Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

  By the end of the war he was a twenty-two-year-old phenomenon, He trained as a test pilot in '46 and '47, and on October the fourteenth of 1947, Charles Yeager flew the plane that broke the sound barrier.

  An amazing character, dazzlingly brush-stroked by Wolfe. He would have made a wonderful central figure for a movie.

  But the astronauts didn't begin until a dozen years later and Yeager had nothing to do with them. In other words, there were at least two central stories in the book and they truly didn't touch at any point.

  Next I got a call: United Artists had bought the book for Chartoff-Winkler and would I talk with them? That event took place in early November, of course at the Sherry Netherland Hotel.

  Robert Chartoff and Irwin Winkler have been best friends forever, and partners for damn near as long. Their producing career provides a fascinating split. In their first decade, they were connected with an awesome number of either critical or commercial disasters, or, most often, both. Here's a partial list:

  Double Trouble

  The Split

  The Strawberry Statement

  Leo the Last

  Believe in Me

  The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

  The Mechanic

  Busting

  S*P*Y*S

  Breakout

  Nickelodeon

  Valentino

  Then, in November of 1976, came Rocky.

  It not only won them the Best Picture award, it made them, forever, rich beyond the dreams of avarice. These numbers are approximate, but Rocky cost barely over one million and took in, worldwide, probably close to a hundred million. When money comes in over the transom like that, no bookkeeper in Hollywood can hide it all.

  With their success, the quality of the Chartoff-Winkler films altered abruptly. Among their productions since, as well as the Rocky sequels, have been Raging Bull and True Confessions. So when we shook hands in the Sherry that November day, I was meeting one of the top producing teams in the business.

  I told them what I thought--that it was a wonderful property, that I wished them joy, that I didn't know how to make it into a movie.

  And then Winkler totally turned me around. He spoke very quietly and he said that probably we should forget the Yeager material and go with the astronauts, starting with their selection, then their training, then the Alan Shepherd flight, followed by the Gus Grissom fiasco, and climaxing the movie when John Glenn circled the earth.

  What he had done, of course, was give me my structure for the movie. Five acts: selection, training, Shepherd, Grissom, Glenn.

  But even more than that, Winkler had set something going in my head. Because, for the first time in my career, I wanted to write a movie that had a message. I wanted to "say" something using The Right Stuff as a narrative vehicle. I wanted to "say" something positive about America. Not patriotic in the John Wayne sense, but patriotic none the less--

  --because the hostages had just been seized in Iran.

  I think it's difficult today, in this terrible time in America, to remember back even three years and reconstruct just how terrible, in a perhaps different way, things were then.

  Jimmy Carter was president--I had voted for him. This gets pretentious but I have to say what I feel--I think Jimmy Carter eventually flew directly against the heart of the American dream. The message America has always beaconed across the world might be put this way: "Careers are open to talent." An individual can go, in one lifetime, as far as his luck and skill will take him. And no one will look down on him because he began poor, unlike, say, in England, where you are what your father and grandfather were.

  And the message Carter was sending from the White House was this: "The world is too much now--one man can't do more than I'm doing."

  On December the seventh of '79 my deal with Chartoff-Winkler was finalized, and I noted in my journal that the date was a good symbol for a patriotic movie. I didn't want to preach in the film--I'm a believer in the old movie adage "If you want to write a message, use Western Union."

  But the astronaut story paralleled the lack of confidence of the hostage crisis. The Russians were ahead. We were second rate. They put a dog in space. Our rockets exploded on the launching pad. Then, slowly, we began to get it together. When Alan Shepherd was lobbed into the skies for fifteen minutes, small as that feat was compared to the Russian achievements, it meant something to the American people. And when John Glenn finally orbited four times around, we went crazy. We had, in our minds, caught up, We were America again.

  As the hostage crisis dragged on--as Carter began wrapping himself in the flag and running for reelection, hiding in the Rose Garden--I became increasingly obsessed with what The Right Stuff presented. I told Chartoff-Winkler I wanted to say something positive about America. I told the heads of UA I wanted to say something about America. All the answers were the same: "Swell, right, go to it."

