Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  It was like having dinner with a beautiful robot. There was no sense of true participation or excitement, no flirtation, no humour. She’d been through so many nights like this she could deal her conversational cards as effortlessly as a croupier. Her mother, Irina Baronova, had been one of the great ballerinas of her generation, a Russian. Her father, an Englishman and member of that now extinct breed, the gentleman agent, had handled, among others, Laurence Olivier. She was educated, intelligent, and cultured. She saw all the movies and plays as they came out and had read all the books you should have by twenty-seven and could talk about them smartly, but she was muted and withdrawn. She drank two glasses of wine and ate very little, and that wisely. She was slender to the point of frailty.

  As the night progressed and I drank a bottle of wine to each of her glasses, I became determined to provoke a reaction. If she dealt me a card, I’d chew it up and spit it back. She asked me if I’d seen Baryshnikov dance in … I asked her how her father died—it was in fact the key to her character though I didn’t know it then. She’d tell me about it politely and then ask me what my favourite film was. And so it went.

  Toward the end of the evening, it seemed to me that one or two of my bizarre remarks fell into her large brown eyes and made them shimmer with unease. Next thing I knew we were in the back of a limo driving somewhere else. I glanced at her without her seeing me and she looked so sad; I said, ‘I love you and I want you to come to England and live with me,’ or words to that effect, and oddly enough I meant it.

  Even more oddly, a month later she arrived. Having endured a long and fruitless marriage, playing her role with stoic grace until the very last moment, she found herself looking into the surprised face of her husband as she said goodbye. And then with surgical speed, she removed herself to England.

  We were together for almost five years. She could organise a complex set of aeroplane flights or a large dinner party with equal ease. She knew wine and resorts and restaurants and famous people. When we went out she got dressed in a matter of minutes, no matter what the occasion, asking no opinions and always looking good. She was a woman of lists and phone numbers. She was, intentionally or not, a professional wife. She was also loyal, supportive, and intelligent, and I was heartbroken when, having again performed her wifely duties to the very last minute, she left me with the same surgical elan as she had left the man before.

  I should not have been surprised because, though intellectually alike, we were constitutionally incompatible. When she was in her teens, her father crashed his car almost at the gates of their house in some far-flung suburb of London, killing himself and profoundly injuring her brother and sister, who were with him. When her mother went into a prolonged collapse, Victoria had to take control—and to take control of the situation, she had first to take control of herself. In this she succeeded. I never saw her drunk. I never saw her angry. Three nonprofessional tears escaped her in three years. They were tears of sympathy for me.

  One day she was offered a supporting role in an American miniseries about the Second World War, an overblown melodrama dressed in the skirts of sincerity (Fifteen Hours of Gut-Wrenching History!). She took the job. When the thing was ready to be dumped on the public, she was invited to Los Angeles to do publicity and I went with her. By luck, one of the producers was moving out of her apartment and so we moved in, thinking to stay for a few months.

  Now the machinery of Hollywood set to work on its latest European acquisition. Everyone was ‘very excited.’ The agency was excited, the producers were excited, and pretty soon there was a publicist on the payroll and he was incredibly excited.

  When cults do this, it’s called ‘love bombing.’ They get you in a room and love you for hours on end while simultaneously depriving you of sleep, and forty-eight hours later you’re a Moony or a Scientologist or some other equally asinine thing. Well, that’s what happens in this situation, only it takes slightly longer. ‘You’re really talented.’ ‘You’re so beautiful.’ ‘You’re going to be a big star.’ ‘You are a star.’

  We’d walk into one of the many gruesome occasions set up to promote this histrionic extravaganza and there’d be a ring of suit backs. When one of the suits saw her coming, the hoop would breach and a dozen lips would draw back and teeth would emerge, hundreds of them.

  ‘Honey, you were great in the show, just great, come over here and meet the head of TV for … Oh, and, er? …’

  ‘Matthew.’

  ‘Yeah, Matthew, go fetch yourself a drink.’

  Off I’d go to fetch the first of many drinks. When I looked back, I’d see the petals of this toxic flower closing around her, she in the center, a fragile but glowing pistil. And to my horror, I saw she was quivering with pleasure.

  A year later, we did a film together, Strangers Kiss, which I co-wrote in two weeks during eight weeks of preproduction fuelled on little but hope. I then directed it in nineteen days. Only when it was over did my co-writer and I realize that the day we started writing we had been only eleven weeks away from wrapping the picture. At the time it was the largest deferment film ever made. We had a hundred and fifty thousand dollars cash from Michael White, the English producer, and managed to persuade our cast and crew to contribute their services against a share in the profits to the extent of a further million and a half dollars. We got so into the habit of pitching the concept of deferment—‘It’s a way for you to invest in a movie without having to have money. All you need do is contribute your energy’—that one night when out to dinner at a Japanese restaurant, we pitched the owner, who agreed to cater the production on this basis. Every day, the restaurant would deliver fifty excellent Japanese meals to the set.

