The Man Who Heard Voices
Page 7
“Look at you,” Zimmer said. “This is really all about story for you, isn’t it?”
Night looked up. He hadn’t heard a word his agent had said.
The next morning Night drove to the farm quickly, peering into his rearview mirror for aggressive suburban cops. He was ready to go to work, ready to write a new character. He felt everything all at once. He was eager to work; he was tired of work. He was weak from the fight; he was empowered by the fight. He was euphoric that he had stood up; he was scared that he had stood up.
He knew people did that in the real world every once in a while. They got mad as hell, stood up, and changed the world. But the act of standing wasn’t necessarily altruistic. It could be intensely selfish. Lance Armstrong had beaten cancer and gotten back on his bike for himself. The fight he inspired in others was a happy by-product. When Bob Dylan played electric at the Newport Folk Festival, that was for himself, but the ripple effect reached Francis Ford Coppola and Joe Namath and the Kingston Trio, who lost their neckties for good. Lady in the Water, the version in his head, was already inspiring Night. He could feel it at the Disney dinner. Whether the real movie, out of his head and compelled to film, ever inspired you or me or anybody else wouldn’t be known until later, when anonymous strangers gathered in darkened rooms and fell into Night’s dream state—or not. Night had told me early on that he didn’t truly know his movies until he saw them for the first time with strangers, at a test screening, cards in their hands. He could tell from their silences and their gasps and their rustling. The voices were always working on those nights in a state of high alert. And then the ultimate confirmation would come—their report cards.
For months to come, at odd hours of the day and night, that dinner at Lacroix would get replayed in Night’s head like the wake-up scene in Groundhog Day. I got you, babe. Sometimes Night would close his eyes and see little oval black-and-white head shots of Nina Jacobson and Oren Aviv and Dick Cook floating around in his head, unwanted house guests that would not leave.
Ever since The Sixth Sense, Night could always get people to do what he wanted them to do. But on that night at Lacroix, he could not. What he did not know, what he could not know, was that that night would start a year when he could no longer get people to do what he wanted. His mojo had taken a hit. The Disney people had gotten deep inside his head, interfering with the good work the voices were supposed to do—and it would be hell to get them out.
3.
I don’t want you to shop the script,” Night told his agent the morning after the Disney dinner.
This made no sense. Not to Jeremy. Not to Jeremy’s partner, Peter Benedek. Not to Jose. This was the chance for Night to make a clean break, to sell himself to the highest bidder, to let other studios try to woo him, to get his best deal.
Zimmer knew he could bring the script to Warner Bros., to DreamWorks, to Paramount, to Fox, to New Line. Executives at Warner Bros. had called Zimmer often about Night. When Night was on the cover of Newsweek, under the headline THE NEW SPIELBERG, he had called Spielberg, an owner of DreamWorks, and said he knew better even if the headline writers did not. There was a relationship there. Paramount had a new boss, Fox owned Night’s only unproduced script (Labor of Love), and New Line had wanted The Sixth Sense from the beginning. Zimmer could easily create a feeding frenzy for the script that the Disney people didn’t get.
But Night didn’t want to play one studio against another. He knew an auction could leave even the winner resentful of his purchase. It was the normal way of doing things, and Night didn’t want normal.
“I want to take it to Warner Brothers,” Night told his agent. Only to Warner Bros.
In baseball, that would be like a star player, able to sign anywhere, telling his agent to make a deal only with the Boston Red Sox.
What if the Warner people didn’t get it, either? First Disney, then Warner Bros. In the space of a month, Night could go from ridiculously bankable to tainted.
But Zimmer knew Night wanted to take that risk. The agent could hear it in Night’s voice, just as he could when Night had said the minimum bid for The Sixth Sense’s script should be $1 million. Representing Night, you had to do things differently than you would for another client, and you had to think differently, too. At the Four Seasons on the morning after the blowup dinner, Zimmer had to collect the sale script from Nina. Night didn’t want somebody who didn’t “get it” to be in possession of the script. Nina didn’t want to give it up. She still believed that Night would change his mind and stay at Disney. Returning the script would be like returning an engagement ring. But Zimmer coaxed the script out of her. He had to. Night was in a frail spot, and Zimmer had to show his client he still believed. Getting the script back from Nina, awkward though it was, would be a symbol.
