The View from the Bridge

by Nicholas Meyer

  My analyst was Dr. Lewis J. Fielding, famous at the time for having had his office burgled by Nixon’s “plumbers” in search of dirt to use on another of his patients, Daniel Ellsberg, in the hopes of discrediting the Pentagon Papers he had secretly photocopied from the Rand Corporation and given to The New York Times. When I first began my analysis, I wasted a lot of Fielding’s time (and my own) making nervous jokes revolving around my anxiety of following in Ellsberg’s footsteps. “Look, doc, I’ve brought you the Pentagon Papers!”

  “Interesting,” Fielding responded, to my chagrin. “You know you’re the second guy today who’s trooped into my office with these things?” Et cetera.

  Under normal circumstances Fielding seldom spoke, other than to recapitulate or string together my associations at the end of the hour (see my notes on editing above), but on the occasion of my Day After soul-searching, he surprised me by interrupting my monologue:

  “I think this is where we find out who you really are,” he suggested quietly.

  Which is one of the most dreadful (and useful) things anyone has ever said to me. I knew the moment the words were out of his mouth that I would have to direct The Day After. I had entered psychoanalysis to find out who I was—and now I was going to.

  It wasn’t all that easy rounding up people to be in the movie or work on it, either. Everyone was as spooked as I was. When I approached Gayne Rescher, my cinematographer from Star Trek II, and asked him to photograph the movie, he said he wasn’t up for it.

  “You mean,” I badgered, “that you prefer to sit around at dinner parties and bitch about the state of the world, but when someone offers you the chance to put your work in the service of your beliefs, you’re gonna turn it down?” He frowned unhappily. “I think,” I pressed shamelessly on, “that this is where we find out who you really are.”

  Damned useful, that phrase. I crowbarred a lot of people with it.

  Jason Robards didn’t need that kind of pressure. I’d met him once at a friend’s house and now bumped into him on a flight to New York. I can’t say it wasn’t a thrill to chat with the man. By way of making small talk, Robards asked me what I was up to. I told him I would be shooting a film that summer in Lawrence, Kansas, about nuclear war.

  “Really.”

  Suddenly I was seized by a weird impulse. We were at 36,000 feet with no TV executives or agents in sight.

  “So, Jason, what are you doing this August?” Maybe I had had some cognac; can’t remember now.

  “Not a thing.”

  “Would you like to be in this movie?”

  “Beats signing petitions,” he answered without hesitation. I promised to show him Ed Hume’s compelling script when we landed, as I had a copy in my suitcase.

  “Great.” We shook on it, and I hoped nobody in LA was going to have a fit. It was slightly anticlimactic to land in New York and find that TWA had managed to lose my bag. Robards didn’t know me that well; perhaps this would convince him I was out of my mind.

  “It’s a really good script,” I told him, vamping like mad next to the luggage carousel, desperate for a sight of my errant suitcase.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he soothed. “Just have someone get it to me one of these days.”

  As it happened, ABC wasn’t bent too out of shape by my hiring one of the best American actors of his generation, but my relations with them and with television in general were congenitally stormy.

  Brandon Stoddard was the head of ABC Circle Films, the branch of the corporation that was going to make the movie, which in fact was his idea (apparently inspired by his having viewed the nuclear themed feature The China Syndrome). Stoddard had an assistant whom I shall refer to as “X.” When X first showed me the script and asked me to direct, the film was planned as a four-hour “event” to be spread over two nights. The screenplay I read, while undeniably powerful, seemed also to be padded. I figured you could shake an hour out of it easily, and the material would benefit from being tightened.

  “Why don’t you whack out an hour of this thing, do it all in one night, and zap the audience right between the eyes?” I suggested to X. “I don’t believe folks are going to tune in for night two of Armageddon.”

  “You’re right about the script being padded,” X conceded, “but what you don’t understand is the economics of TV. ABC doesn’t expect to make any money on The Day After, but there is a limit on how much we can afford to lose. The hour that you propose to eliminate represents essential advertising for us. Those four hours literally translate into three hours of film: ninety minutes a night and thirty minutes a night of advertising.”

  “Ah.”

  “So you see,” went on X, who always spoke as though he saw himself explaining things to a child (and who knows?), “we need the film time to justify the revenue.”

  “Ah ha. Let me ask you something else,” I pursued. “You don’t really think you’re going to get this thing on the air, do you? I mean, the American people watch Charlie’s Angels—they’re not prepared to be exposed to anything like this.”

  “Oh, it’ll go on the air alright,” prophesied X blithely.

  The producer of The Day After was a genial, unpretentious fellow named Bob Papazian, who knew as much about television movies as anyone in the business. He had produced some excellent “prestige” movies about such things as the federal desegregation of Little Rock Central High and would later go on to manage the impossible logistics of North and South, Book II, fighting the entire Civil War in about a week. I liked him; he liked me; we’ve been friends ever since.

