The View from the Bridge

by Nicholas Meyer

  I had a strangely difficult time casting the role of Beth Wexsler, the fiery Long Island Jewish Peace Corps volunteer with whom Hanks, playing a blue-blood Brahmin wastrel on the run from gambling debts, falls inconveniently in love. After a pair of films in which I had “discovered” first Mary Steenburgen and later Kirstie Alley, I was confused by my inability to settle on an actress for the part of Beth. Not being of an analytic turn of mind, I couldn’t figure out what was preventing me from making a decision. I saw all the available “hot” actresses of the period on both coasts, some more than once. I finally realized that I had a “type” in mind, and for some reason I cannot now recall, that type was a blue-eyed brunette. Dick Shepherd and Walter Parkes, my two producers, were beginning to show signs of impatience. What was the problem? A sometime actress friend suggested a girlfriend of hers, so I brought her in. Rita Wilson was of Greek extraction and purely West Coast but she gave a terrific reading. I decided to take this one step further and give her a screen test, which was beautifully photographed by my old DP from Time After Time, Paul Lohman. Rita was great. I suggested, once she was cast, that she visit the famous Hollywood dialect coach, Bob Easton, to see if she could incorporate just the hint of a Lawn Gisland accent. Tom, I thought, should sound like George Plimpton, and then I had a slight epiphany: We would cast George Plimpton himself as Tom’s father. The plan killed several birds with one stone. George was most amusing in the role, and after hanging out with him for three days, Tom mastered that lock-jawed New England drawl to perfection.

  We made Volunteers in Mexico, and it was a happy experience—maybe too happy. The people were great, and my casting of Rita was validated when I realized my leading man had fallen in love with his leading lady; they would later marry. Time After Time redux. What could be bad?

  Well, for one thing, our cinematographer, Ric Waite, whose doctor had assured him that he had the heart of an eighteen-year-old, suffered a heart attack. Ric had flown his own plane down to Mexico and on weekends had offered to fly me over the Oaxacan jungle to the picturesque ruins of Monte Albán. I am not an eager flier and had already had anxious times searching that selfsame jungle from the air for locations. I had sat dangling out of a helicopter with a camera, photographing establishing shots of our village, after Ric had declined so I was sort of relieved when Dick Shepherd, as producer, forbade my going up with Ric as the movie’s insurance didn’t cover it. Later, I could only wonder what might have happened if Ric had had his heart attack when neither of us could’ve landed his plane.

  Fortunately, the attack, when it came, was on the ground and while Ric was obliged to leave the picture, he is still very much alive as of this writing. I promoted our second cameraman, Jack Green, to cinematographer, and he’s had a successful career working for Clint Eastwood, among others, ever since.

  John Candy was a nervous flier, too. A sweet and amazingly funny man, it was all Hanks could do to keep a straight face when playing opposite him. Candy seemed startlingly provincial for someone who had enjoyed such success. He was still basically a boy from rural Canada. No Mexican food for him.

  Filming on location is rewarding—there is no substitute for the reality captured on camera—but it is also hazardous, especially when you are as cut off from civilization as we were. And while you got used to and even thrived on the big privations, dumb things like bagels were sorely missed. And it was disquieting to see how easily, when things weren’t going well, you could turn into the Ugly American, responding to a different world by which you were alternately disturbed and frustrated. When I caught myself veering into this unpleasant mode, I was shocked and disappointed. I picked up a sort of movie-Spanish. I could say “higher” or “lower” or “again” or “cut” or “action.” Several years later, in India, I would master those same terms in Hindi . . . and in India, as well, I had to watch my incipient xenophobia.

