He was a left-leaning liberal but most important he was a great and practicing humanist … unafraid, for example, of going after the left in a movie like The Confession. He also fervently believed that you could do a movie about a political subject that at the same time could be entertaining.
That’s how he felt about the movie we would ultimately call Betrayed—its social impact, he felt, could be enormous: by calling attention to this new, burgeoning neo-Nazism in the American West, we would be doing something socially constructive.
At the same time, he felt that the piece’s underlying themes—rugged individualism and the American cowboy myth perverted into poisonous racism and anti-Semitism—would make for exciting drama.
The creative mix among the three of us was superb. Our discussions were egoless and stimulating. References were more literary than filmic. The sessions were fun. We laughed a lot and told a lot of stories.
“I am not a writer,” Costa said. “I am a director. I will not tell you what to write. I will try to direct as best as possible what it is that you have written.”
“I’m not a director.” Irwin smiled at Costa. “I won’t tell you how to direct. I’ll try to make your job as easy as possible.”
I almost felt off-balance with this good-natured camaraderie.
Was it possible that this was how movies could be made? Without Wild Boarishness? Without somebody twitching all over the place? Without backstabbing and ego?
“Go write your script,” Irwin said.
“Write it with passion,” Costa said.
On the way out, Costa asked me if I remembered the time he had called me nearly ten years ago.
I remembered very well. It was in the months after I had finished F.I.S.T. A man who spoke with a very thick accent whose name I had difficulty understanding said that he had read my script and loved it. He said he couldn’t speak English, but was taking Berlitz courses and would call me back when he had completed them.
“I finish all the courses now,” Costa-Gavras said with a smile. “Now we will do our movie.”
I traveled to Idaho and Montana and Wyoming, attending jamborees organized by the Aryan Nations Brotherhood in their effort to recruit new members. I posed as Joe Ezdras, a bartender from San Francisco who was looking for some answers.
Most of the people I met were not secretive about their beliefs. They were mostly blue-collar people, mostly rural, who felt that the government had become a cancerous behemoth invading their privacy and stripping them of their civil rights. They talked of destructive taxes and repossessed farms, of affirmative action denying their sons and daughters a chance, of a world where smoking had become a worse offense than drugs.
Their grievances led them to two villains: blacks and Jews. The government, they said, was a Zionist Occupation Government, ZOG, and the only way anything would change, they said, was if ZOG was brought down. Their obsession with blacks and Jews put them into a surreal and dark netherworld that encompassed and perhaps put into action the demented fantasies found in a novel called The Turner Diaries, in which black people were hunted down like animals and murdered.
I heard some dark and drunken ramblings about various “mud hunts” that had allegedly taken place in Idaho and Wyoming—but I was never sure whether the alleged participants were recounting reality or fantasizing.
What I found most bizarre and sometimes poignant was that most of these people discussing these ugly, heinous things led exemplary, all-American lives devoted to family and church.
Back in the Bay Area, I found a person who had once been part of a neo-Nazi group called the Order and, on the basis of my research at the jamborees and my interviews with the defector, I wrote the script.
I tried to be as realistic as possible. What I found most frightening and what I thought posed the greatest danger to society was the lethal and mind-boggling paradox: they loved their kids, they prayed every day, they had served (sometimes heroically) in the armed services, and they were capable of injuring and killing people just because they were black or Jewish.
When Costa-Gavras read the script, he said it was the best script he’d ever read. I was flattered and thrilled and when Irwin read it and said he felt the same way … we were ready to cast and shoot … I thought it was the greatest compliment ever paid to my screenwriting.
Costa had never been in the American Midwest, the farm country where the piece was set, and I agreed to accompany him and show him around. We went to Scottsbluff, Nebraska, where Tom Berenger, who had been quickly cast as the neo-Nazi Gary Simmons, joined us.
Tom, who was originally from Chicago, knew and got along easily with Midwesterners, and he and I introduced Costa to hog farmers and iced tea lunches and hamburgers grilled in the backyard, drenched with ketchup.
