The Writer's Cut

by Eric Idle

  I’ve got anxiety symptoms: sweaty palms, piercing headache, spots before the eyes, feelings of panic. Every time I get near my computer I start to shake. I can’t even open my outline.

  So yeah, Thinker’s Block.

  The trouble is you can’t go around saying you have Thinker’s Block. People just laugh. Sam laughed for five minutes.

  “Thinker’s Block?” he said. “That’s hysterical. I love it. Who ever heard of Thinker’s Block? Do you think you’re becoming Jewish?”

  “It’s no joke, Sam,” I said. “I feel terribly anxious.”

  “That’s how I feel all the time.”

  “Sam,” I said, “this is a real problem.”

  “So’s Judaism,” he said.

  He’s a funny guy, but Thinker’s Block isn’t funny. I can’t think of anything. I’m totally blocked. I miss Tish.

  So I accepted a job in London.

  Crazy. Mad. Stupid. Dumb. Go ahead, pile on the epithets, bring on the barbs. What could have possessed me? Well, panic. Richard Hume has just got off the phone. I’m sitting on the floor fantasizing about Leno when it hits me. He actually said one month. I haven’t written anything. That is totally, utterly and completely impossible. I am so disturbed by the thought that I have so little time to turn in my book that I immediately take another job. In London. Why? Because I can. I want to escape. I get an offer. I take it. That’s how I deal with my problems. I run. Or in this case I take a limo to LAX and get on a First Class sleeper to London.

  I told Morty I was free to do this.

  It’s a very highly paid job - a quick punch-up on a mini-series shooting in St. Petersburg. Rumors are that it’s in deep trouble – well it must be if they want me. The Producers want some humor injected into a very long adaptation of an extremely long Henry James novel. Everyone and his brother has had a go at some stage because the script is a kaleidoscope of different color pages, a sure sign that many a hack has had a hand in it. Pure shit is not so easily achieved, and I might have spared a sympathetic thought for Henry James if I had ever been able to finish one of his novels, but for me he was always Edith Wharton in drag.

  Putting humor into Henry James is like inserting salami into a vegan sandwich, but when you’re keen to get away you’ll take anything. In my case a Virgin Atlantic Upper Class round trip ticket and a few nights staring at the fancy wallpaper in Earl’s Hotel. Fortunately there was no need to read Henry James. Even the Producers didn’t ask that – they just wanted something by yesterday and they were apparently desperate and grateful for my tired and pallid one-liners.

  *

  The plane is empty. If I ever read the newspapers I might have been aware of heightened security concerns, but I only read the trades. On the plane I see that we may be about to bomb Baghdad. Now I know why I got the gig. No one else wanted to fly.

  Do I work all night? Or do I drink a fine bottle of Chablis and take a sleeping pill?

  Right.

  When I wake up we’re sliding over Scotland. Broad masses of ancient hills deeply scarred by streams look like sea lions lying in the sun. The countryside is crumpled and strained, the muscles of old mountains broken by long shaded valleys marking the course of vanished glaciers. Fluffy white clouds float by, mirrored by dark parodies of their shapes on the waters beneath. Soon the swirl of hills gives way to purple uplands and whale-shaped reservoirs, and then fall away to the green and brown patchwork eiderdown of England. Black lakes and railway lines and the occasional odd geometric pattern of an unidentified airport. Studded crescents of houses, and the white lines of playing football fields herald our arrival over the outskirts of the metropolis. The steeply angled morning sunlight highlights the city streets beneath, like a satellite photo. A stowing of tray tables, a fastening of seat belts and a handing over of headphones, and we are rewarded with a breathtaking view of London spread out below us; its roadways all higgledy-piggledy, its soggy green meadows with the Thames coiling and snaking and shining in the morning sun. We bank over Richmond and the plane seems to accelerate towards Heathrow. I feel inspired. This is the land of Shakespeare, Chaucer and Keats. I could write any novel here.

  Unfortunately I have to re-write an NBC mini-series.

  A shiny black leathery British vehicle picks me up and takes me through Knightsbridge and along Piccadilly. The sunny day has already turned into light grey rain.

