The investigation of Rose, overseen by Bart, had been methodical and cautious (and proved to be correct). But all through it, Bart felt that he was on trial. On the August day in 1989 when Bart banished Rose from baseball, he was hanged in effigy in Cincinnati. Even though he had been a national figure for over twenty years, during the Rose matter, Bart endured a different level of scrutiny and fame.
“The actor Tony Curtis once told me that fame is an occupation in itself, that it is a separate thing,” Bob Dylan wrote in Chronicles, a book that was popular on the Bristol set. “And Tony couldn’t be more right.” Some people are built for fame. Night was. People tried to sue him for this and that, usually claiming that Night had stolen material. Night knew what it was, grifters looking for pain-and-suffering handouts. Expensive lawyers sent them packing. There were crazy rumors about him on weird websites. Annoying, sometimes very annoying, but nothing Night couldn’t handle. Bart had been built differently. He liked being a public figure when it was on his terms. But there’s another kind of fame, fame as a beast you can’t control, and Bart got that treatment only because the great Peter Edward Rose had a gambling problem. Paul watched it unfold from Seattle, where he was starting his acting career.
He didn’t want to be a movie star, not in the conventional sense. Michael Caine wasn’t really a movie star, he was a working actor, and Paul was filled with admiration for him. “The whiff of the hack,” Paul said of him, whiff being the key word. It was praise. It meant this: You took a job, you worked it hard and well, you had a good time doing it, you deposited your check, you moved on. It takes a certain genius to make things that simple.
When Bart was a professor he was a rabble-rouser, shooting spitballs at the pompous and the stodgy, in touch with his inner wise guy. He was all mirth. Even as president of Yale, you could see Bart’s wink: the raised right eyebrow, the twisted lips above the goatee. He was having a good time. And then he took another step up the ladder. Paul saw it all—the burden of ambition, the joys of mirth—and learned from it all. For Paul, mirth won. Touched by a crappy angel!
When you saw all the actors sitting together in the ballroom at the Rittenhouse, or when you saw Sarita or Bryce or Cindy or Paul hanging out in the production office in Bristol, eating bagels and throwing darts and playing Ping-Pong and waiting for rehearsals to begin, it became obvious how the movie was cast. All the actors were underworked, in different ways. Bryce was finicky about the directors she would work for. Paul had never been asked to carry a high-profile studio movie. Cindy had never been in a studio movie at all, and Sarita often went to India for work, daughter in tow. On and on it went. They were all character actors, really.
None of the actors was jaded. All of them wanted to be there. Nobody was there just for the paycheck. They all had a work ethic. There was not a true star among them. To the degree that Paul was, he was a reluctant star. He had no entourage. Nobody to spruce up his hair or select his shirt or entertain him at dinner. On weekends he commuted home to his wife and son in Brooklyn. He would have taken the train home, or driven himself, except the teamsters required him to have his own car and driver. He resisted the treatment where he could. When producers offered him an assistant, he passed. He didn’t need somebody to make dinner reservations for him. His thing was to walk right in. He needed to travel light. If he let people treat him like a star, he’d lose the thing that made him good.
Night didn’t have that problem. Lady would be marketed as The Village had been, as a movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. He was the movie’s star. Ever since Unbreakable, the selling of Night’s movies had been shrewdly efficient. Whenever he was selling his current movie, he was selling the next one, too. If you sell one movie on Bruce Willis’s name and the next on Mel Gibson’s, you’re starting over each time. When the Lady marketing campaign was being planned at Warner Bros., before the first frame of the movie was shot, Night was always in mind.
The actors treated the script like a text. They parsed it for work and for sport. In Cindy’s audition, and during the read-through and at rehearsals, there was one consistently perplexing moment. It comes early in the script, when Paul asks Cindy, “Could you look up the w-word narf for me?”
In the early versions of the script, the response is what you might expect: “Why would I know this nonsensical word?” But in the sale script and the shooting script, Young-Soon’s response is “It is a bedtime story, Mr. Heep.”
