The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  You don’t have it.

  Yeah, I do. I always have it when I send off the sale script.

  Not this time you don’t.

  Maybe it’ll need another pass. But Nina will see that it’s all there.

  No, she won’t. There’s a fundamental problem in the script that nobody will see until it plays in front of an audience.

  Well, at least I don’t have to write anymore. Not for now.

  The last sound he heard before leaving the farmhouse for the night was Paula closing the door on her way to the copying room, converted from an old bathroom.

  Night and Bhavna headed out to the reunion at Waldron. Everybody there still called him Manoj. His mood was manic and intense. Memories came flooding back. He was twelve, at a school social, the only dark-skinned person there. He asked a girl a half foot taller to dance. They did, clumsily, and then she ran off to her girlfriends. In their giggles he could hear everything they were saying and thinking, and he went home that night and prayed that he could turn off the voices, but that never happened.

  At the reunion he was doing strange things. He apologized to a teammate from a long-ago kickball game, when Night had celebrated his teammate’s game-winning kick with an excessive hug. (Feeling things too deeply once again!) He heard stories about himself that seemed to be about somebody else, the dark-skinned Hindu boy who was pushed into the smelly confessional by the fat nun and ha, ha, ha; ha, ha, ha! Night was giggling crazily at the stories, laughing so inordinately it made others envious and nervous. What his old classmates didn’t realize was that he was on the verge of hysteria, on the verge of doing the one thing he did not do, losing all control. Writing Lady in the Water had taken something out of him.

  He was asleep the next morning when Paula boarded an early flight from Philadelphia to LAX. She did not drink a thing the flight attendants were offering; she would not be using the plane lavatory. She would not leave the scripts unattended for even a moment, and she would not call attention to herself by hauling them into the cramped WC of an Airbus 321. She had a window seat because it was more secure, more private, more removed. The scripts stayed in their snug little case, zipped and locked. She didn’t nap, she didn’t read. For five hours, she kept her eyes on her feet and the scripts underneath them, her knees shaking up and down, up and down, up and down.

  2.

  Paula was early. She was always early. She arrived at Nina Jacobson’s ranch house in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles at 1:35 P.M. and waited ten minutes for her appointed time on the appointed Sunday, then rang the doorbell to deliver the script to Nina. It had to go directly to Nina. That was one of Night’s ground rules. The time had been established in a series of calls with Nina’s assistants. Paula knew both assistants, she knew Nina, she knew Nina’s partner, she had tickled the cheeks of their two young kids. Paula had every reason to think all would go smoothly. It always had. Nina had always been punctual. Dramatic but punctual. She knew Paula had a busy schedule to keep.

  The plan was for Nina to get the script at 1:45 P.M., read it that afternoon, and call Night at his home before 6:30 Pacific time, 9:30 P.M. for him. She knew how anxious he would be.

  There was something about Paula’s personality that made people behave well in her presence and, by extension, made them follow Night’s rules. She was discreet without being uptight, good-looking but not haughty about it, and she never confused her workaday world with the lives of the rich and super-rich with whom she was in daily contact. Her objective was to perform her job exactly the way her boss wanted it performed, which was with precision and without officiousness.

  A Spanish-speaking housekeeper answered the door. Miss Nina was not in, and the housekeeper did not know where she was. Paula was immediately suspicious. This was not Nina being dramatic. This was something else. She thought the way she knew her boss would want her to think.

  What could Nina be doing that’s more important than getting Night’s new script?

  Paula retreated to her car to call one of Nina’s assistants, a woman named JJ, and explained her predicament.

  “It’s odd,” Paula said. “Nina knew I was coming.”

  “Let me see if I can get her on her cell,” JJ said.

  “I’ve got to wait here.”

  “I’ll call you back.”

