Adventures in the Screen Trade (27 page)

Now, in order to "beat the system," what was necessary was a male star, a female star, and a director. I wrote the screenplay. Redford liked it. One down and two to go.

For director, I went to Ulu Grosbard, whom I knew, who I also knew had read and liked the book, and who had just done the lovely film for Frank D. Gilroy's Pulitzer prizewinning hit, The Subject Was Roses. Grosbard said yes. Two down, one to go- -oops.

Strange things began to happen. The movie of Butch had opened by now, and Grosbard began having trouble getting together with Redford to discuss the script. Grosbard was perplexed-we all lived in New York, we didn't need plane tickets to get together. Time dragged, as it does, on, and nothing was

happening. It didn't make sense for Redford to avoid Groshard, because not only had he okayed Grosbard before I ever went to him, Redford was the one who wanted to do the movie in the first place.

Then Redford called me one day from a pay phone in the Sail Lake City airport. What he said was basically that since Butch was now a huge hit, he didn't think "his fans" would accept him as Amos, since Amos was "kind of weak." So good luck with the project, but he was out.

I don't know what happens to people when it happens, but it sure happens fast.

I called Grosbard and told him. We now needed not just a female star, but a male star as well.

By the end of the week, literally, we had Elliott Gould, who at this time, in 1970, had gone from Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice to M*A*S*H and was rated one of the five biggest stars in the business. Two down, one to go. Again- -oops.

I met with Grosbard and he told me that he was now leaving the project because he felt he had a moral obligation to direct Who Is Harry Kellerman and Why Is He Saying Those Terrible Things A bout Me?

But Gould really wanted to do our project, and his agent, David Begelman, famed in song and story, wanted him to get it done. Begelman also represented Faye Dunaway, got the script to her. She said yes. Now all we needed was a director.

I met with Begelman to talk about who would be good for it. I said my first choice in all the world was someone I'd never met, Stanley Donen. Donen, an American living in England, had directed or codirected some of my favorite films: On the Town, Singin ' in the Rain, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and most recently a wonderful tough marriage comedy, Two for the Road.

"Stanley would only be perfect," Begelman told me. "Except he's crazy."

I explained I'd already dealt with some pretty whacko people on this project already, one more wouldn't bother me.

"You don't understand," Begelman explained. "I don't mean Stanley's difficult. I mean he's insane. He cracked up over

in England. Total nervous breakdown. He'll never be able to direct a movie again."

So much for Stanley Donen-or so I thought. Enter Mark Rydell.

I didn't know Rydell. But he was then (he'd just finished The Reivers with Steve McQueen) and is now (most recent work: On Golden Pond) a gifted director, skilled with actors and possessed of a wonderful eye. We met in New York, discussed script changes, etc. Good standard meetings. And after they were over, he agreed to do the movie.

So at last we had the three crucial elements: Gould, Dunaway, Rydell. I won't attempt to describe my relief, but it was considerable. What had begun as a request from one acquaintance to another to try and beat the system had now be- come draining. (This whole process, from Redford's request to Rydell's agreeing, had taken maybe eight months.) And with the many shifts of personnel, the project had become obsessive. I found myself unable to do any writing of my own. The monkey was unquestionably on my back, and until the movie was under way, it wasn't going to leave me. But now, at last, we were set. Oops-

Rydell called from California, said he'd had second thoughts, and didn't feel he wanted to direct the picture.

Panic in New York. Phone calls were made, entreaties, assurances were given Rydell that it really would all work out. Please would he think about it.

He thought about it, decided he had acted perhaps hastily, and agreed, again, to do the picture. With all the elements again intact, Begelman made a deal with a distributing company to take on the picture. (I don't want to get into the technical details of The Deal here-primarily because I don't understand them myself-but the arrangement was that the company would give us the money to make the movie but that we would only get paid upon completion of the film. Which was fine with everybody.)

Then Rydell called from California again to say finally and irrevocably that he had made a mistake when he changed his mind to do the picture and had now changed it again. He was out.