And now Night wanted to offer the script to one studio.
“Okay,” Zimmer said. “I’ll call Alan Horn.”
Horn was the president of Warner Bros. Entertainment. Night and Horn had met once or twice, but Horn was lodged in Night’s mind. He had called Night shortly after The Village opened, when the response to the movie was weird and mixed. Night was in Paris for the European premiere of the movie, and Horn had tracked him down. “The movie really touched me,” Horn told Night. “It was a reminder to me of why I’m in the business of making movies.” Night heard yearning in Horn’s voice, to make movies that dealt with something many filmmakers didn’t want to talk about: the role of faith in our lives. Not in some preacher-on-TV, repent-or-go-to-hell way. Just true faith.
Night didn’t want Zimmer to make the first call to the Warner Bros. president. “The first call should come from me,” he told Zimmer.
That made no sense, either. Zimmer, far better than Night, could put an assured spin on the Valentine’s Day Massacre, as the Disney divorce was being called in Night’s office. Zimmer could play the next move coyly, leave the impression that Night would like to make Lady at Warner Bros. but would consider other places, too. That’s what salesmen do. Night knew that game well. He had played it expertly when trying to evade Harvey Weinstein. But that was when Night was desperate to make his mark. Now he felt a different kind of desperation. He wanted to inspire the masses. He couldn’t do it alone.
Night feared being alone, the parish priest on a windblown rural island, somewhere off the coast of Ireland, maybe, pre-telephone, a man who listens to confessions and offers faith to doubters day after day, but who has nobody to turn to for himself.
He didn’t want to make movies only for himself. During the process, he couldn’t think of his worldwide audience—that was far too broad to comprehend. He tried to imagine one idealized audience member, who got the movie exactly as Night had intended it, and in ways that he never did. So far, that idealized moviegoer was a fantasy. Night hadn’t found that person on any of his previous movies, nor had he on Lady. The idea that that person might exist helped fight the loneliness. But that’s all it did, help. The loneliness persisted.
Night had a plan for his first conversation with Horn. All he wanted to say was “I’ve wanted to make a movie for you for a long time, and this is the one I should be making first.” Then he would turn the matter over to Jeremy Zimmer and Peter Benedek and Jose Rodriguez for the broad strokes and to his lawyers, Marc Glick and Steve Breimer, for the fine ones.
Night went over the conversation in his head again and again. His plan was not to say the name Disney. He wouldn’t say a thing about the problems the Disney people had with the script. He could imagine Horn’s voice, resonant and subdued, saying the things he wanted to hear.
Then he picked up the phone.
“This is a really important call I’m making,” Night said.
“I like this,” Horn said. He had two daughters, too. Night felt a connection with him.
“I always felt like someday we would work together.”
“As you know, we’ve wanted that, too.”
“I won’t be making my next movie for Disney.”
“I’d like to make it for you.”
That was where Night had intended to stop, but he couldn’t. Horn must have heard Night’s confusion and anxiety, because to that most inviting of comments, Horn said only, “Then we would like to be in the next round of conversations.”
Night was hyperventilating, and Horn was assuming the role of statesman. Night was giving up everything and expecting Horn to do the same. And he didn’t. It was unnerving.
Night filled the silence by rambling. He said the name Disney over and over. Night started going on and on about problems with the script. There was too much built up inside him.
…but maybe they aren’t really problems, or maybe they are but they’re fixable problems—and what’s a world without problems?—and maybe I sabotaged myself because maybe I didn’t really want to make the movie for Disney, but you know I was always going to be a child to Disney, and I’m ready to be treated like a man, but more than that, I just wanted them to show respect for me as an artist, as you did, Alan, when you called me in Paris that time—it was on August first, 2004, my daughter’s birthday; we were on a rowboat in the Seine, and I had just lost a bracelet in the water, and then you called, amazing timing, don’t you—are you there, Alan? Hello? Is any of this making any sense?
