The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  Sam Mercer and Barbara Tulliver were both wary of editing on film. There were reasons the whole movie industry—except Spielberg—had gone to the computer. Everybody else was saying that editing on a computer was faster, cheaper, better. Night would acknowledge only the first two, faster and cheaper.

  “David Mamet,” Night said to Barbara. She had edited eight of his movies. Mamet had switched to editing on a computer to save money. Compared to Night’s budgets, Mamet’s budgets were loose change. “He writes on a typewriter, right?” Like a good lawyer, Night knew the answers to his questions. “You keep talking about downtime for me. I’m not worried about it. I’ll use that time to get a cup of coffee and think.” Night was not actually a coffee drinker—he was wired enough without it—but he was making a point.

  Sam said, “If you want to edit on film, it’s going to be expensive.” To edit on film, Spielberg needed a team of seven editors. To edit on a computer, typically on a system called Avid, you could do it with four. More editors meant a bigger payroll and the need for more space. After a movie is shot, editing typically takes place at an editing studio, but Lady would be edited in Night’s converted barn at the farm. Night said he could make the space for the extra editors. He was ready to move the Ping-Pong table if that was necessary.

  “You’re talking to me like I’ve never edited on film before,” Night said to him. He felt with Sam then as he had felt with Jose after watching the teaser. Sam wasn’t honoring what Night wanted to be: an old-school director who really believed the old ways were better. “I learned how to edit on film at NYU. I edited my first movie on film. What I’m telling you is that I’m willing to sacrifice convenience for meaning. I’m telling you I’d rather walk to the restaurant than drive, because you remember things along the way when you’re walking. You keep talking about how frustrated I’ll be, waiting. Last couple times, I never left the editing room. I want to get out of the room. I want to see the scene in my head first.”

  Every time he had to fight for himself—with Barbara, with Jose, now with Sam—he was left feeling all alone. Maybe it sounds like Night needed a yes-man, but Night would tell you that wasn’t it. He needed somebody who could give him what Nina took away that night at Lacroix. He needed someone who could help him drive out the doubt.

  In preproduction, there were weekly meetings with all the department heads. The meetings always grew bigger and longer as the first day of shooting got closer. There would be reports from the stunt coordinator and the transportation chief and the editor and the prop master, all of the many departments in the surprisingly regimented business of making a movie. Surprising because, at its core, it’s a creative business. The impetus for the whole enterprise comes from a writer. As business models go, that’s pretty damn shaky. And in this case, the writer was the boss, and the boss was in a frail place.

  There was always some tense area, somebody behind on something, often construction-related, usually because of permit requirements or the intense summer heat or a delivery failure or equipment malfunction, the stuff of everyday life. Rather than make unrealistic promises, people would lower expectations, and Night would get frustrated. As a boss, his standards were high, sometimes unrealistically so. If you had taken the gig expecting just another job, it was the wrong place to be.

  There’s a show-business axiom, attributed to W. C. Fields, that says you should never work with kids or animals, and Night had both in Lady. He was struggling to find the right child actors partly because he wanted to hire local kids, which meant fewer experienced actors to choose from. For his animals, Night wasn’t sure what to do. After his bad experience with the computer-made alien at the end of Signs, he was determined not to go down that road again for his scrunt in Lady. He was thinking about putting a dog in a scrunt outfit but was convinced that a mechanical creature not only would be more practical, it would work better visually, too. Then there was an animal scene with monarch butterflies. Butterflies are hard to work with, as they don’t readily take direction. The script required a butterfly to land on white-haired Mrs. Bell, played by Mary Beth Hurt.

