The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  Paula had organized a full afternoon for Night, meetings with different special-effects companies and puppeteers, the people who would make his scrunt, his scary creature with long wet teeth and thick, spiky matted grass for fur. Night wasn’t ready to head out. He sat on the edge of his bed, dazed, his cell phone in his hand. He couldn’t understand why he had not heard from Paul Giamatti.

  He kept looking at his watch, which he still had set on Philadelphia time. He kept looking at his phone. He kept twisting his rings. His head was spinning.

  He wondered what he should do with Giamatti if the news from Horn was bad. Should he still call him? He decided he should. He wanted to take Giamatti with him wherever he went next. Night wanted to make him an insider. He sat on the bed and tried to sort through all his problems like that, systematically, one at a time, but he couldn’t. The room was giving him no comfort.

  He put on his boots, mud from the farm still on their soles, and headed out for his afternoon meetings ready to once again be the public Night.

  Alan Horn picked up Night at the Hotel Bel-Air. They did not drive to an empty restaurant. They went straight to Horn’s house. On the short, winding drive there, Night’s heart was racing, but Horn exuded calm. The house was filled with art and books. Nobody was home. Night saw his script sitting on a bare kitchen counter. He liked how it looked there.

  Robinov arrived, carrying his own script. Night was waiting to hear the judgment.

  We love it.

  It’s weird but we like it.

  We don’t get it but we know you’ll make it work.

  We don’t get it but we know your fans will.

  It’s weird. Can you help us understand it?

  We want to be in business with you but not on this script. What else you got?

  He was waiting to hear some overarching thing.

  Instead, they jumped right into it, offering specific notes, asking questions, going through the script page by page. “Anything we say here, it is only in the area of suggestion,” Horn said. “Things you might want to think about.”

  Night was in a daze. At one point Horn said that the “humor in the walkie-talkie scene plays a little young.” Night was normally a good note-taker, but all he wrote down was something like young walkie-talkie no laugh, and when he looked at it later, he had only a vague idea of what it meant.

  At one point Horn left the house for a half hour or so, picked up his daughter from her after-school sport, and returned home. Night liked the whole casual manner. But all the while he was distracted. He thought he could tell, by the way Horn and Robinov were talking and the things they were saying, that they wanted to turn the script into a movie.

  But maybe that’s not the case, because if they liked it and wanted it, wouldn’t they just come out and say so?

  Maybe they don’t want to be so direct.

  Maybe they don’t want to play their hand early.

  Maybe they disagree.

  Maybe they don’t know what to say.

  He needed something from somebody.

  When Horn returned, Night said, “Can I ask something here? Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m not clear: Are you guys in on this thing?”

  He felt all the blood in his body abruptly pooling in his forehead. A pinprick would have created a geyser.

  Horn nearly laughed but didn’t. “Oh. Oh, yes, of course, of course. Absolutely. We’re in. We’re totally in. We want you to make this movie for us.”

  Night wanted to feel relief, but he didn’t. He didn’t know if they were responding to Lady in the Water or to the $2 billion his other movies had grossed. Night did feel like he had a clean slate, a place where he could start over. But the most important questions to Night were still unanswered. Could he inspire them? Could he turn to them when he needed help? He knew he didn’t know. He was just starting out, and he was already exhausted.

  The meeting ended quickly after that. Robinov had his copy of the script, Horn had his. Night had his scrawled notes.

  “This might seem a little strange, but I don’t like to have my scripts floating around, I’ve had problems with—”

  “Here, we have two. Take mine,” Horn said. “I’ve written some notes in the margins, and if they’re useful to you, use them.”

  Notes from an executive that are appropriate for the director to see. Wow.

  Horn asked, “Is it okay if we hold on to the one?”

  “Of course.”

  Night knew he had to say that. They were going to give him at least a $60 million budget to make a movie, and they would spend substantially more than that to market it. For them to be able to hold on to one copy of the script, the way Nina used to, that seemed reasonable to Night. He could do that.

