Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

  And sometimes you do it right and it still doesn't work. That was The Great Waldo Pepper.

  The emotional beginning of Waldo rested with the director, George Roy Hill. Sometimes, back when we were working on Butch in '68, we would digress and George would talk about his lifelong love: old airplanes. Hill had been a Marine pilot in both World War II and Korea, but his heart was then and forever with the Jennys and the other flimsy machines surrounding the period of the First World War. He owned one of these planes, flew it across country, never minding when the cars below went faster than he did in the sky.

  Often, when you begin a project, you fantasize about getting this star or that. You almost never do. Waldo was an exception: The only star we wanted was Redford; no other performer was mentioned. He was involved with us almost from day one. He wanted to do the part and, when he got the final script, agreed to do it.

  And he was wonderful.

  Now, Robert Redford at this time was not just the biggest star in the world. He was a phenomenon. In the period preceding Waldo's release, he had starred in The Sting, The Way We Were, and The Great Gatsby. Plus the enormously successful re-releases of two other hits: Jeremiah Johnson and Butch. No star, at least in my time in movies, has ever had such heat focused on him.

  And it is my firm belief that because of his presence in the film, giving a superb performance in a role tailored solely for his talents, that the movie was a commercial disappointment.

  In order to try and make sense of the above, it's necessary to know a little of the plot of the movie and the world it dealt with: barnstorming.

  The barnstorming era--often referred to as "the short-pants period of flying"--began roughly with the end of World War I and ended with the Depression. When peace came, the Europeans immediately grasped the potential future of commercial aviation, which is why so many of the great foreign airlines were founded around 1919.

  No such thought occurred in America. Planes had been useful in taming the Hun, but that was done. Interest in aviation dwindled and all but stopped, not to be reborn until the Lindbergh flight in '27.

  During that interim, it was the barnstormers who kept flying alive in America. They were either pilots who had served in the war or young men who wanted to fly. Planes, hundreds and thousands of them, were left in crates, just waiting to be assembled.

  What the barnstormers did, at least in the beginning, was to give people rides, sometimes at a dollar a minute. Many if not most people at this time in America, especially in the Midwest, had never seen an airplane, much less ridden in one.

  So for several years, in the late teens and early twenties, a plane would appear in rural areas and it would buzz a town and then land in a field. A crowd would gather and the pilot--a genuinely romantic figure, a man who would usually claim, modestly, that his war experiences were nothing really all that remarkable--this white-scarfed figure would make his pitch and then take people up for rides. And at the end of the day he would more than likely tie his plane down by the side of a barn, away from the wind, in case a storm came up. After which, if he was lucky, he would be given a free meal by some farmer, do his best to seduce any local wenches, and be off into the skies again the following dawn.

  It was a frolicsome time, and the barnstormers would out-smart others in their trade, trying to get the best towns for themselves.

  Then, in the early twenties, people began getting tired of it, so the pilots often banded together and did stunt shows to gather crowds. These shows were dangerous, and often people were killed in crashes.

  Then, when Lindbergh happened, flying started to become Big Business. Those barnstormers still alive often drifted to Hollywood, where they did stunts for news cameras or stunt work for war movies. Most of them ended up broke, or crippled, or dead.

  When Hill and I worked on the story, we found that the structure of the piece almost dictated itself. It fell, naturally, into three acts. The first, the fun-and-games act, had Waldo Pepper, our hero, engaged in hustling and lying about his past and taking people up for rides and having his way with women.

  The second act was the air show act. Fun and games are gone. The air show stunts get increasingly spectacular and hairy. Finally a girl (Susan Sarandon, and was she terrific) dies during a show. Waldo, who is innocent, is blamed and barred for life from flying.

  Act three: Hollywood. Waldo, who really only lives to fly, is an outlaw now, doing stunt work under an assumed name. Finally he gets a chance to do battle with his hero, a great German war ace. They fight it out in the skies, with no bullets, both of them lost souls, trying to recapture a past that for Waldo never was. The movie ends on the climactic air fight where they tear each other's planes apart, with the cameras rolling.