  Night and Nina had had a productive relationship, but combative, too. Night had a good understanding of her life in the office on the second floor of a soulless building on the Disney lot in Burbank, a building where most of the art was by Walt Disney himself. Disney elves were carved into an outside wall, like gargoyles, their cheerfulness fabricated. Night found it all mildly depressing. The hallways and the atriums were sterile and quiet and the offices bizarrely tidy, like the front desk at a Hyatt hotel. The building was meant to pay homage to Walt Disney, but Night felt that the spirit of the man had been sucked right out of it, and out of the executives who worked in the building. Over the years, whenever Nina had tried to tell Night he was going too dark, he’d bring up the name of the company’s patron saint.

  “Bambi. One of the greatest movies ever made by Walt Disney, right? People still love it today. Bambi’s mother dies,” Night argued more than once, each time in nearly the same words. “Shot dead. One of the greatest children’s movies ever.”

  “Night, we’re not making Bambi here.”

  “All right. How about Pinocchio? Little Pinocchio gets drunk! In a Walt Disney production. What are you gonna say today? We’ve got some notes for you, Walt. Can you lose the drinking?’ Walt Disney couldn’t work at Walt Disney today!”

  He’d get a dismissive look.

  Nina had been helpful to him on The Sixth Sense; she had understood the intelligent tone Night was trying to achieve. She knew the movie would require its audience to think, and it had to be marketed accordingly. That had worried some of her colleagues. The obvious way to sell a scary movie to a mass audience is to highlight its fright factor. She carried Night’s vision and his marketing ideas to her bosses. She didn’t leave the room until they got it. The message, that watching The Sixth Sense required a brain, was captured in the movie’s trailer and poster and in every bit of Oren Aviv’s marketing campaign. From the start, you were asked a question: What is the sixth sense?

  Still on the high of The Sixth Sense, Night and Nina had worked well together on Unbreakable—until the Monday after the movie’s opening weekend, when it became clear that audiences were confused by it. The two had their differences over Signs, but the movie was always within the parameters of broad mainstream entertainment, and the disagreements never turned into fights. On The Village, they clashed. Night got Disney to say yes to a dark, political, rebellious movie with a brown look and a series of unsettling questions at the points in the movie where Night typically offered belief. Without having to ask for a thing, he got Disney to put up a $70 million budget for the movie, plus another $80 million in marketing, for a script they might have rejected from any other writer, for a movie that might have been headed straight to your neighborhood art house, if you have one, had any other director made it. All the while, Night felt Nina’s nervousness.

  She was particularly unconvinced by a scene near the opening credits when dates are shown on a tombstone, suggesting that the action takes place in the nineteenth century. The movie had a huge opening weekend, a time when people go to a movie because they like the star or, in this case, the director. But the movie did not have staying power. When interest sagged after the opening week, Nina, in her frustration, kept going back to the fatal tombstone shot.

  “You lied to your audience,” she said. “You didn’t show respect for your audience.”

  Her words hurt Night. Showing respect for the audience was his highest aim as a writer and director.

  Night was bewildered. The movie was about lying. The old generation lies, and the young innocent has to run away to live her life. Anyway, you can go to any old cemetery and see a nineteenth-century tombstone, no matter what y
ear it is. Confusion about time was a critical element of the movie.

  “You want to know the single biggest reason why this movie confused audiences?” Night said to Nina. He never tired of fighting for himself. “Because my other movies gave people a reason to believe in the supernatural. In this one, the supernatural is not real. Now people don’t know what they’re going to get when they come see my movies. You expand your audience that way, you don’t contract it. I’m saying, ‘You can’t trust me at all—you don’t know where I’m going.’ People come to me to believe in things, and this time I told them, ‘The magic’s not real.’ You know, you can say to the audience, ‘You don’t own me.’ They’ll respect that.”

  Nina had no idea what Night was talking about. Night could tell.

  He could see what was happening to her since she had become the boss. She had adopted the values of the modern Walt Disney Company. He had witnessed the decay of her creative vision right before his own wide-open eyes. She didn’t want iconoclastic directors. She wanted directors who made movies that made money; to her, The Village was a lost chance. Had Night only listened to her, it could have been another Signs—that’s the message Night was getting. She was aiming to keep her job by trying to make sure the Disney stock price only went higher.

