Adventures in the Screen Trade (25 page)

The trio spent some days in New York in 1902-we have wonderful photographs documenting their visit. One of Butch's weaknesses was he loved having his picture taken. Butch and Sundance died seven years later, and in that time they led a remarkably varied life, robbing, rustling, ranching, taking various aliases as their needs dictated. My image of them during this time was as if Willie Mays, instead of retiring, had gone to Japan to play baseball and become home-run champion again.

Butch and Sundance did what Gatsby only dreamed of doing: They repeated the past. As famous as they were in the states, they were bigger legends in South America: bandidos Yanquis.

And probably that fact--recapturing their past-is what I found so moving about the narrative. We all wish for it; they made it happen.

One more thing. As a writer I believe that all the basic human truths arc known. And what we try to do as best we can is come at those truths from our own unique angle, to reilluminate those truths in a hopefully different way.

I believed, back a quarter century ago, that it was not possible for two people truly to know each other. No matter how close the husband and wife, the father and son, the lover and beloved, we are locked inside ourselves. In Butch and Sun- dance I had two friends who lived through decades together, who traveled tens of thousands of miles, only to die bloody in a country where no one knew their names, where they barely spoke the language--it seemed a wonderful vehicle to say something about our lack of knowledge, about our hopeless and terrible and, sadly, permanent loneliness....

I feel now that Butch was by far the most important screen- play, for me, that I ever wrote or will write, not because of the success of the film- -but as a learning experience.

The film work I'd done had either been dialog rewrites or adaptations of novels. And in an adaptation, obviously, you've got the source material to move you along. Butch was an original. I had to find the story.

Which story, though? Which incidents? There was so much wonderful material. I mentioned the scene where Butch made the deal with the governor of Wyoming to lei him out of jail. I loved that. I don't know if I've ever come across a better introduction to a character. But it had problems. Logically, in order to gel out of jail, he had to be in jail first.

Which meant he would have to be arrested. And tried. And sentenced. And serve at least some time.

Now add this: For the scene to have any credibility, Butch would have to be young. No governor would dare let so famous an outlaw free. But my story dealt with two guys who were already legends.

If you had asked me, a year before I began writing, what se- quences I was positive would be in the screenplay, I would have come up with two: the shoot-out at the end and the scene with the governor.

But I couldn't make it fit. I fiddled every goddam which way; it kept falling out of the picture. I wanted it in. Desperately. I figured, "Well, what if I had him arrested quickly and then dissolved to a year later and made the governor an old friend and bullshit, bullshit, bullshit." Stunk. Wrong. Silly.

There is a wonderful phrase of William Faulkner's that goes something like this: "In writing, you must kill all your darlings."

The scene with the governor was certainly a darling of mine, but eventually I realized I had to kill it. Because, probably not consciously, I was approaching what I believe to be the single most important lesson to be teamed about writing for films and this is it:

SCREENPLAYS ARE STRUCTURE.

As I said earlier, there are two Roman numeral fs to this book- the first being that nobody knows anything. Well, this is the other, in well-deserved caps:

SCREENPLAYS ARE STRUCTURE.

Yes, nifty dialog helps one hell of a lot; sure, it's nice if you can bring your characters to life. But you can have terrific characters spouting just swell talk to each other, and if the structure is unsound, forget it.

Writing a screenplay is in many ways similar to executing a piece of carpentry. If you take some wood and nails and glue and make a bookcase, only to find when you're done that it toppies over when you try and stand it upright, you may have created something, but it won't work as a bookcase.

The essential opening labor a screenwriter must execute is, of course, deciding what the proper structure should be for the particular screenplay you are writing. And to do that, you have to know what is absolutely Crucial in the telling of your story-what is its spine?

