Night, driven by Franny, left his home for New York early that June day. His first stop was in Tribeca, his adopted neighborhood in New York. He had recently bought a large two-story apartment there that he was rehabbing. It was on a sliver of a street, a holdover from old New York. Night believed in real estate as an investment, although he would never word it that way. He bought houses that he and Bhavna and the girls would use. They planned to spend four or five weeks a year in the Tribeca apartment, plus assorted overnight stays. When Night arrived at the apartment that June morning, there were thirty workers there, laying down floors and installing sound systems and hanging art, getting the apartment ready for a large family housewarming party that would celebrate Bhavna’s earning her doctorate. The place was in a state of chaos, with sawdust on the floor and several languages being spoken at once and different heads of different construction departments vying for Night’s attention. But through the clamor, Night could see what the apartment would look like in five days, on the night of Bhavna’s party. That was one of Night’s skills.
From the apartment, Franny drove Night to Nobu, a chic Tribeca restaurant, to meet Bob Balaban. The actor—a tiny, trim, nearly bald man wearing pressed pants and a pressed shirt on a hot day—was waiting for Night outside, by the front door. He looked stiff. The veteran actor (and author of the charming McGrowl book series) was up for the role of Mr. Farber, the film critic in Lady.
Bob Balaban had recently wrapped Capote, in which he played William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker; he had also been in Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Waiting for Guffman and nearly sixty other movies. His work was known. Typically, a director doesn’t ask an actor with Bob Balaban’s history to audition for a smaller role. What a director could do is have a meeting with such an actor, to gauge interest and chemistry, and that was what Night was planning to do that day at Nobu. But before Night got out of his car, he saw Balaban on the sidewalk and said to himself, Farber! It was just like when he first saw Paul Giamatti. He knew he had his guy.
Balaban knew a limited amount about the role, and over lunch Night told him more. The actor told the director he’d take the role if it wouldn’t give small children recurring nightmares. Right then and there, Night decided he’d let Bob Balaban read the script. Not just the Farber sides but the whole thing. Neither made an explicit commitment to the other over lunch, but that didn’t really matter: They both knew it was a done deal.
Night moved on to his Lin Lao problem. Cindy was already at the Three of Us audition space when Night arrived. Taking Doug’s fashion suggestion literally, Cindy was wearing exactly what she’d worn when she went to Doug’s office to read the script. The building was unusually quiet for a weekday at three o’clock. Night introduced himself to Cindy and said, “How are you?” as if he had known her all his life. He asked if she had any questions.
“Yes, one,” she said. “Does she have any sort of crush on Cleveland?” Cindy thought maybe that would explain why Lin Lao was so willing to give Cleveland books and information.
“No,” Night said. He could have given a five-minute response to that question, or any question about the script, but he limited himself to a single word. She was on a need-to-know basis. She wasn’t in the circle of trust. And with that answer, Cindy, on the spot, had to rethink her approach to the character.
Doug Aibel started reading Cleveland in his neutral way, and Cindy played Lin Lao Choi almost as Annabell from Masha No Home—over the top and heavily accented. She wasn’t throwing it away. Just the opposite. She was extremely loud. If she was an actor who needed to be heard, she was getting heard, likely in the adjoining rooms.
And Night was cracking up from the very first word. He was giggling, he was cackling, he was in hysterics. He sneaked a peak at Doug that said, Is this really as good as I think this is? Something magical was happening.
He had specific requests of Cindy, as if he were shooting the movie that day. “When he says to you, ‘Can you look up the word narf for me?’ you’re surprised that he doesn’t know the word. It’s as if he’s asking you if you know who Little Red Riding Hood is. You’re like How can you not know?”
It didn’t completely compute for Cindy, but she accepted what Night said—after all, he had written it—and she immediately worked in his Red Riding Hood idea.