  Now, this is, relatively speaking, dark material. Oedipus it isn't, but it's a long way from Animal House. Waldo, a brilliant pilot who never got his chance in the war, is hounded from his passion, first by public apathy, then by an unfair legal judgment, finally by the forces of commerce--the Powers That Be in aviation don't want barnstormers around; they're dangerous when you're trying to convince the public to travel in safety aloft.

  But the movie begins brightly. "Rollicking adventures," etc., etc. Not only was the fun-and-games act a way of getting the audience with us, it was also historically valid. Our problem was this: How do you indicate to an audience that bad times are coming?

  The solution was simple: The credits would be moody, mournful, dark. What we had was a beautiful sad tune playing while what we showed were the faces of young dead pilots accompanied by a series of still shots of terrible plane crashes. Planes in trees, planes stuck in rooftops, like that. We were alerting the audience to be ready for what was to come.

  No picture I've been involved with aroused the expectations of Waldo Pepper. A giant star in a romantic adventure, a major director working from the single deepest passion of his life, the most spectacular aerial stunts maybe since Wings. I received calls from people in the business and the word was this: Waldo would pick up all the marbles. Hill and Redford had worked together twice before: Butch and Sting. Waldo would complete the trilogy.

  I saw the sneak in Boston. Hill was there, some Universal executives were there, the place was packed. We were all nervous--normal at such a time. The movie began. The credits were lovely, the audience was properly quiet. Then the fun-and-games act began--

  --and they loved it. Roars of laughter. They "fell about," as the English would have it. That sound of a group of strangers rising to your work--it's rare and it's one of the things you live for if you're in the movie business.

  Now the movie elided into the second act of its story, the part that dealt with air shows. No problem--the audience was still with us. There were stunts, other air maneuvers--we still had them.

  Then we came to the most sensational stunt of all--a midair plane-to-plane transfer. From the beginning of our story talks, we knew we wanted such a moment; it's an incredible sight to see, especially if the camera is set in such a way as to remove the possibility that we might be faking it.

  The plot set up was this: Susan Sarandon played the girl friend of Redford's buddy. She begins the movie as this kind of wide-eyed innocent and, before our eyes, becomes obsessed with being the " 'It' Girl of the Skies." A star.

  The stunt the pilots agreed to try to draw a crowd was to have a plane fly right down the main street of a small town with Sarandon standing on the edge of one wing. Then, with the whole town watching, her clothes are rigged to come off. She's supposed to stand there frozen and helpless (the barnstormers did this kind of thing, by the way) and then the plane is to come back to the field outside town and land and all the locals will come running and take rides and spend money and a happy time will be had by all.

  Only Sarandon freezes in fear on the wing end, and the plane can't land, because her weight makes the machine lopsided, and if it comes down like that, it will crash. Redford is not flying the plane, he's waiting back at the field, but when the plane comes
close he realizes what's happened and he jumps into another plane, gets someone to fly him up close to Sarandon's plane. The two machines maneuver in the sky. Redford gets ready to switch from his plane to Sarandon's, grabbing hold on the opposite side of the wing from her, because if he comes up next to her, his added weight may cause her plane to go out of control and crash.

  Dead silence from the audience. The two planes come close, Redford's about to make the plane-to-plane transfer but the planes are parted by the wind. Again they maneuver together. Again the winds part them. Tension, as they say, is mounting. (The actual stunt, by the way, was done by a sixty-eight-year-old man who got it on the first take.)

  But the audience doesn't know it's a sixty-eight-year-old man. All they know is this: Susan Sarandon is clutching the wing of one plane, and Bob Waldo Pepper Redford is going to risk his life to save her.

  And he makes the switch! Thousands of feet up, a figure grapples his way from one plane to another.

