Adventures in the Screen Trade

by William Goldman

  I almost came out of my chair I was so excited. It had crossed my mind by this point, after ten-plus years in the trenches, that if I was anything, I was a genre writer. I didn't want to write the same kind of movie over and over.

  And the one kind of movie I most wanted to try that I had never been given the chance to attempt was a musical.

  We began throwing little vignette ideas at each other, and some of them were rotten but some of them weren't. Then I realized that the narrative of this kind of film wouldn't have to have all the main characters introduced early on. You could have some stories that went from start to finish, but others could begin a third of the way through and end half an hour before fade-out. I made a diagram for Jewison on a piece of scratch paper, trying to show what I wasn't articulating as clearly as I wanted, probably because I was so excited. The diagram looked something like this:

  I talked for a minute and then stopped, looking at the piece of paper. I realized what I'd done, subliminally, was make a music staff.

  From there the meeting really took off. Metro wanted the musical made. Jewison wanted to make the musical. Jewison wanted me to write it. I was desperate to oblige. Agents were called. Deals were struck.

  Heaven.

  Then it began to rain. A Metro executive (literally) woke up from a sound sleep and realized that Jewison got final cut on his pictures, and what if he decided to ridicule the Grand?

  Now neither Jewison nor I ever dreamed of ridiculing the Grand. We wanted to make this wonderful bubble, an entertainment, very pure and very simple, with the best musical talents we could find. An expose of the dark side of Vegas's underbelly was not what he had in mind. Nor did we want to mock the ladies in curlers or the men in leisure suits. And we weren't after a tract that preached the evils of gambling. We dreamed of Gigi. Of An American in Paris. Of Singin' in the Rain. This message was conveyed to the Metro brass.

  They said that of course they believed us, but we didn't understand one thing: The Grand Hotel was not just another flophouse on the Strip.

  No. It was Unsullied.

  It was Pristine.

  The diamond in the Metro crown.

  And they wouldn't give Jewison final cut.

  Now, final cut--total approval over the finished film--is the most coveted goal a director can aspire to. A lot of directors say they have it. But in point of fact, they don't. Jewison had it; he'd done a dozen pictures and only one--Gaily, Gaily, for which he'd gotten probably his best reviews--had failed. When you're a director, you can alter your fee, you can fuss with every clause in your contract--but your right of final cut is sacrosanct.

  More cannons were fired across the waters.

  Finally Metro came back with this: Okay, you win, we'll give you final cut. Total and absolute and irrevocable final cut.

  With this one small proviso: Anything that takes place outside the hotel is yours to do with whatever you please, but we'll keep control over any stuff that happens to take place inside the hotel.

  Jewison countered that, since, as they well knew, 99 percent of what we planned took place inside the Grand, they weren't giving up a whole hell of a lot.

  They replied that we didn't understand what we were dealing with. The Grand was special.

  Unsullied.

  Pristine.

  The diamond in the Metro crown.

  And what if we didn't put things in the script that appeared on the screen and they were helpless to stop them.

  What kind of things?

  Oh, say, what if we dressed the hotel executives so they looked like idiots? Or what if the boobs on the chorus girls sagged in an unsightly way? Even if we approve the script, you could damage the reputation of the hotel. We'll give you final cut. We'll give it on everything outside. Plus we'll give it on everything inside--unless we feel it's detrimental to the reputation of the hotel. We know you won't do anything detrimental, but if we feel something detrimental is there, of course we'll have to change it.

  In other words, Jewison said, you'll give me absolute and total final cut over everything--unless there's something you don't like, which you'll then alter.

  Now you've got it, replied Metro; what could be fairer than that?

  We were entering, of course, Cloud-cuckoo-land. There is a wonderful Hollywood expression I first heard used by Robert Evans. I asked him, during the casting period, if a certain actor was signed. (In other words, yes or no?) Evans told me, "Absolutely, he's set. But he's not set-set." (In other words, absolutely yes, he isn't signed.) Jewison wanted what he had had for ten years. Final cut. Metro was offering exactly what he wanted. Final cut. Unless they wanted to change something.

