Adventures in the Screen Trade
Page 36
WILLIE
(gesturing for Bimbaum to get started)
It's spherical, Mr. Bimbaum. Don't you remember?
BIMBAUM
I never forgot a head shape in my life. But sometimes, especially with the young, the head shape changes.
WILLIE
Well, mine hasn't changed--I promise you--now c'mon--
CUT TO
WILLIE IN THE CHAIR as BIMBAUM advances slowly, his eyes always on WILLIE's head. He walks around it, bends down, looks up, stands on tiptoe, looks down. Now he places his fingers on WILLIE's head, takes them off, draws an imaginary circle in the air.
CUT TO
MORRIS, in front of the shop, pacing back and forth, back and forth.
CUT TO
BIMBAUM. Finally nods, satisfied.
BIMBAUM
Still spherical.
CUT TO
WILLIE, a sigh of relief; he sits straight in the chair, ready. Then he almost groans--
WILLIE
You're not.
CUT TO
BIMBAUM. He is fiddling with the faucets in the sink.
WILLIE
Forget the damn shampoo.
BIMBAUM
A barber only works on clean hair.
WILLIE
Make believe mine's clean--can't you do that?
CUT TO
MORRIS, sticking his head in from outside.
MORRIS
Forty-one minutes to go, Bimbaum.
(then he is outside again, pacing)
CUT TO
THE SINK as BIMBAUM fiddles with the faucets, getting the temperature just right.
CUT TO
THE CLOCK, ticking away.
CUT TO
WILLIE, his head in the sink now, as BIMBAUM expertly applies shampoo, gets a wonderful lather built up.
CUT TO
MORRIS, on the sidewalk, doing his sentry duty.
CUT TO
DOTS OF LIGHT dancing off the walls of the shop.
PULL BACK TO REVEAL
BIMBAUM holding his silver scissors high, blowing on them, getting them ready.
CUT TO
MORRIS, head in the door again.
MORRIS
Thirty-six minutes, Bimbaum. Nine gone so far.
CUT TO
BIMBAUM. It's as if he hasn't heard. He snips the scissors a couple of times, turns then to WILLIE.
CUT TO
A FEW HAIRS, slowly falling.
CUT TO
BIMBAUM, stepping back from WILLIE, squinting a moment, moving in again, gracefully. He reaches out, makes another tiny snip.
WILLIE
A crew cut, Mr. Bimbaum--I've always wanted one. I know you could give a great crew cut if you wanted.
BIMBAUM
Don't you ever say a thing like that again.
WILLIE
But there aren't that many jobs--Father told you that last night--
CUT TO
MORRIS. In the doorway.
MORRIS
Twenty-nine minutes to go--one-third over.
CUT TO
WILLIE as his FATHER moves back outside.
WILLIE
(turning)
Did you hear that? Did you hear it?
BIMBAUM
Shut up and sit still.
CUT TO
THE DOTS OF LIGHTS, dancing.
CUT TO
BIMBAUM, moving more gracefully than ever, taking a snip here, another snip there.
CUT TO
WILLIE, his eyes just beginning to close.
CUT TO
MORRIS, looming in the doorway.
MORRIS
Twenty-five minutes to go, Bimbaum--
CUT TO
MORRIS, again in the doorway.
MORRIS
Twenty-one minutes to go, Bimbaum.
CUT TO
MORRIS, back in the doorway.
MORRIS
Fifteen minutes to go, Bimbaum.
And he exits as we
CUT TO
WILLIE, soft, throat dry.
WILLIE
Just for God's sakes please do it.
BIMBAUM
(squinting along the part in Willie's hair)
I should ruin a lifetime in fifteen minutes?
CUT TO
AGAIN, THE DOTS OF LIGHT.
CUT TO
BIMBAUM, another small snip, another, a third.
CUT TO
THE CALENDAR ON THE WALL. The river and the rocks and the great green trees.
CUT TO
BIMBAUM, eyes bright, concentrating fiercely, snipping away, his beautiful fingers in constant motion and CUT TO
WILLIE, eyes closed now and
CUT TO
BIMBAUM, moving like a dancer and
CUT TO
THE RIVER, as again it comes to life, starts to flow, and we hear the water boiling over the rocks and hear the wind in the trees--
--and now the glorious theme of "Shenandoah" becomes clear, starting soft, getting stronger--"Away, you rolling river"--and now CUT TO
THE ALARM CLOCK going off and MORRIS in the doorway, talking over the jangling sound of the alarm.
MORRIS
High noon, Bimbaum. Time's up.
CUT TO
MR. BIMBAUM. He says nothing. For a moment he just stands frozen. Then he walks to the still-ringing alarm, and with one swipe of his beautiful hand he knocks it senseless to the floor. Silence. Now he turns toward MORRIS.
BIMBAUM
Get out, Butcher. I'm cutting this boy's hair.
CUT TO
MORRIS. He tries to return BIMBAUM's stare, thinks better of it, turns, meekly leaves, closing the door behind him.
CUT TO
WILLIE, as BIMBAUM comes back to the chair--
WILLIE
Listen, Mr. Bimbaum--
BIMBAUM
--shut up and sit still--
WILLIE
(turning to face the old man)
--I'm sorry--
CUT TO
BIMBAUM.