  At a production meeting, Night was going around the room when he got to Jimmy Mazzola, his prop man. Because an actor was going to touch a butterfly, it was by definition a prop, so the butterflies fell to Jimmy. Night knew that Jimmy had developed, for other movies, a mechanical butterfly operated by remote control, but Night was worried about how a mechanical butterfly would look on Mrs. Bell’s arm in close-up. Night used few close-ups, so the shot would come under particular scrutiny. Jimmy was called upon to give his report on the state of Lady props. You had to be manic about detail to be a good property master. Jimmy was working on a flashlight for Cleveland Heep that would work underwater; a crossword puzzle with boxes big enough for the camera to pick up; an authentic Philadelphia public-transportation bus that would appear in the background. Scores of other things. This morning Jimmy didn’t bother with any of that. When called upon for his state-of-the-props report, he uncupped his beefy hands, and out came a real monarch butterfly, flying up toward the fluorescent lights. “I got hundreds more—and a guy who can harness them and get ’em to go wherever you want!”

  Night watched the butterfly with astonished glee. Jimmy was bringing honor to himself and joy to Night and reminding everybody in the room of the power of surprise and the magic of moviemaking. Night had failed to inspire Jeff Robinov at the read-through, Barbara Tulliver after it, Jose Rodriguez with the teaser, Sam Mercer with the idea of editing on film. But Jimmy he was reaching. He was inspiring Jimmy, and Jimmy was inspiring him.

  Night organized and played in a weekly basketball game, often four-on-four, full-court, in a sweltering school gym. The group would play for close to three hours, with few breaks, and Night was seldom winded. He was the commissioner of these evenings, and he made up the teams in a reasonably evenhanded way, although his team won more often than not. The other players worked with computers or sold things, they had regular jobs, and they did not treat Night as an artiste. They hacked at him and got in his face. Nobody ever talked about work. They played three or four games—sometimes five—to eleven, one point for a regular basket, two points for anything from the normal three-point range. Night ran all night long.

  Of any player, Night took winning and losing by far the most seriously. He was like that in all games. He was a good Ping-Pong player, and if he could hold a fledgling player to seven points, it pleased him. But basketball was his main sport. At age thirty-five, he played like a starting guard on a decent suburban high school team. He dribbled well, ran well, played aggressively on defense, could get off a shot in traffic. His passing game was not a strength.

  One evening Night’s team lost the first two games, won the third, and was leading the fourth game 9–2. The game got tied, and Night made an urgent plea to his teammates: “Let’s see if there’s any manhood left in us—c’mon!” It was the same voice he had used with his cousins years earlier, trying to get them to will the cup into moving. But Night himself missed a fastbreak layup that would have been a game winner. Awful. The shot was one he’d make ten times out of ten if he was just horsing around. It looked like performance anxiety.

  After the game, Night was analyzing what had happened, as if it mattered. “I get so agenda-driven,” he said. “I start thinking about how much I want to win the game instead of just getting into the flow of the game.” For him, it did matter. Why else do it?

  A couple of nights before the first day of shooting, Night had invited everybody working on the movie—the actors, the teamsters, the caterers, Chris Doyle, everybody—to a screening of one of his favorite movies, The Wizard of Oz. He had rented a theater at a big mall multiplex with sixteen screens and sent out paper invitations. Paul had asked Night, “Can I bring a friend?”

  Night wanted a crowd. Kids were welcome, spouses were welcome, Paul’s friend was welcome. Bryce came with her fiancé. Night sat with Bhavna and the girls and several of his cousins. But attendance wa
s poor, and Night was devastated. He wanted the cast and crew to think of Lady as the world thought of Oz, as something magical, but the message wasn’t getting out. Chris Doyle didn’t come, Paul didn’t come. Only about twenty people showed up. Night blamed the turnout on the fact that he hadn’t been involved enough in getting the invitations out. He hadn’t put his stamp on it. Looking at the nearly empty auditorium, Night felt like a preacher with nobody to preach to.

  Night hadn’t seen the movie in a long time. Its lessons, this time, seemed odd to him. That the most important thing in life is not how much love you give but how much you get? The Scarecrow has no brain but becomes a genius because a wizard grants him a phony degree? But Night still found the movie to be powerful.