At a rehearsal, Paul said to Cindy, “It’s weird. Very strange. Here’s this word, nobody’s ever heard it before, and now the guy goes up to some chick sitting by a pool and says, ‘Can you look up the word narf for me?’ And she’s like ‘Of course. Yeah, sure. I was waiting for you to ask.’ You know? It’s amazing. Very strange. I mean it’s cool. Very cool. But amazing.” But Paul didn’t ask Night to explain it. Night was the writer, and Paul knew how much thought the writer had put into each word. Night had chosen the name Cleveland because he felt people would underestimate somebody with that name. Paul figured Night must have had his reasons for Young-Soon’s matter-of-fact response, and he was correct. Anyway, asking pointed questions, that wasn’t how Paul worked. Cindy was comfortable asking direct questions, but Night had already told her how to play the line at her audition. (When you hear narf, think Little Red Riding Hood; how can you not know what it means?) If it worked for Night, she’d make it work for her. It was his script.
Night described that poolside exchange as “the most important scene in the movie.” (It was an ever-shifting phrase for him.) When I asked him about the narf line, he gave me a five-minute answer. He could go for five minutes on any script question. He said that when Cleveland first says the word narf, the moviegoer is hearing a new word, but Young-Soon is not. In the casualness of her response, we’re supposed to take a step into her world, popcorn bags on our laps. He had thought it all out. I’m sure there are astronauts who think like that, mapping out every possibility, but in my experience only Tiger Woods has that move. Tiger can play every shot in a tournament in his head, on a practice tee, before the event begins. He and Night both had not only intelligence, but discipline. If it was Eastern or not, for either of them, I did not know, but it was impressive. Sometimes, when Night was explaining the genesis of a line to the actors, they would take notes in the white spaces of their scripts, as if Night were a college professor and the material would be covered on the next test.
One morning at Bristol, Sarita and Paul and Bryce had all arrived early for rehearsal. Night was not there yet. Bryce said cheerfully, “Do you want to read lines?”
“Yes!” Sarita said.
“Yeah, sure,” Paul said with limited enthusiasm. He was sipping a black coffee.
Bryce immediately suggested they turn to scene 53, page 67. It was a scene that had all three of them in it. She knew every page of the script.
Sarita turned to it. “But you don’t have any lines here,” she said. Bryce’s work in the scene was all pantomime.
“Oh, let’s not do it, then,” Bryce said. She had her breakfast beside her, a murky-looking drink in a mason jar. “It’s all about me!”
It was the kind of joke she never made around Night. She treated him as if he were a god, responsible for her birth as an actress, and she was often nervous in his presence, like Moses before the burning bush. Bryce once said to me, “When I’m around Night, I feel like I’m my inauthentic self.”
But this morning, there was no Night. The three actors, with no parental supervision, before nine A.M., were working all on their own. The hardest-working people in show business.
In the scene, Cleveland is trying to learn more from Story about the rules of the narf world. Story speaks only in hand gestures, as if playing charades, and these are interpreted by Anna.
“I find this scene to be the hardest thing in the whole movie,” Paul said. It was a long scene, six pages in the script, all exposition. (Nina had said to Night, “There are so many rules!” Night answered, “I know. I wa
s thinking of putting in more.”) Everybody else worked off a fastened script, but Paul carried a short stack of individual sheets, though he seldom needed them. Sometimes he’d curl the sheets into a tube and shove it into his back right pocket.
They were doing their work when Night arrived. Bryce said, “This scene is so hard.”
Night nodded sympathetically and said, “This is a scene that can fall apart very quickly.”
He made a few quick adjustments. He put Sarita on her knees, her lower legs underneath her, as if she were praying. “Story’s talking to you in sign language, and you’re getting more and more fluent in her language,” Night said. They did it again, and it was better. Bryce suggested another try, but Night said it was time to move on. Professor Shyamalan was in. Another day was under way.