  He flew to Los Angeles, Night said more than once and with admirable candor, “to try to sell the script to Warner Brothers,” and after he did, he seemed different. After his meeting with Horn and Robinov, he was more assertive, slightly edgier than I had seen him at home. Somewhere on that trip, he slipped out of his middle-of-the-night writing robe and into his director’s outfit, his shirt unbuttoned to mid-chest. He said he was tired of writing, that he was ready to direct again. Directing was like a break. It’s not that hard to get people to do things for you when you’re paying them. But try to get exactly the right 25,000 words down on a 135-page script, leaving just the right white space—it’s hell.

  One night, after Warner Bros. had bought the script, Night and his cousin Ashwin Rajan, and Jose and Paula and I, went out for dinner at Mr Chow. It’s a Beverly Hills institution, a classic see-and-be-seen place, but a half-week behind the news, I’m guessing. It was loud and crowded, with some people, Ash among them, wearing funky woven woolen hats. The old rule, no hats inside, was meaningless at Mr Chow. Ash was a fledgling agent at United Talent, the agency Jeremy Zimmer and Peter Benedek owned. He and Night were like brothers. A few tables away from us, Burt Reynolds and Sylvester Stallone were having dinner with two well-coiffed ladies and a young, quiet, smooth-skinned Hispanic man who looked like he was ready to contend for the welterweight title tomorrow. Both Stallone and Reynolds had skin that was weirdly tight. They looked a little spooky.

  Night asked his cousin Ash if he had a UTA business card and whether he knew how to flash it. Night went off on a long bit on the sleight-of-hand methods that old-school Hollywood agents would use to produce their business cards: out of the breast pocket, from behind the ear, out of the sleeve. Night must have picked up these moves from old movies. He was too young, and his visits to Hollywood were too infrequent, for him to know the routine firsthand. He has fast hands and deft fingers, and the bit was funny for a while, but he played it for the whole night. This was not the contemplative person I had talked to sometimes for hours at a stretch in his office at the farm in the heart of Wyeth country. When we were leaving the restaurant, he sent Jose out first to make sure the car—the enormous, gleaming black Warner Bros. SUV—was idling and ready to go, and then he rushed us into the waiting car as one group, saying, urgently and low, “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” There were three or four photographers he was trying to get past. I could call them paparazzi, but I don’t want to get sued by some paparazzi union for defamation. One looked to be a middle-aged housewife with a pharmacy Instamatic. One girl waved and politely tapped on Night’s window, autograph book and pen in hand. Night lowered the window and signed for her, then hit the up button and said to the driver, “Let’s go!” The driver turned on his left blinker, checked his mirrors, and slipped carefully into the mellow late-night Camden Drive traffic.

  The next night we went out to eat at a restaurant called Koi, which had delicious food and a sprinkling of models and actors hovering at the bar. Ash, no surprise, had made the reservation. He knew the spots, as fledgling agents should. As we went through the lounge area on our way out, a young woman in a bulky sweatshirt—a tourist from the Midwest traveling with her family—slipped past all the models and actors, approached Night, and, with no par
ticular urgency, said that her younger sister, sitting twenty feet away on a sofa, was an enormous fan but too shy to approach Night.

  “We were just saying if we could only see one famous person during our trip here, who would it be, and she says you, and then here you are,” the tourist said. “How strange is that?”

  There was no reason to doubt anything she was saying. Night went over and said hello to the kid sister, who spent two minutes describing to Night each of his movies as if he had never seen them, and what she took from each one. She was sweet and articulate, not breathless.

  “Cool, cool,” Night kept saying. “Thank you.”

  There was no hysteria. She didn’t ask for an autograph, and my guess is had Night offered one, she would have declined it. All she wanted was to connect, brain-to-brain, with the person who made the movies that had a life deep within her, and that’s what she did.