BIMBAUM
I told you to sit still--
(and with that, he swats Willie on top of the head with the flat of his hand.)
CUT TO
WILLIE, sitting still, staring straight out.
WILLIE
Anyway, it's my fault and I'm really sorry.
BIMBAUM
Fault? Nobody's got no time. Why is that your fault?
CUT TO
BIMBAUM. CLOSE UP.
BIMBAUM
The butchers. The butchers are taking over. By the time you grow up, the butchers will own the world, you'll see. Goddam little brat anyway.
(and now as he goes back to work--)
CUT TO
THE CALENDAR ON THE WALL.
And now for the last time, it comes to life--and now again, the sound of "Shenandoah," just like before--
--only it isn't like before--because suddenly the river changes from a lovely stream to something majestic, a giant of a waterway, maybe it's the Amazon or the Nile or the mouth of the Mississippi, but whatever it is, it's awesome, it just makes you gasp--
--and "Shenandoah" changes, too, it's booming now, the sound just as awesome as the sight, and on and on they go, the glorious song, the mighty river, and as they climax--
CUT TO
BIMBAUM. He blows on his scissors, says one word.
BIMBAUM
Done.
CUT TO
WILLIE, blinking in the chair, watching as BIMBAUM, without a glance back, walks out of the store and gone.
HOLD ON WILLIE a moment, alone. Then--
CUT TO
WILLIE, still alone, walking along a railroad track, using his arms for balance. Sometimes it's fun; you get the feeling it isn't that just now.
CUT TO
WILLIE, hands stuffed into his jeans pockets, walking alone across the town square. A couple of KIDS wave to him. He doesn't wave back.
CUT TO
&
nbsp; PORKY playing marbles in the schoolyard. He looks up, sees WILLIE standing on the sidewalk. PORKY gestures for WILLIE to join him. WILLIE shakes his head, walks on.
CUT TO
MORRIS AND EMMA IN THE KITCHEN by the stove as WILLIE enters, stops, looks at them.
WILLIE
Gone?
EMMA
Bag and baggage.
CUT TO
WILLIE. He nods, heads for the stairs.
MORRIS
Willie?
WILLIE stops.
He was a fine barber. No one ever said any different.
EMMA
That's right. But he took too long.
WILLIE makes no reply, leaves them--
CUT TO
THE BACK STAIRS as WILLIE trudges up.
CUT TO
THE LANDING as he reaches it, turns.
CUT TO
HIS ROOM as he enters, looks around. It's the same as before. Reggie Jackson and Bjorn Borg on the walls, his little harmonica on the bed---
CUT TO
WILLIE, stopping suddenly, staring as we
CUT TO
THE BED. Because not far from the harmonica is a small pair of silver scissors.
CUT TO
WILLIE. He walks to the bed, looks at the scissors, picks them up. He lies on the bed, puts the harmonica on his chest, studies the scissors he holds in his hands.
CUT TO
THE SILVER SCISSORS as WILLIE makes them move, three times--snip-snip-snip. It's the rhythm of "Jingle Bells" and he hums the three notes. Again three snips, again he hums the three notes.
CUT TO
WILLIE, and now he pauses a moment, then makes a different rhythm: (snip--snip-snip--snip. He does it again: snip--snip-snip--snip. It's the start of "Bimbaum's Theme." He picks up the harmonica now, plays the first notes--not very well. He stops, wipes the harmonica on his T-shirt, tries again. Maybe a little better. But this time he doesn't stop, he goes right on playing, and as he does--
CAMERA STARTS TO MOVE
Out the window and down the side of the house. MORRIS and EMMA are visible now, by the stove, close together, in the kitchen. She takes a wooden spoon, gives him a taste of what she's cooking. As always: perfection.
HOLD ON THE TWO OF THEM BRIEFLY--
--because the harmonica is still playing "Bimbaum's Theme" only now it's something to hear--Larry Adler on his best day never sounded this good as we CUT TO
THE BARBERSHOP. Empty, shut--
--and now a wonderful guitar sound joins the harmonica. "Bimbaum's Theme" goes on, the two instruments playing perfectly together as we CUT TO
THE SCHOOLYARD. Empty. No marble games--
--and a piano beautifully joins guitar and the harmonica. The three instruments blend and build as we CUT TO
THE BUS STATION. A single figure stands waiting on the sidewalk. It's BIMBAUM, holding his battered suitcase. He stands there in his rumpled suit, fierce, sour, alone--in other words, absolutely unchanged.
The piano and the guitar and the harmonica continue to work their magic as the CAMERA MAKES ITS LAST MOVE--
--up toward the blue, blue sky....
FINAL FADE OUT.
