I was in the cutting room one day with our little radio turned on, listening to President Reagan speak. He began by describing the dreadful potential of nuclear weapons, and as I listened, I stopped work, convinced by his tone that something momentous and just possibly wonderful was about to be announced. A freeze on nuclear weapons? Was it possible?
No, the president had something else in mind, a nuclear space shield, an umbrella of missiles to shoot down other missiles, by which to protect Americans in the event of a nuclear missile attack. The press soon dubbed it Star Wars (to George Lucas’s consternation), and I went back to work, convinced—if I needed any convincing by this point—that this film needed to be made.
Bob and I finished our one-night version of The Day After and showed it to the group of ABC execs. It ran about two hours and twenty minutes. When it was over these guys were all sobbing. These were television executives, but they were also human beings—they had families, they had children, they had lives of their own, a stake in the planet like everyone else—and they had been deeply and obviously affected by what they had seen.
Based on their response, I imagined I was home free.
In fact our troubles had just begun, as a six-month-long tug-of-war soon began over the final shape of the film. Some battles I won; others I lost. When my editor, Bill Dornisch, loyally refused to recut the movie per ABC’s samurai approach (now that there was no advertising revenue at stake, why not trim it to the bone?) he was summarily sacked. At one point I actually walked off the picture for three months while X went into the editing room himself, accompanied by his own editor (Y?), and went to town on the film.
Talk about being the hatchet man . . .
A lot of times in this business, confronted by your own impotence in the face of corporate and contractual reality, you think you will die. That all these corporate honchos had wept buckets when they saw the first cut of the film only compounded my misery. That I had labored so hard and given so much of myself (not to mention the people who worked on the film both in Hollywood and by the thousands in Lawrence, Kansas, who had all trusted me) to something I thought so terribly important and then to see it ripped to meaningless shreds was enough to make me contemplate suicide.
Really.
It was the first of many such contemplations. I crawled into bed and stayed there for days while my long-suffering agent, Gary Lucchesi, labored behind the scenes on my behalf to effect some kind of rapprochement. Agents must take the long view; they don’t want their clients blackballed from future projects because they made waves, a reputation with which I was already flirting. The only good news about being so desperately hurt and angry was that I couldn’t eat, which, in my case, did have some benefits. I simply couldn’t get my head around the fact of my powerlessness against a large corporation; even though I had brought the film into being, given it life, made them weep when they saw it, then fended off all their absurd compromises, I finally couldn’t fend off them. The film was theirs; it was their idea, they commissioned it, they paid for it; I was merely the hired hand. Any droit morale was theirs. Why was I unable to accept this reality? Grow up.
In the end, X’s cut of the film was so ridiculous that even his superiors blanched, for he had inadvertently managed to make plain what we had struggled to conceal: Who started the war? In X’s version, it was unambiguously the Soviets. ABC was contractually obliged to let me see it, and I was shattered afresh, all the stitches on my wounds popping open and the bleeding recommencing. Of course with my reputation for being “difficult” now firmly in place, it didn’t seem to matter much what I did to cement or redeem it. I lay on my bed of pain, stared at the ceiling, and tried to think. It now occurred to me that the last thing ABC wanted for this hot potato was public dissension from the filmmakers’ ranks. Accordingly, when Marilyn Reed, a columnist from the Chicago Sun-Times, called and asked me about the film, I hinted darkly of pressure to recut the movie from corporate sources. I took care to be oblique and nonspecific, but my message was clear. Next thing I knew, I was brought back in from the cold to repair X’s carnage in the cutting room.
In the end, the film was censored, and many things weren’t the way I intended them. In addition, it was preceded and succeeded by all manner of disclaimers but it still packed enough of a wallop to drive Bill Buckley and Phyllis Schlafly crazy. They ran around the country like Chicken Littles, warning anyone who’d listen that the sky was falling, while on its editorial page the New York Post demanded to know why Nicholas Meyer was doing Yuri Andropov’s work for him. (Andropov, lest you have forgotten, was the Soviet premier at the time.) I ask you. The press surprised me by taking no interest in the film itself; all they were obsessed by was the issue of who started the nuclear war depicted in it—we or the Russians? I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why this was the only issue that commanded their attention but later came to understand what I had earlier intuited, namely that nuclear war and its consequences per se were simply too dreadful to contemplate head-on and probably wouldn’t sell newspapers. It was easier and doubtless more reassuring for the press to concentrate on the more familiar terrain of who began it. Never mind the horrendous consequences of nuclear war; safer to concentrate on whom to blame for starting it. X’s version probably would have sent Rupert Murdoch into ecstasies, even as it scotched any possible improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations. I went on CNN’s Crossfire and tried to get in a word edgewise while Pat Buchanan and Michael Kinsley yelled at each other.
The Reagan White House saw the film before it aired and called us with editing “notes”! In retrospect I don’t find this surprising. The President, an old Hollywood pro, doubtless had always longed for final cut. (So did the Army, when we asked for their cooperation before shooting. We didn’t get their helicopters; they didn’t get to rewrite our script.)
