The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  “Well, this is a Valentine’s Day you’re going to remember,” the agent said. “They didn’t, quote, get the script.”

  Zimmer summarized Nina’s problems with the script. Night’s mind raced. He rubbed his face with his skinny dark hand.

  Could I have sabotaged myself because I don’t want to make this movie for Disney?

  Is there some major flaw I’m not seeing?

  Zimmer was imagining what would happen if Disney rejected the script outright. Night would be free to go wherever he liked. “It would be like Michael Jordan becoming a free agent!” Zimmer said. He started to rattle off the names of the studios and studio heads who would love to be in business with Night. Of course, the use of Michael Jordan’s name was a bit of salesmanship. Zimmer knew how Jordan, even in retirement, still moved Night.

  Night could not imagine it coming to that. Disney wasn’t going to let him leave.

  “They’re still coming here for dinner tomorrow night, right?” Night asked. Nina Jacobson was coming with her boss, Dick Cook, and Oren Aviv, the marketing man.

  “Yeah.”

  So he had two days to work. Two days to think. All day Monday and all day Tuesday.

  Night’s chef, Michael Schultz, had been preparing the dinner for days: a four-course meal with roasted lamb and feta ravioli for the entrees, the right wines for the right courses. Michael was built like a college football player, but he made exceedingly delicate dishes. He collected balsamic vinegar as others do wine and drizzled it on fruit for dessert. Michael prepared lunch every day for Night and Paula and Jose Rodriguez, who ran Night’s business affairs, and he cooked whenever Night was entertaining.

  Zimmer didn’t think dinner in the farmhouse made sense now, everyone cozy and sitting together in a dark room with low ceilings. “Let’s do it at the hotel,” he said.

  He was staying, as the Disney people would be, at the Four Seasons, a hotel on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Center City Philadelphia, a short walk from the art museum steps used triumphantly in the first Rocky movie. Night has an abiding love for that movie, particularly because in the end, Rocky…loses. In his Filmmaker’s Handbook, a series of private notebooks he had been keeping for years, Night had written, But he hasn’t really lost. He’s still standing at the end. Apollo Creed, the heavyweight champion of the world, couldn’t knock him down. In Rocky’s mind, that’s a victory. Night imagined that if Sylvester Stallone were making Rocky for Disney today, Nina would require Rocky to beat Apollo Creed. The hero’s gonna lose? Don’t get it. Not Disney.

  “The restaurant at the Four Seasons? That’s a suit-jacket place,” Night said. “Everybody’s wearing ties in there.”

  Night liked wearing good suits if he was trying to sell something—arriving at a premiere, being interviewed by Jay Leno. But not for this meeting. When Nina and the others read the sale script, that was supposed to be the sell job. The dinner was supposed to be something else.

  They decided to have the dinner at Lacroix, a restaurant on the second floor of an elegant, modern hotel, the Rittenhouse, in the heart of Philadelphia.

  Dinnertime came. Night’s driver, Franny Malseed, drove Night there.

  Franny had been a union driver on most of Night’s other movies. He had been a teamster official. He knew the city and how it worked, and people and how they worked. He was smart and discreet. After The Village, Night had hired him to drive for him and his family full-time.

  They arrived at the hotel and Franny asked, “Should I put away my Mickey ears?”

  Franny had owned no Mickey Mouse ears in his rough-and-tumble Philadelphia boyhood, and he was possibly the least likely person in the world to own them now. Night laughed nervously. His stomach felt all clumpy.

  Franny drove up the hotel’s cobblestone driveway and let Night out under the heat lamp. A uniformed doorman opened the door for Night and said, “Good evening, Mr. Shyamalan.” He said it easily, too easily, as if they saw each other daily. The doorman’s greeting confused Night. It made him feel paranoid.

  What does he know that I don’t know?