Horn’s diplomatic tone never changed.
“Yes, of course,” he said evenly. “It all makes sense.”
It turned out that Horn was the one to never mention Disney by name, the way a good college recruiter doesn’t mention the other schools he knows the star athlete is considering.
“We’d like to read the script whenever you’re ready for us to read it,” Horn said.
“I’m going to come out to L.A. on March twenty-first,” Night said.
The date was calculated. He knew Horn would be in town. Night’s plan was to finish the second version of the sale script on March 20 and fly out the next day and deliver it himself.
Night knew he’d need to clear his head to finish the revisions. After the breakup dinner, the rewriting had been a slog. Every time Night sat down to write, the little oval head shots—the trio of Disneyites, Nina in particular—descended upon him. He’d try to chase them out, but he couldn’t.
Horn looked at his calendar. “The twenty-first. Good. If you like, we could have dinner that night.”
“That’d be great!” Night blurted out.
He felt like he was back in high school, failing at cool again.
He hung up and thought, I’m damaged. He was seeing things, and himself, with extreme clarity. He was deflated. But even in his weakened state, Night knew one thing for certain: He wasn’t going back to Disney. The last time he’d felt this way had been after Harvey gutted Wide Awake. Night had known then that even if Harvey Weinstein were the last producer on earth, he would not make The Sixth Sense for him. There are surprising pockets of strength when you’re crazy-mad. Night remembered that from the last time.
Night asked his assistant if she had ever received Nina’s copy of the script. She had. Paula had held the script in her hands, thumbed through it, seen that Nina had written notes all over it, and taken it to the shredder. She knew Night wouldn’t want to see Nina’s notes. Nina was no longer a believer. Paula still was.
Night was consumed with casting questions. It was crucial, make-or-break, that he find the right actor to play Cleveland Heep, the building super. Cleveland was in nearly every scene, and how that role was cast would determine the movie’s fate. Night had been thinking about Tom Hanks, among other actors.
He had been reading the book Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell. The subtitle, The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, interested him. He did his thinking with thinking, but he recognized Gladwell’s theme, about how we use intuition. While reading the book, Night came across a section on casting in which Tom Hanks was featured prominently. From what I could tell, coincidences like that seemed to happen to Night all the time.
Night was fascinated by the book’s description of the Coke-Pepsi wars, about which cola wins the sip test on a supermarket sidewalk and which wins the take-home test, the soda you actually drink with your Sunday-night pizza. Night realized there was a corollary in movies. Unbreakable and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, a Universal movie, had opened the same day. Grinch had a better opening weekend. “Grinch is loved,” Dick Cook had told Night at the time. The way Cook had said it made Night feel alone in the world.
Reading Blink, Night figured out that Grinch had won the sip test, but Unbreakable had won the test that mattered most to him, the take-home test. Unbreakable lived on in a Kanye West rap, in doctoral theses, in chat rooms, in highbrow film magazines. The modern Disney, Night realized, was too worried about the sip test. Under Walt Disney, the company had been all about the take-home test, movies that lingered in your mind forever.
Gladwell described how Tom Hanks was cast for his first big role. “He came in and read for the movie Splash, and right there, in the moment, I can tell you what I saw,” Gladwell quoted the producer Brian Grazer as saying. “We read hundreds of people for that part, and other people were funnier than him. But they weren’t as likable as him. I felt like I could live inside him. I felt like his problems were problems I could relate to.” What Grazer saw in Hanks in 1983 was what Night was seeing in him over twenty years later, even though Hanks had become one of the world’s best-known actors. Night was impressed that you still felt his innocence, after so many years and so much success. Tom Hanks would make a fine Cleveland Heep.