  “Welcome to Earl’s, sir,” says a South African voice.

  Earl’s turns out to be a quiet little backwater hotel off St James’s, an elegant street filled with fine British establishments, where shops call themselves purveyors and sell only one item at a time: Hatters, Gun Makers by Royal Appointment, Shoe Makers since the 17th Century, Fine Wines and Sherries Shipped in Oak, all that kind of quietly snobbish but cool tradition that makes the Brits the envy of the world.

  A quick stroll downhill leads to the park past St James’s Palace where a picture postcard sentry in a scarlet uniform and a tall bearskin hat holds a very real Belgian FN. Security is tight. A couple of armed policemen at the corner of the palace eye me cautiously as I cross on the light. Black taxis tick in a line. Everyone is very quiet. Is it just the normal English reserve? I walk around the tarmac paths in the park, wet black between bursts of sunlight. An enormous white crane with a three foot wingspan waddles toward me. Its narrow black eyes stare at me and as I approach it stands up and flaps its wings warningly. I carefully avoid it. The sky is black over Horse Guards Parade but the declining sun is sending golden shafts over Buckingham Palace along the tree-lined paths. I get an eerie feeling of calm. I circumnavigate the park, breathing deeply, then head up the steps to Waterloo Place and along Lower Regent Street to Piccadilly.

  I venture into Hatchards. Holy shit. The English must read more than anybody. I suppose it’s so god damn soggy all the time they have to do something with all those hours indoors. It’s not as though they talk to each other. “Shush” should be the motto of the country. That and “Sorry.” That’s what they say all day when they shove into you. “Fuck off” would be more honest. Everyone in this country seems to be writing a book. It must be fucking compulsory to write them because the entire store is packed from floor to ceiling with books. Five floors of totally alien books. I recognize none of the titles. They have whole categories of books I have never even heard of: Historical Gardening. Landscape shopping. Geographical novels. Australiana. Royal Dog Books. That kind of thing. There are scores of announcements of celebrity signings and readings by authors everywhere.

  I take one look and flee.

  The rest of the three days I spend holed up in a hotel room with Jeremy Goldsmith, a bearded mini-mogul, dark-eyed with curly black hair, who eyes me with the suspicious look of someone deliberately withholding his Emmy. He feeds me the gist of the scene and I give him improvised gag lines. It’s like a bad TV show.

  A pale-faced English woman with straw hair and freckles glares at me over her tinted granny glasses and writes down everything I say. I could feel contempt oozing out of her Marks and Spencer frocks, her little print bras that could not quite conceal her little pink breasts. At the end of the second day when I leaned in to ask her out for a drink she said with total sweetness “Mr. Hay, do they really pay you for this crap?”

  Crushed. That’s what I was. They’re good at crushing, those English dames. I suppose they have to be, since their males spend half their lives in pubs getting completely plastered, pausing only to cram excruciatingly hot curry into their swelling bellies before lurching home in search of instant sexual satiety before the soccer starts. Their women must need something to defend themselves. It’s Jane Austen’s irony that does it. Irony, iron ladies and iron knickers. I think I’ll write an article about it. Once I finish the novel.

  Part of the kicker on the NBC deal is that I get to go to Russia. Only for three nights but hey, I’ve never been there before. It’s my reward for spending days holed up in a hotel room with Jeremy Goldsmith and it’s well worth every excruciating h
our I spent desperately straining to shovel comedy into the dry Jamesian world of this epic bomb. Henry set his novel in Paris but for reasons known only to the studio we are shooting in St. Petersburg. That’s fine by me. I’ve never been there before.

  As I’m checking out of Earl’s there is a call for me. It’s Morty. Something about Pangloss and urgent. I tell the concierge to tell him I’ll call from Russia.

  St. Petersburg amazes me. I had no idea the place was so beautiful. I had vaguely anticipated a heavy Russian metropolis with onion domes and Stalinist buildings so I was ill-prepared for an 18th Century water city with ice-cream colored palaces in improbable pinks and greens, floating between thousands of canals. A city of light and air and wide stretches of choppy river spread out under a clear blue Baltic sky. Our location is in one of the many Tutti Frutti Palazzi with their schizophrenic interiors ranging between the ornate gilt baroque period of Tsarina Elizabeth – “Rococo ’n Roll” says Jeremy, admiringly – and the more classically restrained ivory moldings of Catherine the Great.