Whatever it is, you must protect it to the death. Sometimes the spine is pretty simple to locate-as in a private-detective movie. There is no story until the detective- Lew Archer, say-is called on to solve something. Archer meets his client early on, takes the case, invariably is given some information about the case by the client, and then begins to act on that information. He goes and talks to people. One interview leads to the next, on and on, you throw in a little action when things get slow (I think Raymond Chandler said something to the effect that every time he felt in trouble, he had a guy come barging through a door with a gun in his hand). Eventually, something is solved, though often not the original event that triggered the story. Butch was not so simple.

The original thing that moved me-and whatever that is, it must always be kept tattooed behind your eyelids-was the story of these two guys whom I liked, but they were pretty much aimless. They drifted from job to job, unlike Lew Archer, who is always totally directed. Not only were they aimless, there was something worse to deal with: When they did act, they did something no one had ever done before-they went to South America.

Now today, looking back on it, with the success c>f the film a fact, that doesn't seem like much. But it was, for me in my job, the crunch. (The first time the script was shown, only one studio showed the least interest. And I remember an executive of that studio saying to me that South America had to go-that Butch and Sundance, in order for the movie to work, had to stand and fight the Superposse. Right here. In the Old West. I tried explaining that they really did go to South America, that what was so moving to me was these two guys repeating the past, then dying alone in a strange land. He replied, "I don't give a shit about that-all I know is one thing: John Wayne don't run away.")

So justifying the shift in locale was a huge problem-because not only don't movie heroes run away, they especially don't in Westerns because Westerns are based on confrontations.

Butch had another problem: For an action picture, it had almost no action. At least not action in the Western-movie sense: shoot-outs and fistfights between hero and villain, massive barroom brawls and stampedes with the heroine's life in danger. Following is a list of such moments in Butch, together with the screen time used:

Sundance shooting the saloon owner's belt off- 4 seconds

Butch kicking Logan in the balls and knocking him out- 9 seconds

Sundance knocking out the Super- posse member (probably you forgot this moment was there)- 6 seconds

The jump off the cliff- 7 seconds

The mine owner getting shot by bandits- 2 seconds

Butch and Sundance killing the bandits- 40 seconds

In other words, up until the final shoot-out, the first hundred minutes of the movie contain approximately one minute of standard Western action. (You could call the various train and bank robberies action, but I wouldn't agree: There's never a sense of jeopardy; it's fun and games time.) There was hopefully a great deal of tension under a lot of the movie-but not the kind of physical action we expect in a Western.

Another problem: Not only did it not have enough violence to be considered an action film, it also wasn't funny enough to be a comedy. First of all. I'm not that skilled at comedy. More than that, if the movie was too funny, the ending wouldn't work. We wouldn't care enough that they died, and since I felt. that sadness-since more than anything that was the emotional core of my interest-1 had to make the audience care too.

Do you know the game that goes like this? "If Jackie Onassis were a car, what kind of car would she be?" Or "If Jimmy Carter were a vegetable, which vegetable would he be?"

Well, if Batch Cassidy had been a performer, that performer would have been Jack Benny.

I saw Benny toward the end of his great career when he did a short engagement in a Broadway theatre. And he was superb. Those fabulous takes, his unique sense of timing, he had it all. And the audience was knocked out- -but he wasn't all that funny.

Sure, there were laughs. But not like Bob Hope gets laughs, or Rodney Dangerfield. Jack Benny was, is, and always will be one of my favorite comedians. Never more than that night in the theatre. And whatever I felt, so did everyone around me. After all, how often do you get to see a master? But it wasn't his comedy that won us-

--we enjoyed being with him. No matter where he led us, we wanted to follow along.

And that, I ultimately realized, had to be the spine'for the movie-the relationship between Butch and Sundance. And I don't mean just liking them. I'm sure that when the people responsible for Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman sat around spitballing, they said to each other, "Hey, we've got to tike the fifty-foot woman, at least a little, so we can feel something when she cashes in. Maybe she likes elephants or giraffes, something to make her seem human."

Butch and Sundance shared almost every scene in the movie, and just like Jack Benny was special, so their relationship had to be special: No matter where they led us, we had to want to follow along. (And the movie had to work off the give and take of the two stars. If they'd been Newman and Brando or Redford and McQueen. the acting would have been fine. But I don't believe the audience would have risen to the film in the same way.)