Later in the script, Lin Lao makes a reference to her mother, saying, “She doesn’t trust Americans. She says they watch too many game shows.” Cindy read it the first time with dripping sarcasm. Night had another suggestion for Cindy there: “Say it like this is a really big problem, watching too many game shows, and that you agree with it.” The second time Cindy recited the line, showing respect for the mother’s considered opinion: Americans really do watch too many game shows. In that tone, Lin Lao hardly seemed American herself. It was completely different.
When they were done with all the funny scenes, Night said to Cindy, “All right, I hate to make you do this, but we’ve got to switch gears here and do the big climactic scene at the end. This is life and death here.”
Cindy immediately became slow and still. She took a deep breath. She took her time. Night no longer was laughing. Like Cindy, he was quiet and still. She could feel that he was letting her affect him. His arms were not crossed, literally or otherwise. She had read once that Night liked to feel the weight of the shaving cream in his hand before shaving, to be really aware of the moment. She felt that during the audition, and it inspired her.
They finished the scene and Night said, “That was beautiful.”
He looked like he wanted to hug her, but he didn’t.
“Would you mind waiting outside for a moment so I can talk to Doug?”
The door closed. “I think she’s really, really good,” Night said.
“I agree,” Doug said.
“I don’t think we’re going to find anybody better.”
He brought Cindy back into the audition room and talked to her.
From the moment he said “How are you?,” Cindy never felt she was in the presence of a celebrity. She imagined that auditioning for Steven Spielberg or Clint Eastwood would be a different experience, that their fame would be overwhelming, that you’d be too nervous about taking up too much of their time to do your best. She felt the opposite from Night. She sensed that he was completely absorbed by the moment and had no expectations about what would happen next.
“Tell me about yourself,” Night said casually. “Tell me about you and acting.”
Cindy told Night a brief version of her odyssey in acting. Her discovery of it as a senior at UCLA, her bouts of depression, her San Francisco years, the near-death of her acting dream, her return to acting through writing her own material.
Night was overwhelmed. Everyone was so certain Lin Lao would be impossible to cast, and yet here was Cindy Cheung, right in front of him, so, so good, sending him a powerful message, that the movie could work, that his faith in it would be rewarded. He could see that Cindy was a kindred spirit.
Night said, “You got the part.”
Cindy Cheung didn’t shriek or cry or do much of anything. She was ecstatic and surprised, but she barely showed it. She hugged Night and Doug.
Night was impressed by her response to the news. It told him that she understood what was happening, that the audition was merely a start. She had gotten the role on merit and faith and work and timing. Not because she had a dream. Not because she prayed. Her role in Masha No Home, at forty dollars a night, had everything to do with what happened in the Three of Us audition room on that afternoon in early June. So did the dead lady’s wigs left in the dark San Francisco apartment and the early-morning poetry gigs at the Los Angeles elementary schools and the turning down of the job at the defense contractor and everything else. It had been a long haul already. All it was doing now was continuing. Magic was no substitute for work.
Night told Cindy he had seldom done that, offered a role right on the spot. He had wanted to do it with Haley Joel Osment,
who played the young boy in The Sixth Sense, but he couldn’t because he “didn’t have any clout with Disney then.”
He had said the Disney name, and nothing happened. His day had been going so well—touring the apartment in a construction zone, casting Bob Balaban as Mr. Farber, finding his Lin Lao in the first box he opened—that there were no cracks for Nina to invade. The oval headshots of the troika, the voices helped keep them at bay, this time. It was a constant battle.
Night said to Cindy, “This is good timing. If you had been working in Hollywood all these years, you’d have the same exact seven moves that all the working Hollywood actors have. But you still have your whole range available to you. I think you’re in a perfect place in your life for this to be happening to you.”
Night had wanted to shoot Lady in one cloistered location, a sanctuary of moviemaking, his Eden, where he could block out the intrusions of real-world show business and do his priestly thing. Cindy was a stand-in for the stewardess on the Warner Bros. jet, the one who loved The Notebook so, looking for real life to give her a reason to believe. Night was pulling Cindy out of the fire, that’s how he felt. She was so deserving and so talented. She had done the work and would do the work. She got that it was a long road. Offering her the job, right there on the spot, he hadn’t felt so sure of anything else he had done in a long time.