  I did my months of research. I went to California and NASA in Houston and to Canaveral in Florida, where I saw a rocket launching and, yes, the ground really does shake and your clothes vibrate like crazy.

  To be sure everybody was in sync, I did something I've never done before: As I was about to begin writing, I sent a note to the producers explaining, yet again, what I was after. Here is the note:

  BOB AND IRWIN--IRWIN AND BOB

  A REMINDER TO US ALL:

  THE MOVIE MUST BE REAL. NOT A DOCUMENTARY BUT REAL. WE MUST RECREATE THAT WORLD AND TIME OF THE LATE 50'S AND EARLY 70'S SO THAT THE AUDIENCE UNDERSTANDS WHY THE FUSS MADE OVER THE ASTRONAUTS HAPPENED. AND WHAT THEY MEANT TO US ALL.

  ONLY IN THAT WAY, I THINK, CAN WE INDICATE TO THE AUDIENCE TODAY THAT WE ARE STILL, IN SPITE OF OUR FAULTS, A GREAT COUNTRY.

  REMEMBER, THIS IS TO BE A MOVIE THAT, IF WE'RE LUCKY, SENDS THE PEOPLE HOME WITH A GOOD FEELING ABOUT AMERICA.

  NOT SUCH A BAD THING TO TRY AS THE 80'S UNVEIL.

  BILL

  In May, I sent the first draft to Chartoff-Winkler. They said they liked it but they wanted me to add a section of basically daredevil material to the early part of the script before they gave it to UA.

  In June, the new material added, UA was sent the screenplay. Chartoff and Winkler said they were pleased with it, but producers often say that.

  UA said they liked it, too, and I had to believe them--because we became a "go" project with a twenty-million-dollar budget and no stars.

  Trumpets, please.

  Next, naturally, came the hunt for a director. Everybody's first choice was Michael Ritchie (Downhill Racer, The Candidate, a lot more). He wanted to do the project. Negotiations began. I hadn't ever worked with him but I knew him and thought him perfect; he is fast, prepared, good with men, and achieves a wonderful documentary look to his films.

  Then his latest picture, The Island, was seen by Winkler, among others, and the feeling about The Island was disastrous--tasteless, unnecessarily replete with gore, the pits. Ritchie was out.

  John Avildsen, who had directed Rocky, was next. In June, Avildsen was one-hundred-percent committed. Then came contract problems. Avildsen was out.

  Enter Phil Kaufman. I knew Phil and I liked him. More than that, we had both been fired from the same project, so we had spilled blood together, always a good sign. Well, almost always. Phil is bright, serious, a good writer, a sports fan, always a good sign. Well, almost always. He had directed a few pictures, and only one of them--a remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers--had done much commercially, but that had been a UA picture. They approved him.

  On July twenty-first, we had our first meeting out in California. The meeting was preceded by a lunch with the producers and some UA brass and we talked about a lot of things but not the picture. Then Phil and I excused ourselves and went into a room alone.

  Within two minutes, I was into the nightmare.

  I mentioned at the start how fortuitous the timing was, since there was going to be a rocket launching in Florida and I knew they didn't happen often and I knew he would be as impressed a
s I'd been. He said, "I'm not going to Florida, but there are some air shows up in Northern California I thought I'd catch." Then I gave my pitch about the chance of making this patriotic movie and he said, "I don't want to do that, patriotism's too easy, Ronald Reagan's patriotic and who wants that?"

  The entry I have in my journal for that day says: "Kaufman meeting--disaster." But in truth, I don't know which of his two remarks proved the more devastating.

  The one about patriotism seems clearly the more potent. But the one about air shows meant old airplanes, and old airplanes meant one thing to me--

  --Yeager.

  Phil's heart was with Yeager. And not only that, he felt the astronauts, rather than being heroic, were really minor leaguers, mechanical men of no particular quality, not great pilots at all, simply the product of hype.