  What had intrigued me about the script of The Day After was its seductive banality. It was just a TV movie about average Americans going about business as usual until they get fried. Since Americans (and, for all I knew, everyone else as well) were constitutionally incapable of reading the “antinuclear” books and articles or watching the alarmist TV documentaries, and were equally unwilling to watch such nuclear-themed movies as On the Beach, I had the idea that maybe the comforting familiarity of our script might work for us, would enable the film to sneak in the back door of everyone’s consciousness, so to speak, in the guise of the good old reliable movie of the week. I knew, however, that whatever its soap opera camouflage, The Day After was no movie of the week.

  Like Stoddard and X, Bob Papazian also seemed to be unable to appreciate what was so clear to me from the beginning—namely, the political, financial, and psychological impossibility represented by the film as a project for American network television. When I tried to explain my fears, Papazian just laughed—his laugh, like Bill Dornisch’s (whom I had cajoled into editing the film), being another sort of giggle. Nonetheless, we got along splendidly and went to work preparing the project. I figured I’d cross the bridge of the padded script (somehow) when I got to it but meanwhile immersed myself in Jonathan Schell’s The Fate of the Earth and other light reading, the sort of thing that—like everyone else—I had hitherto avoided.

  Everyone is aware that a nuclear war would be fatal, but no one knows—or, understandably, wants to know—the precise details. Since our only model for the consequences of nuclear bombs being dropped on humans was Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two horse-and-buggy A-bombs from forty years earlier, any attempt at modeling the effects of a nuclear catastrophe was all guesswork and computerized extrapolation. At the time that we made our film, for example, scientists had not yet discovered the phenomenon known as nuclear winter. But they had discovered a lot of other alarming consequences, including electromagnetic pulsation, known familiarly as EMP, to say nothing of what radiation does to living things not obliterated outright. It was hard to read this stuff, to concentrate on it, to figure out where and when (and how) it belonged in our script—and keep your head out of the oven.

  I had yet to cope with the Byzantine politics that characterizes network television. To take but one example, Bob announced to me one day that we had a meeting to attend.

  “What meeting?” I asked as we got into his car.


  “Standards and Practices,” he answered as we pulled out of the garage.

  “Standards and Practices?” I echoed. “What’s that?”

  Bob defined Standards and Practices. My eyes widened.

  “Censors. You’re describing censors!” I squeaked as we headed west on Pico Boulevard toward ABC corporate offices in Century City.

  “They call it Standards and Practices,” Bob explained with one of his giggles.

  I mulled on this. “What happens when we get there?” I asked.

  “Well, you go through the script, and they tell you what you can’t film. You can argue about some stuff,” he added, casting me a sideways look.

  I said nothing but cogitated some more as we drove on for three more traffic lights. I am not the fastest thinker in the world but I was slowly coming to the conclusion that I had been blindsided. Bushwhacked. Ambushed.

  “Bob.”

  “Uh huh . . .”

  “Lemme ask you something.”

  “Shoot.”

  “If they were gonna censor this script, wouldn’t it have been more appropriate to censor it before I was offered it to direct?”

  “Whaddaya mean?”

  “I mean, you guys showed me a script, and I agreed to direct this script. Now I find out that some people can take it apart before I ever roll a camera. Seems to me if they had wanted to tone it down they should have done that before I agreed to direct it.”

  “This is how it’s always done,” Bob explained, puzzled.

  I thought about this as we headed into the ABC garage.

  “Bob.”

  “Still here, Nick.”

  “I just want to say that I can’t be bound to honor anything that happens in this meeting.”

  Nervous guffaw from Bob.

  “Hey, take it easy.”

  “I’m just telling you. This”—I hefted my copy of the script—“this is the script I signed on to shoot, nothing less.”

  More uneasy laughter from Bob.

  The meeting was even stranger than I had imagined. A man and a woman who never smiled went through our script page by page.

  “On page two,” the woman indicated, “where the patient calls the Japanese doctor tojo, that’s out.”

  “How come?” I found myself asking despite myself.

  “Because the term is racially offensive to Japanese viewers, and we will not knowingly insult a portion of our viewing public.”

  “Did you ever make a film and use the term ‘nigger’?” I asked.

  “Never.”

  “Didn’t you make a miniseries called Roots ?” I pursued. “Seems to me the term ‘nigger’ was all over the place.”

  “Yes,” admitted the man, “but that was in context.”

  “What does that mean—‘in context’? Means it was about ‘niggers’?”

  They shifted their positions in their seats. To my left, Bob squirmed.

  “It’s out,” the woman said flatly.

  “Completely,” added the other.

  I said nothing.

  Later on they objected to a scene where one of the characters purchases a diaphragm.

  “How come?” I replied, dutifully maintaining my proscribed part of the exchange, as ritualistic as the responses of the congregation. They seemed to expect it.

  “Because the network will not take a position that could be construed as endorsing birth control.”

  It took another kind of control to just sit there. Where do the people come from who do this job? Did they have childhoods like the rest of us? Go to school? Get drunk, laid, laugh, cry? Or are they born, Athena-like, full-blown from the head of some executive?

  “You mean you guys have never made a film where birth control devices were used or discussed?”

  “Never.”

  “Didn’t you make a film about teenage pregnancy a year or so back? Seems like there was all sorts of talk about diaphragms, pills and such.”