All I had, then, were the two guys. And it was my job to make them as inviting, and at the same time as unusual, as I possibly knew how.

As I've said, the most important minutes of any screenplay are the first fifteen and what I'd like to do now is talk about the structure of the first quarter hour of the screenplay, the first four scenes.

SCENE ONE: BUTCH CASING THE BANK.

Very short scene. A guy walks up to a bank that is very modern-looking and ugly and heavily barred. (The guy is Bulch and he's an outlaw, but we don't know that yet.) He looks at the bank sourly, then talks with a guard.

BUTCH

What was the matter with the old bank this town used to have? It was beautiful.

GUARD

People kept robbing It.

BUTCH

(walking off)

That's a small price to pay for beauty.

Not much unusual here. What it really is is a statement of theme: Times are changing and you have to change with them-if you want to survive.

(I happen not to believe Butch's final retort-1 don't think he'd say it and I think it's smart-ass. There's a lot about the screenplay I don't like, the smart-assness just being one of them. I also find there are too many reversals and that the entire enterprise suffers, on more than one occasion, from a case of the cutes. But the quality of the dialog is not at issue here; proper structure is what we're after and I feel the first scenes will illustrate my point.)

The first little scene is crucial for theme statement-some- thing that gets repeated again and again as the story moves on.

SCENE TWO: SUNDANCE PLAYING CARDS.

Now I think we're starting to move into strange terrain. But it doesn't look like it at first. It looks like the standard cornball card game we've seen a zillion times.

We're in Macon's Saloon, and Macon, written as a strong, tough guy, is involved in a game of blackjack. A stranger is dealing. The Stranger is also winning. He cleans out the table and Macon accuses him of cheating.

We don't know yet that the dealer is the Sundance Kid, but the Kid knows who he is. And he also knows three things: He hasn't been cheating, his honor and integrity have been insuited, and he is also the fastest gun in the history of the West.

Make this a John Wayne movie and you're into a "When you say that, smile" situation. Direct confrontation. Wayne, more likely than not, would pick up the card table and clobber the enemy.

What does the Kid do? He just sits there, silent and sad, while his tormentor stands, guns ready, and says, basically, get the hell out of here.

Now Butch conies tearing up. The Kid tells him he wasn't cheating. Butch could not care less about Sundance's being unjustly accused. He wants out. The Kid is stubborn: "If he in- vites us to stay, then we'll go."

And what does Butch do next? He tries to undermine Sun- dance's confidence. "You don't know how fast he is. . . . I'm over the hill-it can happen to you." Anything to avoid a con- frontation. Butch knows who the Kid is and what he is capable of; there's no way the Kid's going to lose.

Finally Butch, with no other cards to play, tells his secret- the Kid's name. "Can't help you, Sundance," he says. And we still don't know what that means-

-but Macon, the guy who's accused the Kid, sure does. That's why he's written as a hero: big, rugged, powerful. It can't be Donald Meek across the table, not if the next moment's going to work. And that moment is panic: "I didn't know you were the Sundance Kid when I said you were cheating. . . . If I draw on you, you'll kill me."

Now the reader is hopefully saying, "What's with this Sun- dance Kid anyway? I never heard of him, but maybe I better pay attention."

Macon backs down, invites them to stick around, but they've got to be going. There wouldn't be any gunplay at all if Macon didn't ask for it:

MACON

Kid? (a Little louder now) Hey, how good are you?

Butch between Sundance and Macon, but not for long, because the minute Macon asks his question, Butch gets the hell out of the way fast as we

CUT TO

Sundance, diving left and dropping, and his guns are out and roaring and as the sound explodes-- CUT TO

Macon as Sundance shoots his gun belt off and as It drops

CUT TO

Sundance, firing on, and CUT TO

the gun belt whipping like a snake across the floor as Sundance's bullets strike. Then, as the firing stops-