  When we got to the sidewalk, Night was nothing like he had been the previous night, on the way out of Mr Chow. “They were so nice,” Night said, speaking of the midwesterners. He sounded vulnerable and needy. It was endearing.

  A lot of “industry” people stay at the Hotel Bel-Air, so in addition to the crisp free copies of The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times and The Wall Street Journal, there are copies of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter available, too. On the morning we left, Night’s move from Disney (or “the Mouse House,” as Variety calls it) to Warner Bros. was front-page news in both trade papers. They had only the main points of the deal worked out, but enough to go public.

  There was no evidence of the move’s true drama and emotion in the stories. In an era of press releases and prepared statements, news stories often become sterile and neat, the way the participants want them to be. What’s lost is how messy life is. Still, for what they were, they were accurate.

  There was one quote in the stories from an unnamed Disney employee: “We have a terrific relationship with Night, and although we didn’t agree creatively on this particular project, we look forward to working with him in the future.”

  A more truthful statement would have been: At times we have had a terrific relationship with Night, and although we didn’t “get” his new script, we offered him a $60 million budget to make it for us anyhow. But he walked. We hope he’ll make another movie for us again someday, although when he said goodbye to us, it sounded like he really meant it. You know his whole thing with Harvey!

  You don’t expect deep truths in those kinds of stories. You expect sanitized bullshit, and that’s mostly what you get.

  Paula, Jose, and I were in the second row of the gleaming black SUV, with our luggage in the back. Marc Glick was staying in Los Angeles to work out the details of Night’s contract with Warner Bros. The contract would be worth around $20 million, to buy the script and secure Night as the director, plus a percentage of the gross. In other words, the kind of deal a movie star gets, a big-time, top-tier, A-list movie star who can pretty much guarantee a $50 million opening weekend and a movie that will gross at least $200 million. If you had 5 percent of the gross, that’s another $10 million. Plus a cut of DVD sales and all the rest. You can’t even use the word payday to describe such sums.

  Night had dropped his idea to finance half the movie’s budget. He didn’t think it was the right time or place to go so far out on a limb. Nina Jacobson and Dick Cook and Oren Aviv had been so sure of themselves when they said they didn’t get it. Night was wondering then—and would be for a long while to come—if they were right.

  Night had been eager to make a big bet on himself. He was in the process of buying an enormous Main Line estate not far from his farm and office. It was maybe the grandest of all the horse-country estates, with a house where you could shoot a remake of Howard’s End, once Night was done rehabilitating it. The project would take years and would cost tens of millions of dollars. If he had a half-interest in one movie that became a phenomenon, the whole project would be paid for. But Night didn’t feel ready to make that bet. Doubt had been deposited in his head.

  Night got in the car last but right on time at seven-thirty. (He took punctuality seriously.) He was furious. I’d never seen him like this. He tossed copies of the trades on the dashboard and said to Jose, “Did you see this shit?”

  Jose nodded.

  “Get Zimmer on the phone.”

  Despite the early hour, Jose tried to get Zimmer on the phone. Night continued to rail about Disney. “What the fuck is that all about? We had an agreement. We all agreed about what we would say. We agreed that we would all be gentlemen about this and not turn it into something. Then they say this shit about creative differences? What kind of shit is that?”

  There was a literal truth in Disney’s statement that “we didn’t agree creatively on this particular project.” Had they agreed creatively, Night would have been making the movie for Disney. But Night, in full Johnnie Cochran mode, plowed right through the narrowness of that claim: “What happened to ‘Here’s sixty million dollars. Go make the movie for us’?”

  He was staring straight through the windshield, and his words were bouncing off it and reverberating to the three of us behind him.

  “Where is that? If I had known they were going to go talk about creative differences, then I would have said, ‘I left Disney even after they offered me sixty million and final cut.’ But I took the high road.”

  He was steaming.

  “You got Jeremy?”

  Zimmer was not picking up his cell phone or his office phone. Jose didn’t call him at home.

