Or we could get rid of the narrator altogether and have it move from scene to scene like most movies do.
Think again now. If you were going to tell the story as a screenplay, how would you go about it? And why? And what would you gain?
And what would you lose?
(5) WHERE DOES THE STORY TAKE PLACE?
Easy. Just where it does. A small American town. Unspecified. I'm from a small Illinois town (or it was small when I was growing up in it), so I guess that's where it takes place.
I mean, why change it? You can. No problem. Set it in the South or in a city or outside of London--but what do you gain?
When you make a locale shift, you are moving away from the author's intention somewhat. And it's imperative, when you do an adaptation, to stay as close as you can to the author's intention. One little shift here, another there, and suddenly you'll find the material fragmenting on you.
Sure you can shift it. But you better have a goddam good reason. Better than just, say, that the producer always wanted to visit New Zealand.
(6) WHAT ABOUT THE CHARACTERS?
Getting toward the crunch now. Lots of thoughts involved. Have we enough characters to tell our story? Have we too many--can we cut some or amalgamate? Shall we change them? How? Older? Younger? Make them more appealing? Sweeter? On and on.
Let's get specific. Da Vinci has five people. Here they are and we'll talk about them one at a time.
Willie
Morris--his father
Emma--his mother
Porky--his friend
Mr. Bimbaum
Willie
Obviously, since somebody has to get the haircuts, we've got to keep Willie. I think we like him in the story. (At least I know we're supposed to like him.)
He's certainly not memorable, like Phoebe in Catcher. But that's probably okay, the story isn't about a memorable kid. What we've got is a marble player, a prepubescent who cares more about sports than girls.
What about girls, though? If we up Willie just a couple of years in age, we can add the brush stroke of adolescent problems. He can want to look better so he can impress someone of the opposite sex. (That would help buttress his actions when he double-crosses his father in the second haircut.) But what about the difficulties of adding a girl character?
We don't have to add one.
We can just switch Porky's sex.
Sex switching has been done in movies before, most brilliantly in the Gary Grant-Rosalind Russell version of The Front Page, retitled His Girl Friday, where Hildy Johnson went from being a male to a lady without even a change in name.
Porky can be a tomboy who is dealing with the same body changes that Willie is going through. And we can take their relationship through that pain of her going from pal to female to see if their world can withstand such a shaking.
Problem: Porky gets a haircut from Bimbaum. A girl wouldn't likely do that.
Possible solution: Do we need Porky's haircut? Can Willie's need alone be a sufficient drive? Especially since he now, for the first time, cares about his looks.
My instinct at this point is not to mess around with any of this--for the same reason, essentially, as I didn't want to switch locales. It reshifts the story, certainly more than a little, and Mr. Bimbaum may end up being this extra thumb. Who cares if he loses a job or not? Whether Willie and Porky survive takes center stage.
Okay. Enough about Willie for now. But this kind of questioning is the kind of thing you must leave your mind open to. Most free-associating ideas end up like toothpaste. Sometimes they don't. Is this one of those sometimes? Make up your own mind.
Morris and Emma
Again, not memorable creations. But the story functions pretty well with them along, the story's not about them, and they provide (again, were meant to provide) a feeling of family warmth against which Bimbaum operates.
But do we need them both?
One of them absolutely--someone's got to run the goddam barbershop.
What if we knock off the mother? Would that make the Willie-Morris relationship closer and, again, buttress Willie's double-cross?
But Emma has some helpful exposition. And the feel of the house, the warmth of the kitchen, is her doing. Yes, we can get rid of her, but I don't think the game is worth the candle. I say keep her.
Getting rid of Morris is also possible. But it presents credibility problems. I mean, how many lady barbers are there in small towns? Some, sure. But it throws a weight where you don't want it--you've got to think about extraneous things as you go through the screenplay: It's all kind of weird having a lady doing that kind of work when her kid's growing up.