  A trio of misfits comes together and helps a little girl get home—it’s a win-win. Night hoped to do about the same in Lady. The residents of the Cove come to the aid of a creature called Story who’s trying to get back home. They help her and she helps them. The whole thing may be a dream, or not. There’s not a single profane word in Oz (which would surely get a PG rating today: scary themes; melting witch; homosexual innuendo). Neither was there any cursing in Lady, not even from the smokers. Most significantly, the movie was about faith, about what you can achieve if you believe. Dorothy is going to get herself home, one way or another. Lady dealt with the same thing. But that the opportunity to see a pristine print of The Wizard of Oz, on a big screen, as the guest of your director, that that did not draw a crowd worried Night to his core. He wondered if Nina was right, if nobody cared about the old magic anymore. After the screening he said to me, “I thought being old-school was a good thing for me. After the Oz screening, I wondered if I was even relevant.”

  Night and his little group were watching The Wizard of Oz in Theater 1 on an ordinary Thursday night in August. Up and down the hallway, there were fifteen other screens in action. Across the corridor from Oz was Hustle & Flow, with Terrence Howard playing a budding rapper and reciting the lyrics to a composition in progress that would have sounded out of place in the Land of Oz:

  You ain’t know you fuckin’ with a street nigga

  From the gutta pimp tight slash drug dealer…

  In the next theater was a small group watching one of the acclaimed chase scenes in The Dukes of Hazzard, the tension of the hunt heightened by the threat of motion sickness from a good-looking girl in the backseat. Nearby was a snack stand selling small sodas for four dollars (the real profit centers for the theater owners) and next to that another theater, virtually empty, showing Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo. The theaters were all nearly empty, at the height of the summer blockbuster season.

  The following morning, a Friday in mid-August, there was a final production meeting. Monday would be the first day of shooting. The group had grown so large that the meeting was held in the Bristol Moose Lodge, a mile or two from the set. Chris Doyle, normally so voluble, said almost nothing and wore dark oversize sunglasses, Elton-style. Betsy Heimann gave a terse report on the state of wardrobe and even Night, with his ESP, could not figure out what was bothering them. He asked Jose to find out the specifics, because he knew only the general category. On Monday, shooting would begin on a strange and complicated movie. If you wanted to believe in Night and what he was trying to do, you had to be nervous.

  That afternoon, Night read a story in The Hollywood Reporter, comments from the new Disney CEO, Bob Iger, about the future of the movie in the movie house. The new Disney boss said the time had come for studios to consider releasing movies in movie theaters and on DVD at the same time. “The rules, in terms of consumption, have changed so dramatically,” Iger said.

  That subject infuriated Night. It wasn’t just Iger. Whole sections of the industry were starting to say the same thing. Night was appalled. He wrote scripts and exposed film and edited it with only one thing in mind, ultimately: what the picture would look like to the moviegoer in a movie house. That’s how movies were meant to be seen. That’s where the magic happened.

  His first great movie experience had come in early summer 1981, when Night was still Manoj and not yet eleven. He and a friend had gone to see Raiders of the Lost Ark. Manoj didn’t want to see it—his interest in movies was only ordinary then—and when they arrived, the theater was practically sold out. Manoj and his friend couldn’t get two seats together, and Manoj ended up sitting by himself next to an elderly couple. The old man said something to his wife and left. When he returned, he had a Coke and a popcorn for the skinny little Indian boy sitting next to him. Manoj was awed by the stranger’s generosity. How it affected what happened next, Night never figured out, but the lights went down, the movie came on, and the boy went into a dream state. Three people had a major impact that day on young Manoj Shyamalan: the old man sitting next to him; Harrison Ford, playing Indiana Jones; and the director, Steven Spielberg. From that day on, his life had a path.

  Night couldn’t see straight, reading the news story. Does Bob Iger understand anything about the magic of movies? Now Disney wants to ditch the theater experience in the name of greater profits?

  Night called Jeremy Zimmer. “Can you believe this Iger shit? Get me a reporter I can talk to, I’ve got to respond to this.”