  Night was shaking his head.

  I asked, “Can you do like the athletes do? Can you take your anger and turn it into performance?”

  Tiger Woods has that move. He’ll miss a short putt or a camera will go off on his backswing, and he’ll get, as the old-school ballplayers say, “the red ass.” He turns his rage into effort and wallops a 330-yard drive; he turns his rage into concentration and delicately plays a half-swing pitch shot. Even in a rage, Woods has different speeds. More than that: He becomes keenly aware of everything in his arsenal. It raises his game.

  The time between the end of my question and the beginning of Night’s response was 0.0 of a second.

  “The only way this movie’s gonna be good is if I can find peace. All my unhappiness with Disney, the whole ‘we don’t get it’ thing, I’ve got to bury all of that or this movie will suffer. You can’t inspire people when you’re angry.”

  The words spilled out of him without a moment of reflection. It was not the answer an athlete would give, not an ordinary one, not even Tiger, who never tells you what he’s thinking anyhow. It was an answer from a Zen master, except that Night was not a Zen master. He made movies. He lived in the world where art, commerce, and lies collide.

  For a while Night had been telling me that he thought of himself as an idiot savant, to use an expired phrase. Like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man, but Night’s gift was not for counting toothpicks when they tumbled out of a box and onto the floor, or knowing when Fernando Valenzuela would pitch. Night’s gift was for knowing feelings instantaneously. Not all the time, but sometimes. His gift was an ESP for frame of mind, his own and others’. “The voices,” they popped in and popped out, sometimes useful, sometimes not. That business about Paul Giamatti’s shoe and step and how it had revealed Giamatti to Night: Interesting stuff, but what did it actually mean? Then on the plane: I had been thinking about when I could read the script, and out of the blue, Night had invited me to do so. You could call it a coincidence, if you like.

  But this instant search-for-peace response, that was something else. When Night evaded Harvey in selling The Sixth Sense, he’d made the move to survive. Now Night was dealing with rejection, pride, anger, insecurity, invincibility, betrayal, fatherhood—and doing it all at once. But even in the thick of it, he had it all sorted out. He had identified the problem, stripped it naked, and figured out the solution like a grown-up doing first-grade arithmetic. That was the savant in action
.

  Sitting there in the SUV, I felt as if I had a spyscope that let me see into the place where the oval head shots of Nina and Dick Cook and Oren Aviv were floating around, where the picture of the trash compactor was filed, where Lin Lao’s mother was invented while sitting in a hotel lobby after the breakup dinner at Lacroix. In a moment when he was riddled with conflict, the voices were telling Night to go placidly, etc. We’ve all been there, so angry and red-faced and mad that all you want to do is kick down a door. Night was in that exact spot, and all he was thinking about was his need to find peace only because the voices were screaming a single message to him: Find peace, find peace, find peace.

  4.

  It’s not easy to make a living as an actor. Cindy Cheung was born in 1970, and by the spring of 2005 she had a full-time office job; her acting work could barely pay her cell-phone bill, the only phone she had. As a tall Asian woman, she didn’t have much to audition for. When the studios were casting Asian women, they usually wanted someone short to stand behind a counter at a dry cleaner or something. Still, Cindy Cheung kept at it. There had to be thousands of other thirty-five-year-old actresses doing the same thing, clinging to the hope of discovery. In that way, she was no different from the stewardess on the Warner Bros. jet to Los Angeles, the woman Night had imagined pulling out of a burning building.

  Cindy didn’t come to acting until she was a senior in college, majoring in applied math. After graduating from UCLA, she could have taken a job at Northrop Grumman, the aviation defense contractor, as a software programmer. Instead, she got a gig performing at Los Angeles elementary schools, reciting poetry while wearing a bowling shirt and bouncing around as if on a pogo stick. She made the rounds in Hollywood, but it was slow going. She got a day of work on Seinfeld as Woman No. 1, but when her episode aired, Cindy’s role was cut.