The money people came in. They always do. Paul Hilepo represented Cindy Cheung, and Sam Mercer represented Blinding Edge Pictures and Warner Bros.
Sam offered $65,000 for the ten-week shoot, the SAG minimum. Bryce Howard had received the SAG minumum for The Village, her first studio lead. Night was paying himself the SAG minimum to play Vick.
It was not close to what Hilepo was looking for. Taking the role would be a big move for Cindy. She would have to quit her stable job, and who knew when she would get acting work again? Nothing much had changed: There still was little work for tall Asian-American actresses. He told Cindy he thought she should get $250,000. Trying to get there, the agent—without revealing his negotiating strategy to Cindy—asked for $1 million.
Sam Mercer was amused and a bit appalled, but he negotiated with Hilepo as if the agent had said something realistic. Mercer went up $10,000 to $75,000. He added a two-room suite in the Ritz-Carlton in Philadelphia for the entire nine-week shoot. And seventy-five dollars a day in meal money.
Hilepo said it wasn’t enough. He knew the bankroll behind Mercer was immense. He knew how much Night wanted Cindy. Night had said it, right there in the Three of Us audition room. In that moment of revelation, Night had given away a lot of bargaining power.
Weeks went by. Cindy asked her agent, “Is Night aware of what’s going on?”
“Don’t worry about that. This is what you pay me for,” Hilepo said. He would get 10 percent of Cindy’s deal. He was doing his job, getting the best payday he could for an actor who had been paying her dues for years. “He’s not going to hold you responsible for any of this. It’s all on the agent.”
Night knew how it worked. Marc Glick and Jeremy Zimmer had just done the same thing for Night with Warner Bros., gotten him the best deal they could with his new studio.
“Oh, no,” Cindy said. “I want him to know. Based on what he said that day at the audition, I would think if he knew what was going on, he’d say, ‘Get it done.’” She wasn’t worried. That day in the audition room, something had changed. Night had guessed that, and he was correct. She knew that if she didn’t work in Night’s movie, something else would soon come through.
Cindy was mistaken about Night: He did know what was going on. And he felt the SAG minimum was a fair rate for an actor with no experience making her first studio movie. Money complicates everything. That day in the audition room, he was certain he had found exactly the right person to play the role. But at $250,000, she was not. There was a number, a dollar figure, at which Night’s belief in Cindy was compromised by the limit of what he was willing to spend, and what he thought was fair. Sam Mercer and Jose would sometimes say to Night, “It’s show business.” They didn’t need to. He understood that. He was an intuitive businessman.
One day in late June, Night said to Sam, “Make them a final offer, and if she doesn’t accept it, we’ll start auditioning again.”
In the audition room, Night had been certain he knew where Cindy was in her life, that there was a reason their lives had intersected when they did. He felt so good about what he had done. But now he realized he had been wrong. The person he thought she was, that person would have jumped right on just to see where the train would go, even at the SAG minimum. Reading people, that’s what Night did. That’s what allowed him to write, to cast, to direct, to lead. But he had misread Cindy, misread the room, that day. He had offered Cindy the chance to be on his team, but it was not enough. Night’s faith in her would not pay Cindy’s bills.
For Night, where there had been assuredness, now there was doubt. Nina was back in his head again. He was all fucked up.
5.
Things were moving fast. A building, the Cove apartment complex, was going up from scratch. The blueprints called for five stories with fifty-seven apartments, plus a pool and a bungalow for the super. It was being built on a derelict lot in Bristol, Pennsylvania, a working-class suburb of Philadelphia. A year earlier the building had existed only in the imagination of a father and his two daughters. Now it was a union bonanza.
Every day brought new people, new questions, new issues. Cindy Cheung was offered $100,000 to play Lin Lao Choi, take-it-or-leave-it, and she took it. Night decided to disassociate her agent’s cheeky salary demands from the actress before him, “for the good of the movie.” That had become a regular theme for him. He talked often of defending the movie, defending actors, defending characters, defending angels. It was exhausting, all this work in the name of defense.
