But things improved. The many and generous friends about whom Walter Mirisch spoke after Verna Fields’s funeral began to make their appearance. A young man living in the apartment across from mine, originally from Illinois, was a film critic for Variety. He was so good that they booted him off the paper for having standards that were too high.
My little Love Story book came out, and that was a kick. They’d tried to make the cover look as much like Erich Segal’s source novel as possible, which was embarrassing, but still I had written the thing and it had paid my way to California. I remember seeing the first copy in the drugstore across the street from my apartment about nine o’clock one evening.
A young mother was shopping with her child, stopping before the magazine rack. I pointed out the book and said I had written it.
“You wrote Love Story ?” Her eyes widened slightly.
“Well, no, not Love Story,” I explained. “See? The Love Story Story.”
“Oh.” She looked at me dubiously. “No kidding . . .”
I pulled out my driver’s license, which had my name, after all. She brightened.
“You’re from Colorado . . . I went skiing there. . . .”
This was getting too complicated. I just bought her the damn book.
My first job was working for no money, developing a treatment for Elliot Silverstein, the director of the hit film Cat Ballou and later the amazing A Man Called Horse. I learned lots of stuff from Elliot, a former theater director from Boston who had staged the original production of Bernstein’s opera Trouble in Tahiti. Silverstein was a sort of amalgam between Bill Schwartz and Howard Stein, my playwriting teacher at Iowa. Like them, he did not suffer fools gladly. Elliot had a short fuse and piercing blue eyes that glared at you from behind steel-rimmed spectacles. Working for him I began to realize that my background in theater was actually a sort of impediment to screenwriting.
“You want to solve all your problems with dialogue,” Elliot observed bluntly. “But movies aren’t dialogue, they’re pictures. Contrast Star Trek with Mission: Impossible,” he went on, ever the pedagogue. (Star Trek again. What was it with Star Trek?) “Turn off the video on both and listen. Star Trek works fine; it becomes a radio play—because it’s all dialogue. On the other hand, Misson: Impossible without the visuals is just a series of sound effects. Now try it the other way round: if you turn on the picture and turn off the sound, Star Trek becomes essentially a series of talking heads. Mission: Impossible, by contrast, looks like a movie.”
Compare and contrast, and remember, neatness counts. Elliot lived on a largish motor yacht in the marina, an area I got to know well, as well as his friends, a collection of Hollywood types, good, bad, big (big bosomed), small, and no account.
What surprised me was how generous Elliot’s friends all were, how interested in a newcomer. They plied me with questions and encouragement. Later, more cynically, I could place another construction on their amiability: if the new boy had something to offer, they wanted to get in on it sooner rather than later, when the line got long.
But I don’t think it was that cut and dried. Los Angeles just turned out to be a friendly place—more friendly than I had imagined. People were enthusiastic about things, excited about new people with new ideas. . . .
HIRED
When I began to focus on work I made myself a new rule: no speech in a screenplay by me was going to be more than ten lines long. This restriction was a killer. I was going to have to learn to write all over again, write in a way where literacy itself was a disadvantage. Later, watching the work of Steven Spielberg, I understand how much my verbal facility worked against me. It’s better if you can think in pictures. What happens to your scene when you turn off the sound in your head?
Another rule: how many pages can you write of a screenplay before it is absolutely necessary for someone to speak?
I was certainly lucky. After three months my agent got me a job writing a movie for two producers at Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers! I was “on the lot.” I had an office in the dream factory, I was one of the chosen few who was admitted by the guard at the gate. I even had a parking space, though the white-stenciled name on it read a sobering VISITOR. No matter. I trudged happily, deliriously, through the rows of soundstages and wardrobe departments, on my way to work in the movies. The first thing I did when the door was shut was slide a piece of Warner stationery into my typewriter and punch out the following:Dear Mom and Pop: I am writing this from my office on the Warner Brothers lot . . .
Don’t let anyone tell you that being “on the lot” is not a thrill.
I was part of the circus at last.