  Total stalemate.

  Which was when I got my ho-ho-ho genius idea.

  I decided what I would do was write a screenplay different from anything I'd ever tried: a total piece, including everything. Everything in every scene. If, for example, two hotel executives were talking, I wouldn't just write the setting and who they were and what they said. I would also include precisely how they were dressed, how their ties matched their immaculate suits perfectly, the tasteful paintings in the background on the wall behind them, everything. All chorus girls would be totally described, with each glorious boob pointing, if necessary, north.

  The point being, if everything was put down, and precisely put down, and if Jewison agreed to accept and shoot only what was written, there would be no way to double-cross them and bring scandal down around us all. The script, as I could conceive it, would probably be totally unreadable and would certainly be as long as the Oxford English Dictionary, but I hoped it would move the project along.

  Would Jewison accept my notion, though? I called him in California. He thought about it, finally deciding that the air of distrust around the movie was not the best of all possible atmospheres to try to make a movie in, so yes, he could live with my idea. If it wasn't in the script and he shot it, then they could change whatever they pleased. Because he would make damn sure that what he wanted was in the script.

  Now I had only to convince Metro.

  I flew to California, optimistic as Candide. Into disaster.

  It took place in Los Angeles on a Saturday morning. My memory is, at a house Jewison was renting. Present were Jewison and Pat Palmer, his partner and producer, several Metro executives. Plus Norman's agent, Stan Kamen, and mine, Evarts Ziegler. These are two genuinely remarkable men. Not only did they both survive the rigors of top academic educations, they were both alive and well after probably fifty combined years of very hard agenting labor. They sat, Zig and Kamen, in a corner of the room, close together, out of the way.

  There was the standard nervous chitchat, because the meeting could not begin until the arrival of the crucial figure, Frank Rosenfelt, the head of MGM.

  More talk, blah blah blah, tension mounting. Now no one wants to be at a meeting in L.A. early on a Saturday morning. So the hour adds a certain discombobulation to the waiting.

  Finally, out front, there is audible the closing of a car door. Rosenfelt has arrived.

  Now there is the sound of the opening and closing of the front door of the house. Rosenfelt is inside.

  Inside the house, yes, but not yet in the room. And you must picture what happened next. All the rest of us are standing in the living room, waiting. Rosenfelt is out of sight, moving along the corridor toward where we all stand.

  And while he is still out of sight, he begins to speak, his voice booming, growing louder as he grew nearer. But no one can see him yet. We can hear him, though, and his words are forever etched on the inside of my eyelids.

  "I just want you to know," this voice begins, "I want you to know I'd be taking bread out of my children's mouths if I gave final cut on this picture."

  And he's still not visible.

  I glanced at Zig and Kamen then, seated off in their corner, and their heads were shaking side to side, in perfect wordless unison. They knew what I didn't: that incredibly, before the meeting had started, it was don
e.

  Rosenfelt entered the room, we all shook hands and managed to make it together for an hour. But it was futile. I flew back to New York, leaving, sadly, the Grand. Still Unsullied. Still Pristine. Gleaming like a diamond in the Vegas night.

  In the movie business, the wheel is always in spin; projects die, are buried, then miraculously rise. (Bo Goldman's script of Shoot the Moon, supposedly, was written ten years before the movie was made.)

  So it was with Grand Hotel. In early '81, Jewison called me and said he'd been approached again to do the musical. Did I think I could reawaken my enthusiasm? I asked him about final cut. He explained there had been a couple of changes. One being that the hotel and the movie studio were now separate entities, which I never really understood. More important, David Begelman was now in charge of the studio and he and Jewison had a long and good relationship. Jewison felt Begelman could offer him sufficient controls to make the situation manageable.

  I told Norman I would get back to him.

