The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  She moved to San Francisco to study at the American Conservatory Theater. In her classes, she was urged to “get in touch” with herself, and the self she touched, she quickly discovered, was depressed. Her parents had divorced and a guy had broken her heart and she was living on the top floor of a musty old Victorian house in Chinatown, with the dark wigs of the previous tenant, now dead, shoved in old drawers. A therapist advised her to go for a bike ride. The fresh air helped. Prescription medications helped more. After a year or so, she was off the meds and feeling good about herself and her acting. She had won the female lead in a Horton Foote play that did not call for a tall Asian-American woman. A triumph. She felt the lure of New York, and in 1998 she moved there. She was twenty-eight and single and looking to lead the acting life.

  Whenever she did audition—for Broadway, off-Broadway, TV shows, commercials, studio movies, independent movies—the casting directors could see she had talent. She was tall and slim and attractive, with a beautiful singing voice, a knack for imitating people, and an excellent sense of humor. But in the end, it was nearly always the same. If the casting people were looking for an actress, no ethnicity or race specified, they looked at Cindy Cheung and saw a Chinese actress, even though she was a native Californian with the mid-country voice of a Des Moines weather lady. To the casting directors, she was tall and Asian—a freak show. There wasn’t much out there for her.

  Night’s casting director, Douglas Aibel, needed help. He knew he wasn’t going to be able to cast Lin Lao Choi by normal means. The over-the-phone notes Doug had gotten from Night added up to a character nobody had ever seen—except Night, in his head: She’s in her early or mid-twenties. A gigantic Korean-American. Dresses like Britney Spears. Six feet tall. Rolls of fat. Confident. Comfortable in a bikini. Sweet, funny, mystical. Fights with her mother but respects her. Movie pivots on her.

  Aibel asked Night if he could hire a scout to work Korean neighborhoods, turn over rocks in Hawaii, in Korea, on basketball rosters, in women’s professional wrestling, anywhere. (“Hire anybody you need,” Night said. He could say that; he was one of the movie’s two producers.) Out of habit and a sense of fairness, Aibel made plans for open calls and for notices in Back Stage and on various websites. He wrote a character breakdown, to be sent out to agents and managers, trying to honor Night’s vision but broad enough to find somebody. Rolls of fat, Doug could not use that.

  He expected conventional searches to yield nothing. “The people who respond to those things are people who want to be actors,” he said. “The person who’s going to get this role doesn’t even know she wants to act yet.” He wanted to honor Night’s vision, but this one would be tough. Night was looking for a freak.

  After the meeting at Alan Horn’s house, Night was desperate to reach Paul Giamatti, but he could not find him. Not in his apartment in Brooklyn, not on his cell phone. When he finally did reach him, all Paul said was that he hadn’t read the script yet.

  Night’s heart sank. Reading the script wasn’t a major time commitment. You could do it in ninety minutes, less if you liked it a lot or not at all. But he buried his disappointment and summoned his inner salesman.

  “Listen, dude, I wrote this role for you, man,” Night said. “I really want you to do it, and so does everybody at Warner Brothers. I gave them all sorts of opportunities to tell me they didn’t want you, and they said, ‘No, we think he’s great. We want him.’” Paul said some noncommittal thing and the conversation was over.

  A week passed. Night had still not heard back. He didn’t know if Giamatti had read the script or not, if he liked it or not, if he wanted the job or not. No news was bad news.

  One day in that period, I was at the farm for lunch. I mentioned to Night that Christine and I had seen The Upside of Anger, with Joan Allen and Kevin Costner. It had been our Saturday-night movie date.

  “How was it?” Night asked.

  “Excellent.”

  “How was Costner?”

  Costner plays a retired baseball player, often drunk, who has a sports-talk radio show, except he won’t talk about his baseball days. He’s slovenly and cranky.

  “Outstanding.”

  “Is he funny?”

  “Extremely.”

  “How’s he look?”

  “You know, he’s got a little paunch. He’s losing his hair. He looks kind of beat up. He looks good.”