Warner Brothers back then was still a real studio, complete with backlot. Although it has more recently been converted to office buildings and parking spaces, in the early seventies you could still wander around back there and see “medieval” wrought-iron chandeliers from which you knew Errol Flynn had swung a million “Action!”s ago, all stacked in neat configurations next to submarines, airplane fuselages, spiral staircases, doors of all sorts, and even a huge castle, which had variously functioned in Camelot (in the eponymous, ill-starred musical) and as a monastery in the Kung Fu television series. There was a “New England” town square, an “Elizabethan” street, a generic “European” street, an Andy Hardy All-American type Meet Me in St. Louis street (the real one at MGM was already apartment houses in Culver City), and several “New York” or “big city” streets with brownstones, stores, and movie theaters. And of course your basic “Western” town street was still in use, though fading fast, even as I explored its dusty storefronts.
The film I was working on was nothing, in fact, to write home about. The producers wanted a horror film with a twist—a film in which men, and not women, were the victims. The idea pleased me. I recalled a letter to the editor I had read in the Times some years earlier, where a woman had complained about Hitchcock’s Frenzy. “Just once,” she wrote, “I’d like to see a movie where the man’s eyes widen in fear . . .” Armed with the producers’ mandate to that effect, I dreamt up a story about an etymological experiment gone wrong at a remote desert think tank, in which all the women are turned into “queen bees,” whose biological urge to reproduce always resulted in the death of the chosen drone. As their colleagues start mysteriously dying off, the men become panic-stricken, have to resort to the buddy system at night, etc. while the girls grow redolent with health and well-being.
The film, as I finished it, was called The Honey Factor, a nice, oblique title for a film I felt could play the trendy Cinema I on Third Avenue or the Paramus drive-in with equal appeal.
The producers seemed pleased. By this time it was Christmas and I made my big mistake: never visit your parents during preproduction. When I returned from New York a week or so later, one of the producers made a big speech about how a screenplay is a blueprint for a building that hasn’t been built yet, how there were always adjustments to be made, etc. “You know, maybe we need another window? A few more electrical outlets?” Made sense to me.
I sat down and read the revised script, puzzled to find that The Honey Factor by Nicholas Meyer was now Invasion of the Bee Girls by Nicholas Meyer and Amy Andrews.
Amy Andrews? Who the hell was Amy Andrews? Girlfriend of one of the producers, it turned out. All that had been witty and oblique (the Cinema I stuff) had been chucked in favor of dumbed-down stuff for the Paramus drive-in crowd.
I was furious. Mortified. Impotent. I rang my agent, bellowing like a wounded elephant.
“Get my name off these fucking credits.”
“No,” he responded, “get her name off the fucking credits.”
“You don’t understand,” I whined, “this thing is a piece of shit.”
“You don’t understand,” he corrected. “You need the credit.”
In any case, the assignment of credits wasn’t up to me or the studio; assigning the final credits for a film is the jealously guarded prerogative of the Writers Guild (of whic
h I was now a member). On this occasion the Guild decided in my favor.
We will come back to this topic of credits by and by.
I never did manage to see Invasion of the Bee Girls. Maybe one day. People who see it on my résumé keep telling me it is a camp classic but I never know what this means or if it’s a good thing.
Meantime it was back to the drawing board. Invasion of the Bee Girls was not going to be my passport to immortality. Looking back on an enterprise of this sort, one is inevitably tempted to gloss over the dry spells and concentrate on the positive events, to telescope time so that good and bad are conflated to the point almost of overlapping. Not the case. There was a year when I made four thousand dollars, in all. My parents were still of the opinion I was heading nowhere fast, but mercifully I heard about their anxieties only secondhand, through my sister and her husband, also now in Los Angeles. Still, a secondhand vote of no confidence was demoralizing enough. TV dinners were the order of the day. As was self-doubt. I spent a lot of time on my own—it had begun to seem like my natural state—wondering if I was ever going to have anything to show for my efforts besides a stash of model boats. I had a chip on my shoulder, exacerbated by an arrogance that erupted when I felt ignored. At the same time, like Groucho, I would never have belonged to any club that would have me for a member.
