It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive (8 page)

“There’s going to be one captain, and it’s going to be me!” (Cap’n Crunch, 1972?)

Faced with his tantrums, I usually tried to summon the calmest demeanor I could.

“Listen,” I’d say softly. “You’re going to have to stop screaming at me. I understand that you’re the one who’s going to direct the movie. But I’m going to write it. And I’m not going to write it, word by word, here under your watchful eyes.”

“So you’re refusing. You’re refusing to work with me.”

“No. I’m saying I’d like you to tell me what scenes you want from the book. Tell me what scenes you want that aren’t in the book. I’ll write them. Then you can give me notes. I’ll rewrite, incorporating the notes as best I can, and we’ll work from there.”

“I can’t have you writing without me. That’s a waste of time. If you write by yourself, you’ll just write things that don’t work for me, and we’ll be right back where we started.”

Then he simply took up where he’d left off, as if we’d never had any conflict at all. “Two pages. You’ll do the hallway in two pages. Now give me some shorter scenes. We’ve had a couple of long scenes, so now I’m going to need some shorter ones.”

He was smoking a cigar as he barked these orders. My old friend Tim, with whom I’d shared so many laughs over so many silly moments. With whom I’d created my own history, and whom I’d helped create his. Many people had criticized him to me in more recent years. They saw me huddled with him at a party and came over to talk after he was gone.

“Do you know him?” they asked. “He’s so arrogant.”

My old friend Tim, whom I defended on those occasions – strenuously – had come to fancy himself the auteur of my autobiography. As the result of a few seasons on a TV show, a couple of roles in feature films, and a few books he’d read, Tim had come to see himself as the reincarnation of Orson Welles. As they say in show business, “Oy, vey.”

I felt attacked, misled, and trapped. I had already accepted money and agreed to terms. I was under obligation to deliver a screenplay. And I was heartbroken. One moment I seethed with rage over the seventeenth of Tim’s daily slew of insults. The next moment I realized that this was what it looked like to watch a friendship die.

Of even greater concern than friendship and professional obligation, however, was that I had only one life story to tell. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t told in the dismal fashion of most of the films in its genre. More than that, I wanted to make sure it didn’t fall into the genre most people would have categorized it as belonging to. The fact is there has
still
never been an American theatrical release film in which the main character’s life-threatening illness drives the plot, and in which the character survives. It’s never been done. Never, ever. They always die. Every single time. Conquering this issue was one of the creative challenges that had me excited about the prospect of writing the script. I wanted to give the film an unconventional, uncertain ending. I wanted to leave the audience with an image of the lead character physically safe, but walking off into an unknown future. This goal, too, turned into a point of contention.

“You can’t break the rules until you’ve mastered the rules,” I was told. (To my amazement, a quote from my sixth-grade gym teacher upon doing a reverse, double-pump layup instead of a traditional one during basketball drills.)

I sensed that the showdown wasn’t destined to go my way, and that ultimately I was going to have no say whatsoever in how the film got made. Besides my emotional investment in the material being battled over, I didn’t know how to deal with being badgered, bullied, and shouted down for hours on end. In one of the oddest ironies of my strange existence, I had somehow mastered surviving treacherous ordeals while not knowing very well how to take care of myself in a creative collaboration.

At night, after “working hours” were through, I was living in my
old-friend-and-current-adversary’s guesthouse. I didn’t own a car. I was 150 miles from my apartment in Manhattan. Unless I was willing to walk out on the whole endeavor, I had nowhere to go. I’d slink back to my quarters and wait to get up the next day to go at it all over again. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether it’s a distortion or not, but I felt like I was fighting for my life all over again. Or at least fighting for the right to tell the story of it in a way that made sense to me.

And that’s when Patricia stepped in. She became my knight in shining armor. More accurately, she became my knight in a ten-year-old, beat-up, rusted-out Volvo she called “The Moo Monster.” Patricia was playful and childlike in that way. She named her cars. She even spoke to them.

“Come on, girl,” Patricia would appeal when the car made ominous sounds. She’d pat the dashboard as a gesture of encouragement. I know she did these things with at least a bit of a sense of humor about them. But I think she also believed her relationship to the car had a positive effect on its performance.

Patricia heard the pain and strain in my voice while I was working on Long Island. She got in the car and traveled to me on a work night to be by my side. And that’s where she stayed.

At this point, Patricia and I had been dating for only about six months. Her rescue mission in the Moo Monster was the first time I witnessed her ferocious way of expressing her loyalty, and I found it deeply restorative. Hers wasn’t an “I will stand up for him because he is right” call to arms. Her stance was, “My man is being attacked, and I will defend him. My man is being attacked, and his enemy is now my enemy,
and will be from this day forward
.” Patricia would hear none of my layered interpretations of Tim’s behavior, or confessions of my own culpability. “He’s a monster,” she declared. “He’s treating you like shit, and I hate him for it.” And she did. It was as simple as that. And I felt loved so deliriously as a result that it moved me to fall in love with her.

Patricia’s exhibition also caused me to question whether I’d ever lived the meaning of the verb “to love.” It’s easy to
feel
love for another, I recognized. But I also learned that
to
love someone is a much more active, and generous, endeavor than anything I’d undertaken before (let’s hear it for the slow learner at the back of the room). The fact that it was also an exhibition of the precise differences in our characters that would eventually doom us was an irony that wouldn’t become clear for some time.

Patricia continued to visit during my luxurious servitude. Things grew ever more tense between Tim and me, and less and less was accomplished. I finally shortened the length of my stay from three weeks to ten days and arrived home eager to get to work on my own. I gained strength from Patricia’s support. She worked as a creative executive for a major film company. Anyone who’s familiar with creative executives in the film industry knows the title doesn’t necessarily mean they possess any great insights – or even any creativity. But I respected Patricia’s opinion.  She complimented the work I’d been doing and it meant a great deal to me.

