Instead, about 7 A.M. last Sunday, a fisherman named Jimmy Potts spotted what seemed to be a child bobbing in the waters of the East Bay River. Mr. Potts hauled him into his small motorboat,
Later that day, Taylor told his momma that he really liked the boat ride. In the hospital, he sang, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
Mother Encourages Son’s Independence
Mrs. Touchstone lost Taylor at a Wal-Mart, once. “That was bad,” she said,
He ran out of Cheetos once and hiked a few blocks, alone, to get some. The police found him and brought him home.
He decided once that the floor in the grocery store needed “dusting” — he likes to dust — and he got down on the floor and began dusting the grimy floor with his fingers.
But he has never lived in a prison of overprotectiveness. Even though his mother says there are limits to how much freedom he can realistically have and how much so-called normal behavior she can expect from him, she decided years ago that the only way he could have anything approaching a normal life — in some ways, the only way she herself could have one — was to let him go swimming, visit neighbors, take some normal, childlike risks.
He is prone, now and then, to just walk into a neighbor’s house. Once, he went into the kitchen of a neighbor, opened the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk, slammed it down on the counter and stood there, expectantly. The woman called Mrs. Touchstone.
“What should I do?” the woman asked.
“Well,” Mrs. Touchstone said, “I’d pour him a glass of milk.”
The fact that Taylor is not completely dependent on his parents, that he is not treated like an overgrown infant, that he is allowed to swim on his own and roam the aisles of the Wal-Mart and raid the neighbors’ refrigerators, may have helped him survive when he was all alone in the swamp, his family believes.
His father offered this explanation: “That’s all his mom. I was overly protective.”
The phenomenon of his journey has prompted teachers at his school to consider changes in the study plan for autistic or handicapped students. One teacher told Mrs. Touchstone that they would stress more self-reliance.
Mrs. Touchstone, who jokingly calls herself “Treasurer for Life” for the Fort Walton chapter of the Autism Society of America, said her son’s journey should clarify, in some people’s minds, what autism is.
“I want every inch of that swamp he crossed to count for something,” she said.
For now, life is back to normal. He screamed when he was forced to take his medicine, which is not so unusual for a 10-year-old. “We’ve got a little autism in all of us,” Mrs. Touchstone said.
Taylor has always been something of a celebrity in his neighborhood, so his mother does not expect much to change after his ordeal. There was a sign outside his school that just said, “Welcome Home,” and many people have called or written to tell her how relieved they are. One elderly neighbor wrote to tell Mrs. Touchstone how relieved she was that “our child” was home safe.
Mrs. Touchstone will not waste time wondering, at least not too much, about her son’s strange trip. She can live with the notion of a miracle.
“I guess God was looking for something to do,” she said. “I guess he looked down and said, ‘Let’s fix things up a little bit.’ ”
Why did it move me so?
First of all, I have kids. And they were little once. And you remember things you did to please them, dopey family stuff that maybe alone on earth you remember and I remember when the eldest was pushing three and we were driving along and up ahead was a traffic sign. She pointed to it and said, “P-o-t-s … stop,” and for hours afterward, thoughts and talk of dyslexia, which she did not have, were very much in the air, and what my wife and I didn’t realize was this: Jenny was just bored going “s-t-o-p.”
Personally, I would open The Dolphin with the cow scene. Maybe as a credit sequence.
FADE IN ON
A country road, somewhere South, farmland whizzing by. Now a curve in the road and when we come out of it
CUT TO
Cows.
Dozens of them munching away, no big deal, we’re just looking at cows. Most ordinary thing in the world. But this is what we hear--
Joyous laughter.
Coming obviously from the throat of a little kid. It’s exultant almost. Just the happiest sound there is.
CUT TO
Inside the car and TAYLOR’S MOTHER driving along, looking across toward the passenger, whom we can’t see yet. She smiles, echoing the happiness she hears and
CUT TO
THE COWS. And they are doing nothing to provoke such a reaction. Still just a bunch of munchers. But the laughter is still there. Then we hear TAYLOR’s voice. Very young.
TAYLOR (OVER)
Cows.
CUT TO
HIS MOM, nodding to herself.
MRS. TOUCHSTONE
That’s right, Taylor.
Now as she drives along--
CUT TO
Another curve in the road. Mrs. Touchstone takes it slowly, hugging the right-hand side of the two-lane highway.
CUT TO
MRS. TOUCHSTONE, concentrating on her driving. But there is, for some reason, for just a moment, a look of sadness.
CUT TO
THE FARMLAND. The cows are gone now, behind us.
TAYLOR (OVER)
Don’t see cows.
CUT TO
MRS. TOUCHSTONE. Driving along.
MRS. TOUCHSTONE
We’ll come again.
(and now on that)
CUT TO
TAYLOR TOUCHSTONE himself. He is big, and not thin, and he holds a stuffed leopard in one hand, a pink blanket in the other. He is autistic, and he is ten years old.
And very much the hero of this piece.
TAYLOR
(to his mother)
Don’t see cows.
(MRS. TOUCHSTONE says nothing, concentrates on the road.)
CUT TO
TAYLOR. CLOSE UP.