I lost my agent, who didn’t trouble to tell me I had lost him, a familiar if unpleasant repetition. One morning the phone rang and someone named Kevin Sellers informed me that he would now be handling my affairs.
“What happened to John?” I asked, naively surprised that an agent who had been unable to sell anything by his client should wish to dump same.
“He’s very busy,” Kevin explained. He turned out to be a good kid, and I liked him a lot. He actually cared about writing and movies.
Of course he did not remain an agent very long.
Also I acquired a girlfriend. When I met Kelly she had been working for one of the two Bee Girls producers (not the one with the girlfriend-writer). I was instantly smitten. She had, after all, smiled at me, and we moved in together shortly thereafter, me shifting my Culver City digs for a small house in funky Laurel Canyon.
Kelly was beautiful, intelligent, musical, and neurotic, though I suppose I ran her a close second in that last department. It was a stormy romance, chockablock with scenes wherein she spoke long monologues about her life and times while I sat cowed and listened, wondering how had I gotten myself into this. Or could wangle my way out. The sort of thing Philip Roth describes so well. The affair last lasted two years, succumbing, finally, to a kind of attrition.
YOUR NAME HERE
Things weren’t all or always terrible. During this time, I wrote a couple of television movies that were actually filmed. It’s hard to convey what a thrill it was to finally hear actors speaking my lines. I wasn’t always happy with their performances or the editing or the direction, or the lines themselves, for that matter (always too many words; I was always mentally reaching for a pencil to scratch things out—picky, picky, picky), but I was far from unhappy. This was exciting stuff. I wasn’t making a great living but I was managing to support myself in a minimal sort of way. A young director with whom I was friendly, Jeremy Kagan, asked that I write the screenplay for what ABC assumed was going to be a Kung Fu TV movie, Judge Dee. Actually, the film was a horse of quite another color. Dee Jen Jay, a seventh-century Tang Dynasty circuit court judge, was China’s first detective of record, and a large amount of detective literature in which he is featured was Westernized by a Dutch diplomat, Robert Van Gulik. The Judge Dee books are popular all around the world, except in the United States, for some reason. I adapted Judge Dee and the Haunted Monastery for Jeremy and, using an all-Asiatic cast, we filmed on the Warner backlot, converting the old Camelot castle into our monastery. The film looked great, the actors struggled with my rococo Mandarin English (too many words), but the studio/network were pleased with the result—pleased enough to order up a second Judge Dee movie, which I also wrote. I was getting the hang of all this seventh-century Tang Dynasty stuff and greatly anticipating the second movie when, unfortunately, Khigh Dhiegh, the lovely actor who played the Judge (you may also remember his droll turn in The Manchurian Candidate) succumbed abruptly to a heart attack.
As suddenly as all the activity started, it stopped. As I was to learn, this is a feast or famine business. You’re hot, you’re in demand, you’re making a living. Then you’re high and dry, out of fashion, out of cash . . .
And then the WGA goes on strike.
STRIKE!
The 1972 Writers Guild strike changed my life dramatically. There’s lots to be said about the Guild, but for the moment I’ll confine myself to the strike itself, which required me to picket outside the (then) Goldwyn studios at Santa Monica and Formosa for three hours a day, four days a week, carrying a placard. All writers are frustrated actors; now here we were, starring in our own production of Waiting for Lefty Meets On the Waterfront While Waiting for Bardot, shouldering our picket signs as though they were rifles and we, the workers on the front lines of the proletarian revolution. Writers of the world unite; we had nothing to lose but our subordinate clauses.
We all picketed with a partner. After three hours walking with him or her in a long oval, with the sun beating down on the pavement (and us), we learned more than we ever cared to know about him—and vice versa, natch. I picketed with an older man named Al Beich who had written a lot of Mannix episodes. One day when our shift was finished, he invited me back to his place for a drink.