  “I’ve always liked him,” Night said. “I met him once. He punched me in the arm and said, ‘I know you.’ I liked that. Very endearing. Was he likable in the movie?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Life’s caught up with him. He doesn’t have that invincibility anymore. Damn! Jose, don’t tell them anything’s up, but call Costner’s guy and see what his availability is.”

  Twenty minutes later, Jose had an answer for Night. “He’s got an independent movie that has him tied up for the first two weeks in August, and then he’s available after that.” Available is a loose word in these kinds of discussions. Shoots run longer than scheduled, and agents have multiple irons in the fire in the “available” periods. Most things don’t come through.

  The voices were going off.

  Maybe it’s not Paul. Maybe it’s Costner. Costner has warmth. Costner grabbed my elbow. Cleveland Heep has to have warmth. Paul hasn’t even read the script. Does that mean anything? My God—is there someone I can talk to besides myself?

  “It’s not ideal, but we could shoot other things first,” Night told Jose.

  He asked Paula to get Sam Mercer, Night’s producing partner, on the phone.

  Night’s first words to him were, “I’m starting to have second thoughts about Paul.”

  It was startling. What about Listen, dude, I wrote this role for you, man? What about Night’s moment with Paul Giamatti’s shoe? That day his decisiveness had been overwhelming. The voices were loud and clear. They were telling him that he didn’t need Tom Cruise or even Tom Hanks. Night wanted the guy with the meager beard who played the flunky writer in Sideways. And now that actor didn’t seem to want Night. The traffic wasn’t moving two ways, like it was supposed to. As Night was flooring it toward Giamatti, Giamatti should have been coming straight at him. And he wasn’t. He was…nowhere.

  Night couldn’t see the reality, that Paul Giamatti was an actor in demand with a lot going on. Night wasn’t accustomed to dealing with real-world intrusions. You were supposed to get sucked up into Night’s world and to hell with everything else. But that wasn’t happening.

  “What do you think about Costner?” Night asked Sam Mercer.

  It wasn’t common for Night to ask Sam creative questions. But he needed someone to turn to, and Sam was there. “Is Costner too graceful for this role? You believe Paul as a building super. But this is a super who is not a super, you know? Waiting like this for an answer from Paul, it makes me wonder. Maybe he just doesn’t want to do it.”

  Night went outside, collar up against the wind, alone with about the biggest casting question of his career.

  One of the things Sam did for Night was have the conversations Night didn’t want to have or didn’t know how to have. He protected Night from some of the harsher realities of moviemaking: negotiating with union bosses, landlords, agents, managers. Sam was a fixer. He could say, to anyone, “Are you in or are you out?” He didn’t brag to Night about his methods. He did the opposite. He protected Night from them.

  Several days after Night had asked Sam about Kevin Costner, Night got a call from Paul Giamatti.

  “Dude, I am so Lady,” Giamatti said. This was in March, five months before shooting was supposed to begin, an eon in moviemaking.

  “Stop it,” Night said playfully.

  “I’m telling ya—I am.”

  Night didn’t need to ask Paul what had taken him so long. The thing was, he was in. And for a moment Night was healed.

  Every time Night said Paul Giamatti’s name, my heart raced. I had first met Paul over twenty years earlier, when he was a s
kinny, curly-haired impish high school student wearing red high-top Chuck Taylor Converse basketball shoes, which even then was a retro look. We were briefly neighbors when I had my first job after college, working as a year-round reporter on Martha’s Vineyard. I knew Paul only enough to say hi in the summer of 1983 and the summer of ’84. But for those summers I knew his parents well. And there was Night talking about Paul with such fervor all those years later.

  The Giamattis—Bart and Toni and their three children—had a summer home on the Vineyard, on a little hill in the woods. Their modest rancher was separated by ten yards of crabgrass from the one I lived in. Our other neighbor, John Farrar, was the EMT who had pulled Mary Jo Kopechne’s body out of Ted Kennedy’s 1967 Oldsmobile. Bart and Toni and I were all fascinated by a peculiar book, for which Farrar was a source, called Teddy Bare, a diatribe by Zad Rust, who called bullshit on every claim Ted Kennedy made about the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Bart and Toni loved the peculiar. The kids I didn’t know about.