During the rehearsals, particularly after the read-through, in the period leading up to the first day of shooting, an intimacy was developing between the actors and Night. He was being accepted as an actor himself. There was storytelling, much chitchat, revelations here and there. Bill Irwin did not own a TV. One of the smokers, Joe Reitman, was dating Annie Duke, the star poker player. The head smoker, Jared Harris, was the son of the actor Richard Harris. On it went.
Night had assembled a group of actors with no bombast. They were a study in self-deprecation.
Bryce said to Paul one afternoon, “Have you noticed rehearsals move much more quickly when I don’t have any lines?”
“There’s a reason for that,” Paul answered. “I have all the lines in the movie. ‘Vick, how long have you been writing your book? Wait, wait. Don’t tell me. Six months!’”
One day they were blocking a scene—who stands where and when—and Bryce said to Paul, “Did you know my right side is my better side?”
“Really. How can you know such a thing?”
“I noticed something going on with my face, and I asked my father about it, and he said, ‘Oh, yeah. I’ve known that for years. Your right side is more chiseled. Your left side is sort of rounded.’”
“Wow,” Paul said. His constant state of astonishment made people comfortable around him. “I wish my father would have told me I have a better side. A chiseled side. Man. My face is a balloon.”
Night, falling in with his actors, sometimes assumed that self-mocking tone, even though it wasn’t his natural voice. He told about his first day of shooting The Sixth Sense, a kid director working with a big star, Bruce Willis. “I’m setting up a shot, and Bruce is in his trailer. Somebody comes up to me and says, ‘Bruce wants to know what’s taking so long.’ Somebody else comes up and says, ‘Harvey Weinstein’s on the phone. He says he has to speak to you now.’ And I’m like ‘Oh shit—what do I do?’”
In preproduction, the hair and makeup people would try out different looks on the actors and take pictures, so they would have records. Sometimes Night would sit with them and thumb through magazines. In high school, it had always been work for Night to be social, trying to fit in, but now he was at the center of it all. He was reading a story in Glamour about Tom Cruise’s girlfriend, Katie Holmes. “It says here that she’s an ordinary girl from Ohio who has become Hollywood’s hottest actress. Is that actually true? Because I’m a Hollywood director, and I’ve never thought about her for anything.” Then he said, not with disbelief but because he wanted to know, “Who reads Glamour?”
The conversation went from Katie Holmes to Reese Witherspoon to Kirsten Dunst to Charlize Theron to Angelina Jolie. A hair lady was showing Night a picture of how he might wear his hair as Vick, but Night shook his head and said, “Too Bay City Rollers.” She knew exactly what that meant: too 1975. Somebody said, “How ’bout that Angelina Jolie? She rode right through that incest rumor thing. Looked like it might slow her down, but she went straight damn through it.” Something having to do with the actress kissing her brother at a long-ago Oscars. Night went back to Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise. He was fascinated by the hold Scientology had on the actor. He asked, “Who is L. Ron Hubbard?”
He was often funny that way, appealingly snide. In his office one day, Night was looking at a draft of a Warner Bros. press release that would announce the first day of shooting. Night read it out loud to a little group: “‘A journey into the heart of the human condition, exploring the epic beauty that can be found in the everyday and the extraordinary things we can achieve when we strive to find our purpose in life.’ Why don’t they just write ‘Don’t come see this movie’?”
But Night knew you had to think about marketing from the beginning. One day in his office before shooting began, a small group gathered, and Night showed a mock Lady trailer he had made, one that would go to Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov and some of the Warner Bros. marketing people. Technically, it was a mock teaser. About six months before a big movie goes out, movie audiences start seeing teasers, vague shorts designed to plant the idea of the movie in your head. Much closer to the release date, the trailer goes out, meant to give you a glimpse of the movie and make you want to see it.
Before showing the mock teaser, Night said, “If I could do The Village again, I’d market it as a romance. I’d lead with the romance in the trailer, then give them the scare at the end. I told the Warner Brothers guys they could bill Lady in the Water as a romance, and they were like What? But Titanic is the number one movie of all time. And it’s a romance.”