  There is another, more perplexing downside to some location filming. I always suggest people read Pauline Kael’s perceptive review of Peter Weir’s The Year of Living Dangerously, which she ingeniously compared to Casablanca: two people falling in love during a crisis in a third-world country and escaping by plane. Only in Casablanca, as Kael observed, the third-world natives were actually extras from Burbank, where the movie was shot. When filming ended, they went back to their homes, schools, Little League games—and the next movie, where they might be playing aristocrats at a ball. But the extras in The Year of Living Dangerously really were those deprived and desperate souls, hired for doubtless nonunion wages, who, when the film ended, could only return to their miserable, precarious existence. The fact that the white people made it out on the plane only trivialized their escape. In Casablanca, by contrast, you are undistracted by the sight of real poverty and so are able to concentrate on the fate of Rick and Ilsa.

  Volunteers brought excitement and employment to this Mexican backwater. We worked harmoniously together as a team—but at the end, the white (and Thai) people would leave. . . .

  After four months in the jungles of Mexico, we returned to LA, and I edited the film with my childhood best friend, Ron Roose, who had played Passepartout in our 8mm version of Around the World in Eighty Days. Maybe Ron hadn’t wanted to wear a necktie, either, for he’d also gone into the movie business. He was an actor’s editor, great at shaping performances. Editing was rhythm to Ron, constructed around what he referred to as the “moment”: the look, the line, the close-up that seized a scene and directed all before and all after to its heart. He looked for those moments, sometimes viewing the film MOS—originally “mit-out sound” in the words of some transplanted European director—searching for the music in the images and faces and not just the words. Ron would find these “moments” where I had never noticed them, digging out the details and nuances in the scenes.

  I would have done well to have been on my guard against all the conviviality during shooting. The film would have been better, though I count it a success overall, if I hadn’t been having such a good time. My early successes had lulled me into imagining that I knew what I was doing and could therefore do it every time. There were things I learned from the experience, however. In no special order they are: (1) Just because something is funny doesn’t mean it belongs in a comedy. There are different kinds of humor, different styles, and you don’t just throw everything in the kitchen sink because it will get a laugh. (2) Be careful when you ask actors to do an “accent” that they are not imprisoned by said accent, that the accent doesn’t become the performance. And (3) Henry James said that life is hot but art is cool. If you are the puppeteer you must toil behind the scenes, dry-eyed, and make sure the strings do not get tangled. If you’re having too much fun, you’re not thinking with the critical distance you need; you’re not hearing the little voice inside your head that’s supposed to be reminding you what the movie is supposed to be.

  We flew to London when it was time to record the music for Volunteers, written by my other “discovery,” James Horner.

  Back in LA the film suffered a curious fate. Because Hanks and Candy had appeared together in the hit kid movie Splash, the studio wanted to market our film in the same fashion, so we previewed to a summer audience of teenagers in the San Fernando Valley.

  There the film died on the screen. The events of the sixties and all the smart references went right over their heads. Jokes about Kennedy or Albert Speer were meaningless, since this audience had never heard of those people. Inside movie references to The Bridge on the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia were likewise wasted. I had been trying without success to warn management that this was the wrong crowd for our film. Now it was too late. We opened at the end of summer (I wanted Thanksgiving and hoped we’d play at colleges, not beaches), and predictably, despite rave reviews from such publications as The New York Times, our film found favor on the East Coast and among people who read, but, like many Woody Allen films, it was viewed as obscure elitist material everywhere else. A pity, but maybe its fate was embedded in its subj
ect matter.

  Or perhaps the film was simply not funny enough. It is always tempting to blame the ad campaign, the marketing strategy, or “the studio” for a film’s failure. When your film gets good notices but doesn’t do big businesses, the temptation is to blame marketing. In this case, a persuasive argument might be made but not necessarily a conclusive one. Volunteers was a quirky, grown-up comedy, aimed at baby boomers, not yuppies. (That would’ve been the Splash audience.) Looking for what Ted Ashley labeled the tom-tom factor, that magic frequency, the dog whistle that attracts everyone within earshot, is the crapshoot that movies have always been. Nowadays demographics and awareness surveys try to remove some of the guesswork but at the same time they also wean out the variety. Once bookstores begin stocking their shelves via computer calculations, esoterica is going to fall by the wayside, and soon we’ll all be reading Nicholas Sparks.

