The View from the Bridge
Page 21
Following the completion of The Deceivers in the spring of 1988, my wife and I found ourselves driving down the M4 motorway outside London. “This road makes me sad,” I declared abruptly. “Because this is the road to the airport,” I explained when she asked me why, “and one day we’ll be traveling it in only one direction.”
She thought about this and then said, “I didn’t realize you felt this way.”
“Neither did I,” I conceded, but I did. There was silence in the car as I realized we were both wondering the same thing. What if we didn’t go back? Was it possible to earn a living out of Hollywood if you didn’t live in Hollywood?
WINDMILLS REDUX
We decided a reality check was in order and returned to Los Angeles in July, still paying rent on our Soho house and me keeping the key and my passport in my pocket, telling myself that we could return at a moment’s notice. In Los Angeles Tanen was still enthusiastic about Don Q, the script for which he found hilarious. The question now was, Who should play the Don? I suggested one actor and he scowled.
“I’d rather give the money to the American Cancer Society.”
The question was answered by Ron, who had just seen John Lithgow on Broadway in New York in M. Butterfly.
“He’s the Don,” said Ron.
I had, as it happened, directed Lithgow in The Day After. Paramount sent me to New York to witness his astonishing performance in David Henry Hwang’s play, and I went backstage to see him afterward.
“God no, not a starring role,” he protested, when I explained why I was there. “I’ve never carried a picture. I couldn’t carry a picture.”
“Will you at least read it?” I begged. Lithgow was nothing if not polite. He promised to read the script, but I knew the planets were slipping out of alignment and phoned Lucchesi, trying not to sound desperate.
“He says he can’t carry a picture,” I reported. “How can we make him do it?”
Lucchesi thought and said, “We’ll stage a reading of the screenplay on a night when his theater’s dark. Get any actors he names to be in it with him and make a contribution to Actors Equity or something.”
This ploy actually worked. On an insufferably hot, muggy August afternoon at the Minskoff Rehearsal studios in New York, with a roadshow company of South Pacific practicing next door and “Bloody Mary is the girl I love” thumping through the walls, I assembled my cast around a group of trestle tables, scripts in hand, and gave them the only stage directions for which there was time, all too aware of a clutch of Paramount executives who had flown in from LA and were watching the proceedings skeptically.
“Think Wizard of Oz,” I told them. “And have fun.”
With Lithgow as Don Quixote and Jerry Stiller as Sancho, along with Joe Morton and a host of other notables doing this out of the goodness of their hearts (and a substantial contribution by Paramount to an actors’ charity), we launched into the Don’s odyssey.
The script was a sensation. I sat there, no longer aware of South Pacific , in a state of pleasant astonishment. The small audience (also astonished) laughed heartily, the actors were clearly enjoying themselves, and at the end no one wanted to leave, a sure indication of success.
“I get it; I’ll do it,” said Lithgow, looking up, grinning and surprised.
The planets had aligned; we were home free.
Only we weren’t, which is the moral of the story. You’re not home until you’re home.
Paramount was having having their worst summer in recent memory. Even their Sean Connery picture (The Presidio) had bombed, as did another film (Distant Thunder)—this one having the misfortune to include Lithgow in its cast.
And to top it off, Tanen’s two-year contract was up, and he left to return to his beloved cacti. With him left Quixote’s champion.
The script was later mounted on the radio by the BBC with Paul Scofield and Bob Hoskins in the principal roles, an interesting—interim—fate. Normally, when a play is produced with even a modicum of success, sooner or later the odds are good that it will be produced again. If it’s a hit play, those odds grow in your favor. Hamlet is a good example, but Sleuth and High School Musical are, too.
Screenplays are different. Most never get made; they gather dust on shelves and with time, they become either dated or somehow less urgently plausible as properties than when they were new. And even if fortune smiles and your script is produced, the odds are that it will never be produced again. Even if your film is remade, the likelihood is that some version of the story will be filmed but not from the screenplay. If your lead actor was miscast, he will remain miscast forever, your screenplay, unlike its stage counterpart, dipped forever in cinematic amber. When Paramount decides to remake The Manchurian Candidate, they don’t dream of using the same script. New is better. If there are reasons that screenwriters do not enjoy the same social or cultural or literary cachet as playwrights, this fact must be numbered among them.
Ten years later Lithgow called. I hadn’t heard from him in some time.
“Please don’t hate me,” he began.
“Why should I hate you?” I asked.
“Because tomorrow you’ll read in the trades that I’m going to play Quixote on TNT for Peter Yates from a script by John Mortimer. I wanted you to hear it from me first.”
I drew a deep breath. What could I say? What was there to say?
“Promise me one thing,” I begged, keeping my voice steady. “Promise it’ll be funny.”
It wasn’t. But it succeeded in moving the goal posts for the feature I had written off the field to infinity.
Five years after that, Ian McKellan wanted to do the film, and Paul Giamatti was up for playing Sancho. Still no dice.
The planets had almost aligned—but, as the man says, there’s many a slip ’twixt the cup and the lip. If Paramount had had a better summer, if Tanen had chosen to stay on . . .