We also introduced him to the drink known in Nebraska as “The Colorado Motherfucker,” but after the introduction, and half a tall glass of it, Costa went back to the Ramada Inn and left us alone to do further research for the evening.
There wasn’t a whole lot of other research to do at night. Tom and I drank oceans of beer and I’d find him in the pool each morning doing a hundred laps, trying to get rid of the aftereffects of the night before.
We were so desperate to find a really good meal that one night we crashed the local country club in our jeans and long hair, announced who we were to those in charge, and ate a great steak.
Costa, the sophisticated Parisian, seemed bemused the night we took him to the biggest local attraction. There was Costa-Gavras atop a Conestoga wagon! As it made its way back and forth across a dirt field in emulation of the Pioneers!
Tom Berenger, whose movie Platoon was still in the theaters, was the biggest star to hit the town of Scottsbluff, Nebraska. He looked the part, too. He was tan, slim, his outfit consisting day to day of a pair of worn jeans, a T-shirt, and a baseball cap.
Word spread very quickly that Tom Berenger was in town and spending lots of nighttime at the bars. A lot of the cowgirls in their rhinestones would come by and ask us about Hollywood.
One day we had lunch at a hog farmer’s house. He had three daughters in their late teens and early twenties. They couldn’t keep their eyes off Tom. They rushed to bring him his hamburger, kept asking if he wanted more potato chips, and finally asked if they could take a picture with him. Tom looked embarrassed by the whole thing—Costa and I kept laughing at him—but graciously allowed it.
One of them went up to him and whispered something into his ear and I saw Tom blush, then laugh.
“Where?” he said, and she motioned toward the back of the house. The other two sisters were standing nearby, giggling.
“I’ll think about it,” Tom said.
“Don’t do it,” I said when she moved away. “This is farm country, man. They’ll bushwhack you. They’ll put you in jail. You’ll have to marry her.”
“All she wants is an autograph,” he said.
“What? In the back room.”
“For her and her sisters.”
“All three of you in the back room?”
“Well, she wants me to autograph their panties.”
He wandered into the back room after a while and Costa and I and her parents sipped some more iced tea and heard a lot of giggling. Tom emerged a couple minutes later.
“How was the autograph party?” I asked him later.
“Wet surface,” he deadpanned. “Tough to write.”
· · ·
Back in Hollywood, meanwhile, Irwin Winkler relayed disturbing news. Jerry Weintraub, the studio head who’d contracted this project, was out.
Costa and I were worried. Usually in Hollywood, when the studio head who’d contracted to do a project was fired, it meant that the project died with him.
“Don’t worry about it,” Irwin told us.
The new heads of the studio were Lee Rich, the former head of Lorimar, and Tony Thomopoulos, the former head of ABC Entertainment.
“Tony’s close to Mike Ovitz,” Irwin sai
d. “So am I. Mike will work this out.”
When we got back to L.A., Lee Rich and Tony Thomopoulos told us that they were as committed to this project as Jerry Weintraub had been.
“I have only one suggestion,” Tony said.
Costa and I waited breathlessly. Tony was a TV guy, a nice guy, but a TV guy. We had no inkling what the suggestion would be. It could be anything.
“A tattoo,” Tony said. “I think the guy—the neo-Nazi, Berenger, should have a tattoo. Then when our girl, the FBI agent, is in bed with him, she discovers the tattoo and it is in that intimate moment that she knows that the man she’s falling in love with, the man she’s just had sex with, is the enemy.”
“Hmm,” Costa said.
“I don’t know,” Irwin said, “it’s pretty old. I’ve seen it before.”
“I think we can come up with something better,” I said.
“Well, it was just a suggestion,” Tony said.
We all smiled and thanked him.
“By the way,” Tony said, “I have some notes.”
“Notes?” I said. “What notes?”