  Bart was the baseball commissioner when he died of a heart attack in 1989 in his house on Martha’s Vineyard, eight days after kicking Pete Rose out of baseball. He was fifty-one. Paul Giamatti, newly graduated from Yale, was in the house at the time. So was Toni. The timing of his death was not a coincidence. There were other serious underlying health issues, but the matter of Mr. Rose, as Bart politely referred to the tsuris wrought by Rose’s gambling problems, killed him.

  In Sideways, when Paul’s character goes to his mother’s house and steals money from her bureau, there are a dozen or so family pictures on top of it. They’re movie props. But one of the photos shows Paul standing with his father. It’s a graduation snap, happy and real, on the screen for maybe a second. When the picture came into view, Christine says, I gasped. Bart was a seminal figure to me as a kid out of college. In a different way, Toni was, too. Some years after Bart died, I wrote a play about him. It had a brief run in a small theater. And nine years later, there was his son telling my new subject, “Dude, I am so Lady.”

  My minor link to Paul, I mentioned it only in passing to Night, and I mention it here in the interest of disclosure and for another reason. Early one day in preproduction, when Paul met Night in New York City for a wig fitting, I was surprised that Paul recognized me immediately. He knew nothing about my being around, and we hadn’t seen each other in twenty-one years. (“My memory for faces is scary,” he said later.) Paul was bearded and schlumpy and endearing. I saw him and thought of my struggling twentysomething self; Paul’s theater-loving parents; the unlikely path of Paul’s career; the circular nature of life. I was beginning to understand what Night meant when he said there are no coincidences.

  As soon as she moved to New York, Cindy Cheung realized it was where she was meant to be. She felt that when she was first living in Queens and more so when she moved to Manhattan.

  For two years, she worked side jobs that let her continue to act. She worked as a cocktail waitress, although she knew nothing about liquor. (People would ask for a Glenfiddich, and she would say, “Glen who?”) She worked as a hostess at an Italian restaurant where the manager instructed her to seat the old people in the back. She worked at a travel agency that catered to old people, and once she called somebody to follow up on a recently mailed brochure only to be told the intended recipient had died. She had a back-office job at Prada where she was the one person who didn’t speak Italian, resulting in the misfiling of many order slips.

  But all the while, she continued to act. She needed people to hear her. She went to workshops, she performed for free, she attended readings for new plays.

  Cindy and a group of Asian-American actor friends founded a group called Mr. Miyagi’s Theatre Company. On rented stages, they did a revue of scenes from the collected works of John Hughes: snippets from The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink and Sixteen Candles. People found their way to it, even after the group started charging five dollars a head.

  Then Cindy performed in an off-off-Broadway play called Masha No Home, in which she played a Korean-American wife. D.J.R. Bruckner from The New York Times found his way to it and wrote: “Samantha Quan as Masha and Cindy Cheung as Annabell have the big roles, and they do them proud.” He said Cindy was “incendiary” and “explosively funny.” Somebody was hearing her.

  In their next outing, Cindy and her Mr. Miyagi’s Theatre Company accomplices wrote and performed a sketch comedy piece called Sides: The Fear Is Real, about the auditioning process. People found their way to that one, too, including a reviewer for The Wall Street Journal, Terry Teachout. He wrote: “Collectively written by the six terrific Asian-American performers who make up Mr. Miyagi’s Theatre Company, Sides is a zany catalogue of everything that can possibly go wrong at an audition…Catch it now and in five years you can tell your friends how you first saw Sekiya Billman, Cindy Cheung, Paul Juhn, Peter Kim, Hoon Lee and Rodney To back when they were still struggling actors.”

  Two people had noticed her. It helped her keep going.

  When Night returned from Los Angeles with a deal for Lady in place, he started hiring people quickly. His first hire was a famous cinematographer, Chris Doyle, who had shot one of Night’s favorite movies, In the Mood for Love. Actually, to say Chris Doyle shot it doesn’t do him justice. He shrouded it in lusty carnal darkness. Night wanted that look for Lady. Night didn’t want a director of photography who would just execute the shots Night already had in his head. He wanted Doyle to bring him options. That was what Night told him when he hired him. It was a risky move. Night knew Doyle could make or break him.