And as screenwriters, damn near the last thing we want is our audience thinking extraneous things. We want to put blinders on them--we want them looking where we need them to look--and the minute they begin contemplating matters that are not our concern, we're in terrible trouble.
We are trying to tell our story. There's no time in a screenplay where we can lose them. Because movies keep going, going, going--it's not like a novel where you can go back and reread a section or a paragraph. We must grab them and make them listen to us. Once their mind begins wondering about matters foreign to our story, we've lost them. And once we've lost them, even for a long blink, the game is gone, we may as well pick up our baseball and head home.
So I say keep the parents.
Porky
Well, can't we get rid of somebody? Porky has the smallest part, we've already said we can probably sneak safely home without his haircut. Willie doesn't have to be playing marbles when Morris comes to get him, he can be shooting baskets alone or be home doing schoolwork. Do we need, do we really need, Porky McKee?
Please think about that seriously.
All right. If you think we can get rid of Porky, you have made, for me, a grievous and damaging error.
Why?
Three things about this material that have been stated before can be put together here: (1) This is the story of a guy who loses a job; (2) the guy happens to be a barber; (3) our particular barber happens to be an artist.
What does Porky have to do with all this?
Porky is the first one who tells us that something strange and different has appeared on our horizon. He carries perhaps the most important single piece of expository information in the entire piece.
He's been playing marbles. The game is interrupted. For a haircut. He waits. And waits. For hours. And he's pissed. When Willie returns he lets him know he's ticked about the wasted time. And in that angry state, what does he do next?
He tells Willie, "That's a beautiful haircut. A really beautiful haircut."
Boy, do we need that.
Because kids don't talk that way to each other.
He is a peer. An angry very young man. But such is Willie's transformation that he loses his anger and just stares before commenting on the cut.
Later, Willie's mother echoes the thought, but that's bullshit, that's meaningless. That's what a parent says to a child. My God, how many parents do we know with homely children who believe their offspring are glories? So a mother, a parent, a loving one, who compliments a child, that tells us nothing.
But when Porky McKee says "beautiful," that's gold.
Mr. Bimbaum
He's our man, he's our story, there's no way we're going to dump him.
But he sure isn't very likable.
And we don't know much about him.
What about that?
One of the constant comments screenwriters listen to is this: Nobody gives a shit about the main character. You get that from executives, producers, directors, you certainly get it from stars.
And there's a point to it--they're not dumb. If we are doing a gangster flick--say, for example, a great one like White Heat with Cagney--the problem of likability doesn't arise much. Cagney was meant to be repugnant but fascinating, and he sure was. I doubt anyone suggested an added scene where he saves an orphan from drowning.
But audi
ences do want to identify. We all crave heroes. So what do we do about the unyielding crustiness of H. Bimbaum? Can we make him more sympathetic? Sure we can.
Should we?
That brings us to the final and most important question that must be answered before a screenplay can be begun.
(7) WHAT MUST WE CLING TO?
In an adaptation, you have to make changes. In any adaptation. You simply must. If a novel is four hundred pages long and a screenplay runs a hundred and thirty-five, how can you remain literally faithful? Obviously, you can't. Same with a play. If you just shot the stage play, the audience would go mad with boredom. There were many pleasant comments concerning All the President's Men centering on how faithful we were to the book. Of course we were--but the movie also ended halfway through the Woodward and Bernstein effort.
So changes must occur.
Which changes, though?
While you are altering, you must also remain faithful to two things: the author's intention and the emotional core of the original work as it affected you.
So we've got to make changes with "Da Vinci." Which changes, though? What do we change?--
--and what must we cling to?
The fate of any adaptation hinges on how the screenwriter answers that question.
Mr. Bimbaum is just a bitch of a problem. He makes no attempt to enlist our sympathies. He swats Willie on the head, snorts at Emma, calls Morris a "butcher."