Chapter Seventeen
Interviews
Designer: Tony Walton
Tony Walton was born in England but has worked in America for the past twenty years. Unusually versatile, he not only does sets and/or costumes for movies but on Broadway as well (Pippin, Chicago, Sophisticated Ladies, Woman of the Year). His first film was Mary Poppins, which earned him an Oscar nomination for Best Costume Design. With Philip Rosenberg, he won an Oscar for Art Direction on All That Jazz. Among his other films are:
A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum
Petulia
Murder on the Orient Express
The Wiz
Equus
Prince of the City
ON DESIGN
The production designer is responsible for the visual elements of the film--hand in hand with the cinematographer and, of course, the director. There are some directors who are visually very powerful, some who are less so. When you've worked with a director before, you tend to develop a shorthand with them, and I suppose there's more liberty, more trust.
ON WORK HABITS
One of the first things I like to do, and I imagine it's frequently done, is to take a film, more or less scene by scene, and try to picture what it would be like just in terms of the color palette of the whole film, so that if it needs to be soothing, it's keyed a certain way; if there's a need for jarring moments, it can be helped enormously by the use of jarring color or an unexpected contrast in coloration.
Ideally, I come on very early, frequently early enough to participate in the decision of who's to be cinematographer. Six months before filming isn't unusual. In a complex film, a film that requires a tremendous amount of building, then it would be much longer than six months.
ON DESIGN EMPHASIS
The emphasis shifts, depending on what the film is. For example, with Prince of the City, one of the major problems was the astounding number of characters, many of whom appeared for such brief moments that it was obviously going to be very hard for an audience to follow who was who at any given moment. So one of the tasks on my end was to try and make the environment of each of those people as blindingly clear as I could without caricaturing it so that it drew attention to itself. It was important to have a sense, not necessarily of remembering the name of the character, but of knowing whose team, what side he was on--white hat, black hat, or whatever--whether he was a bureaucrat or a street person. All of this, of course, with a strong level of believability.
In Murder on the Orient Express, a level of believable reality is not what we were after; it was a contrived, fluffy affair, and we wanted the people to have a movie-movie feeling. So the costumes were not broken down to look real or worn. And the sets permitted a certain kind of glamorization. People can talk about the train and how lucky we were to be able to shoot on the real Orient Express, but actually it was entirely made in the studio, using some key "museum pieces" from the actual train. People who had traveled on the real train said, "Oh, how nice to see it again," but actually it was an almost absurd glamorization of what the real thing was. If we had done the real thing accurately, it would probably have looked just a hair tacky.
ON DA VINCI: STUDIO OR LOCATION
Da Vinci centers on a remarkable event in a very normal environment.
If there were a practical way to do it, I think it would be best to find real locations and try to bend the technical problems to make them work within the real environment. I'm not saying you can't create a real environment on a set, obviously you can, but there's something about using reality that forces everyone's approach to be more believable.
And I think I would use the strangeness of Bimbaum and his abilities to be a really powerful counterbalance to the surrounding normalcy. So that even in looking for a small town, I think it would probably be a good idea not to look for anything too picturesque but rather for something that is like the square root of small towns.
ON DA VINCI: WIGS
The haircuts themselves obviously present a problem for the costume designer and hair and makeup people--I would think almost certainly you'd need wigs for the two kids. That's a very dangerous thing--wigs have a tendency to look, well, wiggy, so you'd have to be sure to have someone who really does wigs beautifully.
The reason for wigs is that you don't want to be controlled in the scheduling by the length of hair that the kids have at any given moment. It might just be possible to do so, but it would be terribly complex--especially in the shooting of the time-passage sequences. So it would be valuable to be able to control that up front.
ON DA VINCI: BIMBAUM'S COSTUME
My first impulse would be to go for maybe one or two imperceptible pieces of perfection about him.
Maybe a hard color in a little immaculate bow tie. Or perhaps the nature of the cuffs on h
is shirt would give a very precise fine touch to his general bagginess. Or maybe a totally unexpected pair of shoes--which, of course, you don't see in films too often. But there might be an opportunity in his almost balletic movements around the barbershop chair to see that his shoes are very particular, very strange.
ON DA VINCI: THE ENDING
I felt the ending slightly unresolved. Perhaps that shot of Bimbaum that then traveled up to the sky accounts for it, and I wondered if there might be some value to our being left with some sort of image of Bimbaum--that left him unchanged but in some way gave a slightly heroic sense to him. You know, that it wasn't a defeat, that there was a little victory left behind--I'm hopeless at suggesting any way of achieving that.
ON DA VINCI: THE HAIRCUTS
This is all off the top of my head, but might it be possible, in addition to the calendar on the wall, to have some magazines lying around? Perhaps the one on top might have an autumnal scene, a lot of clouds, so that for one of the fantasies the ceiling could have kind of a floating quality and you could see that Willie's drifting off and the clouds are wafting by, as opposed to your repeating of the water imagery.
I'm really mucking about now, but I wonder if the rushing water might be related to the shampooing part--the haircuts are obviously a sensual experience.
The massiveness of switching to the Nile or Amazon or some kind of giant waterway might be out of scale for the story itself and might give a risk of pretentiousness to the last moments of the final haircut.
Again, on those last haircut moments--perhaps the film could be agonizingly slowed up so as to make our sense of anxiety about Bimbaum's lack of speed more provoking. Perhaps leaves, falling so slowly from trees--perhaps that could help us share Willie's wanting so much for Bimbaum to speed up somehow.