He turned off the light, Jose hit a button, and Brick’s drawings from the storyboards filled a large-screen TV. A moody piercing violin solo came up. The pictures depicted Cleveland at the pool with a flashlight in hand. Cleveland carrying Story. Cleveland writing in his journal. There was no voice-over, only a tenor singing a snippet of a modern opera in Italian. Then, near the end, in a simple typeface, were the words: Cleveland Heep’s life is about to change. Forever. Followed by: M. Night Shyamalan’s Lady in the Water. A Bedtime Story.
You wouldn’t think a one-minute movie made with still drawings could be so beautiful. Where the script was cryptic at times, the teaser was only simple and poetic and gorgeous. Bryce said, “People are going to go to the movies to watch Dukes of Hazzard II or whatever, and that teaser’s going to be the most memorable thing they see.” It seemed like a true statement. The teaser captured the particular kind of love at the heart of the story.
“I think it’s great,” said Sam Mercer, the producer. “It shows the true tone of the piece.” By that he meant romance, of an odd sort, over creepy suspense.
You wondered how the real teaser, with the actual actors and the Chris Doyle cinematography, could be any better, to say nothing of the movie. If the movie turned out to be as good as that teaser, Night would have made something special. Everybody in the room felt that. Night was feeling exceptionally good.
Everyone in the room cleared out except Jose. Something was bothering him.
Night and Jose had known each other a long time, since before The Sixth Sense. They had met in a karate class and had become good friends before Night hired him. Originally, he had been Night’s assistant. On Lady, Jose was the associate producer. It can be hard when friends work together and there’s an imbalance in power, more so when the boss is seven years younger. In style and temperament, Night and Jose were totally different. Jose’s feet were firmly on the ground, and Night lived for the esoteric. But there were things that only Jose could tell Night, because he’d been there when nobody else was. He had credibility that way. He used his influence judiciously.
“The Village, that idea about selling it as a romance?” Jose said.
“Yeah?” Night said quickly.
“I know a lot of people who said if they had known it was a romance, they never would’ve gone.”
He had wanted to remind Night that Titanic was first sold as a disaster movie and that the teaser for Lady needed hints of scariness and suspense to keep Night’s core fans coming back. But Night’s impatience was palpable, and Jose stopped short.
Night was overcome with anger and loneliness and despair. He was on a high aft
er showing his mock teaser, and now it was gone. It was the same sentiment he had felt with Barbara after the read-through: I have failed; I am alone. In his anger and frustration, Night pounced on Jose’s “they never would’ve gone” and said, “Don’t make decisions based on those people, or you’ll be working at Burger King.”
Jose did a lot of things Night never knew about. Sarita had mentioned that she liked a certain dish at the read-through dinner and Jose arranged to have a quart of it sent to her. He created goodwill. Burger King? Jose, hurt and angry, walked out of the office without saying another word; Night was left sitting in his big swivel chair behind his big director’s desk, and now he was truly all alone.
Night wanted to edit the movie on film. Nobody was doing that anymore except Steven Spielberg. Studio movies were still shot on film. (Every so often a movie shot on videotape, like The Blair Witch Project, slipped through the cracks and into multiplexes.) But they were all edited digitally, on a computer, which allowed a director to look at dozens of different takes in rapid succession, with clicks of a button. Nobody was splicing anymore. The term cutting room, in a literal sense, had become an anachronism. But Night wondered why the movies that made the deepest impression on him—The Birds, E.T., Lolita, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Godfather, Jaws, The Exorcist, Being There—were all edited on film, as all films were until the early 1990s. Night wondered if writers wrote better on a typewriter or by longhand than they did on a computer. If writing is rewriting, as E. B. White said, it was certainly easier to rewrite on a computer. But Night thought “easier” was an unworthy goal. He imagined writers (screenwriters included) thought better and longer before committing something to paper in the days when rewriting was clumsy and time-consuming and expensive. He argued that writing was not actually rewriting but thinking. Editing on film was like writing on a typewriter. Editing on film forced a director to think more about the essence of the scene and how the scenes—141 of them in Lady in the Water—add up to a movie.
The Man Who Heard Voices Page 18