by Lee Hill
13
Hawkeye (Travels with Harry)
All you have is the power of persuasion,” Terry would say again and again to those who asked him about the pitfalls of screenwriting. Screenwriters who wanted to redress the balance had to become producers or writer/directors. Not everyone had the right combination of political instinct, business sense, temperament, ambition, and energy to take a role other than that of hired pen. John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion viewed screenwriting as a well-paid form of slumming, which bought time to work on novels, nonfiction books, or essays for the New York Review of Books. Other writers, like William Goldman, seemed to delight in being the Hollywood equivalent of court advisers. Then there were the script doctors like Robert Towne and Elaine May, who took a surgeon’s pride in their ability to save a blockbuster or anonymously polish a comedy. Directing one’s own material was no guarantee of success either. Paul Schrader and John Sayles still relied on byzantine layers of international financing, festival acclaim, and solid reviews to sustain their personal films (nor were they above taking on a rewrite or two). Southern was not alone in his frustrations with screenwriting, but unlike other Writers Guild members, he did seem incapable of using the system to his advantage.
On October 23, 1985, Southern made his greatest attempt to change this state of things. Along with a grand good friend, the celebrated singer/songwriter/arranger/producer Harry Nilsson, he joined the executive lineup of Hawkeye. Executive Vice President Nilsson and his company president James Hock conceived Hawkeye as a way to develop and oversee a variety of film and multimedia projects. Cindy Sims was hired as the director and secretary-treasurer of the new company, because of her experience working for Segal and Goldman, a business management firm specializing in entertainment.
Offices were leased at 1130 Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, California. Southern was given his first corporate title, vice president of literary and script development. As a Hawkeye executive, he would receive an annual salary of $40,000 and 400,000 shares in the company. Financing had been arranged by Hock, who had experience working with America’s major banks.
Despite expertise at the executive levels of the new company, there was something wrong with this enterprise. By the end of 1990, Hawkeye would collapse like the proverbial house of cards. By Hollywood standards, it would not be a disaster on a par with United Artists and Heaven’s Gate, but it was certainly a case study in hubris worthy of closer inspection.
Hawkeye was formed out of Southern’s strong friendship with Harry Nilsson. Like Randy Newman and Carole King, Nilsson was a songwriter who got his start writing material for others. In the sixties, the Brooklyn native’s work was covered by the likes of Herb Alpert, the Monkees, the Byrds, and the Ronettes. The influence of the Beatles and Bob Dylan on Nilsson and other songwriters led to the pursuit of more creative autonomy. In October of 1967, Nilsson released a solo album, Pandemonium Shadow Show. The record would have sunk like a stone had it not been for the fact that, out of the blue, the Beatles championed it.
In 1968, Nilsson traveled to London to meet the Fab Four, and was greeted as if he were the fifth Beatle. He wrote “The Puppy Song” for Apple protégée Mary Hopkin, which became a modest hit. He became especially close to John Lennon and Ringo Starr. In 1969, his cover of Fred Neil’s “Everybody’s Talkin’” from the Midnight Cowboy soundtrack helped to put his second album, Aerial Ballet, in the top ten. Ironically, the cover elevated Nilsson to the celebrity he had sought. His next hit, the 1972 single “Without You,” was also a cover, this time of a Badfinger song.
Still the singles sold very well and raised the sales for Nilsson’s solo work up to that time. RCA extended its investment in Nilsson. Through a healthy contract and various recordings of his work by other artists, the money rolled in. By the mid-seventies, Nilsson—who not so long before had managed the evening clearing operations of a bank—was living the rock ’n’ roll dream.
Southern recalls meeting Nilsson through Ringo Starr around the time of The Magic Christian. Gail Gerber says he knew little of Nilsson’s music before then. They were at a gathering arranged by Ringo when Terry heard some music playing. He complained about the singer’s voice.
“He was embarrassed,” recalls Gerber. “Because then he discovered the guy was in the room. Someone said, ‘This is Harry Nilsson, the guy who was just singing.’ I mean, I guess he just had to get used to Harry because he really did appreciate him…. [Nilsson] was distinctive in the way he would avoid actually ever getting to a note for a long time.”