  From the start, the dinner was a disaster. The tables were too close together; Night felt that other diners could hear their conversation. The service was slow. There were many courses with tiny portions. Night was not touching his food, and at one point the chef came out to ask if everything was all right, then laboriously explained the menu. The waiters hovered excessively. Nina and Night did most of the talking. They were sitting next to each other, with Zimmer on Night’s left. Usually, Night found Nina’s screechy voice amusing, but this night it was only grating. She sounded like the adults in the Charlie Brown TV movies: wha-wha-wha-wha-wha. Her problems with the script came spewing out of her without a filter. The boundary between candor and anger, Night couldn’t identify it.

  You said it was funny; I didn’t laugh…You’re going to let a critic get attacked? They’ll kill you for that…Your part’s too big; you’ll get killed again…You’ve got a writer who wants to change the world but doesn’t, but somebody reads the writer and does? Don’t get it…What’s with the names? Scrunt? Narf? Tartutic? Not working…What’s with all these rules? Don’t get it…Lin Lao Choi—and good luck finding a six-foot Korean girl—is going to explain all these rules and all these words? Not buying it. Not getting it. Not working.

  She went on and on and on. Night was waiting for her to say she didn’t like the font Paula had printed it in.

  The attack left Night feeling euphoric. He felt like a boxer, adrenaline coursing through him after getting hit. He came out flailing. He started with a broad attack, then planned to go into a line-by-line defense and conclude with soaring praise for his own work. He didn’t want to have to do it, but who else would? He went right into Johnnie Cochran mode, which suited him. He did an excellent and funny “if the glove don’t fit, you must acquit” bit. He was a good actor.

  He continued, “All right, you know Harriet Beecher Stowe, she wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, right?”

  Throughout high school, all Night did was watch movies. Play sports and watch movies. He learned about acting and lighting and beats and storytelling by watching movies, and by listening to his parents tell their stories. After college, he became a serious book reader.

  There was a group nod. Night found it unconvincing.

  “It made you feel for the slaves. It’s an amazing, amazing book. But in and of itself, it didn’t change the world.”

  More nodding.

  “Abraham Lincoln read it, became president, and ended slavery. That’s what’s going on here. A writer writes, and years later, somebody reads the books and gets inspired. The writer doesn’t know he’s written something important. He’s just writing because he believes. It’s a big idea, my biggest ever. What aren’t you getting?”

  For a moment he felt sane and clear. He heard Zimmer chuckling, and Night knew what it meant: You’ll never beat Night in debate.

  He was just about to shift gears when he looked at them carefully, one by one. He looked at Nina, at Cook, at Aviv. He saw nothing. They weren’t engaging him the way an opponent is supposed to. There was no boxing match going on. They were looking at him like he was on another team.

  Suddenly, he knew. The problem was not Nina Jacobson or Dick Cook or Oren Aviv. He wasn’t looking at three individuals. They had morphed into one, the embodiment of the company they worked for, and that company, the great Walt Disney Company, founded in 1926 by Walter Elias Disney, no longer valued individualism. It no longer valued fighters. Nina and Cook and Aviv wanted Night to be a cog. They had talked so much about Team Disney, about turning every employee into some kind of bland cheerleader, all with the same nose and hair and body type, that they had left no room on the roster for the star. They didn’t want stars anymore. And as Night looked at them, he realized this wasn’t a dinner meeting. It was an intervention, as if they were meeting with an alcoholic who needed to get into a treatment program. Their purpose was to talk some sense into him. Get on
the team, buddy—we can all make lots of money!

  Night felt sorry for them. They felt emboldened by The Village, by their belief that had Night only listened to them, that movie could have earned double or triple or quadruple the money it made.

  “What are you saying, Nina? What are you saying the script needs? Three weeks? Three months?”

  Nina said nothing. Her face said, Not three weeks, not three months, not ever.

  “You’re saying I’ve lost my mind.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “Yes, yes, you are.”

  Night went into a long monologue of everything he had written as an adult, as a writer-for-hire, as a ghostwriter, as the writer of four original screenplays for Disney. He cited dollar figures, how the movies had ranked for their studios. When he got to the four Disney movies he had made, it was pow! whack! zoom! bop! The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Village.