  Maybe Romeo and Juliet should have lived? Bookstores? What am I talking about?

  Meantime, released in the fall of 1986, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home was the franchise’s biggest success to date. The film had what is known as “crossover appeal,” meaning that Ned Tanen had been correct when he had said he would have made the film even without its Star Trek associations.

  The film remains sprightly years later, the cast and crew clearly having a good time kicking up their heels in the service of an intelligent and worthwhile story. The film comes perilously close to being a spoof of the series, which may add to its appeal, especially for aficionados. Adding to the aura of good feeling was the score by the late Leonard Rosenman, a long-time friend of Nimoy’s and one of the ablest composers ever to grace the medium of film. (His work on Rebel Without a Cause prefigured and greatly influenced Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story.) The fact that the film did not take place in outer space, that the crew was featured in real locations (including a nuclear powered aircraft carrier!), and that the comedy was broad throughout doubtless contributed in large measure to the crossover factor. Star Trek had been brought down to earth, where lots more people could relate to it.

  The screen credits seemed quaint to me. The original writers were given screenplay credit, with Bennett and me in third and fourth place respectively. Evidently the WGA arbiters had had difficulty distinguishing between story and script. It was definitely the same (Nimoy and Bennett) story but couldn’t possibly contain any of a screenplay I had never read. These results are not necessarily the result of ineptitude. When you agree to read an arbitration for the Guild, like as not a truck drives up to your place and drops off twenty drafts of a movie. You are (somehow!) expected to keep track of who wrote what in each. Inevitably, even the most conscientious reader’s eyes glaze over and the most punctilious note-taking gets messed up. The credit, as I have noted elsewhere, mightn’t be such a big deal if there weren’t bonuses attached. Oh, well.

  Subsequently I wasted several months (and two trips to Spain) at a company called Kings Road, where I tried to make a Jules and Jim-like romance, set during the Spanish Civil War. We had actually begun casting when the project fell to pieces, and I went into a serious depression, from which I was rescued when Dawn Steel told me and my partner, Steven-Charles Jaffe, to set up shop back at Paramount.

  I became a fixture on the lot, staying there a total of fourteen years. I saw myself as the in-house mascot, housed (fittingly, I thought) in the Marx Brothers Building. I helped the studio on different scripts, ate lunch at the commissary, got my hair cut on the lot, and bought my blue cotton work shirts at the company store. Who needed to drive anyplace?

  I’d fallen in love with a book called Field of Blood by the English journalist turned novelist Gerald Seymour. It was a shattering tale, set in Northern Ireland and chillingly reminiscent of one of my all-time favorite movies, Odd Man Out, with many of the same moral complexities organically intertwined in its plot. I knew exactly how to write and direct it.

  “This studio is not making a movie about the IRA,” said Ned Tanen when I broached the project to him. After I rolled around on the carpet of his office, foaming at the mouth, he offered Seymour’s agent a generous option fee, but that gentleman, smelling Hollywood calling, was demanding something like ten times the amount.

  “This is ridiculous,” said Tanen. I rolled and foamed some more a week later, and he upped the offer—“all this for a movie we’ll never make,” he growled.

  The London agent held firm. I asked my wife if we could kick in some of our money. She said yes; Paramount said no.

  And that was the end of it.

  For a time.

  It must’ve been late 1986 when one of the producers of Kramer vs. Kramer, Stanley Jaffe (no relation to Steve), dropped into my office and asked me to give my opinion of a script called Deception. I had known and liked Stanley from the time when I’d been the office boy at Paramount in New York. He could be prickly, too, but funny, and I always looked forward to our encounters.