  Everyone's stopped with their popcorn now, staring at the screen. I was staring, too, probably just as caught as they were. The transfer is a really chilling moment because it's shot from above and you can see the ground far below. No cuts to faces, no way to fake it. They're up there.

  Now the stunt really begins to get hairy. Redford makes his way slowly to the center of the plane, shouts to the pilot. Put the plane in a shallow dive to give it added balance--he's going to make the move out to where Sarandon, speechless, stares blankly out.

  The plane begins a shallow dive. Redford, inch by dangerous inch, starts toward Sarandon, only now he's talking to her, telling her it's okay, everything's going to be fine, he's coming.

  No response from Sarandon. No sound but the sound of the motor and the wind. Redford is twelve feet away from her now, now ten. Talking soothingly, telling her that all she has to do is take his hand, grab hold tight, just take his hand, take his hand.

  Eight feet away from her now. Now six. He reaches out his strong arm, still talking to her, still telling her it's okay, everything's going to be fine.

  Sarandon blinks a couple of times. He's getting through to her. The fear, which had her so totally, is beginning to break.

  On Redford comes, talking, arm out. Closer and closer. Take my hand. Just take my hand. Five feet. Take my hand. It's all right. We'll laugh about this later. Four feet. Almost there. Still he talks, his strong voice soothing. Take my hand now. Please, that's all you have to do. Take my hand. Take my hand. Now we're on Sarandon. His meaning registers. The fear retreats even more. Now we're on Redford--so close he can almost grab her, talking to her every moment. Now we're on Sarandon again and at long last she reaches for him--

  --and now we're on Redford, stunned, alone on the wing. She's fallen. We hold on Redford's face a moment, distraught, stricken; he's come so far, risked his life, tried so hard. But she's gone.

  So was the audience.

  At first there was just this buzz. You could see people turning to each other, asking questions. Where's the girl? What happened? Then the buzzing stopped--they realized where the girl was. Dead. And after the buzzing ended, there was silence in the theatre. But not the silence of a group held in suspense. No.

  They were furious.

  They felt tricked, they felt betrayed, and they hated us. The most violent sneak reaction of recent years probably belongs to Rolling Thunder, where the audience actually got up and tried physically to abuse the studio personnel present among them. These people in Boston were much too civilized for open warfare. They just sat, sullen. For the first hour of the movie, they were in love with us, and in that instant when the girl went off the wing, the affair ended.

  We'd tried to prepare them. We'd begun with death. We'd had people getting injured early on. We talked about pilots dying, we showed crashes. We knew it was a demanding moment and, academically speaking, we'd prepared for it properly.

  They didn't want to know about "academically speaking."

  Waldo Pepper had let a girl die. Only he wasn't Waldo, he was the golden boy of the middle seventies, he was the hero of his time. Errol Flynn didn't let girls die from the wings of airplanes and neither, goddammit, did Robert Redford.

  I truly believe that if Jack Nicholson had been in the part, he wouldn't have been as good as Redford, but the movie would have worked for audiences. Because there is, inherent in Nicholson's persona, something dark. They would have expected trouble with Nicholson. Or Pacino. Or De Niro. Or the Redford of today. We know he's not just a golden boy anymore. We saw his serious side in All the President's Men, we know it from his Oscar-winning directing work in Ordinary People. But the Redford of 1975--alas no. Waldo was and is, for me, a quality adventure film. And usually a movie like that, especially one with a major star, finds a major audience.

  But the Bostonians who angrily left the theatre were typical of audiences all across the country when the picture was shortly released. We had given them something they didn't want. No matter that we did what we could to forewarn them--we could not shake their expectations.

  There is an Eisenstein dictum that says: "You must go where the film leads you." For a movie to work for a mass audience, they must be willing to let you lead them toward your destination.

  They wouldn't follow us with Waldo. No matter how we tried....

  Chapter Nine

  All the President's Men

  "Have you heard about these two young guys on the Washington Post?"