TAYLOR
(to the leopard)
Don’t see cows…
(The leopard shakes its head as we)
CUT TO ANOTHER
THE CAR, driving on through the farmland…
There’s a lot of other stuff I’d use, too. I love it when there he is in a neighbor’s kitchen, banging away with the milk carton. And the disappearance, searching for Chee•tos, I’d sure put that in. (Foreshadowing, as they say.) Plus maybe a family outing where you see what a dolphin he is, how happy and tireless he is in the water (Foreshadowing II).
And I think you have to have a scene, maybe in the family, maybe at school, where you talk about Taylor and what his limitations are and why his mother is raising him this way, with as much freedom as he can handle. And I’d probably want something in school, to show that he wasn’t the most popular kid on the block.
Note: this story cannot be cute like Rainman. You betray the heart of the material if you phony it up. Look, I liked Rainman too, was glad it won the Oscar that terrible year—but I was always aware that I was watching Hollywood Horseshit. I knew nothing was going to happen to poor little Dusty. And that he and Cruise—who for me gave the performance that made the movie work—were going to tug at my heartstrings and leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling.
I want more from The Dolphin. I don’t mean more in terms of accolades or box-office glory—I want you to be rocked by the fucking glory of Taylor’s survival and at the same time be aware that this kid is not going to turn into Cary Grant and have Katharine Hepburn chasing after him. And his family is always going to suffer pain. End of note.
Back to Taylor. I think you throw in as much as you can of what everyday life was like for him before he went floating away. But I also think this: that is not going to take very long. I would guess that at the latest, by the twentieth minute, Taylor has begun his journey. This is a hundred-minute flick.
Now here is what you must know: I cannot write this picture. I do no
t know remotely how and I’ll go further and say this: I don’t know that it can be done.
There is a legal phrase that is used in music-plagiarism suits, the kind of thing that always seems to swirl around Andrew Lloyd Webber. You know, someone appears from somewhere and claims they wrote “Memory,” or something along those lines.
The money part.
That’s the phrase, “the money part,” and it means this: the heart of the song. That part of the song that makes it what it is. Well, movies have money parts, too—not all of them, maybe, but a lot. And in this case it is clearly not the looking after cows or the milk carton.
It’s the trip.
That amazing four-day, fourteen-mile trip.
By a ten-year-old.
An autistic one, please.
Through an area where four Rangers died.
Through thunderstorms.
And snakes and alligators.
That is the money part. And a fabulous one it is. With but one problem—
—how do you write that in a screenplay?
Remember, earlier, when I talked of the limitations of the form? Well, I think we have run smack into one. I don’t want to make this mechanical, but listen—for me, the climax is when he is found. From there until the end cannot take more than a couple of minutes, five at the most. We have to fill eighty minutes of screen time, remember. Eliminate the end, and we’re down to seventy-five.
We need and will want some family scenes. There’s the “Have you seen Taylor?” scene. And the calling-the-police scene. And the planes-leaving-their-airstrips-and-going-looking scenes. And the search-on-foot scenes. And a couple of family scenes.
But they all must be short. Because our heart is not here, we want to be with Taylor and what happens to him.
Give all these scenes together fifteen minutes. Want to make it twenty? You’ve got twenty.
We still have an hour to fill with Taylor.
And all he does is dolphin along.
Sure, sometimes there is the thunder. But how many nights of that can you have? And sure, a couple of snake scenes. And the same number of alligator scenes. But nothing happens to the kid. He gets scratched, period. He can’t get bitten by the poisonous snakes or he would die and if they are nonpoisonous, who gives a shit? The gators can’t catch him or they would munch him. And how often can he just barely get away?
How do we fill the time?
There is a similar true event that has a similar problem, the single most famous act of courage of the twentieth century—Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.
It was made into a movie thirty years later, The Spirit of St. Louis. Written mostly and directed by one of the all-timers, Billy Wilder. Wilder miscast his picture fatally—the almost fifty-year-old Jimmy Stewart as the twenty-five-year-old Lindbergh. (For The Dolphin we are not going to get Matt Damon.) He also gave the Lindbergh character flashbacks.
But we can’t give Taylor flashbacks. In the first place, he probably can’t remember much, and if he could, how much suspense can we build into a memory of him blowing out his candles when he was, say, six?
Wilder also gave Lindbergh—and this is not, let me preface quickly here, something Mr. Wilder wants festooned across his tombstone—a fly. You got it right, a common housefly that somehow gets into the plane and gives Lindbergh someone to talk to. (Stewart, apparently less than thrilled with the device, once told Wilder, “Either the fly goes or I go.”)
But impoverished as the fly might be, we can’t even do that—Taylor doesn’t talk. And if you give him words, how often can you hear him say “Want Chee•tos”?
I love this story so and it moves me continually and we all know that anything can be a movie, but I’m not sure about Taylor and his Odyssey. Oh, you can cheat it. You can make the mom the hero or, if you get a star, he’d love to be the one who fought the snakes and killed the alligators as he swam through this deadly terrain for his beloved son.
But that is not the story that moved me.