  “Yes, but that was—”

  “In context,” I finished for him. “Anyway,” I reasoned, unable to stop myself from engaging in this discourse any more than I could prevent myself from debating with the Jehovah’s Witnesses who knocked on my dorm room in college, “this character later bitterly regrets having used a diaphragm. That certainly would seem to be the opposite of an endorsement of birth control.”

  “It’s out.”

  “Completely.”

  I said nothing.

  And so it went. Where nuclear war was concerned, they also objected to scenes that depicted the electromagnetic pulse and its consequences. They were scientific experts now. We found ourselves arguing over scientific data none of us was qualified to evaluate.

  They told me the EMP was “out.” I said nothing but sat with the script in my lap, making not a single note. Bob was writing stuff down, but for the life of me I couldn’t see why.

  Later, filming in Lawrence, Kansas, I ignored every one of their directives. Matters came to a head about ten days into shooting. We were filming one of the family subplots (which took place while the United States and the Russians were getting ready to launch their missiles), when I got tapped on the shoulder by Bob.

  “There’s a call for you from LA.”

  “Can you take a message?”

  He shook his head.

  “It’s the ABC brass.”

  I took the phone. The voice on the other end was apoplectic. He was on a speakerphone, and I sensed a bunch of other execs in the room with him.

  “Nick, what do you think you’re doing!?”

  “Shooting the script you offered me to direct.”

  “But we agreed, you agreed—” the voice expostulated.

  “I agreed to nothing,” I pointed out, having been waiting for this moment, “except to shoot the script you offered me. But rather than have this discussion,” I went on, by way of preempting his next expostulation, “let me make this easy for you. Fire me.”

  “What?”

  “Fire me. I didn’t want to make this depressing movie anyway. Fire me, and I’ll have a perfect out.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Not me. Look, you’re only ten days in, it shouldn’t be too hard to reshoot. You just get a new director and some new actors—”

  “New actors?”

  “Well, if I walk, Jason’s gonna walk, maybe JoBeth Williams, too, but that shouldn’t be a problem,” I hastened to assure him, warming to my topic. “You just replace Jason, replace JoBeth, replace Gayne Rescher, and before you know it, you’ll be—”

  “Hang on.”

  I could hear voices mumbling and thought I caught the phrase “that son ovabitch” before my correspondent got back on the line.

  “Nick, we’ll get back to you.”

  “Do that.”

  The next day the phone rang again, this time in the Kansas farmhouse where we were shooting. This time the voice—the same voice—crooned with patronizing serenity.

  “N-i-c-k, it’s your movie, you shoot it the way you want, but, as an officer of ABC Circle films, I must tell you that legally none of that stuff can be in the picture.”

  “Fine, you’ve told me.”

  And there that particular brouhaha ended. In the event, not one of the items I shot was deleted, including the celebrated diaphragm and the scenes involving the effect of the electromagnetic pulse, which depicted all electricity cutting out in the wake of an airborne nuclear explosion.

  Following the shootout with the network, actual shooting, first in Lawrence, Kansas, and later at an abandoned LA hospital, went very well. For all the bad rap Kansas has garnered in recent years, what with trying to turn back the clock on Darwin, the people of Lawrence were as sophisticated as any I’ve ever met and they came out by the thousands to make the film work and achieve a scale it could otherwise never have afforded. Now, granted, some of these folks were just there because the idea of being in a movie struck them as fun, but I talked to a large number who had come out of political convic
tions and genuine concern at the prospect of a nuclear war. The Day After is dedicated to them. (The night the film aired, they held a candlelight vigil for peace in Lawrence that hundreds attended; twenty-five years later, at an anniversary reunion and screening in Lawrence, the people who showed up were not movie freaks, but peace junkies.)

  There were other problems, however. When it came time to edit the film I was confronted with the hour’s worth of padding in the script. I had never edited scenes “to length” before and the process as well as the concept I found confounding. Why should a scene play longer than it could justify itself on the screen? I placed a call to X.

  “Listen, X,” I said, “I know that you want this film for two nights, but candidly, I think it will be significantly weakened if we keep in all this extra stuff. I believe in putting my best foot forward and making the best possible impression on you guys that I can. Can’t I edit the film the way I think it should go and then, if you still want the rest back in, we can restore it?”

  “I’ll get back to you,” said X. A day later, he called.

  “We, too, believe in the doctrine of first impressions,” said X. “Edit the film your way, and we’ll look at it.”

  I was astonished by this response, which only made sense when I later learned how difficult it had become for ABC to get any sponsors for the film. As I had anticipated, the political landscape was beginning to register seismic tremors, and the withdrawal of sponsors was one of the earliest manifestations of the difficulties we were to have broadcasting The Day After. General Motors, General Mills, General Foods—all the generals had headed for the hills. Certainly if ABC couldn’t get advertisers, it made no sense to stretch out the movie beyond a single night. In the end my hatred for the commercials that insistently interrupt the action on network television, and my dream that they might be magically dispensed with, was gratified. The only advertisers to hang in were Commodore computers and one of the smaller car rental companies. Tactfully, the network decided to have no commercials after the bomb dropped. (I wonder if their tact would have obtained if they’d been getting prime ad rates.)