“Just follow my car,” he offered by way of directions. In LA you measure places by the time in takes to reach them, not how many miles there are between them. “It’s about ten minutes,” Al said.
The car of this proletarian revolutionary turned out to be a vintage green Rolls-Royce convertible. I followed it west on Sunset Boulevard until we turned into the driveway of the most opulent building north of Sunset, the one everyone stares at from his car and wonders about, a European-looking stone mansion of enormous proportions and (relative) age, situated on the primest real estate in town.
Mannix paid for this? Maybe I should think twice about episodic television.
It turned out that Al (who was in his sixties) was in fact part of the enormously wealthy Beich candy family, and that it was his (much older) sister, Mary—who was never there—who actually owned the place. It further turned out that Mary was herself the much younger widow of Wyatt Earp’s lawyer, a man named McCarthy (you following this? you believe this?) for whom the place had been built by Italian artisans, imported from Italy for the purpose. (They probably stayed to work on Griffith’s sets for Intolerance when they were finished.)
The estate was like Norma Desmond’s mansion in Sunset Blvd. , a miniature palazzo, complete with marbled-floored ballroom, a kitchen larger than my entire one-room flat, a stage (for live theatrical productions) in the basement, along with hundreds of polo mallets suspended from the ceiling—McCarthy was an avid polo player; see the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills hotel—next to Renaissance canvasses and even a blue, eighteenth-century sedan chair in the foyer, which sported a telephone within its recesses.
In the basement were all McCarthy’s files and contracts of the day. You could pull open a drawer and see how much Vilma Bánky was getting. Or Rod La Rocque. Or Valentino. I felt a little like Joe Gillis. All I needed was the Salome script to work on. At least Al’s pool had water in it, not rats.
The trip to Al’s was an amusing break in an otherwise bleak and uninteresting time. The strike squelched everything. You were not allowed to write scripts. Just when I was getting started, too.
“Well, since you can’t write screenplays,” Kelly pointed out, washing the dishes as I dried, “now you’ve got ample time to write that novel you’re always talking about.” Ah, yes . . .
THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION
That novel. As though I needed to bash my head against the brick wall of fiction one mo
re time.
But the truth was that because of the Writers Guild strike, I had nothing better to do—at least when I wasn’t literally walking around in circles on the picket line—so I started banging away at my long-gestating notion of a Doyle pastiche in which Sherlock Holmes met, matched wits with, and finally collaborated with Dr. Sigmund Freud. Freud cures Holmes’s cocaine addiction; in return, Holmes’s methodology sets Freud on the analytic path that will lead to psychoanalysis.
What became The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was the end result of many thoughts and influences converging. My long-standing fondness for the Holmes stories was, of course, the starting point. (In my early teens I had actually attempted to turn Holmes into a musical.) But it must also be said that my distaste for all the Holmes movies and other imitations played an almost equally important part. In a word, I have never seen a Holmes movie I didn’t dislike; almost never read a Holmes pastiche (other than a couple of very early ones) that seemed to me to capture the essence of Holmes and his amanuensis. Holmes pastiches, in whatever medium, always emerge as campy and unreal, in stark contrast—to me, anyway—with the original stories. It’s the difference between a live Bengal tiger and the taxidermic version. In most of these stuffed approximations, Watson is always depicted as an idiot, an admittedly tempting choice because it’s so easy, but one that, on closer examination, makes no sense. Why would a genius choose to hang out with a buffoon? How can we reconcile bumbling Nigel Bruce as the bluff but reliable narrator of the original case histories? Holmes’s vanity is a subtle thing: he wants the appreciation of a regular man, not a sub-regular man. At least part of my impetus, therefore, was this disgust with what I regarded as inferior imitation. I felt—innately felt—that I understood these characters, their nuances, and Doyle’s narrative tone better than anyone else. Right or wrong, that notion helped goad me to the project.
The View from the Bridge Page 4