  While Night was making his preproduction hires, Paula was preparing for her June wedding, after which she would be leaving Night to open her own gift shop, something she had wanted to do for years. Night was worried about her departure. Paula wasn’t a student of film, but she knew exactly how her lactose-intolerant boss liked his hot chocolate. Paula was training her successor, a Bryn Mawr College senior named Maddie, who was something close to an authority on Japanese black-and-white horror movies, among other genres. Night was amazed by what she knew.

  Night was starting anew. He was bringing in many new people for Lady, more than he normally did. Betsy Heimann, who so expertly chose the leather-and-polyester wardrobes for Quentin Tarantino in Pulp Fiction, was hired as the costume designer. Martin Childs, an Englishman who had designed the sets for Shakespeare in Love, was hired as the production manager. Night hired Mary Cybulski, David Mamet’s longtime script supervisor, a sort of accountant of words. Night liked that they all worked often on non-studio movies. They could think for themselves.

  Night brought in a bunch of old hands, too. Brick Mason as his storyboard artist, the person who turns the screenplay into an elaborate comic strip before it becomes a movie. Barbara Tulliver as his editor, the director’s bullshit detector. Jimmy Mazzola, formerly Woody Allen’s prop man, as property master, in charge of the things the actors handle. Bill O’Leary, a veteran New York gaffer, as the lighting chief. Night the working writer was in hibernation. Now he was the bossman, always decisive in public. He was running a company that was growing bigger daily.

  “I have a need to lead,” Night said. Typically, writers are not leaders. The fringe is their home turf. But Night had no trouble being in the center of a swirl. Even when he was between movies, he had lots of people on his payroll: Franny the driver, Michael the cook, Dana the nanny, plus a farm manager, various gardeners and handymen, at least one assistant and often two. Then there was a steady stream of people hired on an as-needed basis, which meant close to full-time, including architects, landscape designers, sound engineers, pool people and security people and horse people, a piano teacher, a projectionist. There was always somebody at the entrance gate at the farm, waiting to be buzzed in. Night did not live by Thoreau’s maxim: Simplify, simplify.

  His days had become much more scheduled and mechanized, with lunches and job interviews and conference calls and visits to possible shooting locations. He was still thinking
about the script constantly, tinkering with it when he could. But there were no more afternoons whiled away in front of the computer. He was in preproduction now. He had become an evangelist for his movie, constantly defining it for people who had not read the script. He’d say, “It’s a fairy tale.” Or “It’s about a dream.” Or “It’s an epic love story!” He was a one-man marketing department. In preproduction, he spoke often of the “tone of the movie” and how each person he hired would need to influence the tone; he said that the movie would succeed only if he got a hundred tonal decisions correct, or a thousand or ten thousand.

  His preproduction months were March through August 22, the first day of shooting. All he needed was someone to play his sister, someone to play Lin Lao Choi, a place to shoot the movie, a way to make the mechanical scrunt move like the bastard child of a wild boar and a hyena…His lists, which he kept on long narrow cards left over from The Village, were endless. He had good days, when the mental picture of Nina wouldn’t visit him once all day, and more bad ones, when he couldn’t run her out.

  Don’t get it; don’t get it; don’t get it.

  Night couldn’t tell if it was his voices, spurring him on like a mocking coach, or if Nina was saying something he would someday find to be true, that Lady really did not make sense.

  Cindy Cheung left nothing to chance. She spent twenty dollars a month, under the table, to get a daily e-mail intended for agents and talent scouts, which gave her a one-day jump on the major plays, movies, and TV shows being cast in New York. She scanned the report daily, looking for the word Chinese. Day after day there was nothing. Then one day in spring 2005 she saw a character breakdown, submitted by Doug Aibel, the likes of which she had never seen before. It was for a Warner Bros. movie to be directed by M. Night Shyamalan.