From this inauspicious beginning, a beautiful friendship emerged. Like Southern, Nilsson was a shy and sensitive man with a fragile artistic gift. He was married to a beautiful and loyal Irish woman, Una, and lived for his kids. Nilsson’s smooth-as-silk voice was eventually ravaged by drug and alcohol abuse. His delicately evocative solo albums, also like Terry, would eventually shows signs of self-parody. Gerber describes their relationship as “the love of one drunk for another.”
During the seventies, whenever the two found themselves together in Los Angeles or New York, they would indulge in some hell-raising. Sometimes it was innocent, like taking Nile to meet Marc Bolan at a recording studio. Other times it involved serious drinking—brandy Alexanders, cognac, whiskey sours, etc.—with the likes of Keith Moon and John Lennon in his “lost weekend of 1974” period. Occasionally Southern and Nilsson would toy with a script, as they did in 1976 with King Dong, a rather obvious parody of the classic fantasy film.
“Harry wanted to party and he had enough money to do it,” recalls Gerber. “But he couldn’t just party, so, under the pretense of partying, he had to pretend it was like work. He wanted to come up with all these projects. I don’t think he was ever serious because I think he was too afraid of being judged or exposed. There are a lot of very talented people who are always in rehearsal or always in ballet class because they don’t want to get out there on that limb that we all know so well.”
By the late seventies, Nilsson began to turn his attention to film projects like animated film The Point and the soundtrack to Robert Altman’s Popeye. He started developing treatments and story ideas for film and television. Because of his song catalog and some astute real estate investments, Nilsson was able to indulge himself. The business reasoning behind Hawkeye was not unsound. In Hollywood, you protected yourself by using the same corporate approach as the big studios and production companies.
After the establishment of Hawkeye, a whole slew of projects were announced. Treatments and scripts were sent to the studios and agencies around town. The two strongest candidates were Obits and The Telephone. Obits was originally a screenplay by Roger Watkins. It dealt with a tabloid reporter’s investigation into a strange obituary notice. Hawkeye acquired the rights on July 3, 1985. In the fall of that year, Nilsson and Southern rewrote the screenplay.
In the new script, Harry Taylor, a reporter for News World, decides to write about the life of Jason Stoat, a Texas oilman who had died several years earlier. His investigation takes him to Crystal City, Texas, the spinach capital of the world. He discovers there were two Jason Stoats, both twins. One is still alive. While searching for the latter, Taylor meets other members of the Stoat family—the incontinent Peirsol; Emily Stoat, who uses a manufactured voice box to communicate and masturbates to a recording of Walter Cronkite’s voice; and the obnoxious Vern. The male Stoats try to get Harry to sleep with Emily at a strange dinner. Obits continues in this baroque fashion, culminating in a scene set back at the offices of News World, where the editor receives a postcard indicating Harry has indeed become a part of the bizarre Stoat family.
A reader’s report gives a pretty good sense of the reaction to this script from other production companies: “Apparently the idea here is to create an adult X-rated fantasy featuring a live-action reporter who enters a make-believe world that might even be a world of his deranged fantasies and fears. Whatever the goal is, it is not at all clear from the way the script is written. The op
ening sequence is intriguing but the rest of the story is vague, puerile, and offensive.
“If one puts aside the many off-color, distasteful scenes long enough to examine the story, it shows itself to be completely lacking in logic and continuity. Unlike Roger Rabbit, this fantasy never defines the separate worlds, their origins, or shows under what conditions they might come together. Consequently, everything feels arbitrary and confusing. We don’t know if the lead is nutty, if he’s happened on a haunted house, or if the make-believe stories he’s been writing have actually come into existence.”
The reader concluded that the script’s lack of commercial appeal was compounded by the “disgusting use of sexual innuendo, masturbation, nudity, and excrement.” In a filmmaking climate in which the most popular films were escapist fare like Back to the Future and Mad Max 2, the mondo-satire of Obits was distinctly out of fashion.