  It was unusual; Night seldom wanted press, unless he was selling one of his movies.

  “If Disney wants to go down this road, I’ll fight them every step of the way. I’m in on this, and I’m in strong.”

  Before he left for the day, Night read a note Chris Doyle had slipped onto his desk. Doyle and Night had talked about how the whole movie should be shot in a gloaming, how the movie’s days would never have any brightness to them, and how its nights would never be pitch-black. Doyle had been conducting experiments to achieve that look. It was dangerous, what Doyle was trying to pull off. It thrilled Night. He felt he had started to reach Doyle, and vice-versa. Doyle’s note was a kind of haiku.

  M’nght

  it works!

  our “night”

  is so romantic, ethereal

  and “true” to all

  I hoped to bring to you…

  (Thanks for your trust)

  Night smiled wanly. He stepped out of the old 3M building and into the late muggy dusk of an August evening. It had been another twelve-hour day, but Night wasn’t counting hours, he was trying to use them. Franny was waiting in the car with the engine running and the air-conditioning on. Night got into the passenger seat and pushed it back as far as it would go. On the drive home, he fell into a deep sleep. Preproduction was over. Monday was the day.

  7.

  The night before the first day of shooting, I asked Night about the state of his head. “I’ve done six other movies, and I’ve never felt this level of anxiety. My hope for this shoot is to be ruthless, electric, and dangerous,” he said.

  He didn’t sound like a man who’d found peace.

  When Night arrived on the set at 6:25 A.M. on opening day, his director of photography was already lit. Night was wearing an embroidered button-down shirt, a departure from his everyday rock-band T-shirts, all done up, the way kids used to be for their first day of school. Chris Doyle was wearing a mustard-colored silk boxer’s robe. There was alcohol on his breath and in every manic movement he made. He grabbed Jimmy Mazzola’s genitalia (through his shorts), and he lifted the shirt of the head stuntman, Jeff Habberstad, to kiss him on the stomach. Jimmy was a character and a Brooklynite, a guy from the neighborhood, he often said, and he’d seen a lot in his years. He laughed it off. But Jeff was a lean runner from Washington State, with pictures of his wife and three kids on his travel coffee mug. His thing was to calculate and prepare for risk—he once jumped out of a truck that had been dropped from a plane—not to cater to the eccentric. There was pain in the stuntman’s face. But it was the first of forty-five days, and he made no fuss. Then Doyle gave Paul Giamatti the same treatment as Jimmy Mazzola, and Paul did just like Jimmy, he rode it out. Doyle greeted Cindy Cheung with a sort of tackle, a kiss on her s
tomach, and immediately asked makeup to “make her elbows more beautiful.” Who knew what was wrong with them, but Chris Doyle saw things that only he and the camera did. More than once Night said, “His eye is unbelievable. I can’t imagine making this movie without him.” That’s how he felt, even with the muddy screen tests, the stomach kissing, and everything else. Doyle was helping Night feel dangerous. Doyle had come up with a new name for himself, this time an American one: Super Chris. As if he were indestructible.

  On the back of his director’s chair, Night’s long surname was misspelled; the buzzing chorus of the August cicadas was overwhelming the sensitive boom mikes; and a boy actor, required only to lick his palm and slap his kid sister across the cheek in one fell swoop, could not get it done. It was the first scene Night was shooting. Movies are almost never shot in the sequence of the script, and Night was not scheduled to film the screaming Perez de la Torre sisters until much later in the nine-week shoot. Lick-Slap Kenny was supposed to steal the second scene, but Night had no reason to think he’d do well. The kid—hired through a Philadelphia casting agency—had been consistently, comically terrible in rehearsals, where his lick-slap was stuck in first gear, so slow it looked like he was lapping up the side of a delicate triple-scoop ice-cream cone. Night had said, “Here, let me show you how I used to do it with my cousins.” Quick lick, quick slap. Slam-bam. But the boy had his own metabolism. In rehearsal, Paul was so amused by the slomo lick-slap that he hid his face behind his script.