  Well, now.

  There is no way I can explain to you the size of the chasm between us but I will try. Let's suppose you were hired to do a movie about the Dallas Cowboys. Roger Staubach. Tony Dorsett. "Too Tall" Jones. They were your heroes. And your job was to make them as central and splendid as you could.

  And you did that.

  And everyone said fine.

  Then a director came aboard who said this: "The Dallas Cowboys are minor leaguers--there hasn't been a real football hero since the days when everybody played the whole game, sixty minutes, offense and defense. Tony Dorsett stinks. Roger Staubach sucks. There hasn't been a real football hero since Bronko Nagurski, and he's who I want to glorify."

  Now, I'm not saying that's wrong; in this example I've given, I happen to agree--Bronko Nagurski was the greatest football player who ever lived.

  But that's not what I was hired to write.

  I was supposed to tell the story of the astronauts. And I did. More than that, I wanted to say, using them as a vehicle, that America was still a great place, and not just to visit.

  What Phil wanted to say was that America was going down the tubes. That it had been great once, but those days were gone, and wasn't that a shame.

  We met for three days, and we went over the script. The version UA said yes to ran 148 pages. Do you know how many pages remained in the version Kaufman wanted to make?

  Six.

  One scene was all that would remain, a bitter fight between an astronaut and his wife.

  On the twenty-fourth of July, Phil and I met with Chartoff and Winkler and I tried to explain the wee differences that existed between the director and myself. Chartoff and Winkler did what all bright producers do: They tried to make peace. What they said was sure, here and there maybe it's not the same, but in general you guys really agree with each other. I could not, I simply could not, make them understand.

  But I had an ally--Phil. He's a writer, too, and he knew full well what I was talking about. And finally, with his help, the situation surfaced.

  We agreed to think about things and meet again three weeks later, and what everybody would do was take a few notes and try and come to an agreement.

  We were to talk for three solid days in August. I went back to L.A. to begin. The first problem surfaced when it turned out we wouldn't have three days, because Winkler had made plans to go vacation in the South of France in the middle of the second day.

  And Kaufman's notes turned out to be a thirty-five page treatment of the film. I will quote here only the first and last lines; here is the beginning:

  "This is a Search film, a quest for a certain quality that may have seen its best days...." (That quality, by the way, is bravery in the sense that Wolfe uses it in the book: the right stuff.)

  The last page lists a bunch of movies we should all be seeing: The Searchers, La Dolce Vita, Grand Illusion, and half a dozen more. His final comments on them said this: "Many of them have a rambling form--but a compelling theme; they are episodic. 'Truth' is found along the way. And in all of them, it seems, we detect the passing of a higher quality." (Italics mine.)

  We talk about Phil's notes on Monday and now something new has been added: Not only do Phil and I disagree, but Chartoff and Winkler disagree, Chartoff basically siding with Kaufman, Winkler with me. Then, at the peak of all this, Winkler takes off for the Riviera. (Chartoff and Winkler, by the way, ended their partnership pretty much at this time, and I have no way of knowing if The Right Stuff contributed to that severing. But there was a lot of emotion flying around the room while we went at it.)

  At five-thirty the next morning, I had my nightmare, waking terrified because in the dream I was falling to my death.

  Soon after that I did something I never conceived could happen to me: I left the picture. It was something I'd never done before and knew I'd never do again. (Ho-ho-ho, read the next chapter, it gets easier.)

  Anyway, there was anger, and there were lawsuits, and everything was eventually settled. Not amicably, but guns are no longer being fired across the water.

  UA dropped the project, and The Ladd Company picked it up, and Kaufman has written the movie and is directing it now. It should come out at Christmas.

  This has been by far the hardest chapter of the book to write. I regret the experience so totally. There were no villains, we all behaved I think as well as we could, and yet it happened and I still don't know why.

  The UA executives at this time were not exactly riding a hot streak--some would get canned for Heaven's Gate. And I wondered did they meet with Kaufman before he took the job? If they did, what did he tell them?