  There were reasons, pro and con. The negatives were these: It is hard to get your passion back. We had wanted it so badly in '77 and felt we were kicked in the teeth. I was four years older, with different interests and feelings concerning the movie business. Most of all, though, the project had been shopped.

  Metro really wanted to make the movie. If it stunk, no one would blame the hotel. But if it worked, and movies are a worldwide operation now, you couldn't ask for a better piece of publicity for the Vegas Grand or its sister up in Reno. In every country, the Grand Hotel would be a known commodity. Great for business.

  And any number of directors and writers had been involved in these intervening years. I suspect the reason the movie didn't happen was that eventually the directors had said no for the same reason Jewison did. This was a big and important movie for both the hotel and the studio, and you didn't want to entrust it to the boys responsible for Reefer Madness. And if you want a Sydney Pollack or a Mike Nichols, two of the many directors who had been in and out, you have to give them what everybody else gives them: control.

  To me, then, Grand Hotel seemed just the least bit tired.

  But--

  --I still wanted to work with Norman Jewison.

  --Jewison still wanted to do Grand Hotel.

  --It was still, I thought, a good idea for a movie. I still wanted to do a musical film.

  --And, of course, the Grand was still there.

  Unsullied and Pristine.

  Yes, there had been movies about Vegas before. Sure, we'd all seen flicks about gambling. And God knows hotels weren't virgin territory for a background.

  The Grand, though, truly was Special. Maybe the biggest hotel in the world, maybe the most successful hotel in history. All ours to show for the very first time.

  So, did I want to do it?

  Absolutely yes.

  As much?

  Probably, hesitantly, no.

  I called Jewison back and told him my thoughts. We decided, what the hell, let's give it a whack. Deals were struck, Jewison and I met, went over our old story notions, decided which held and which didn't. We came up with some new ideas. He knew whom he wanted to do the score: Alan and Marilyn Bergman (The Way We Were, The Windmills of Your Mind) for lyricists. Marvin Hamlisch (A Chorus Line) for music. He set about contacting them.

  I set out for Vegas. I had researched the Grand earlier, but that was before the tragic fire. And the last time, the personnel had been a bit hesitant about answering questions. It was crucial for me to know as much about the operation as I possibly could.

  This time everyone was wonderful and open. I spent a week taking in as much as I could. The shows, from both the audience and backstage points of view; the kitchens, the casino operation, the room operation, the Eye in the Sky. Everything I needed they gave me. I learned about the jai alai fronton and the promenade of shops. All kinds of new notions popped--wouldn't it be terrific if we shot here? Hey, we could set a wonderful scene there. Really a terrific time for me. We're talking about a two-thousand-room hotel with a casino the size of a football field and I was getting to understand it--if not all of it, at least enough.

  Now, the Grand (and I think most of the other major hotels on the Strip) has an interesting wrinkle. The biggest, most ornate suites are not for rent. They are kept empty for the highest rollers. And when one of them comes to town, they are given these gigantic suites free. As a perk. Often along with their meals and free shows. Whatever they want. Just so they'll gamble at the Grand and not, say, at Caesars Palace across the street.

  I wanted to see these gigantic suites, and toward the end of my stay, I asked if I might be given a tour. No problem. A polite young man who worked in the reservations office took me up to the very top floor. There's a private guard at the desk by the elevators, always on duty. We moved past him and I was shown one suite, then the next. Finally, when I was studying maybe the biggest suite of all, the guy said the magic words: "This is the one Mr. Ashby used."

  Hal Ashby is a major Hollywood director (Shampoo, Coming Home), and though I'd never met him, we had mutual acquaintances and I was surprised to find he was such a major gambler. I said as much.

  "No, no," the reservations man said. "He didn't sleep here, he shot here."

  I was entering the quagmire. He shot a scene in this suite? I asked. In this hotel?

  "He didn't shoot just a scene in this hotel. He shot a movie."