  “Ya gotta admit the bitch had kitsch,” he breathes in my ear through his thick black beard.

  It’s a heritage movie. That is to say it’s heavy on sets and costumes and desperately light on drama. The hairdos do most of the acting. It’s a four-parter, to be spread across a sweeps week. Major names look bored as they hang around in the grounds of a pale pistachio summer palace. The lesser actors, in their fine costumes in their chairs, glance up guardedly from their English newspapers, then turn away, disinterested.

  “The Rewriter’s here,” I overhear at lunch, in a tent.

  “Another one?”

  “Perhaps they get them by the Yard.”

  Brits can be quite cutting.

  “Which one is he?” asks a red haired young thing in an Anna Karenina dress. “The thin one with the glasses?”

  “No, silly, that’s Boris’s boyfriend. He’s the one in the Bruce Willis sandals.”

  And I thought it was cool now to wear socks with sandals.

  The sexual mores of Catherine the Great are the subject of today’s lunch time gossip. Everyone is intrigued by the stimulating detail, indelicately dropped by the tight-skirted interpreter, that the Tsarina Catherine had three ladies in waiting test her lovers first.

  “Like wine waiters.”

  “Food tasters.”

  “Dick tasters,” says a gay wag. And there are shrieks.

  “Only the finest men of her regiment were chosen,” persists our Cultural Guide. “All of her lovers were tested for stamina, finesse and intelligence.”

  “And what was the nature of the reports?”

  “Oral?” someone shrieks and there is high fiving.

  The questions keep coming.

  “Did the men know they were auditioning?”

  “Yes.”

  “What kind of women had the job of testing?”

  “Aristocratic ladies in waiting.”

  “What kind of a job is that?” a young actress inquires.

  “A blow job ducky,” shrieks the wag to more ribald laughter.

  I wonder what kind of a reward it is to fuck your way through three ladies in waiting only to face a forty-five year old German nymphomaniac.

  The consensus is that it’s exactly like Hollywood.

  Speculation lasts until the end of lunch when I am led away. I’m being sent back.

  Morty has called and spoken with Jeremy. I’m urgently needed back in LA.

  “Lucky beggar!” shout the extras when they hear of my departure.

  “Blimey, he didn’t last long.”

  “Sorry,” says Jeremy. “But, well, you’re done aren’t you?”

  It’s true. I’m well done.

  3

  I get home without incident. The plane is half empty. Bush has been in the news threatening Baghdad.

  Bad Dad, bad gag. (Must be something in there for Leno.)

  He has delivered a final warning about Saddam Hussein. Colin Powell has presented some evidence of something or other at the UN. He holds up what looks like a vial of cocaine. It all looks very serious.

  I’m just happy they haven’t cancelled the Oscars.

  Ok it’s true the Academy Award Show is totally tedious TV. A fashion parade followed by a funeral, with an endless succession of bearded men thanking their mothers, but I like the parties. I can usually get into one. This year, as a novelist, I might even get into the Vanity Fair Party. And the Awards should be funny as Steve Martin is hosting.

  Still jetlagged, fumbling through a pile of mail I come across a package from Pangloss Publishing.

  Is it a personalized invitation from Graydon Carter to get out my little black tux and party on with the rich and famous?

  No. It’s a clipping from USA Today.

  With my photo on the front page trailering my interview on page four.

  Holy shit.

  My initial feelings of pride are suddenly submerged in shameful memories of that lunch. That girl. That interview. That sex.

  It all came back to me. The reasons I had fled the US of A.

  Oh fuck. Oh hell. Oh crap.

  I’m in shock. I’m jetlagged and I’ve just waded through the junk mail in my doorway. I’m staring at a copy of USA Today, and reading my own words.

  “A novel is a series of words posing as reality.”

  A picture of me on a bad hair day, looking palpably guilty stares back.