But close is no cigar.
Does that mean never? Why should it? A period script, at least, stands a better chance of not dating. Terry Gilliam tried his Quixote, and that came to grief. Wait another fifty years and try again. . . . It takes only one yes to wipe out all the nos. . . .
One has only to point to John Huston’s tenacious infatuation with Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King. He first sought to film it with Walter Huston and Bogart in the roles of Danny and Peachy; a generation later it was to have been Burton and O’Toole; finally, after another generation the roles were assumed by Sean Connery and Michael Caine and who’s to say they weren’t the best ones for it? Was it the same screenplay throughout all those attempts? Don’t you believe it.
I tell this story glibly enough, but it fails to convey the feelings of heart-ache and despair that you can experience in this line of work when something into which you have poured years of effort and every fiber of your being because you love it so much comes to nothing. The sick feeling that overtakes you when you finally realize you’ve spent a substantial portion of your life on earth in pursuit of a goal that will likely never be reached is something that I, for one, have never really learned to process. Others may be more philosophical, but I didn’t go into this line of work with any motive other than to see the movies I dream about. I don’t worry about what is “commercial,” because all too many examples have demonstrated that no one knows what that is, that the most unlikely material, if done correctly (whatever that means), can bring people to the theater. I carry my impotence around with me, cursing the fact that I don’t have the wallet to make things happen that I know are wonderful.
Tolstoy (who later disowned the statement) famously said that the purpose of art is to teach us to love life and that to love life is to love God. I don’t know about the second part but I’m pretty sure about the first. Books and movies have gotten me through some pretty tough times, and I’m fairly certain that this is the service they perform for most people, who could use a breather from reality and some inspiration every now and again, a time out before returning to the battle.
SOMMERSBY
Arnon Milchan and Steve Reuther talked to me about making an American version of the story of Martin Guerre, recently the subject of a successful French film. I decided to base my script on the actual events, rather than the French movie, and researched the case, which is amply documented. In brief: the true events transpired in sixteenth-century France, in the Pyrenean village of Artigat, where sullen fifteen-year-old Martin Guerre married Bertrande de Rols and then, having impregnated her, ran off and was never heard from again, effectively condemning the woman to perpetual widowhood. (She could hardly remarry as her husband—so far as might be known—was still alive.) Eight years later, to her delight, Martin returned, filled out and matured. Where once he was surly and withdrawn, he was now gregarious and uxorious. He fathered a second child with Bertrande, and all seemed jake. Except for the growing suspicion on the part of first one and then another of the villagers that the Martin Guerre who left Artigat almost a decade earlier and the newly returned version might not be the same man. There were rumors that the genuine Martin Guerre had lost a leg at the battle of St. Quentin. Eventually the matter came to trial (the judge’s book on the case is one of the sources that preserved it for us), with half the town swearing in one direction, the other half in the other. Suddenly, to the consternation of all, a one-legged man clumped into the court, instantly recognized as the real Martin Guerre (surly as ever). The imposter, one Amaud du Tilh, who had recognized their resemblance in the army, was hanged, drawn, and quartered.
The success of the story depends on the absence of certain technological developments—e.g., photography, fingerprinting, ready communications—that would have cleared up the mystery conclusively. What was the last moment in human history when such an event might plausibly have occurred? And where?
After mulling the matter for some time, I decided that the end of the Civil War might be just such an era. In Mark Twain’s disturbing novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, set during this period, fingerprints are introduced for the first time, but their usage was clearly not commonplace. Telegraphic communication, especially in rural areas such as those in the decimated South, might plausibly be absent, and so might Mathew Brady and his camera. The conceit might just fly. I also liked the idea of doing a film in the Reconstruction era because I didn’t know offhand of any other, with the exception of Gone with the Wind and Bright Leaf, an obscure Gary Cooper-Patricia Neal opus. The subject of tobacco—about which I knew next to nothing—would also, as I imagined it, constitute an intriguing part of the tale.
Milchan liked my idea, and I went off on a Southern tour, starting in Washington, D.C., and heading for nearby Richmond, Virginia, searching for a plausible locale and learning about tobacco growing. After Richmond and a tour of the Philip Morris factory (“PLEASE FEEL FREE TO SMOKE” read a sign in the reception area), various state film commissions assisted me as I poked into antebellum Southern mansions (the local of equivalent of French chateau country) in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee, where I finally found a milieu that satisfied me. I returned to Los Angeles and wrote what I called Sommersby and turned it in. Milchan and Reuther professed themselves delighted. They landed Richard Gere and Jodie Foster and they hired Jon Amiel, the English director of the spectacular British television series The Singing Detective, to helm the movie.
He told them he didn’t want to change a word.
Sometime later I was puzzled to hear that another writer had been engaged to do the inevitable production rewrites on my script. My first reaction was possessive indignation. Why was someone else being hired to rewrite my original work—especially when that work had attracted all the talent? Then I thought about it for a while, and calmer feelings prevailed. After all, I told myself, he’s the director, he can hire whomever he likes.