  The lesson of Night’s own thirty-four years was so clear to him: If you’re a Bob Dylan, a Michael Jordan, a Walt Disney—if you’re M. Night Shyamalan—and you have faith and a vision and something original to say, money will come. But if you’re chasing money, the audience will see you for what you are. Night knew his ideas were no longer making an impact on Nina. He was losing her, losing the hold he once had on her. He blamed that on the culture of her corporation. Disney, he realized, in the blind final years of the Michael Eisner regime, had changed. It was now in the business of cloning.

  And now, a half-year after The Village had run its course, Nina was not home at the appointed time to receive Night’s new script.

  JJ called Paula back and said, “I couldn’t get her on her cell phone, but I’ll e-mail her on her BlackBerry.”

  Paula waited in her car, stewing, wondering how this delay would affect her other appointments.

  A few minutes later, JJ called again. “Nina’s on her way. She should be there in ten to fifteen minutes. She’s just coming back from a birthday party with her son.”

  Birthday party? Nobody said anything about a birthday party.

  Nina arrived home at 2:15 with her young son. By way of apology, she offered Paula low-carb soup from the refrigerator and a ride to Philadelphia on the Disney jet. Nina had a Tuesday-night dinner meeting with Night at the farm, to talk about the new script and an overall strategy for Lady in the Water.

  Paula passed on the soup and on the ride home. She didn’t think it was her place to fly on the Disney corporate jet, not if Night wasn’t going to be on it.

  “Hopefully I can read it now,” Nina said, “if I can get the kids down for a nap.”

  Paula handed over the script and left, perplexed and disturbed.

  She went to Oren Aviv’s house. She was making plans to retrieve the script when Aviv started to say, “If Night doesn’t trust us with the script—”

  “Please,” Paula said. “This has nothing to do with trust. It’s just how Night likes to do this.”

  That was different.

  And then with Dick Cook, another strained handoff. As Paula gave him the script, she detected no emotion from him, just corporate good manners. When Paula mentioned she was scheduled to pick up the script at 9:45 P.M., Cook said that he might be out at a screening. “If that’s the case, I’ll leave it with somebody here to give to you.”

  Somebody? You don’t give Night’s script to some unidentified person. What’s going on here? These guys are not playing by the rules.

  She said nothing. She was the personal assistant to M. Night Shyamalan, and he was Richard W. Cook, chairman of the Walt Disney Studios.

  When she was done with her rounds, Paula called Night at home. She seldom did that, only when she was sure he’d want to hear from her. The answering machine came on. She said, “I just want you to know that everybody got the script and everybody seemed excited.” She regretted her words immediately, but there was no re-record option. Excited. Everybody in Hollywood used that word. Seemed. She knew that would worry Night. The truth was, the script distribution had gone poorly.

  At 6:30 P.M. Pacific time, Nina called Paula on her cell phone and said, “I wasn’t able to get the kids down for a nap. Could you call Night and tell him I’ll call tomorrow and tell him what I think of it?”

  Now Paula was beyond shock. She felt like a pile of bricks had hit her. She wanted to throw up. She was accustomed to people treating Night with deference—with the respect he had earned—and now they weren’t. She was accustomed to people doing what Night wanted them to do. It was part of his aura. Something had changed.

  Nina read the sixth draft of Lady in the Water, the sale script, that Sunday night, after her kids had gone to sleep and the house was quiet. Whatever issues she’d had with Night and The Village, she was still intrigued. On four previous occasions she had sat down to read original M. Night Shyamalan scripts, and all four times the scripts had been well-crafted, unique, and interesting. The scripts didn’t have typos and misspellings or any big plot holes. He always worked them over hard before sending them out. They typically contained little direction, or notes for the director—for himself—about how the scenes should be shot. There wasn’t much exposition. The story was told through the dialogue, in what was said, and often in what was not said. Reading Night’s scripts was like reading a play, just about. The scripts were literate and grown up. She knew Lady in the Water, whatever it was, wouldn’t be a mess. Night couldn’t write a mess. He was too talented, and he worked too hard.