“Script notes.” He handed Irwin a document that looked like it weighed a pound.
“I didn’t know you had any script notes,” I said. I kept eyeing the pages in Irwin’s hands.
“We do,” Tony said.
“It’s okay,” Irwin said. He quickly got up to say goodbye.
“Should we discuss them?” I asked Tony.
“We’ll discuss them first,” Irwin said. He looked like he wanted to race out the door.
“I don’t mind discussing them now,” I said.
“That’s okay,” Irwin said, “we’ll discuss them later.”
“Whatever you want to do,” Tony said.
Irwin led us out. When we got to the parking lot, I said, “They’ve got all those notes? Let me see ’em.”
“Are they formidable?” Costa asked Irwin. He pronounced it the French way—for-mi-da-ble.
“I don’t know,” Irwin said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t matter?” I said. “They’re the studio’s notes. This is how movies get screwed up.”
“Will you settle down?” Irwin said.
He took the notes and started tearing the pages into pieces.
When he was done tearing up all the pages, he smiled and said, “Good meeting, see ya later,” got into one of his antique Ferraris, and drove off.
Costa and I stood in the lot a moment and laughed.
“He is a very good producer,” Costa very formally added.
Our major piece of casting was still undone. Katie, the FBI agent sent undercover among the neo-Nazis, was the star of the movie.
We heard that Debra Winger—my attorney, Barry Hirsch, her attorney as well, had gotten her the script—was interested. Costa, Irwin, and I drove to Winger’s house in Point Dume one day and after a thirty-minute discussion, she agreed to do the movie.
Winger had a fearsome reputation and, while happy that she was in (we admired her work), we feared that we’d all get gray hairs in the course of the shoot.
“Well, so far so good,” Irwin said in his understated way.
“So far too good.” Costa laughed.
“Well, this is as far as I go,” I said.
I was finished with the script; Costa’s task was just beginning.
“The easiest movie to cast and get made,” Guy McElwaine told me, “is a sexual thriller set at a resort location in the tropics. Every movie star wants a paid vacation, tropical sunshine, swimming in the moonlight. Every movie star wants to have real sex on the beach with his co-star.”
I wrote a sexual thriller called The Bouncer set at a resort location on Maui. It was a story of seamy seduction with lots of hanky-panky on the beach and in the moonlight.
No star was interested. No studio was interested. I couldn’t sell it. It’s still in my drawer.
While Costa planned the Betrayed shoot, Richard Marquand flew up to Marin to tell me that he’d found the next film he wanted to make. It was a script called American Rocker by a songwriter named Scott Richardson.
“I want you to rewrite it,” Richard said.
I read it and told him I thought it was awful. And I didn’t understand why he wanted to do it.
“You’ve just had a big hit movie,” I said, “you can do anything you want to do. And you want to do this?”
He told me how much he had always loved rock and roll—one of his early directing efforts was a brilliant little film about the Beatles for the BBC which I had admired. This script was about a young woman who wanted to be a rock star.
“There’s never been a really good rock and roll piece,” Richard said. “I like The Rose very much, but even that didn’t quite completely work.”
He told me that Craig Baumgarten and Lorimar wanted to make a big deal with him to put the movie on a fast schedule for distribution.
“We’re not going to have much time,” Richard said, “they want to put it into the pipeline quickly. They need product.”
I was against it.
“I don’t think there’s a movie here, Richard,” I said.
“I can do it if you help me,” he said. “Besides, it’ll give us a chance to be together. I miss you. I know you’re gallivanting about with these world-renowned directors, but I miss you.”
I missed him, too, and besides, I found it almost impossible to purposely disappoint him. We had shared too many laughs and good times together.
“Aw, fuck it,” I finally said. “Okay, I’ll do it, what the hell.”
He laughed.
“You’re the only man I’ve ever met who can accept an absolute fortune so ungracefully.”