In the years to come I would hear all sorts of amazing stories connected with The Day After and the effect it had on people. How a general in Havana saw the picture and said the Cuban Missile Crisis had never been real to him before viewing it; how the Joint Chiefs had screened it at the Pentagon, searching for a way to discredit it—and me. How the White House felt the crucial need to put someone on television directly following the picture to say how off-base the thing was. They considered Jeane Kirkpatrick, which would have been fun, but unfortunately wiser heads prevailed and we were all treated to the benign presence of Secretary of State George Shultz, reassuring Ted Koppel that everything was going to be just fine. Then followed an all-star session of Nightline (the most highly watched edition of the program ever), featuring Elie Wiesel squaring off with Henry Kissinger and William Buckley, with Kissinger opining that scaring ourselves to death was no way to make nuclear policy.
Seeing as that is just what we had been doing for the previous forty years, I felt his argument had some holes in it.
I tried to watch the film the night it aired but couldn’t imagine anyone sitting through it. After all, it wasn’t a very good movie; that had been, in a way, the point. If the movie had been “good” in the conventional sense, we could have let ourselves off the hook, talking about how wonderful Jason Robards was, how effective the music was, etc.—anything other than contemplating its stark nuclear message. (As far as music went, there wasn’t any, other than some Virgil Thomson over the credits and a few bars to link a couple of scenes, as I hadn’t wanted to “goose” anyone’s reactions.) As a director, I had made the film as a counterintuitive exercise. I knew if people discussed the movie instead of what the movie was about, we’d have failed. I wanted all the script’s banality to work for me, to entice the audience past our subject matter until they were drowning in it. Seeing the film that night on television, however, all I got was the banality.
And thank God there was no CGI technology available to make nuclear destruction spectacular and “fun,” which was how The New York Times some thirty years later reviewed an end-of-New York movie called The Day After Tomorrow—global warming as a special effects
extravaganza.
The morning following our telecast I was stupefied to learn that over a hundred million viewers had stuck with the thing to the end, often watching in hand-holding groups. Ed Hume had known exactly what he was doing. It is my understanding that the hundred-million mark for a TV movie has yet to be surpassed. And with all the channels currently available to fragment the viewing audience, it seems unlikely a single event will ever again capture so large a portion of the population.
The Day After is probably the most worthwhile thing I ever got to do with my life to date. In the immediate aftermath of the broadcast, though, I wasn’t convinced it had done any good. Who wants to admit that his mind was changed by anything as dumb as a TV movie, anyway?
Following the telecast, an instant survey was taken in which people were asked if the movie had changed their minds about nuclear war. The press then gleefully informed me that according to their stats, no one’s mind had been changed and what did I have to say to that?
I answered truthfully that it was too soon to say what effect the film had had on viewers and whether any were prepared to admit—even to themselves—if it had. What do people really believe about anything? People aver all sorts of positions and ideologies—but do they mean what they say? Or are they saying what they want to believe? Hope to believe? Want you to think they believe? Maybe we only learn what we really believe on our deathbeds or with a gun to our heads.
But at least one person’s mind was changed by the film. When President Reagan signed the intermediate range missile treaty in Iceland, I got a lovely card from someone that said, “Don’t think your film didn’t have something to do with this,” which turned out to be intuitively prescient. Some years after I had a weird confirmation of this fact. I was speaking at Oxford, and a student asked if I’d ever read Reagan’s autobiography. I said I hadn’t, whereupon he handily produced a photocopied page for me in which the president described his reaction to the film, essentially allowing as to how it had altered his perception of the nuclear subject. Remember, this was a president who saw life in terms of movies, and it had taken a movie to help him see that nuclear wars are unwinnable. Later, when I met Edmund Morris, author of Reagan’s biography Dutch, he confirmed the paragraph in his book that stipulates the only time he ever saw Reagan depressed was after viewing The Day After. Reagan, who had come to power contemplating a winnable nuclear war (“if we have enough shovels . . .” etc.), had changed his mind.
Take it where you find it. The Day After received a staggering twelve Emmy nominations. In the end, it won only two; a smaller film, Special Bulletin, rushed into production on tape by NBC, took the “nuclear” TV movie Emmy a year earlier while we were fighting over our film’s final cut. In Special Bulletin, the anti-nuke activists are the baddies who set off an A-bomb. Go figure.
When it was time to make the VHS and later DVD versions of the movie, I was allowed to reinsert some of the cut footage that the network had deemed too controversial to air.
Since its initial broadcast, a number of books and PhD theses have been written and (continue to be written) about The Day After, not counting Reagan’s memoir. Many of these contain a great deal of information regarding the politics—national as well as network—behind the production and subsequent reaction to the film of which I was unaware. I have chosen to relate the making and airing of the movie as I experienced it, rather than including information to which I had no access at the time.
Before ending this chapter, there is an incident I feel bound to relate that occurred somewhere around this time and that had a profound effect upon me.