  “I do have an addiction to fiction. But some things you don’t need to make up.”

  The interview is so ambivalently written that even I can’t tell if I’m a nice person. It describes itself as a candid talk with the man behind the most legally interesting book of the year. All this under the headline:

  Screw You’s Who’s Who.

  Stars outed in screen writer’s tell-all confessions.

  If you think The Wind Done Gone was contentious, wait till Hollywood hears what’s heading for them in The Writer’s Cut. Watch out for fireworks when this one hits the stands. It’s liable to be sued before you can read it.

  “Yes I’m expecting trouble,” says Hollywood screenwriter Stanley Hay. “Some people won’t like it. The Writer’s Cut is an honest statement about excess and after all nothing exceeds like excess.”

  He is given to paradoxical epithets and snappy one-liners. Not always original, by the way, but that doesn’t seem to bother him.

  “Theft,” as he says, “is the art form of Hollywood.”

  “My book is Psycho-Therapy, half Hitchcock and half Freud,” he tells me over lunch at The Grill, ordering another bottle of their finest Montrachet.

  “It’s healing, he claims, perhaps to counter accusations of sexploitation.

  “It’s more than a book, it’s a self-help guide to living in the fast lane,” says the movie writer turned author. “It’s very modern in concept. Part confession, part rant, part recipe book for the soul.”

  You can bet it will be the confessional part that will set the fur flying when various Hollywood Mses read all about themselves in Stanley’s sizzling new blockbuster. There’ll be lines around the block, buster, for this one. Some cats have been well and truly let out of the bag. Is it Gwyneth, Sarah, Selma, Nicole, Geena or Mary Kate and Ashley? Stanley won’t say, but his publicist has given this gal some pretty big hints and let me tell you someone is going to be blushing pretty pink.

  Someone must have shown her my article from Stroke magazine. The brief celebrity BJ in the Chateau Marmont.

  “I got the idea from Rousseau,” says LA born Stanley, 26. “Confession is good for the soul.” Maybe, but it’s probably better for the wallet. Watch out for the you-know-what hitting the cinema fan when this one hits the stands. My advice is to grab it soon before it opens in a Courtroom near you.

  Rousseau? What bullshit. I never read him in my life. Oh brother. I can feel myself going hot and cold. I begin to recall how much I had to drink when I gave this interview and the dreadful events afterwards are beginning t
o swim back into my head. I have been in denial for three weeks. Oh no. I didn’t.

  Richard Hume calls.

  Pangloss are in a panic.

  “We’re a week past the deadline.”

  They are panicking that they won’t have enough time. But they have the printer on hold. And they really love the piece in USA Today. He puts on Stephanie Sharp, head of their PR department.

  “We love that piece,” she says. “Dharma Coleman seemed to really like you. Where the hell have you been?”

  “Writing. Hiding away.”

  “Well we’re thrilled with her piece. You seem to have made quite an impression on her. What did you do to her Stanley?”

  What didn’t I do? I can remember hours on my orange shag carpet, rug burn on my knees and I was pulling pubic hair out of my teeth for days … oh God. Oh no.

  “She thinks you’re wonderful, Stanley. She called to say she’s selling a longer version of the interview to Book Magazine and they’ll probably give you the cover. And she’s trying to interest Graydon Carter in a spread on your book. It’s got everything he loves, sex, power, fame and vulgarity – perfect for Vanity Fair. We’re all over the moon about it and we’re going to double the print run on the strength of it. Congratulations.”

  Quadruple it, quintuple it, maxi-google it, doesn’t make any difference; there still ain’t no it.

  I’m in total shock.

  Why did I open my big mouth?

  It had been a day beyond any other. On such a day Michelangelo took up his chisel, Mozart sat down at the clavichord, Damian Hirst cut up cows and dumped them in formaldehyde. It was a day when I believed I might write anything. I was filled with unbridled optimism. I was full of liquid eloquence. I believed myself artistically invincible. I could feel the creative power surging through my every pore. Or was it the cocaine?

  I can remember lying naked underneath a young woman with a tape recorder in my face, seriously discussing my book.

  “Is your book a spoof?”

  This was her opening line at lunch.