Hysteria in New York. More phone calls, more entreaties. Wouldn't he please reconsider one more time?

He did. He at last definitely and irrevocably said yes. He would direct the picture.

With one small proviso: I was no longer to be involved. He had someone he wanted to fix the script. It was my screenplay based on my novel but I was forced out.

What I know now that I didn't know then was simply this: I was having my first experience with a "writer killer."

There are a lot of directors in Hollywood who are writer killers. Some of the best directors in Hollywood are writer killers. I don't mean to indicate that these men don't like writers. In point of fact, some of their best friends are writers.

But what writer killers do is they work with you on a project, and they ask for apples and you try and give them apples, then they say no, pomegranates would be better, so you try and write pomegranates. Then that doesn't satisfy them and it goes on, rewrite following rewrite, until your mind is fucked around. You are frustrated, confused, maybe useless. Now, it's conceivable they're just such perfectionists that they never stop sec- ond-guessing themselves. It's also conceivable they wanted to bring in a friend all along-1 don't know.

Many, maybe most, of the Hollywood community has a certain contempt for screenwriters. And they're not necessarily wrong: Most of us are not very good. But writer killers are the worst, because usually they are talented, usually they are bright, and I don't think that consciously they always know their objective.

Which doesn't mean they don't achieve it. Perhaps the best example I can give of the subconscious contempt concerns an experience I had with Sydney Pollack on another project that never happened. We were talking one day and as usually happens in meetings, you drift away from the subject, circling awhile, and Pollack told me how much he loved Boys and Girls Together-he had been one of the directors who had tried to lick the problems of the book. David Rayfiel- his closet writer, the one he usually brings in-had done the adaptation. We were so faithful to your book, Pollack told me. We treated it with such care. God, we were faithful. And then he found a ,copy of the script.

Let me just read you a scene, he said. To show you how faithful we were.

I didn't want to hear it-I don't like my writing, don't reread it myself, and the thought of having someone else reading my lines to me was something I wanted to avoid.

No no. Pollack said, you'll really love this. You'll see how faithful we were. I couldn't stop him.

He found a scene, started to read it-and it was a scene that wasn't in the book, between two characters who never talk to each other in the book. I asked him to stop.

He wouldn't. He kept reading on and on, reading this terrible scene that had nothing to do with my novel. All on the pretext of showing his faithfulness. And he simply would not stop.

I don't know to this day if he realizes the contempt in what he was doing. Maybe if I could have shown him some scenes I'd redirected from Jeremiah Johnson,{or me his best film-maybe if I'd forced him to watch stuff I'd done to his work, with different locales and different actors and different camera shots- maybe he might have understood. But only maybe.

When I was forced off The Thing of It Is. . . I guess I snapped. I am not, by nature, Homeric, but I had some kind of rage building. I didn't care about the movie, I didn't care about anthing.

So I self-destructed the project.

Okay-if they were going to force me off my own movie, fine. Do it. But I insisted on being paid first. I was told that would explode the deal, which was based on no one being paid till the movie was done.

I didn't care. I just didn't care. I demanded payment immediately. Then I took my family and we fled on vacation. While we were gone, the explosion look place. The Thing of It Is . . .was dead.

Dissolve, as they say Out There.

A year later, my telephone rang. It was Stanley Donen, whom I'd still never met, and he was in New York, could we talk. We did, and I told him how much I'd always wanted to work with him and he said much the same to me, and then he wondered did I have any ideas?

Now, Donen was the director who Begelman had told me had gone insane in England and would never be able to direct again. Stanley didn't seem insane to me. I gave him The Thing of It Is ... and while he was reading it, I kind of tippy-toed around, trying to ascertain the state of Stanley's mental health.

It turned out he was fine. He hadn't had a nervous break- down-he hadn't even had an upheaval--what he did have was an agent who wasn't David Begelman.

