The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  “What are you going to tell Night?” Christine asked.

  “He’s gonna want to know what we thought of the movie.”

  “Are you sure?”

  The next morning Night called me before I could call him. Night knew what I did not, that Lady was not a movie yet. Once, I had anticipated a celebratory conversation, but now I was dreading it.

  “I’m not the intended audience for this movie,” I told him.

  “You didn’t dig it,” he said.

  “You loved E.T. I didn’t. Maybe I’m not qualified to be discussing this movie. Maybe my tastes are too earthbound for it.”

  “Where did it lose you?”

  There are artists who can’t take criticism from anybody. Night can’t not take criticism. At Night’s invitation, I laid out everything. So much of what we say in our everyday conversation is dressed-up bullshit—trying to get people to like us, trying to keep our jobs—it felt good to be able to speak to somebody who felt he needed to hear what he didn’t want to hear. Night knew he could make the movie better. That’s why he was listening to me, just as he would have listened to forty different voices, had he been ready to fill the screening room with strangers that afternoon. The ability to hear voices—internal voices; external voices; voices that have language; voices that don’t—we all have it, Night said, but you have to make yourself available to them.

  After that phone call, I saw Night in even more heroic terms. I didn’t “dig” an early version of Night’s movie. So what? I’m one viewer, watching a movie that was still in editing, just like the kid from NYU. What drew me to Night in the first place was his energy at the Burch party and what awed me about Night was his effort, his endurance, his willingness to struggle.

  He wasn’t Bob Dylan. When Dylan played electric and the old folkies booed him, Dylan knew he was doing something right. Night would never be happy willfully alienating people. He had never completely buried Manoj. But the originality of Dylan was a true inspiration for Night, and making Lady was a giant step for him. By risking his career on a fairy tale, he was making the rest of his moviemaking life possible. He was making good on what he told Nina after The Village, that he didn’t want his audience to know where he was going next. He wasn’t going to let the success of The Sixth Sense define the rest of his career.

  The following morning, Night called again. This time he was all revved-up. He said he was going to begin the movie with a voiceover that would explain the legend behind Story, so that the moviegoer is ahead of the movie’s characters, and the driving tension is to see if the actors will catch up. That sounded interesting. It sounded like Columbo, the old Peter Falk detective show, where we know things that Lieutenant Columbo does not, and we watch to see if he’ll figure it out, even though we know he will. Night was going back to one of his earliest script drafts, when he had opened the movie with an explanatory voiceover, but he had abandoned it along the way. It came back to him when he and Bhavna, both fans of horror movies, watched a screamfest, Hostel, in their hotel room on their March trip to Los Angeles. The movie opens with a murderer cleaning his bloody tools. “That one image,” Night said, “made me stay with the movie.” Night’s idea was that you would hear the voiceover at the start of Lady while looking at pictures—paintings—of Story’s underwater world. “If you make the right tonal change it can infect the entire movie,” Night said. “It could be really beautiful. Cool, right?”

  My contribution was minor, like seconding a motion. There were many others. There was the kid reviewer from NYU. There was Barbara Tulliver. There was Bhavna, the person most open to Night’s movies, who told her husband, maybe inadvertently, that even she couldn’t tell what Night was trying to do. There was Alan Horn, giving Night the time he needed, another way of saying that the movie was not there yet. Most significantly, there was Nina, Night’s most critical reader. Night had placed our Lady problems on a scale and now the scale had reached its tipping point. In his desperation, Night was finally in his comfort zone. Now was his chance to be Michael—Michael Jordan—and get off a two-pointer in traffic at the buzzer, with Team Jordan down by one.

  As a tester, I was now spoiled. Night disagreed. “You haven’t even seen the movie yet!” he said, but I knew I’d need a long time before I’d be able to see Lady with fresh eyes. I see movies in movie theaters, and only once, typically. Night sees movies again and again. He had seen Lady dozens of times, more than that, tinkering all the while. He was looking for one more thing. He said, “I’m like a scientist now, mixing all these chemicals together. You can put in a hundred chemicals, and you get nothing. But if you add one more, and it’s the right one, the whole thing goes poof!”

  The next two weeks were a blur.

  It seemed like seven P.M. was never going to come, and then it did. By Night’s calendar, Lady in the Water made its debut in front of forty strangers in his screening room at the barn at seven P.M. on the third Tuesday in April 2006. Its scheduled public premiere was three months and three days away. As the civilians came in, parking their cars and minivans and SUVs by a stone wall off an old farm work road, Night watched discreetly from the porch of the farmhouse. It had been a peculiar day for him, a day with no Lady work to do, just the long wait for seven o’clock. Night was wearing a T-shirt one of the smokers had worn in the movie, stenciled with the words FLUORIDE IS MIND CONTROL. He wore jeans, as he did every day, but he had given his daily work boots a day off. He had on sneakers, Vans, the kind skateboarders wear. He was never too far from his boyhood.