As a decision-maker, Night was at times a willful procrastinator. He’d sometimes say, “Let me wait and see how I feel on the day.” That is, the day the scene would be shot. More often, he was scary fast, a Vegas card-counter knowing when he wants a hit on 17. Once he had Cindy signed on—signified by her head shot going up on Sam Mercer’s office wall—Night quickly settled on an actress to play Lin Lao Choi’s mother. Night hired a tiny Korean-American woman named June Kyoko-Lu, who promptly informed Night that Lin Lao might be a legitimate Chinese or Vietnamese name, but was definitely not a Korean name. Night, just as promptly, came up with a new name for Cindy’s character: Young-Soon Choi. Mary Cybulski, the script supervisor, made certain the next iteration of the script included the name change, with the hyphen.
Mary protected the Lady script, in its every detail. Betsy Heimann, with as many words for brown as Eskimos have for ice, did the same for the movie’s wardrobe. There were zealots everywhere—a wig man who might have put a hairpiece on every last actor, given the chance. These were people immersed in craft and many of them were kings in their departments. Night had brought in all these people to serve his script, and along the way Lady became their movie, too. Only Night belonged to no department. He didn’t have a little crew working under him, but everybody, hundreds of people, in competing departments. He talked all day, hugged often, laughed easily, gossiped occasionally, and at the end of the day, he looked exhausted and alone. The best sleep he got was in the car when Franny was driving him home.
Night made his movies near his home because he could and because he wanted to sleep in his own bed and see his wife and girls, and because he could claim Philadelphia for himself. No one else was making movies in and around Philadelphia on a regular basis.
Between the city and the suburbs and the farmland beyond it, greater Philadelphia had everything Night needed. All three had character, the city most particularly, with its peculiar evening light, yellowish and dark, with short midnight shadows in the old graveyards in the courtyards beyond Independence Hall. Night liked the way John Landis shot the city in Trading Places and how Peter Weir shot it in Witness and especially the way J
ohn Avildsen—or should the credit go to Mr. Sylvester Stallone?—had shot it in Rocky, one of Night’s favorite movies. The city is gray and gorgeous in Rocky. The rotting fruit on the streets of the Italian Market. The blunt yellow rock of the Art Museum’s outer walls, an impenetrable fortress of good taste, not built for anybody named Balboa or Shyamalan or Duwayne, unless they were cafeteria workers or guards or something. What a movie.
Night wanted to shoot Lady in the city, but there were logistical problems to every building he considered, namely live tenants. Still, he held on to the idea that he could shoot in the Philadelphia city limits.
Night had shot much of The Sixth Sense and Unbreakable in Philadelphia, and he and Bhavna had a charitable foundation that helped working families buy homes in the city, with the idea that home ownership could improve blocks, schools, and lives. Dealing with city bureaucrats, right up to and including the mayor, had triggered so much headache and heartache that Bhavna and Night often wondered if the program was worth it. But they saw tangible results, and were committed to the program.
Philadelphia had a look all its own: glass high-rises and sagging warehouses and row homes and brown-brick churches with spires that have stood since Benjamin Franklin’s time, all practically abutting. But the best chance to shoot in the city was to build a building in the vast Philadelphia Navy Yard, even though it was near the Philadelphia airport, which meant problems with jet traffic. There was back-and-forth between suits from the mayor’s office and Sam Mercer, even a discussion of rerouting jet traffic. But when Night heard the particulars he decided it was too risky, which was why he was led, reluctantly, to a thirty-five acre fenced-in industrial site called the Bristol Commerce Center, formerly a 3M plant, near the intersection of I-95 and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, on a street that only sounded quaint, Green Lane. Night had stipulated that the set be within forty-five minutes of his house, and Night carefully timed the length of the trip when Franny drove him there the first time: forty-three minutes.
The Man Who Heard Voices Page 13