We sat in the rain in Palm Springs for a week going over the Scott Richardson script, which, I thought, was basically an excuse for Richardson to put some of his songs—which were quite good—into a movie.
During our discussions, we evolved a romantic triangle featuring a young rock singer who wants to be a star caught between an English pop idol and a washed-up and retired American rocker.
In my more frustrated moments, I kept muttering, “This is a mistake, Richard.”
And Richard smiled and said, “We’ll work it out.”
I had to have the rewrite done within two weeks. I met the deadline, but hated what I’d written. Richard liked it, Lorimar liked it, and we went right into casting.
For the part of the young woman, we cast Fiona, a New York club singer who the record companies were convinced would be a big star. I looked at her screen test and said she couldn’t act. Richard and Craig felt she was fine.
For the part of the English rocker, we cast Rupert Everett. I couldn’t argue with that; I thought him to be a marvelously gifted actor. And for the part of the washed-up American rocker, we cast … ta-dum! Bob Dylan.
“Can Dylan act?” I asked Richard.
“No, certainly not.”
“But we’re casting him.”
“We are. All he has to do is to be himself.”
I repeated my mantra.
“We’re making a big mistake here, Richard.”
“Do you like Bob Dylan?” he asked.
“I revere Bob Dylan,” I said. “I have every single one of his albums. I have every single one of his bootleg albums. I will travel a thousand miles to see him in concert. But I don’t think we should cast him in this movie. I don’t think we should do this movie. I think we should give them their money back and pull out of this movie.”
“You wrote a brilliant script.” He smiled.
“Aw, fuck you,” I said.
He knew damn well how I felt about my script. I kept trying to rewrite the damn thing behind Richard’s back even though it had been cast and budgeted.
We met Dylan at a sushi place in Malibu to discuss the script. He was wired and uptight—he wore black leather and motorcycle boots—and hardly said a word. His leg kept jiggling. He hardly ate and then he left.
We me
t him again in Denver, where he was appearing in concert at Red Rock with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. He was friendly and seemed pleased that we had flown in to talk to him.
“What’s your favorite Bob Dylan song?” he asked me almost shyly, phrasing it exactly that way and I told him it was “Mr. Tambourine Man.” To my delight, he played it at the concert that night, introducing it only with the words “Hey, Joe, this one’s for you.”
We congratulated him after the show and agreed to meet at the bar of his hotel that night to talk about the script. But when we met at the bar, Bob Dylan said, “Can you fly to Portland? We’re in Portland next.”
Richard and I both knew a thing or two about game playing, so Richard said, “Bob, we have flown here. To Denver. We will not fly to Portland. We have flown to Denver. We are here.”
When Richard said it, he sounded like Richard Burton, which made sense, because for a time in his career he had served as Burton’s professional voice, filling in for him at looping and radio interviews that Burton didn’t want to do.
Bob Dylan grinned when Richard said that and said, “Yeah, you’re here in Denver, that’s true,” and we agreed to meet him in his hotel suite at eight o’clock the next morning.
When Richard and I walked into the suite the next morning, greeted by a roadie, we were told to sit on the couch, Bob would be right out. There was a quart bottle of Jim Beam on the table, about a quarter gone. We waited for about ten minutes.
When Bob did come out, he was bare-chested and barefoot, wearing only a pair of jeans. He said “Hey” quite affably, reached for the Jim Beam, took a huge slug, and sat down facing us.
Richard did the talking. He said that it was very important within the dynamic of the script for him to meet Fiona as soon as possible, since his love story with Fiona was at the heart of the piece.
“I don’t know about that, man,” Dylan said. “I can’t kiss her. I don’t believe in that stuff.”
“You don’t believe in kissing?” I asked.
Dylan thought that was hilarious and started to laugh. “Not kissing her, no,” he said. “Not up on-screen. I don’t do that.”
Richard kept going on and Dylan kept laughing and slugging on the Jim Beam and then he said he was sorry, he had to get ready, “The bus is heading to Portland.”
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