  But it's obviously wrong to blame them for the ensuing disagreements--because I've never met with a director and discussed the script before he took the job. The director says yes and then you meet. Always. And always there are disagreements, but that's not only to be expected, it's not a bad thing--bright directors can make tremendous contributions to a script.

  Chartoff-Winkler were doing their job--trying to get a picture made. And Kaufman had a vision of what he wanted on screen.

  But it had nothing to do with mine, and I often found myself wondering in the ensuing months why I was hired in the first place. Since what I wrote so obviously didn't matter.

  I mean, here we were, an expensive "go" project, and no one said, "Hey, let's try and make the script work." I may have never felt, in movies, such impotence as during The Right Stuff meetings. Whenever anyone asks, "How much power does a screenwriter have?" my mind now goes only to those terrible days in Los Angeles.

  The answer, now and forever: in the crunch, none.

  Could I have stayed on the project? If he needs the credit or the job, any screenwriter can throw a bag over anything and do it for Old Glory.

  But whatever I wrote would have been, I think, useless. I wouldn't have believed a word of it and I would have known, as I hacked away, that everything was doomed to fail because it was so clearly not what Kaufman wanted.

  I still feel sad. But ultimately, one nightmare was enough....

  Chapter Twelve

  Grand Hotel

  Grand Hotel was a movie that I very much wanted to write, that I was contracted to write, that I then found out I couldn't write: It is the story of losing confidence.

  The film, of course, was to be a remake. The original MGM version won the Oscar as Best Picture fifty years ago, and it still probably has the quintessential all-star cast: Garbo, Crawford, Barrymore, Barrymore, on and on. I had seen this version and Garbo was beautiful, Crawford was a revelation. But it seemed to me to be hopelessly dated.

  I got word that Norman Jewison (In the Heat of the Night; Fiddler on the Roof; The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming) was interested in doing the remake and wanted to meet. I thought I ought to see Grand Hotel again, and that was done. Garbo was still beautiful, John Barrymore was even more romantic than the first time--but it seemed more dated than ever.

  Meetings are part of the Hollywood mating dance. (Maybe Woody Allen's best punch line is "All the good meetings are taken.") Mostly, at least in my experience, they are bullshit. I have met some dazzling salesmen and been impressed wit
h their acting technique, but usually they are futile: If you have a strong opinion going in, it's not likely even the legendary Skouras Brothers in their prime can make you change it.

  The Grand Hotel experience--it covered five years of my life--was unusual at least in this respect: It provided me with both the best and worst of meetings.

  They came in that order. Jewison was staying at the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York. (Practically everyone in the movie business, for reasons passing understanding, stays at the Sherry when they come to Manhattan. I have known of studio executives who have stayed at the Park Lane, another fine establishment, who felt they had to explain why they weren't at the Sherry before any talk could get under way. The subtext being, of course, that they were still the "A" team, even though they had been banished, for the moment, to Central Park South.)

  Jewison is a tough, feisty, funny, no-nonsense director, so we got right to it. I said I thought the picture had something from the past that couldn't be successfully given breath. I knew this version would take place at the MGM Grand Hotel in Vegas, an incredibly successful operation, but I didn't think that was enough. No one had shot at the Grand, no one had ever seen its size or interiors, so that was a plus. But about the only one I could think of.

  Then Jewison took over. He wasn't interested in resurrecting the old classic. He didn't want to find a modern equivalent for the Garbo part or any of the others. He just wanted to use the title and the same kind of multistory approach as the original.

  And he wanted to do it as a musical.

  A great big high-style glossy, classy musical, the kind Metro was the master of in the old days. Musicals were out of fashion--this was April of '77--because making them had become prohibitive. But since this was to be a Metro movie about a Metro operation, that didn't matter so much in this case. We had a real shot at doing something wonderful, something not seen in years, and if we were lucky, maybe we might come up with a movie people could mention along with the legendary Donen-Kelly-Minnelli works of the forties and fifties.