  Victoria and I, and our two partners, Blaine Novak, whose original idea this was, and Doug Dilg, who was the physical producer, owned the company which made the film, and it was one of those incandescent productions of which you dream for the rest of your career. Without pay, everyone worked tirelessly and well to produce something of which they could be proud. Several careers were founded on Strangers Kiss, and years after the film came out, Doug would send checks out at Christmas time according to our profits and everyone’s investment. Some people received checks for five dollars, some for five thousand. We were scrupulously honest.

  In the film, Victoria played the emotionally muted girlfriend of a Fifties gangster who finances a movie for her to act in, hoping it will bring her to life. But when it does, when she starts to enjoy the process, he becomes jealous and starts to intrude, holding back money and questioning her sadistically when she comes home. He sends someone down to the set to watch her—and finds she is having an affair with the lead actor. To everyone’s surprise, not least hers, the gangster forgives her and offers marriage. She takes pity on him and allows herself to be drawn back into the suffocating relationship.

  Amusingly (though only in retrospect), she went on to play the part in real life, forcing me to play the sorry cuckold. She was offered a role in a comedy with Steve Martin. The movie was called All of Me, and there was a lot of rushing around with jars of cremated ashes, funny walks, and things like that.

  A few weeks into shooting, she came to me in the back room of our apartment where I was labouring on something no one would ever make and said, ‘I’ve fallen in love and I’m leaving you.’

  ‘Fallen in love with who?’ I asked, stunned. We had made love the day before and she had said, ‘That was so good.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she replied and smiled involuntarily, as if embarrassed.

  ‘It matters to me,’ I insisted, and after a while she told me.

  ‘It’s Steve.’

  ‘Steve who?’

  ‘Steve Martin.’

  ‘You’re fucking kidding me,’ I said. But she wasn’t.

  She packed quickly and left to go stay with friends.

  That night I went to a wedding party. There were balloons. I wrote a note and tied it to one of them and let it go. The note said, ‘Help!’ and benea
th it was my phone number.

  No one called. I couldn’t believe what had happened and the irony of it did not escape me. I kept wandering around saying, ‘I can’t believe this,’ and ‘My God, in L.A. all the clichés do come true.’ Now when I drove around town I wore shades no matter how dark it was, so if she saw me she wouldn’t see the pain in my eyes. I did not behave well. Like most abandoned lovers, I could not allow myself to see the logic (logic!) of her choice. How could she leave me for Steve Martin?! A joke’s a joke, et cetera. Looking back on it, of course I was the joke, albeit a rather sad joke. How could she not leave a hard-drinking failure for a charming, clever, genuinely talented multimillionaire comedian? I had worn her out. She had stuck it as long as she could, trouper that she was, and then, with the same decisive swiftness with which she had left her previous husband, she left me. I have rarely seen her since.

  She and Steve got married. He wrote a role for her in his next movie. She played a ‘quirky English girl’ and wore hats. For some reason, no more roles were forthcoming from that source. Unless an actor writes his own movies, he or she isn’t working until someone offers them a job. As today’s ‘new talent’ steps off the plane at LAX, yesterday’s ‘new talent’ is suddenly and brutally ignored. The light of admiration dims, praise ceases to rain down. Unseen, the flower wilts.

  For writers, it’s different. Writers can always work. The organism blooms in the dark. Strangers Kiss took me to numerous film festivals where I exploited my recent heartbreaking bachelorhood to the full, and then I started writing again. I wrote constantly, stopping only to drink, screw around, and exercise. There were car crashes, weird sexual encounters and even weirder love affairs, miscarriages, cocaine binges, fights, and many blackouts.

  After a year of this I was offered a movie to write and direct for Showtime, the cable company. Slow Burn was a novel based on a true story about a kidnapping in Palm Springs. The producer was Joel Schumacher, who is now a big director. I spent two months in Palm Springs and could never find the beach. I was convinced there had to be one because why else would anyone endure that heat, but in the end I was persuaded there was no beach, just a bunch of senile golfers in search of the next hole. The movie starred Beverly D’Angelo, Eric Roberts, and a very young Johnny Depp. It was okay and did well. The writer of the book on which it was based hated what I had done so much that in his next book, he wrote in an English scriptwriter with short hair called Matthew. Matthew got killed in a manner so excruciating it made even the unsuperstitious me wince as I read it.

  Next I wrote and directed Heart of Midnight, an independent movie for an eccentric Hungarian/Australian producer named Andrew Gaty. Andrew had distributed Strangers Kiss in Australia, where he had made a lot of money. Now he was in America to make a dangerous career switch. He was a stocky, powerfully built man with thinning hair, crazy eyes, and a broad smile. He was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel in possession of a terrible script which he flapped at me as we sat beside the pool in a cabana, I feeling rather self-conscious. After I’d read it and rejected it, he told me I could do what I liked with it so long as the location and the basic premise remained the same. I didn’t really want to do it, but Andrew was irresistible. The more I said no, the more insistent he became. His visions of our future together, founded on this single film, became increasingly optimistic and outlandish, as did his charm and humour. Rejection was the stone he honed himself on, and pretty soon, sharp as a razor now, he cut me loose from my good taste and reason. Aside from Andrew’s relentless and persuasive charm, Denise was pregnant with Anna Bella and I needed the money. I started to rewrite the script as we entered pre-production.