  She looked at the black cover page with the emblem of his company, Blinding Edge Pictures. It showed a diver in flight. She liked Night’s sense of style.

  The script began with a dedication page, which was literary and rare. She knew the story came from a bedtime tale he had told his children. It wasn’t like Night to tell her much about a script before she received it, but he had told her that.

  To my daughters,

  I’ll tell you this story one more time

  But then go to bed.

  There was an early, funny scene in Spanish, the fastest-growing language in America. Nina was fine with that. The protagonist, Cleveland Heep, the superintendent of the apartment building, had a stutter. She made a note of it—two hours of stuttering could make an audience insane. The beautiful wet pool creature, the role slated for Bryce Howard, showed up on page 15. Bryce was not a star, nobody would come to a movie because she was playing the female lead, but she was pretty, talented, inexpensive, and Night had loved working with her on The Village. There was a character named Reggie who worked out only the top half of his body, and Nina found him amusing.

  And then she started to have problems. She wasn’t yet on page 20 of a 136-page script.

  There was a scary-looking creature, sort of a mutation between a dog and a hyena, with sharp wet teeth and spiky grass for fur.

  And Night wants this to be a Disney-branded movie? Too scary.

  There was a fivesome of smokers, and even though they smoked only cigarettes, it was clear they’d logged a lot of hours, if not years, with their mouths on bongs.

  Not Disney.

  The film critic in the movie, Mr. Farber, was attacked.

  Not smart.

  Then there was the role Night wanted to play himself, Vick Ran, a stymied writer with a cloudy future, living with his sister and carrying the movie’s message. It was an enormous supporting role, the second-biggest male role in the movie, and Night had never had a role nearly this big.

  Should the audience see that much of Night?

  Then there was the enormous Korean party girl, Lin Lao Choi, who explained the mythic tale that was the backbone of the entire scrip
t. She did her explaining not through action, the holy grail of modern moviemaking, but with words.

  Way too much exposition.

  With Lin Lao and her invented language came Nina’s biggest problem with the script. She didn’t understand the myth.

  Scrunt, narf, tartutic, the Great Etalon—what are these things?

  And her size.

  How are you going to cast a six-foot-tall Korean girl, with rolls of fat, who speaks English and Korean?

  Nina read it once and then read it again. She picked up a phone and called her boss.

  “I don’t get it,” she said.

  “Neither do I,” Dick Cook said.

  Jeremy Zimmer’s first call the next morning—Monday, February 14, 2005; Valentine’s Day—was from Nina Jacobson. The agent and the Disney president knew each other well, not just because of Night but also through Zimmer’s other clients. They saw each other at business meetings and movie openings in Los Angeles. That Monday, Zimmer was in Philadelphia.

  Nina got right to the point: “We don’t get it. We don’t think it works.”

  Zimmer was not prepared to hear that. He knew the script was not perfect. He had told Night he had problems with Lin Lao Choi; he thought she was “stilted.” But he liked the script. More to the point, he thought it represented Night, and because so many people liked the way Night thought, an audience, a big one, would undoubtedly find its way to the movie. He listened to a short version of Nina’s problems with the script and drove out to Night’s farm.

  The farm was a refuge, Night’s weekday office and his family’s weekend retreat, neighboring the great estates made famous in the movie The Philadelphia Story. The writer and agent hugged. Night had no use for many Hollywood customs, including the overly sincere man-to-man Hollywood hug. He used the Philadelphia hug, the one he had learned playing in city basketball tournaments: traditional shake, soul shake, followed by a meeting of the right shoulders.

  He saw the worry on Zimmer’s face. “What’s wrong?”