  “Seven for seven. Two of the four I made for Disney are among the largest-grossing movies of all time. But now—now I’ve written Lady in the Water, and I’ve lost my mind. Suddenly, I can’t write anymore. I’ve lost my touch, gone crazy.”

  Nina wanted her child back, the one who wrote The Sixth Sense. She said, “You know we had our problems with The Village.”

  That was true. But Night had always thought they let him do his thing, as a writer and a director, because he had earned the right to do so. Now he was hearing something different. He was hearing: We didn’t put our foot down last time, and we regret it; we’re not going to make that mistake again. Nina talked so often about the underlying lie of The Village. In Night’s mind, he was successful because he was honest. He wrote the stories he wanted to show and tell, not the ones he thought others wanted to hear. When he was telling a lie—and he was, of course, a fiction writer—it was willful. It was for the good of the story.

  Nina started talking about a Disney movie on the docket that Night could direct. It sounded to Night like a girls’ movie, maybe about ice-skating or something. She seemed to not even know him. All he’d done for Disney was direct his own original scripts. Warner Bros. had approached him about directing the first Harry Potter movie. Night was a fan of the book, but he couldn’t do it. He was making Unbreakable then, his own idea. It had to take precedence. Steven Spielberg had once approached Night about writing a sequel to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the movie that had made Night want to be a writer and director in the first place. He was tickled. But in the end he said no. He didn’t see a way to improve upon the original. To Night, the challenge was to say something original, to reach other people with his own ideas. It was so basic. How could Nina not know that?

  He had known these people for years. He had always liked them; he had always thought they were smart. He knew they were good people. But a different kind of group thinking had taken hold of them. All of a sudden they looked like strangers.

  It seemed to Night that they didn’t know how they wanted the meeting to end. He could not relate. He was always thinking about endings. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t come in and say, “Help us understand this movie.” Had that been the first thing said at dinner, the whole night would have played differently.

  Sadness washed over him. He wanted to please people, that was a big part of his personality. He knew he had a conventional streak a mile wide, that there was more Bobby Zimmerman in him than Bob Dylan. He knew Manoj still lived. Manoj wanted to make his parents proud. Make his wife proud, his children, his sister, her husband, his employees. Make them all proud. The doorman he didn’t know at the Rittenhouse, make him proud. In high school, when he was still Manoj, he always wondered what it would be like to be popular, what it would be like to be the guy who says to the girl, “You wanna—?” and she says, “Sure,” without knowing where they’re going. Nina was practically screaming at him: You can be one of us! And it was so inviting. It was easy. Be on the team, get even richer, get even more famous!

  No, he didn’t want to be on the team, not that team. To be on a team of actors, real actors, to be counted among the iconoclasts and the misfits? Yes, that was appealing. To be on a team of conformist executives? No. He wanted to be Dirty Harry, breaking rules to get results. He wanted to be Michael Jordan, taking the last shot, whether he made it or missed, whether the Bulls won or lost. He wanted to be Dylan, Picasso, Kubrick, William Hurt, Walt Disney. He wanted to be Night the day he said to himself, I’d rather not make The Sixth Sense than make it for Harvey. He dug deep and said something he didn’t know he still had in him: “I’m going to have to decide whether I make this movie at all, or whether I make it elsewhere.”

  Nobody responded.

  Finally, Zimmer said to the Disney trio, “We’re thankful for the truthful response you’ve given us.”

  The agent knew the Disney people were in a difficult spot. If the movie turned into a big hit at another studio, these three smart people running the Disney movie division would not look good. It was a business filled with second-guessing. Zimmer didn’t want to see them embarrassed. He didn’t want to see them fail. He had good relationships with them. He took projects to them all the time.

  Night didn’t look at Zimmer. “I don’t agree with that, I don’t think it was a truthful response,” he said.