How are we supposed to like a man like that? One answer would be if he had a decent relationship with somebody. And I think the logical person would be not the parents but the more central figure of Willie. Can we structure that into the story? The reason for all this is simple enough: If Willie cares about the old guy, Bimbaum's departure would be a more emotional moment. If the kid cares, we ought to care.
Easy enough to set up. Let's say it's evening or it's a Sunday, the shop is closed, and the kid's folks are off somewhere--a celebration maybe, anniversary, birthday, whatever. All we need is a moment in time when the kid and the old guy are alone.
Now, once they're alone, we can't make it too easy--they shouldn't fall into each other's arms. So try this--just an example, you can come up with any number that are better, but what if the kid is making himself a sandwich, peanut butter and jelly, but the house is out of peanut butter, so the kid says that he's off to the store, can he get the old man anything, and the old man snaps, "What, I'm so old I can't go to the store myself?" And the kid is hurt, which you see in his eyes, or he snaps right back, "Boy, you never make anything easy, do you?" and he slams his way out the door.
Then we cut to a full jar of peanut butter and the kid making himself lunch, and Bimbaum comes in and watches or busies himself so that his back is turned to the kid and he mutters something like "I never been able to," and the kid, concentrating on his sandwich-making, says, "Able to what?" and Bimbaum answers, "Make anything easy," and then quick to cover his embarrassment he scowls and says, "How can you eat that junk?" and the kid says, stunned, "Junk? You call peanut butter and jelly junk? Are you crazy, it's better than anything," and the old guy seems dubious and says, "I wouldn't put stuff like that in my stomach," and now the kid, really stunned, says, "You never had peanut butter and jelly? Never tasted it, even?" And he may hold out the sandwich and the old man grunts "No" but the kid insists and as the old man relents and takes a bite--
--we cut to the two of them at the kitchen table, both eating peanut butter and jelly, and the old guy is wolfing his, you can tell he really likes it--only, of course, he'll never admit such a thing--and finally he says that his wife was a stickler for healthy foods and now the kid is shocked--"You? You had a wife!" and Bimbaum snarls yes, yes, he had a wife, a good woman and a stickler for what you put in your stomach, only maybe she died or she left him, he was such a crank, the point is, he's alone.
And then he rambles about how that changed him, how he became obsessed with hair after that, and he talks about what his life was like before, gives details, and the kid is fascinated (if we can do the details well enough) and as he goes to make himself another sandwich he can see Bimbaum wants another, too, so he makes them both seconds and while he's doing that he casually asks what the H stands for in his name and Bimbaum answers and the kid admits that his first name is a stinker, too, and we fade on the two of them eating quietly, with a sense of pleasure. Bimbaum and the kid, sort of together--a bond formed over peanut butter and strawberry jam.
Well, what do we think of that? Probably a bit contrived, but since we want to know about Bimbaum, again, probably the scene will hold. Also, the sequence is sentimental, but this isn't Death Wish II, what's wrong with a little decent sentiment? The sequence serves the function it was designed for: It draws the two main characters together to give emotional punch to the firing and departure of Bimbaum.
So do we add it in? Is it a good idea? Well...?
YUK!!! It is a putrid idea. It is not only putrid, it is something much more damaging than that: It is wrong.
Why?
Two reasons. One: Bimbaum is a sour pickle of a man. The minute we turn him into Cuddles Zacall, he diminishes. Dickens can make Scrooge cute and we love it. That's a Christmas story about a tight financier.
But Bimbaum is an artist! He is strange. He has and must always have mystery. He appears out of nowhere on the first day of marble season, disappears two haircuts later. Strange things happen when he works on you: Time vanishes, wonderful sounds and thoughts fill your brain.
How does he do it?
That's the mystery we must protect. And the minute we find out anything about his past, anything at all, we are ripping at the heart of our material, changing it, ruining it forever.