Undeterred, Nilsson and Southern continued to shop Obits around. However, it was The Telephone that managed to attract star power. Written with Robin Williams in mind, The Telephone is an O. Henry–type monologue about Roger Wilcox, an unemployed actor coping with mounting debts and possible eviction. As the actor’s answering machine fills up with messages from creditors and estranged friends, he launches into a series of impromptu stream-of-consciousness impersonations. His only contact with the outside world consists of neighbors banging on his wall to try to quiet him and a visit by his sleazy agent and bimbo girlfriend. Eventually we discover the telephone connection has been cut off for months and that the actor has clearly gone insane in the interim.
After several attempts to get the script to Williams through his agent, Nilsson and Southern were able to pin the actor down at one of the comedy clubs where he made his impromptu appearances. In the end, Williams passed on The Telephone. Then they discovered that Whoopi Goldberg was keen to work on the film. The talented comedienne had made her well-received acting debut as Celie in The Color Purple, directed by Steven Spielberg, but subsequent films such as Jumpin’ Jack Flash and The Burglar were indifferently produced. No one seemed to really know how to exploit Goldberg’s comic talent.
Goldberg liked The Telephone and asked Southern and Nilsson if they would consider rewriting it for her. They agreed and received a letter of intent from Goldberg signaling her commitment to The Telephone once a distributor or studio was in place. Over the course of 1986, Hawkeye shopped The Telephone around with Goldberg’s name attached. Eventually New World Pictures came on board. Rip Torn was hired to direct the film. According to a Hawkeye deal memo, Southern was to be paid $350,000 for his script, but there is little evidence that he ultimately received more than a modest first installment of this sum.
Production began in January 1987, in San Francisco. Goldberg’s character was now called Vashti Blue, but the plot remained the same. Elliott Gould played Rodney the agent and Amy Wright was Honey Boxe. John Heard made a brief cameo at the end of the film as an angry representative of the telephone company. Filling out a few minor parts were Severn Darden as a friendly neighbor and Herve Villechaize, whose voice was the only thing that surfaced in the final cut.
It became apparent very quickly as filming began that Goldberg was operating under a different set of rules than Torn, Nilsson, and Southern, regarding the ultimate creative authority on the set. The New World producers had told Goldberg she could improvise as much as she wanted and that she would be allowed to exercise final cut in the editing room.
“One of the producers told Whoopi that she could improvise on their script,” recalls Nile. “They told her she was the bread and butter of this production and the script was really not that important. That was, of course a big problem. The other one was that Whoopi put in place her then husband as the cameraman and Rip had gone to great lengths to get John Alonzo [a veteran cinematographer who had shot Chinatown, The Fortune, and Cross Creek] to shoot…. This was a one-set apartment. To make it interesting you could do some really great handheld stuff. Rip ended up saying that this cameraman had dyslexia with the camera. He would shoot what should be a close-up with a wide shot and vice versa, and nothing was working. Rip would say after the end of a few takes with Whoopi doing all her wild improvisations, ‘How about one for the author?’ and she’d say ‘okay’ and she would do it like it was written. It was very bad for Rip to have to deal with this scene and he didn’t have a good time at all.”
“I don’t know to this day how she could not appreciate or just be interested [in]…two people like Terry and Rip Torn,” said Gail Gerber. “I can’t understand that. Apparently there was this person who said, ‘Really, Whoopi, what we want is for you to wing it.’ She would have been wonderful if she had stuck to the script. It was a wonderful monologue. That monologue was so solid that to read it at the kitchen table was wonderful. I had a French friend who read it in her French accent, all the characters. It was just mesmerizing. They could have done it standing on their heads. Anybody could.”
The $2 million production wrapped on schedule, but was followed by a yearlong battle between Hawkeye, New World, and Goldberg over final cut. Southern and Torn took a print of their version to Sundance in January 1988. The New World version opened in a few New York and Los Angeles theaters the same month. The reviews were lukewarm and dismissive. New World became embroiled in a lawsuit with Goldberg over whether or not she did have final cut.