I also drew courage and inspiration from conversations with screenwriting friends more experienced than I. Over the next few weeks I completed what I thought was a lean, clever draft of an appropriate length, handed it to Tim and awaited his response. He seemed to have accepted that I was going to write the screenplay of my choosing, while allowing him to have merely a great deal of influence, as opposed to absolute authority.

My liaison to the production company throughout these struggles was a man named Bob. Bob had proven himself to be perceptive in terms of script and story, and canny in his ability to compare versions. He had often asked how things were going in my work with Tim, and I’d always insisted things were fine. Eventually, as he continued to probe, I decided to share with him some of the trouble I was having. Now that Tim and I had moved past some of our earlier difficulties, we were having disagreements over which version of the screenplay to turn in. I also shared with Bob my dilemma in regard to whom to hand the damned thing over
to
. Along with his refusal to agree on an acceptable version, Tim had insisted that I not hand the script over to my employer, as they’d instructed me. His command was that I deliver the script to him, allowing him to hand deliver it to the production company.

I understood Tim’s desire to be perceived as the mastermind of his project. But he was putting me in an impossible (not to mention humiliating) position. I had my own contractual obligations. Then there was the issue of trust. I wasn’t sure, at this point, that my old “friend” would deliver to the company the same version of the script I instructed him to.

Bob seemed sympathetic to my plight. He suggested that I allow Tim the honor of making our official submission, and that I should hand over to Tim the version of the script I felt best about. But he also invited me to simultaneously prepare for him another version, one that might offer a good representation of what I felt Tim preferred, and was pressing me to write. Bob wanted to read both and decide for himself which one was superior. This would mean twice as much work for me, but the opportunity for an opinion from a keen third eye made it seem worth the effort.

Once Bob had read the scripts he discussed with me his impressions of the two versions. He agreed that mine had more humor and emotional complexity. He also agreed it would make a better movie. The problem was, it didn’t appear my version was the movie Tim intended to make. Bob told me that Tim had delivered the script I’d put my name on, but he’d also arrived at their offices with another stack of index cards. He’d sat with the president of the company, with Bob, and their director of development, and had pitched his own scene-by-scene reworking of the material as his preferred option. Bob was regretful. But he said there was little they could do to force Tim’s hand. Their agreement with him was to finance a film over which he’d have complete creative control.

I was impressed with the deal Tim’s team had cut for him. No rides at Busch Gardens for my old friend.

“I’m afraid there’s nothing we can do about it,” Bob said. “We’ve got a deal with him.”

“Well, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” said Bob. “Or, at least you’ve got a deal with us. He optioned the material from you, and then we bought the option from him. As part of his deal, we gave him a guarantee to direct. So when we bought the rights from you, that ties us all to him. There’s no way this company can produce the film without using him as the director.”

“What if I didn’t have a deal with you?” I asked.

“But you do.”

“What if I didn’t?”

“You
have
a deal with us. That’s what we
paid
you for. When you signed that deal, you signed over all the underlying rights to the book and the story.”

There was a pause.

“You signed the papers, right?”

It wasn’t asked with any kind of alarm. It was asked the way you ask a question you think you already know the answer to, in order to prove a point.

Amid the struggles with Tim, I’d taken the agreement that granted the production company the rights to my life story and slipped it into a drawer. Unsigned. It wasn’t done in a scheming manner. It was a matter of practicality.

The contract we’d agreed to distinguished between two fees I would be paid: one was for writing services. The other fee would be compensation for the underlying rights to the story. Separate amounts had been negotiated for each. The only money I’d received so far had been accompanied by a letter stating, “Advance payment for writing services.” It made no mention of any part of the payment being for the purchase of the underlying rights to the story. I cashed the check for writing services, and went to work writing a script. I figured the remaining amount of my fee was being withheld until I provided an acceptable one.

I wasn’t concerned about the bulk of the money that was still due. I could understand the company’s desire to hold off on paying for the rights to a story I hadn’t yet proven I could write to its satisfaction. By that same reasoning, I didn’t see why I should sign a contract granting the production company those rights before it had compensated me for them. So the papers remained unsigned. Only after it became clear that the promises and assurances Tim had made to me weren’t going to be honored did I knowingly decide to let the contract ripen and ferment. It turned out to be a choice that would, for the ninth or tenth time (if you include the literal as well as figurative senses), save my life. Or at least the story of it.

“You signed the papers, right?” Bob asked.

The face I made wasn’t a smirk, and it wasn’t a grimace. It was more like a shrug. A shrug that said, “I’m not saying I did, and I’m not saying I didn’t.” I had no idea why I was being so coy, or any idea, really, of anything I was doing. I changed tactics immediately.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t. They’re sitting inside a drawer in my desk.”

It was one of those glorious moments in life. Not glorious because of their content, but glorious because of their purity. Glorious because of the irreversibility of the action. Like the moment you tell a woman you love her for the first time. Or the opposite, that you’ve been having doubts about the relationship. When you confess an affair. Or like when you tell someone that they don’t actually own the rights to your life story. That they don’t have the right to produce a movie on the subject in whatever way they choose, regardless of how you feel about it. Glorious, because no matter what you suddenly feel about the decision you’ve made, there is no turning back.

As for Bob and his reaction, it was impressive. It was clear that his mind was working along several tracks simultaneously. He appeared startled. He seemed concerned that he and the company were in deep shit. He looked as though he needed to have a talk with his boss as quickly as possible. But he also seemed to be scanning his mind for the new possibilities that might be raised by this revelation. He began to ask me about those possibilities immediately.

“So who
would
you want to have direct the picture?”