I was in New York and had, for some reason I cannot now recollect, been invited to attend a party in a Fifth Avenue apartment, given for members of the French film industry. I was there by myself, wandering around, knowing no one, but happily eyeing French filmmakers and actors whom I had long admired, as they ate and chatted in French among themselves, convivial, charming, and effortlessly Gallic. I spied a director who had long been an idol of mine. We had not been introduced, but I hovered nearby, watching his every move, hoping to glean I knew not what. He was standing by the buffet table, now laden with desserts, and the hostess passed and said, “Oh, Louis, darling, would you be an angel and cut these cakes?” before moving on to other obligations.
Having nothing better to do than indulge my fascination for this director, a slim, dark-haired gentleman, not especially tall, I watched him cut dessert cakes and as I did, I died a thousand deaths. I don’t know about you, but as far as I am concerned there is only one way to cut a round cake; you start in the middle and carve out pie-sliced wedges to the edge. I daresay not one man or woman in ten million has gone about it otherwise for ten thousand years of human cake-cutting.
And yet here was this French director carving out triangles, parallelograms, squares, ovals, and what-have-yous, cutting the cake as no one before had ever cut the cake, thinking through (or not even thinking, doing it on instinct or intuition) the whole cake-cutting business as if it was for the first time.
I sidled up to him and tried to keep my voice casual.
“How come you’re cutting the cake like that?”
He shrugged, didn’t look up, and went on sculpting. “Well, this way everyone can have the size and shape that they want.”
A perfect answer to go with his unprecedented act. I was in the presence of a genius. No wonder Louis Malle had been able to make a comedy about incest. I stumbled away in a daze, left the party, and walked alone up Fifth Avenue in the dead of night, stunned, indeed humiliated by the thoughtless feat of originality that I had witnessed.
My first response was that I couldn’t wait to cut the cake like that. I am not brilliant. As I continued my lonely hike uptown, I realized that I would never cut the cake like that, nor do anything so profoundly original, as long as I lived. The first man who said a woman’s lips were like a rose was a genius; the second guy who said it was a plodder. It was a sobering moment. I had come face to face with my limitations and in a fashion that I could not ignore. It was as if I was a pianist and had finally listened to Horowitz. What was the point of going on if you know you were never going to play like Horowitz?
In years to come I had another insight that was somewhat comforting: While it was true that I would never be capable of that sort of act, I had, on the other hand, recognized it when it had occurred. I did understand its significance at the time and preserved it in my memory; I am relating it to you now. That is the sort of artist I am; not of the first rank, perhaps not even of the second, but I do recognize something original when I see it; I can preserve it for others to savor, even if the originator of the act is unaware or unappreciative of just what it is he or she has done. I could never write The Odyssey, but I can probably make it into a very good screenplay. That is the other thing I am besides being a teacher. A storyteller. Not the creator of stories, but rather the re-creator. I would never have imagined anything as original as Sherlock Holmes—but I might, with some success, imagine him meeting Sigmund Freud. If someone had said their two names together first.
STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME
Based on Khan’s spectacular success, it was by now a foregone conclusion that there would be a third Star Trek feature and that it would involve the resurrection of Spock. The year was 1983, and I was deeply involved in cutting The Day After. I was also falling in love.
Paramount Pictures asked if I would write and direct the third Star Trek movie, an offer I declined. I still felt passionately that Spock ought not to be brought back to life and in any case, bringing dead people back to life was something I didn’t know how to do, because, I suppose, I have trouble believing such a thing is possible. The tale of Jesus’s resurrection is one of the most prominent in our culture, but I have difficulty with that one, as well.
When Leonard Nimoy learned I was not going to direct the film, he perceived a challenge that suddenly made the whole project interesting to him and he perceived some leverage as well:
He wanted to direct the film in exchange for his participation as the resurrected Spock.
Michael Eisner tried to talk him out of this, pointing out that directing a film is hard enough, but a directing debut in which you are also the star places you under a triple burden.
At which point Nimoy called and sought my advice. My reply was very simple: “Are you prepared to let this ship sail without you?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” he answered.
“Then sit tight; you’re gonna direct the movie.”
Which is exactly what happened. Did I feel a pang when I learned the film was going forward with Nimoy at the helm? Possibly. I had become friends with many of these people, and there was certainly something alluring in the promise of directing a film that had all a studio’s resources—production and distribution—behind it. If you’re doing a studio film, nothing is too good for you; the red carpet of money and expertise is yours. Ever since the French gave us the auteur theory, the director has become king, and if you don’t keep a cool head, you may confuse yourself with the job description. All the importance, all the deference attached to your every whim and opinion is there only so long as you are doing what the studio wants you to do. You ride first class—but only for the duration of the film.
Of course, if you are Kubrick or Huston or Coppola or Scorsese, you really are king.
Nonetheless, I don’t believe I lost much sleep over Star Trek III. Nimoy and Harve Bennett wrote the screenplay together, Bennett produced (minus the participation of Bob Sallin, whose place and function were assumed by the very capable Ralph Winter), Nimoy directed, and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock was released in June of 1984. This was the second pairing of Bennett and Nimoy, and they worked well together. Kirstie Alley declined to reprise the role of Lieutenant Saavik, and her place was taken by Robin Curtis. It was a thankless task for the newcomer; it’s far easier to create a character than reprise someone else’s performance (James Bond being the exception that proves the rule).
The View from the Bridge Page 17