  That question was asked me over the phone early in the winter of 1974. By Robert Redford. And it began my association with All the President's Men.

  I had not heard, at that point, of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. Redford explained that they were young reporters (both in their late twenties when the break-in took place at the Watergate complex). And that they had been doing sensational work on the story and had written a book. He had taken an option and asked me to read it.

  The version that I read was well prior to publication or even the proofing stages. It was a Xerox copy, full of half pages and cross-outs, and it weighed a ton. I went through it quickly and I knew well before I finished that it was not a job I could conceivably turn down.

  Nobody wants to be connected with a garbage film. I find it hard to believe that at the early meetings involving The Green Slime or Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter that the creative teams really thought they were in the Citizen Kane derby.

  What you pray for is this: (1) a movie that people will remember and (2) a movie that people may actually go and see.

  Movies with that double potential come along not too often, and when one does, and you're offered a shot, I think you have to take it.

  I had no idea whether anyone would want to see a picture about Watergate, but Redford, then the number-one star in the world, was not just going to produce it, he was committed to playing the Woodward part, so obviously that didn't hurt. But the Watergate story had been so important to the country for so many months that I felt if it could be pulled off, people might remember.

  Now, there were problems.

  (1) Watergate had been so heavily dealt with in the media that a lot of people, rightly, were already sick of it.

  (2) Certain kinds of subject matter were viewed with less than glee by studio executives: sports, for one; politics, for another. And All the President's Men certainly was a political story.

  (3) The book had no structure that jumped out at me. And very little dialog.

  (4) There were all those goddam names that no one could keep straight: Stans and Sturgis and Barker and Segretti and McCord and Kalmbach and Magruder and Kleindienst and Strachan and Abplanalp and Rebozo and backward reeled the mind.

  (5) Great liberties could not be taken with the material. Not just for legal reasons, which were potentially enormous. But if there ever was a movie that had to be authentic, it was this one. The importance of the subject matter obviously demanded that. More crucially was this: We were dealing here with probably the greatest triumph of the pri
nt media in many years, and every media person who would see the film, if there was a film--every columnist and commentator and reviewer--would have spent time at some point in their careers in a newspaper. And if we "Hollywooded it up"--i.e., put in dancing girls--there was no way they would take it kindly. We had to be dead on, or we were dead.

  (6) Redford himself. He was not to be a hired hand on the project. Being the producer meant that a lot of directors might shy from the job, since they don't like having their star be their boss.

  Plus this: He wasn't just the star, he was the co-star. The Bernstein part would have to be equal. At least that. Because if you are a star, and your co-star is your producer, your part can disappear pretty quickly in the cutting room.

  And we needed a star. If we had gone with a relative unknown--say, Robert De Niro at that time--not only would it have thrown the balance out of whack, Redford was very much aware that people would say he was afraid of an equal and wanted it all for himself. There were only two equals who had the proper ethnic qualities for Bernstein--Hoffman and Pacino. If we couldn't land either one of them, we were in trouble.

  (7) And this turned out to be one of the great jokes--my wife remembers my telling her that my biggest problem would be somehow to make the ending work, since the public already knew the outcome.

  Was ever a man so naive?

  Before I went down to Washington to meet with the authors, I began my preliminary research, and one of the things I found that I hadn't known was the inept quality of so much of what went on.

  The famous break-in of June 17, 1972, the event that triggered everything, was not their first attempt. The burglers had tried several times before, and they kept goofing it up. Once, they got trapped and had to hide for the night in an empty room in the complex. Better than that, another attempt failed because the keys they had made to get them into Democratic National Headquarters didn't fit. Now, they had had these keys made in Miami, and after their bungle some of them went back to Miami to have keys made all over again.

  The reason I suppose I liked that stuff was my obsession with the likelihood that everyone assumed they knew everything about Watergate. So I felt whatever I could bring in that was surprising would help us.