Then I thought about the matter some more and grew angry all over again. Surely there’s a missing phone call here from my good buddies, the producers, I realized. The one that goes, Nick, you’re not going to like this but you know that crazy director we hired? Well, he wants to use his own blah blah blah.
Working myself into a towering rage, I phoned Steve Reuther and told him what I thought of this behavior. He mumbled an apology but we never spoke again.
Later, when the new draft of the screenplay turned out to be an unholy mess, Richard Gere, who never quite understood why the first draft had been altered, wondered why they didn’t simply go back to “the Meyer draft.” According to Maggie Wilde, then Gere’s manager, he was told by the producer that I was “unavailable.” This led to a third writer being hired, whose job was somehow to put the thing back to where it was, which didn’t happen. It would have been, I suppose, unthinkable to simply fish the original script out of a drawer.
COMPANY BUSINESS
In Los Angeles again and occupying square one, Lauren and I hung around until the advent of George Bush I in November, following eight years of Ronald Reagan, pushed me over the edge. We were back in London by Christmas, and I told myself I had escaped the pull of gravity. Lauren decided she wanted to purchase a home, and we did, in Holland Park. Paramount generously sustained my office on the lot in Los Angeles, and I was just about the first person to use e-mail. I could write a screenplay in London, hit SEND, and have it printed out in my office at Paramount by my assistant, Denny Martin Flinn.
Flinn, whom I had hired out of the Paramount personnel pool, had been with me for several years. Originally a Broadway dancer, he had starred in A Chorus Line and other notable hits before taking his bride west and settling in Los Angeles. Now the father of two, he took charge of my office, organized my life, and introduced me to computers, overcoming my lifelong technopho bia. Not only was he a one-man living encyclopedia of the American musical theater (about which he subsequently wrote a number of informative books), he was also indefatigable, with several screenplays under his own belt and bursting with promising ideas for more. A lot of time in our office—even via e-mail when I lived I London—was spent in long, animated discussions and arguments over books, films, and ideas for same.
By this time Dawn Steel had also departed Paramount to head Columbia (where she would commission the restoration of Lawrence of Arabia). The musical executive chairs were empty only briefly. In 1987 Frank Mancuso named Gary Lucchesi, my former agent, head of motion picture production, and Sid Ganis, formerly head of Paramount marketing, was put in charge of the studio in 1988.
Around this time I decided to change agencies and was curious to know what it would be like at CAA, the powerhouse packaging plant where an old friend of mine, Rick Nicita, was a Big Deal. He suggested I write an original script for myself to direct, and so I tried my hand at something I called Dinosaurs . It involved two aging spies, a Russian and an American, who find themselves on the run together as the result of a spy swap gone wrong, in a world where they are technologically as well as ideologically obsolete. The whole point of the movie is more or less summed up when the American asks the Russian mole where he got his information, and the latter replies, “CNN.”
Significantly, this line never made it into the finished film.
I showed Nicita my first draft to see if I was on the right track, and he became excited. I was nowhere near finished when another agent at CAA called and asked what I thought of Gene Hackman for the role of the American. I allowed he would be perfect—Hackman was arguably the preeminent film actor of this generation—and the agent said, “You’ve got him.”
“I’ve got him?” I echoed.
“You’ve got him. Now what do you think about Baryshnikov as the Russian?”
I tried to think—this was happening very fast. “Well, he’s not really old enough to be a dino�
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“He’ll get the picture made,” I was told on the other end of the line. I thought, Well, this is why you came to CAA, isn’t it? And so I struck while the iron was hot—instead of finishing a decent script.
Dinosaurs (a name I couldn’t use, as it turns out Disney had already registered it) was sped into production even as I tried to finish a screenplay that struggled to reflect fast-moving events in Eastern Europe, where the Berlin Wall was collapsing. I also tried to sit down with Hackman, but he was always busy. Gradually I learned that between the time he agreed to do my film and nine months later, when we were ready to roll in Berlin, he’d squeezed in three movies back-to-back: Postcards from the Edge, Narrow Margin, and Class Action. . . . This, I told myself, could not bode well.
That turned out to be an understatement. Two weeks before we started Hackman wanted to be replaced. What comparable star he imagined would be available on such short notice was beyond me. Did he realize he would be leaving a lot of folks in the lurch? Did he care? MGM, the movie’s financier, made it simple: if Hackman didn’t show up in Berlin, MGM threatened to sue him.
So it wasn’t a happy camper whom I finally got to meet, ten days before we were to start. He began by commenting on the script—the first time he’d addressed the material in the nine months since he’d agreed to perform in it—which he felt contained too much violence. (This from the man whose next film would win him an Oscar as the sadistic Little Bill Daggett in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.)
When I demurred at Hackman’s critique and mumbled something about our film being a spy thriller in which such goings-on were typical, he glared at me. “You know, you and I don’t get along.”
“We don’t?” I asked, in shock. “But we’ve only just met.” In fact we hadn’t been sitting together five minutes.
For me, used to getting people to do my bidding because they liked me, and because I liked them, this was not good.