  Deception was a really good script with a nifty, gut-twisting plot, well drawn characters—including one genuine original creation, a latter-day riff on Hedda Gabler named Alex Forrest. My only real problem with it was the ending, which didn’t seem to quite go with the rest of the story. You have smart days and dumb days. This was one of my smarter days, and I punched out a four-page, single-spaced memo on how to fix the script. Over the next day or so, I got some more ideas and threw them in, too. I sent my revised letter off to Stanley and thought no more about it.

  Some weeks later he invited me to lunch. As I walked to the commissary, I suddenly wondered if he was going to offer me the movie to direct, but this was not the case. At lunch I was introduced to Adrian Lyne, who had already been signed as director. We chatted, and I had another smart day, said some clever things I cannot now remember, and went home that night feeling pleased with myself.

  Two days later I received a summons to Dawn Steel’s office, toward which I headed with a slight case of dread. What indiscretion had I committed now? On her otherwise immaculate black basalt desk I spied, to my alarm, a copy of my memo.

  “Listen, Nicky,” she said without preamble. “Here’s the straight dope. We’re not making this movie unless you rewrite it according to what you put in this memo, and you can have anything you want, and yes, that means we’ll even buy your stupid fucking IRA book.”

  Dawn never meant anything by these locutions; that’s just the way she talked. Around this time California magazine ran an article about her entitled, “The Queen of Mean.” I wrote a letter protesting the smarmy piece, pointing out that if Dawn had been a man, they never would have commissioned, let alone run it. They responded by revealing my screenwriting salary, as though that was the reason for my defense. Dawn’s reaction was, “If I’ve done half those things (in the article) I’m goddamned ashamed of myself.”

  As for Deception, I thought it was silly on Paramount’s part to spend all that money—first on my revisions of their script, then on purchasing the rights to Field of Blood at an extortionate price, then for my full freight to write a screenplay they never intended to film—but what did I know? In the event, it worked out for everyone. Paramount’s movie, now titled Fatal Attraction, turned out to be a big hit, and I got to write Field of Blood, one my best scripts, even if they didn’t film it.

  (Until later. Live long enough and you’ll see all your movies made.)

  That same year I agreed to direct Michael Hirst’s script of John Masters novel The Deceivers for Merchant Ivory, a task that would take me and my new family (which now included a daughter) to London and to India for a year.

  It was in early ’87 when I heard rumblings about the next Star Trek film. Taking a leaf from Nimoy’s playbook, William Shatner’s quid pro quo for participating in the new movie was directing it. I was again asked to write the screenplay. When I asked what the film was to be about, I was told, “the search for God.”

  This did not strike me as an especially promising premise. How could such a search possibly conclude? Fortu
nately, I had the multiple excuses of my Fatal Attraction chores and my imminent departure abroad.

  TILTING AT WINDMILLS: A DIGRESSION

  Movies get made not by accident, but because the planets align. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t, and sometimes it takes a long time before they do. As Don Quixote falls into this category, it may be worth recounting the story thus far.

  It was late 1986 and my producer friend David Foster (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Getaway, etc.) and I had always wanted to make a movie together. With typical perversity I asked if he’d ever read Don Quixote, and when he said he hadn’t, I recommended the Samuel Putnam translation. After reading it David was hooked. “Don Q! Don Q! Gotta make Don Q!” became his mantra. Regretting my silly suggestion, I said it would never happen. There was a reason Hollywood had never tackled Quixote, that Orson Welles’s fabled version was never completed, etc. The musical Man of la Mancha, inspired by an episode in the life of Cervantes, failed as a film. Still, Foster, nothing if not tenacious (a key virtue for producers), was not about to give up. We were lunching in the Paramount commissary when Ned Tanen walked by and said hello. “Never mind ‘hello,’ ” Foster retorted. “This boy has done Star Trek for you, Fatal Attraction for you”—this was a gross exaggeration, to be sure, but exaggeration is the lingua franca of Hollywood—“what are you gonna do for him?”