In fairness to Goldberg, The Telephone was a project that never quite solved the problem of how to make someone going nuts in a room visually interesting. Not unsurprisingly, The Telephone’s only success came when two German actresses gained permission to do the script as an intimate theater piece.
In the wake of The Telephone’s dismal critical reception and dim commercial prospects, Hawkeye’s other projects attracted little attention. Nilsson traveled to London in April 1988, to seek out financing for Obits with Pablo Ferro attached as director, but a promising deal fell apart. Those close to Southern felt the Hawkeye management team lacked the discipline and killer instinct to survive in Hollywood’s competitive environment.
“I was then managing a lot of artists, a lot of Academy Award–and Grammy-award-winning musicians, writers, actors,” said Si Litvinoff, who was briefly attached to the Hawkeye team. “I had a couple of meetings with them to see if we could pull something off. Unfortunately, despite my efforts and a great deal of effort on Terry’s part, which managed to get some money in, Harry seemed to change his mind every day. He wouldn’t show up for meetings. I saw the ship sinking. When you have some experience with these things you begin to recognize [when] there is something suspect. That was unfortunate because Terry tried and I tried to get [Hawkeye] moving forward, but that was a waste of a lot of money.”
For Southern and Gerber, the best thing about Hawkeye was the steady income. The nature of Terry’s job at Hawkeye was, Nile believes, too ill-defined for him to be effective.
“Personally I thought the company was not being run terribly well,” said Nile. “If he was to be in charge of literary development, he should have a secretary and there should be constant updating of ideas and material. As it was, he and Harry were pretty much riding shotgun and just firing away, but not really making the kinds of business choices you need to make running that kind of company. You shouldn’t put energy into one really bizarre script, but you might do a few things and try to make some money, even commission other writers. There were a lot of possibilities. In any case, [Terry] was earning a salary through Hawkeye even though he was living in Connecticut and just wandering around. He would be rewriting these different scripts that Hawkeye was developing. One was about shuffleboard. He was working on these scripts that were in development hell, really.”
Hawkeye’s other projects included the Saturn Awards for science fiction, horror, and fantasy films released in the previous year. Nile worked with Pablo Ferro on preparing a montage of clips for the broadcast. Nile also worked on a history of the Doobie Brothers documentary. There was also vague talk by Nilsson of
commissioning Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and Southern to develop interactive software. These peripheral projects, along with a dozen or so scripts floating through the offices of agents and producers, did not generate a great deal of heat for the ill-fated company.
“My dad was always based in Connecticut. Harry wanted him to move out and live in L.A. My dad did come out for some meetings and vaguely considered the possibilities of getting a place. It didn’t seem like it would happen,” said Nile. “At least he was really earning a salary from Hawkeye. It was a godsend and we thank Harry for that, but then the checks started to not come through anymore. The company started to dissolve [and] my dad had to look for another source of income.”
Gail remembers a poignant conversation she had with Harry’s wife, Una, that sheds some light on one problem with Hawkeye—the relationship between Harry and Terry. “Una said, ‘The worst thing that ever happened was Harry meeting Terry.’ Well, I told her, ‘Well, one of the worst things that happened was Terry meeting Harry,’ so that was pretty well both our points of view of their relationship.
“They weren’t doing anything really bad. They weren’t getting laid or anything. They would hole up in the most expensive hotel in town. Whatever town it was. Fooling around writing things. They were wasting time and other people’s time, too. Their own time turned out to be short.”
Harry and Terry were their own comedy team and audience. Like Southern, Harry Nilsson came from inauspicious beginnings. His creative gifts—his beautiful voice and joyous songs—were also rare, fragile, and almost too precious for this world. Both men masked their hypersensitivity through gregarious personas. If Southern was the Grand Guy, Nilsson played the fedora-wearing man about town who could hang out with rock ’n’ rollers or dine out like a gourmand at the finest restaurants and bars. Both men used drugs and alcohol to mask their insecurities. They were both aware that they were viewed as coasters who had seen much better days. If Southern was the almost forgotten writer of Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider, Nilsson had to deal with the public perception of having gotten John Lennon so drunk that he walked into a club with a Kotex on his head.