  Franny, Night’s driver, in his dress-up pressed slacks, picked up Alan Horn and Jeff Robinov at the airport and drove them to the farm. Sam Mercer came in. So did Jeremy Zimmer and Peter Benedek, Night’s agents. Jose Rodriguez was there, of course. They would all be standing, or sitting on the floor or on folding chairs. The forty seats were for the forty guinea pigs. As they came in, Maddie and a new assistant, April, had them sign confidentiality agreements, a promise that they wouldn’t go out and review the movie on the Ain’t It Cool website or anything like that. At the end of the screening, each person would be given an off-white heavy-stock card with a series of multiple-choice questions about the movie, then the chance to comment on it. Barbara Tulliver made brief introductory remarks, and the movie began. April waved to Night, a signal to him that the lights were down and he could now slip in. He got in just before the new two-minute voiceover—read by David Ogden Stiers, Major Winchester on the TV version of M*A*S*H. As the detached booming voice delivered the legend of Story, moody pictures of her world filled the screen. There was complete silence and stillness among the civilians, and a deep thrill came over Night. This is the way the movie needs to begin! Then Paul’s bearded face filled the screen as he looked to squash a bug, and behind him the Perez de la Torre sisters screamed, as they always did. There was a communal laugh in the screening room. Night had ’em. Now he had to keep them. He listened and watched, to see if the audience would make the moves he needed them to make, from humor to suspense to fantasy to tenderness. Intellectually, he had thought it out every which way, but it wasn’t an exercise anymore. He watched a young girl, maybe eight, cover her eyes and turn her head to the side when she sensed the scrunt was going to attack. He could see her terror. Night was delighted.

  Before the screening, Night had told me that he just wanted to feel like Rocky Balboa when the final credits played. “If I’m standing, that’ll be a victory,” he said. Nothing he’d ever worked on had required so much effort, or brought him so much doubt. If he was hearing the collective silent voices of the forty moviegoers correctly, the first screening was coming off like a repeat of the actors’ read-through on that hot August day in the cold hotel ballroom. In the audience’s laughing, crying, screaming, and silence, Night heard a craving for a message they had buried a long time ago, that magic can happen, if you believe. Who’s talking about things like that anymore? Nobody. Almost nobody.

  When the movie was over, Night slipped out as quickly as h
e had come in and went over to the farmhouse. The civilians filled out their cards and headed to their cars. Horn and Robinov and Sam and the others came into the farmhouse, like athletes returning to the sanctuary of the clubhouse after a game. Robinov said, “Can you believe how it played in there? Amazing.” Horn looked at Night in a way that said, What did you do these past two weeks? The old farmhouse was vibrating.

  April came in with the scorecards and handed them to Night. His heart was racing. A few people had suggested to Night that a screening at the director’s own converted bucolic barn, a million miles away from the sticky floors and mushy chairs of a mall multiplex, would skew the results, but Night dismissed that. He had shown test screenings for The Village at the barn, and those results told him what hundreds of thousands of people told him shortly after its national premiere: The movie confused them.

  Night retreated into the cramped copying room. There were many places he could have gone, but that’s where he went. Fourteen months earlier, on a Saturday night, he had handed Paula a disk with the sale script for Disney, and Paula had dutifully made copies, on a machine that could handle only twenty pages at a time, for the Disney troika. Night put the forty cards on the copier and thumbed through them one by one. His daughters were home in bed and Bhavna was in India on a philanthropic mission. Lady in the Water had been like an affair for Night, but now he was ready for it to end. He needed it to end. He was spent. He studied the cards and read the comments and tallied the scores. He could feel the blood coursing through his veins, the sweat on his neck, the thin MIND CONTROL T-shirt clinging to his body. He had been looking for a person to hear him for years. He knew who it wasn’t. It wasn’t Nina. For all his decency, it wasn’t Horn. It wasn’t Chris Doyle or Paul or Cindy. The answer was in the cards. It was us. We go to his movies—the more, the better—and then Night has his proof: We hear him.

  Night did the math. He could turn anything into a number, and now he had nothing but numbers in front of him. He checked the math again, to make sure it was correct. He couldn’t believe the result. He was stunned. None of his movies had ever scored higher. It matched the best test scores The Sixth Sense had received, right before its release.