Splash, directed by Ron Howard, is about a wayward mermaid, played charmingly by Daryl Hannah. Now, two decades later, Night had hired Ron Howard’s daughter to play the part of what Night called a “sea nymph.” When I asked Night about the coincidences, he said that when he was writing Lady, he wasn’t thinking of Splash, and when he cast Bryce Howard, he wasn’t thinking about the Ron Howard–mermaid connection. But he liked how the pieces fit together.
“There are no coincidences,” Night said, echoing Freud. Night was one to process connections all the time. Everything fit.
In terms of fame, Tom Hanks was near the top of the list Night had been keeping, candidates to play the role of Cleveland Heep, the stuttering building super. Night was the rare director who could hire anybody he wanted, provided the actor wanted the job. On the list with Hanks were Johnny Depp, Kevin Costner, Matt Damon, Tobey Maguire, Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Paul Giamatti. Tom Cruise had been on it for a while but Night decided his star power would overwhelm the role. Hanks, a different sort of star, was the most obvious choice. Many people will go to a movie just because he’s in it. On that basis, Night knew that Paul Giamatti was the least likely choice.
But while writing the role, Night’s head kept returning to Giamatti. He had loved him in American Splendor and Sideways. He felt Giamatti had the same everyman quality as Hanks, but with Giamatti, the audience would have no preconceived notions. Night could tell Giamatti was smart but didn’t want people to know it. Cleveland Heep was like that. Giamatti made unlikable characters likable, starting with Pig Vomit, Howard Stern’s boss in Private Parts.
Paul Giamatti was the son of a star, in a manner of speaking. His late father was A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former Yale president and baseball commissioner. He was a towering figure in two important American institutions, a man with a commanding presence. Compared to his father, Paul Giamatti seemed so unactorly. He always looked like some guy sitting in a coffee shop, lifting the pickles off his tuna-fish sandwich.
In American Splendor, he played the cartoonist Harvey Pekar, and you couldn’t help but feel for the guy. You knew Harvey had no power over his abrasiveness. In Sideways, Giamatti’s character stole from his mother, was an insufferable wine snob, and was pretentious about his lousy writing. And you liked him anyhow. Paul Giamatti was funny. He was funny as the obnoxious producer in Big Fat
Liar, he was funny as the straight-man detective in Big Momma’s House, he was funny as Pig Vomit. Cleveland Heep had to be funny, at least sometimes.
Paul Giamatti didn’t look anything like a leading man from central casting (he was round, balding, with his hands often shoved deep in his front pockets). Night liked that. He sensed Giamatti had a deep honesty about himself. It’s crazy: You make a living pretending to be other people, and the thing you need most is honesty. Not in the Boy Scout sense of the word. Night had known great actors who were great liars in their everyday life, and why wouldn’t they be? Night meant honesty in the willingness to lay oneself bare. That’s how he’d written Cleveland Heep, and that’s how he saw Giamatti. Cleveland Heep had to get the residents of an apartment building to come together. They’d do that only if they believed him. Night thought Giamatti could pull it off.
Still, Night knew his casting idea was not for the faint of heart. Paul Giamatti’s biggest acting gig (in terms of people reached) had been as the voice of Frank the Talking Headcover, a puppet on a golf club, in the Tiger Woods spots for Nike. That was the guy Night was thinking of hiring to play the lead in a movie that would open on seven thousand screens across the world. In a script that was like nothing Night had done before and like nothing that other directors were doing. Night would be asking Paul Giamatti, who had never had the lead in a big-time, big-budget mainstream movie, to carry his next movie. He decided he should do the conventional thing, for a change: meet him before hiring him.
They met for lunch on a winter day at the Mercer, a chic hotel in lower Manhattan. Night arrived first and positioned himself so he could see Giamatti as he was coming in. The main dining area of the restaurant was in the basement, one level below the lobby. Night saw Giamatti coming down the exposed steps. It was a cold, icy day, and Giamatti was wearing sensible shoes. That was the very first thing Night saw: Paul Giamatti’s solid plain brown left shoe. Then he saw him take a step. There was something slightly awkward about it; the toe went a little low and the heel came a little high. The image of the shoe and the step got stuck in Night’s head.