  Eventually, I cast Jennifer Jason Leigh as the lead and she was everything I’d hoped for. I also had a production designer named Gene Rudolf who was exceptional. But I had written the script too fast and it walked an uncomfortable line between art and exploitation. Andrew was so optimistic and determined he listened to no one and so miscalculated the budget that we were in the red before we began pre-production.

  We built the main set (a defunct sex club) in an abandoned town hall in Charleston, South Carolina. I went down a couple of weeks ahead of Andrew, who flew back and forth between New York, where he owned an apartment on Park Avenue, and L.A., where he was now engaged in all kinds of complex financial negotiations to do with foreign sales and distribution pickups, none of which I understood when he’d call me in the evenings. A couple of days before he was to join us permanently in the South, the line producer, the man who actually deals with the nuts and bolts of production, took me aside and said, ‘We’re several hundred thousand dollars over budget, but if you speak to Andrew, don’t tell him. I don’t want to undermine his confidence while he’s out there in L.A. trying to sell this thing.’

  I had so much to think about myself, I merely shrugged. This couldn’t be true. How could a movie that was supposed to cost less than a million be ‘several hundred thousand’ over budget? Half an hour after Andrew arrived, I came out of my office and found him leaning against a wall, face buried in his arms, sobbing.

  ‘For God’s sake, Andrew,’ I said, ‘pull yourself together, people are watching.’

  ‘I’m ruined,’ he told me. And he was.

  We managed to complete the movie, but, even beyond the fact that it was flawed, it was cursed. Companies went bankrupt around it. What little money it made never reached Andrew and he was forced to sell his Park Avenue apartment in New York and rent a smaller one in Los Angeles, where he remains.

  Never use the word ‘heart’ in a movie title. It is a word begging for affection. Never use the word ‘midnight’ either because it begs to be found exotic when in fact it’s merely tired and sleazy. The combination of the two words was the kiss of death. I’m not saying this was our only problem, but I’m convinced it compounded all the others that Heart of Midnight had. I wanted to call it simply X, which would have been much better. The film, which dealt with sexual perversity and violence, was gang-raped by the critics. As the father of the movie, I suffered more than I acknowledged at the time, partly because I knew they were right, it was not a good film. However, just because you have an ugly kid and know it doesn’t make it any easier to hear about it thirty times in a single week.

  By the time the film came out, Anna Bella had been born and I wanted to stay home and watch her grow, at least for the first year. I decided to write a mainstream Hollywood movie and make some money.

  I went out and pitched Consenting Adults.

  Pitching is when you go out and tell a story to anyone who’ll listen and has money—studios, producers, actors with their own companies—and hope they’re sufficiently interested to pay you to write it. All writers do it differently. I’m told there are writers who go in and say, ‘A man and a woman! She’s got claustrophobia, he’s afraid of open space! They have to get from L.A. to Chicago!’ And get the deal. I’ve never been able to do this. My pitches last at least thirty minutes and are really an outline for a script.

  I used not to be very good at this. One morning soon after I arrived in L.A., I found myself in one of those typically deceptive Hollywood offices—pine tables, fat white sofas and armchairs—pitching to a producer and his D-girl (the person who administers the development of material). I was about halfway through and explaining a particularly interesting point in the story when I saw the producer’s head start tilting toward the back of the sofa. He rested it there a moment and then his eyes began to glaze over and he fell asleep. I turned toward the D-girl and continued pitching. No deal.

  With Consenting Adults, it looked as if no one would go for it, so I went home and started writing. Then a bright and aggressive man named Chip Diggins, who had heard the pitch, pushed it through at Hollywood Pictures (a now defunct division of Disney) and I got paid to finish it. I was lucky—at first. Everyone connected with the development of the script was smart and creative and we had fun, which, of course, is often the key to good work.

  The film
got made with Kevin Kline and Kevin Spacey. The director was Alan Pakula, who was notorious for torturing writers, but I was happy to be tortured; the thing was getting made.

  I liked Alan. He was a tall, grey-haired man, deliberately professorial and fundamentally a gentleman. I hoped, secretly, that he would become my mentor, something I had never had. This didn’t happen for various reasons, but I learned a few things from him nonetheless. ‘Everything is possible if you don’t panic,’ he would say, shutting the door on his line producer only days before shooting, ‘and nothing is possible if you do,’ he’d add, sitting down with me to start going over the ending for the fiftieth time.

  He had started as a producer, producing among other things, To Kill a Mockingbird. As a director he had made such films as All the President’s Men, Klute, and Sophie’s Choice. He was married to a handsome society woman and author of popular historical books. The two of them knew everyone in New York from Arthur Miller to the Mayor. He could charm anyone into just about anything. He was a good craftsman and, usually, a great actors’ director. He was urbane and capable.

  There was one thing he was lousy at, and it drove him insane: he could not write. Whenever he tried, it ended in disaster, and I think this is what caused him constantly to chew over scripts—including scripts by such writers as William Goldman—until he’d chewed out much of what was good in them.

  In the case of this movie, the process unquestionably made the script worse, and it got worse still when he finally laid hands on it himself. Something that was witty and clever became slow and turgid.