  Carefully, one by one, out loud and to himself, Night went through the cards, reading the responses to the question, “What would you tell a friend about this movie?” The civilians said the movie was suspenseful, scary, funny, unexpected, different, spiritual. In perfect Palmer script and little-child print, in full sentences and ungrammatical fragments, the message was the same: They liked the movie. One woman who checked off the twenty-one to twenty-four age box said, “That it’s a bizarre mix of comedy, fantasy, action, scary—suspenseful—yet works—kind of like it didn’t make up its mind in a good way.” Thirty-nine cards were positive or better. One card was negative. One person did not like it. Night wondered what he had done wrong.

  There’s the power of one person’s faith, and there’s the power of a group. Lady in the Water had some of both. Night with his cousins, trying to get the cup on the table to move, had some of both. So did Night in Bristol, with the actors and the crew. Night had created a village, and the village made him feel less alone and helped him make his movie. People bought into it. Paul Giamatti put Chrismandu’s name and telephone number in his wallet! That was something.

  I had less than a bit role at Bristol—guy with notebook—but I felt the pull of village life. One day during preproduction my car conked out on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway; over the phone, Jimmy Mazzola gave me a Who’s Who of mechanics in his borough plus an invitation to his house for a recuperative meal.

  Near the end of the shoot, I went to the California desert for my day job, to cover Michelle Wie’s first golf tournament as a professional. In the third round, I saw her take what looked to me like an incorrect drop. The correct drop would have had her backswing impeded by a bush. Reporting the story—the way I felt was the right way to report it (talk to the subject first and the rules official second)—led to her being disqualified. If you want to do something unpopular, get a pretty, talented, likable sixteen-year-old girl golfer disqualified from her pro debut. I got bombarded. One caller to my house said my head should be severed, stuck between a sliced hamburger bun, and crammed into a microwave. Returning to Bristol, to the village Night had created there, was a relief.

  Paul Giamatti understood the weird spot I was in in a way almost no one else could, even though the stakes in his father’s situation with Pete Rose had been incomparably higher. Paul gave me the advice he follows himself: Who gives a fuck what a bunch of strangers think? In his own way, Paul was warm about the whole thing, warmer than I knew he could be. About seven people understood what I was trying to do, and he was one of them. You might think it was a coincidence, that I was around Paul just then. I don’t.

  At a Halloween wrap party for the movie, Yen Nguyen, the beautiful camera loader, came carrying a golf club and dressed as Michelle Wie. We had never spoken during the shoot, but that evening she said to me, “How do you like my costume, Mike?”

  “Funny,” I said.

  Night knew I was lying. He said later, “She doesn’t know you well enough to be making that joke.”

  He had his own take on the golf incident. “Michelle Wie’s your subject, you’re looking for moments when she reveals her character, and the moment she took that drop in front of that bush, she did. She was taking a shortcut. I’ll bet Tiger has never taken a shortcut in his life.” Night didn’t even know what had made me watch the drop so intently in the first place. All during the drop, Wie’s experienced, professional caddie, I thought, had looked nervous. I don’t know what he was thinking—our true thoughts are our last great privacy—but I do know what his face was saying to me: This is going too fast. In a completely different circumstance, when Paul’s shoe spoke to Night, it must have been nearly the same thing. So far, listening to voices had done nothing but get me in trouble, but what the hell. There was no denying their power.

  During the shoot, The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story about how people complete a sentence that begins, “I believe…” I found it interesting and polled various Lady people on the subject. Cindy Cheung said, “I believe that imagination is our greatest power.” Chris Doyle said, “I believe all the world is a little mad except you and me and even you are a little strange.” Bryce said, “I believe in the power of the individual to alter the destiny of humanity.” Paul said, “I believe there is no way Shakespeare wrote those fucking plays, no way in hell.”

  Night said, “I believe.”

  “Right,” I said. “But how do you complete it?”

  “It’s complete,” he said.

  We were driving to work. It seemed like Night was always driving to work, even when he was driving home.

  “I believe. Period.”

  He was already working on the next one.

  Author’s Note

  This book is nonfiction. The scenes and names are all real. Many of the quotes have been edited, as spoken language doesn’t always work on paper, but no liberties in meaning were taken. If a conversation was recounted by others, I used it only if the source was trustworthy. I found Night to be more trustworthy than most.

  Night read the book in manuscript form and made numerous suggestions, many of which I took him up on. His main note was to cut out the boring parts, which I have tried to do. He made no suggestions to make himself look better, which is part of his dazzling oddness. I think I know now the meaning of counterintuitive.

  Readers may want to know, among other things, how I got in Bryce’s trailer (she invited me) or Sarita’s handbag (she told me what was in it) or, to the degree I did, Night’s head (ditto). You are welcome to write and if I can tell you I will. (Modernists may use mbamberger0224@aol.com.) Please, though, do not ask me to get your ideas to Night. For that I suggest mental telepathy.

  Michael Bamberger

  April 25, 2006

  Philadelphia

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  Michael Bamberger, The Man Who Heard Voices