Van Gogh was an artist. An artist, a genius, and a mystery. The basis of his madness has got to stay out of our grasp, beyond our comprehension. Once we say, "Well, yes, Vinnie was a weirdo, but consider the traumas of his childhood," and then we outline the essential why of his career, the mystery is gone. One of the reasons the critics can never nail down Shakespeare is we don't know anything about him. A few dates--he was born here, left for London X years later, had his first success X years after that--but that's all. He remains a mystery and that is part of his legend.
Bimbaum better remain a mystery too. Or we are left with sentimental garbage.
Nothing is bulletproof.
Believe that. Jaws could have been Orca--they were both about angry monsters; The Thing could have been The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes--they were both about angry vegetables.
Gone With the Wind could have been a disaster; during shooting, the creators of Casablanca were convinced that it was a disaster.
You think Gone With the Wind couldn't have been Mandingo? Wrong. The creators of the Mitchell classic made some genuinely remarkable decisions. Here's one, for example. Gone With the Wind centers around the time of the Civil War. Well, one thing that movies have always done well is action. Big battle scenes. Great hordes of soldiers doing and dying, cannons blasting away.
Well, there isn't a whole lot of that in the movie. Some, sure, but it would have been easy, even logical, to add in twenty minutes, say, of surefire battle stuff and cut twenty minutes of Scarlett and Rhett. But they didn't. What did they cling to in Gone With the Wind?
Scarlett and Rhett.
And we must cling to Bimbaum, just as he is. Cranky, cantankerous, weird, arrogant, different. He is what's special about the material. And somehow, we must try to keep that special quality and, at the same time, make the audience give a damn.
Easy money at the brick factory....
Chapter Sixteen
The Screenplay
FADE IN ON
A MARBLE AS IT ROLLS ALONG THE GROUND. It's moving pretty fast and WE STAY right with it. Then, as it starts to slow--
PULL BACK TO REVEAL
A SCHOOLYARD on an agonizingly beautiful spring day. TWO SCRUFFY-LOOKING KIDS are engaged in a fierce game of Little Pot. (Never mind what the rules are, they don'
t play it for long.) PORKY McKEE runs alongside his marble toward the target--a small chalked circle with a bunch of smaller marbles nestled inside. As his marble comes to rest no more than twelve inches from the circle, he is pleased--this is evidenced by any number of things: He whoops out loud, jumps in the air, clasps his hands above his head like a triumphant fighter.
CUT TO
THE OTHER KID--it's WILLIE--and he holds his lagging marble in his right hand, stares at the small chalked circle many yards away. He concentrates, slowly starts his lagging motion, bringing his arm back with care--at which point PORKY begins a wild rat-tat-tat of talk.
PORKY
(nonstop)
You'll never beat me, never beat me, jinx--jinx--give up, why don't you?--jinx--
WILLIE does his best to ignore it all, lags and--
CUT TO
HIS MARBLE, rolling along, WILLIE chugging right beside it, eyeing its progress.
CUT TO
THE SMALL CHALKED CIRCLE and PORKY's marble. Now WILLIE's comes into view, goes past PORKY's, finally stops no more than a couple of inches from the target.
CUT TO
WILLIE AND PORKY. PORKY just stares, then grabs a pretend knife, stabs himself in the heart, falls groaning to the ground.
WILLIE looks at PORKY. They have lived next to each other for eight of their eleven years, have been best friends for six of those eight. But this is marbles.
WILLIE
(John Wayne was never tougher)
I take no prisoners, McKee.
Now he kneels beside the chalked circle, picks up his marble, expertly brings it into shooting position, takes a deep breath, when--
MAN'S VOICE (OVER)
Go take a haircut.
As WILLIE looks up--
CUT TO
A BALD MAN standing on the sidewalk not far from them. His name is MORRIS.
WILLIE
(plaintive)
Now? Daddy, this is for the world's championship--and I'm winning.
MORRIS
Go!
Adventures in the Screen Trade Page 33