If you can make this play, if you can fix it so I can see this story and have it be honest and simple and all that good stuff, I would probably give you my Knicks tickets.
Or at least think about it …
* * *
Doctoring
Whenever I am offered a movie job, I always view it with two very different hats—my artist’s hat and my hooker’s hat.
My artist’s hat asks: Can I make it wonderful?
The hooker wants to know only: Will it get made?
If I can’t make it wonderful, obviously I can’t accept. The reasoning is pretty obvious: Why struggle knowing you will fail from the beginning?
In truth, I cannot remember ever having turned down something I loved because I felt it was too uncommercial. If I were given a brilliant novel dealing with six octogenarians in the death ward of a cancer hospital, I’m sure I would pass. But not before trying to get the producer to get it done on television, especially someplace like HBO, which doesn’t have to deal with the problem of selling in the same way.
When I am offered a doctoring job, however, neither hat is necessary. Doctoring is about one thing only: craft. I am dealing with a maimed and dying beast and the only question is: Have I the skill to surgically repair it?
I should add this here: except in very rare occasions, I never doctor a flick that isn’t gearing up for production. So often, executives will tell me that if I just doctor their invalid, they can almost certainly promise we will become a “go.”
Screenwriters get blamed for most failures anyway, and the great thing for me about doctoring is that for once, I am the fucking hero. I am the stud with the white hat who alone can bring peace to Dodge.
Doctoring, you should know, is not new. Studios in the thirties and forties, when everyone was under contract, jobbed in writer after writer as a matter of course. The reason you are reading about it now in the media is because of cassettes and residuals. There is real money attached to being given a screen credit now. If the movie is a hit, I should think hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When Stepmom opened to less than glorious reviews, the critics had a problem: they couldn’t blame Julia, couldn’t blame Susan, they never blame the director. So who was responsible? Obviously the five listed screenwriters. Easy target. It’s so easy to write something like: “It took five screenwriters to turn out this piece of shit?”
Let us pause and think, but for a moment, of the logic behind that. Why would a studio keep spending more and more money for screenwriters unless there is a very good reason? I know nothing about this movie but I do know the reason: ego clashes. I will bet the farm that Julia had to have her person fix up her part, then Ms. Sarandon (whom I adore and have ever since she ruined a movie I wrote called The Great Waldo Pepper by being so entrancing and sympathetic she threw the movie out of whack) brought in her pet. And there’s Chris Columbus, the most successful director of the decade whom you never heard of (I think he ranks just behind Cameron and Spielberg in terms of movie grosses)—well, he had to direct the thing, so he had to bring in his guys. On and on.
I haven’t read the screenplay but I’ll bet this: the movie got worse with each new writer.
A lot of top directors never change writers. Lean and George Roy Hill didn’t. Kazan didn’t. Eastwood never does. And if God cursed me and made me be a film director, I wouldn’t dream of changing. Part of the adventure is who you go into battle with. Who cares.
Script doctors do not care.
Because most critics and media writers still think screenplays are dialogue, I don’t care how often I tell you this—dialogue is one of the least important parts of any flick.
So if doctoring isn’t about flashy talk scenes, what is it?
There’s no one answer possible, it depends on why the movie is in trouble. Jerry Belsen is famous Out There for helping Back to School be a huge hit for Rodney Dangerfield. Belsen supposedly said three words that changed everything:
“Make
Rodney rich.”
That’s good doctoring. And if he didn’t write a word of dialogue, it’s still good doctoring. I worked on Twins for four weeks and if you asked Ivan Reitman what I did that helped make it a worldwide success he would say two things.
I wrote the credit sequence where the twins are born—and in the crib, one of them is already tormenting the other. Reitman feels that got the movie off to a solid start.
Twins was a story when I got there about these two mismatched guys who came together and went looking for their mother, who was dead.
The big thing I did was convince Reitman that the mother had to be alive. If you look at the movie today I don’t think you can imagine it with the mom already among the departed.
Twins took in close to a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide at the box office. Allowing for inflation, double that. A monster. What was that one idea worth? You decide.
When Richard Attenborough asked me to come in and help with Chaplin, I read several books about the man. And I thought it might make a terrific flick.
Because of his childhood.
Charlie had one of those lives even Dickens wouldn’t have dared dream up. Poverty, sure, lots of that. Love, nope, none of that. But a lot of people are poor and unloved, no big deal.
It was the madness that rocked me. Chaplin had madness in his family. His mother was insane. And when he was a teenager, he had to put her in a lunatic asylum.
I ended All the President’s Men on a fuck-up by Woodward and Bernstein. My logic was that time had proven them right, had made them rich, famous, media darlings of their time. So the audience, I hoped, would carry that out with them so we did not have to tell them how wonderful were Bob and Carl.
Chaplin’s horrible early life stayed with him as he performed and came to America and got to Hollywood and—this is true now—for reasons no one will ever know, he was doing a movie and wandered into a prop-and-costume shack, tried this on, that on—and exited as the tramp. Arguably the most famous image in the first century of film was born full-blown that day. He went in as Charlie, came out a little later with the shoes and the hat and the cane, and stood there blinking in the sunlight.
Which Lie Did I Tell? Page 31