and would never be able to direct again. Stanley didn't seem insane to me. I gave him The Thing of It Is... and while he was reading it, I kind of tippy-toed around, trying to ascertain the state of Stanley's mental health.
It turned out he was fine. He hadn't had a nervous breakdown--he hadn't even had an upheaval--what he did have was an agent who wasn't David Begelman.
Begelman's behavior, by the way, is not remotely unusual. Not that agents are all liars. But since no one knows what will work, agents are constantly and rightly promoting their own clients. Had I been less of an idiot, I would have checked Begelman's statement when he made it. But he was so powerful, so bright and persuasive, I never thought to do so.
Besides, we were both New York Knick fans and I figured that counted for something.
Donen wanted to direct The Thing of It Is... so the second act was under way. He gave the script to Robert Evans (then married to Ali MacGraw), who was at the peak of his career as head of production at Paramount. Love Story, a genuine phenomenon, was primarily Evans's baby.
Adventures in the Screen Trade Page 21