  Gasping now. A whole movie?

  "I wouldn't know if it was a whole movie or not. But he was here a long time."

  How long?

  "I'm not really sure. Eight weeks maybe. Maybe twelve."

  This was the first I had ever heard of Lookin' to Get Out, a movie Ashby was directing with Jon Voight and Ann-Margret. I didn't know the name of it then, of course, but I did know this: I was shocked, I was pissed, but most of all, for the first time on this project, my confidence was shaken.

  Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound. If you're trying a screenplay, you know it's never going to be Bergman. If it's a novel, well, what kind of a novelist can you hope to be when Dostoevski was there before you. And Dickens and Cervantes and all the other masters that led you to the prison of your desk.

  But if you're a writer, that's what you must do, and in order to accomplish anything at all, at the rock bottom of it all is your confidence.

  You tell yourself lies and you force them into belief: Hey, you suckers, I'm going to do it this one time. I'm going to tell you things you never knew. I've--got--secrets!

  When I was trying Harper, one of my confidence builders was that there hadn't been a tough-guy detective movie in years. If I'd found out that Clint Eastwood was doing a Dashiell Hammett, I could have handled that. I would have told myself, what the hell, there have been lots of tough-guy detective movies in the past, there is always room for another if it's good enough.

  But when I found out, after years of working on Butch Cassidy, that another movie was planned called The Wild Bunch (the name of Cassidy's gang), that was a blow. There was always room for another Western--but you couldn't be the second Butch Cassidy film. In Hollywood, often success comes not from being best but from being first.

  I went back to my room at the Grand and called Jewison. He was just as stunned, I think, as I was. It was crazy--because the same company that was distributing the Ashby film was distributing ours.

  But there was no point in going out the window. The important thing was to read Lookin' to Get Out and find really what similarities the two films had.

  Back in New York, I read the script to the Ashby film: He had, indeed, shot everything i
n the hotel. The same locations we wanted to use. All. My reaction on finishing, it, though, was probably less depression than bewilderment.

  Because, first of all, the script was written to shoot at Caesars Palace. Caesars had apparently taken one look at it and said "nothing doing," so Ashby went across the street and got the Grand's consent.

  The Unsullied Grand.

  That pristine diamond of the Metro crown had refused to trust us in '77, and here they had okayed a script that had, among other things, a scene where one of the male leads waits outside in the corridor so his buddy, inside, can get a blow job from a whore.

  And as far as putting their executives in a bad light, one of the main plot points of Lookin' to Get Out hinged on the hotel's top man not being able to recognize the voice of a good friend, thereby giving imposters the run of the hotel.

  Okay. The idea for Grand Hotel was already a little tired. And Ashby had shot everything we wanted to use. Still, our stories were completely different. And most important of all, we were doing a musical, a full-fledged musical set in Las Vegas--no one had done that for a while.

  Then I found out that Francis Coppola was shooting One from the Heart, a full-fledged musical set in Las Vegas.

  I was, to put it bluntly, in despair. My secrets were being stolen away. Every time I thought about the movie, the presence of Ashby and Coppola blocked any hope I had at vision. Whenever I thought of a musical moment, I wondered if Coppola had come up with the same idea; every book scene went flat because I knew that wherever we put it in the hotel, the audience would have been there already.

  When I write, I must convince myself that it's going to be wonderful. (There is a character in a great play by Tennessee Williams, Camino Real. She's the Gypsy's daughter and she's a whore, but in her heart, each moonrise makes her a virgin.) I'm like that--each moonrise makes me a virgin, too--I'm going to write it and this time, this time, it won't be crap. When I don't have that confidence, I'm in big trouble.

  I don't think I realized finally quite how big my trouble was until I read the Variety review of a movie starring Peter Falk called All the Marbles. Falk played a character who managed a lady tag-wrestling team, hustling his ladies up the rungs of the wrestling world, hoping for a shot at the world's championship.