Begelman's behavior, by the way, is not remotely unusual. Not that agents are all liars. But since no one knows what will work, agents are constantly and rightly promoting their own clients. Had I been less of an idiot, I would have checked Begelman's statement when he made it. But he was so powerful, so bright and persuasive, I never thought to do so.

Besides, we were both New York Knick fans and I figured that counted for something.

Donen wanted to direct The Thing of It Is. . . so the second act was under way. He gave the script to Robert Evans (then married to Ali MaeGraw), who was at the peak of his career as head of production at Paramount. Love Story, a genuine phenomenon, was primarily Evans's baby.

Evans kind of liked it, was willing to develop it, but of course it all came down to casting. If we could get two leads he approved of, we were under way.

Then we got lucky: Mia Farrow had an obligation to Paramount for a picture, she was right for the part of the beautiful WASP wife, and she agreed to do it. So all we needed was the man.

James Caan was willing to do the script. We told Evans. "No penis extension," Evans said. (I still don't know what that means.) Caan was gone.

Donen and I met with Alan Alda, who would have been the best of all possible worlds. Alda said yes, he really wanted to play the male lead. Evans said no-again the mysterious penis extension was at work. Good-bye, Alda.

So Donen and I went to England to work on rewrites, with Mia Farrow as our lady, but no man. Then we lost Mia Farrow. She was preempted by another film and gone. Donen and I continued working in London, the mood not too cheery. We had Donen, but we were back to square one on casting. Until Ali MaeGraw entered the picture. MaeGraw was, at this time, the top female star around, having gone from nowhere to Goodbye Columbus to Love Story. But she hadn't found a part that excited her sufficiently. Evans told Donen that if we could strengthen the female lead, we had a shot at MaeGraw.

So we did what we could. Since the story was of a married couple in trouble, we couldn't make it a one-star vehicle. But we added scenes, shifted focus and emphasis where we could, and sent it off.

Alas, the lady was not pleased. That pretty much ended it. Donen went his way, I mine. MaeGraw decided to do The Get-away, where she met and married Steve McQueen, left Evans. Nobody beat the system. . . .

CHAPTER SEVEN

The Stepford Wives

"I think Nanetle might be rather good for the part of Carol, don't you?"

"She's a wonderful actress; I think she'd be fine."

That innocuous dialog, spoken casually between myself and director Bryan Forbes-he asked the question, I made the reply-was, at least for me, genuinely memorable. It marked the only time that I realized, early on before shooting, that a project I was involved in was more than likely doomed. What follows will try and make some sense of that. In general, what we are dealing with here is perhaps the most perplexing problem the screenwriter faces: his relationship with the director.

One can, if one wishes, divide the process of making a movie into three parts: prior to shooting, shooting, and postproduction. (There are those that claim the process should be divided in half: making the picture and selling the picture. There's a lot of wisdom in that view, but it has nothing to do with writing scripts, so a mere mention here will have to do.)

The first of the three parts listed above generally takes the longest time. (Always remember that movies are these great elephantine husks that hundreds of people at various limes are trying to lug toward the finish line. It's at least two to three years between the first glimmer of doing a movie and its appearance at your friendly neighborhood theatre.)

More often than not, the movie begins with the producer. He reads a book, a treatment, an outline, sees a play, overhears a remark, whatever. Something tolls him that a movie is lurking in the vicinity. Once he has acquired the rights to the project, which can take a lot of time and legal hassling, more often than not, again, the producer will then hire a screenwriter.

In my own case, from the first phone call to the First draft being submitted takes six months. I'm not writing all that time. But usually there's research to be done. And then finding a structure. And then all the things we writers are most brilliant at: finding reasons not to get to it. Eventually, though, we do, the producer reads the script, suggests changes, changes are made.

And then it goes to the studio.

The studio executives read, meet, mull, meet some more before deciding thumbs up or down. Most of the time, the answer is in the negative.

Statistically, in my own case, I suppose half of the screenplays I've written have actually seen production. And I am being dead honest when I tell you this: I have absolutely no more idea as to why some of them happened than why some of them didn't.