  He felt Nina had been preconditioned not to like the script, that she hadn’t given it a truthful reading. He had put his heart into that script, he had put his soul and his dreams and his faith into it. It had more of a big idea behind it—more of him—than anything he had ever written. It deserved more than we don’t get it. And even if they absolutely could not see what he was trying to do, he felt he merited a different tone. They didn’t have a single question about the script. How could that be?

  “There’s a certain amount of space you have to give an artist, and the problem here is that you haven’t given me that space. I don’t have any room to move. You like the side of me that does conventional things that make money, and you don’t like the side that does unconventional things.”

  Everything was out now, including Night’s unhappiness. Night could see how they were seeing him, as a child not ready to leave home. And now the child was no longer running to tennis practice and saying, “Loveya!” before slamming the door. The child was saying, “I’ve got a driver’s license now, and I’m outta here.” Disney was on the verge of losing its most successful writer-director since Walt Disney himself.

  Aviv and Cook were gasping for air. Aviv said, “As we say, ‘We don’t smell it, we sell it.’” The meeting had gone awry, and now they were winging it. Cook told Night he could still make the movie at Disney, even if the executives didn’t understand it. He said, “Prove us wrong, Night.”

  But Night knew he could not do that. Spend a year of his life trying to prove them wrong? No. What a waste of energy. He could not make a movie for these three people. Their lack of faith in Lady in the Water would infect the whole project.

  There was almost nothing to talk about, and the dinner came to a quiet close. Night tossed his spotless napkin on the table. The check came and Zimmer paid. The fivesome headed to the elevator, even though the lobby was only one flight below. Zimmer inspected the bleached-blond wood of the elevator door. The air smelled of fresh flowers, the way it does in expensive hotels. The doors opened.

  “You three go down,” Cook said. “I want to talk to Night for a minute.”

  Soon they were alone outside the elevator.

  “Just make the movie for us,” Cook said. “We’ll give you sixty million and say, ‘Do what you want with it.’ We won’t touch it. We’ll see you at the premiere.”

  “I can’t do that,” Night answered.

  “C’mon.”

  “I thought we were going to ride into the sunset together,” Night said wistfully.

  “We still can.”

  Night felt like the boy his parents had raised, the one who always knew to thank his mother’s friend for bringing him to Chuck E. Cheese’s, even though the big furry ro
dent scared the hell out of him.

  “I want to thank you for six great years and four great movies,” Night said. He could have added Mr. Cook.

  An elevator came, and they rode down together in silence. There were no hugs and there were no loveyas. The three Disney people walked together past the doorman and out of the hotel and into a waiting car. They returned to their hotel still believing that Night would change his mind, that he would abandon Lady in the Water and make a movie for Disney that made much more sense for everybody—for the three of them, for Night, for the Disney shareholders. But as they left, Night was crying. He was crying because he liked them as people and he knew he would not see them again, not as his partners. He was crying because he was scared, because there was a big part of him that did want to simply get along with everybody, to do something safe, to be successful, whatever that meant. He was crying because he knew they could be right. He was crying because in rejecting that script, they were rejecting him.

  That night was the beginning of the madness. Not mad like Vincent van Gogh was mad, but mad for Night, mad enough that he found himself saying something very unsafe, something imprudent, something he had never said before: Keep your goddamn money—I’m going to make the movie I want to make. He hadn’t even known he had it in him.

  Night sat down on a lobby sofa. He hugged his knees and lowered his chin on top of them. His mind was moving fast now.

  He started talking to himself. The voices were a chorus, screaming at him, advising him, consoling him. “I’ve got the fatal flaw. It’s Lin Lao Choi. She can’t just spout off the rules on command. It’s got to be funny. I could give her a mother. She could speak only Korean. Now there’s a cultural divide, an age gap…”

  Zimmer said to him, “Do you realize what’s happening here? Your career is about to go off in some direction, and we have no idea what it is.”

  “…so if the mother speaks only Korean, she represents the old country, the old way of doing things. She knows the rules because it’s part of her lore.”