What Just Happened? (16 page)

Notice the lower right corner. That is a list of revisions that took place, most of which occurred while we were shooting. There were many more rewrites, but these were the ones that made it into the script. If you examine the page closely, you see that the reworked pages of each revision were printed on a different color. I especially liked the salmon-colored pages. By the time De Niro was shooting his death scene, there were so many changes that the spine of the script looked psychedelic. From a producing standpoint, the impact of this can be immense. Naturally, with this much reexamination
going on, a lot of disagreements emerge between the director and the writer. The producer, who also has a minor vote in all of this, helps to negotiate these issues. All of this occurs while the movie company is straining to get the day's work done and the actors are pleading for new pages so they can prepare.

Producers tend to approach this problem in different ways. I prefer to keep going with the writer that I started with, using that popular sports theory that it is best to stay with the player who got you there. In this case, Glazer's script got us to the starting gate. Other producers and directors prefer to use multiple writers, hoping to bring in different points of view. It is not uncommon for a movie to have exhausted ten writers and more to complete the job.

Often, the director doesn't even want the original writer around. His mere presence on the set becomes a distraction. When this happens, the neglected writer is either sequestered in a small section of a trailer trying to knock off pages, or he's left huddling by the crafts service truck eating doughnuts and making friends with grips and assorted workers from electrical.

On the other hand, some screenwriters simply refuse to visit a set. They can smell the impending ostracism. When we were doing
The Untouchables
, De Palma and I needed additional work from Mamet. I hoped to lure him by inviting him to Chicago. My thinking, of course, was that once David saw Sean Connery, Kevin Costner, and De Niro, the enthusiasm of the crew, and the beautiful production designs, he would get juiced up and jump in with some new pages. No chance. If I remember correctly, his response was something simple. Something like ‘No.' When I suggested that he might have some fun dropping by, no writing required, it was as if the phone went dead. The silence continued until I said, ‘Okay, I think I know how you feel about this.' I personally believe if you are trying to make a movie of substance, singularity of voice leads to the best results. When things are working correctly, the writer can give a movie as much cohesiveness as the director, and they both benefit from their collaboration.

It seems like several hundred years since Cameron Crowe wrote and Amy Heckerling directed
Fast Times at Ridgemont High
.
Perhaps because of a dimming memory that's receding like a flushed toilet, or maybe because of the lingering ill effects from too many bad substances, I recall the making of that movie as a sunny and fresh experience. It was Cameron's first screenplay and it was Amy's first shot at directing a feature movie. They were wide-eyed, and so was I. In fact, it was so early on in my career that I still wanted to be a producer whom others could lean on.

Once Cameron finished the first draft, it was patently evident that his take on teen life in high school was authentic. He had spent a year infiltrating his high school and was able to mainline the source of his characters. Mind you, the studio was slightly horrified by the explicitness of the material, but the costs were so low that we were able to fly under the line of fire. Even though Amy, who was also a budding writer, wanted changes and adjustments to the script, Cameron had to be the guy who was going to see it through. He became a fixture on the set. As a result, many classic moments were created
after
filming began.

For those who want examples, three weeks into the shooting of
Fast Times
, when even the most nearsighted of executives were noticing that Sean Penn was stealing the movie, I did what any producer who was still breathing would do: I asked for more Spicoli scenes. Cameron, who was trailing the action and at our disposal at all times, came up with a few sequences, all of which ended up in the final cut. My favorite was a flashback with sportscaster Stu Nahan interviewing Jeff Spicoli after Spicoli had dreamed that he won the Hawaiian surfing championship. In the scene, Spicoli, buzzed on THC, clad in surfing shorts and Hawaiian leis and sandwiched between two perfect Southern California girls, is holding an oversize surf trophy. It was originally written for Spicoli to be a guest on the
Merv Griffin Show
, but Merv refused the part because of the drug references. When Nahan was the ‘best' that we could get, Cameron readjusted the scene to accommodate the moment.

S
TU
N
AHAN
: You know a lot of people expected Mark ‘Cutback' Davis or Bob ‘Jungle' Gerard would take the honors this year.

J
EFF
S
PICOLI
: Those guys are FAGS!!!

S
TU
N
AHAN
: That's fantastic … Let me ask you a question … When you get out there, do you ever fear for your life?

J
EFF
S
PICOLI
: Well, Stu, I'll tell you, surfing is not a sport, it's a way of life … no hobby … it's a way of looking at that wave and saying, ‘HEY, BUD, LET'S PARTY!'

Staying with the screenwriter who got you there has its rewards.

When things got hairy on
Great Expectations
, rightly or wrongly, I was committed that Mitch should stay the course. I advised Alfonso that if he wanted changes, he should work with Mitch until he was satisfied. This process started early during preproduction and continued through filming. Somewhere in the centrifugal force of the collaboration, signs of differences were starting to surface. It wasn't that the screenplay wasn't working or that Alfonso's choices were wrong, it was that there seemed to be, at the core, a tonal difference among all of us in the way the movie was to be expressed. To put it simply, we were rarely on the same page.

The first hint that the differences were more than subtle occurred at the beginning of the schedule when we were shooting the scene of Finn, as a ten-year-old, when he falls hard for the ice princess Estella. The scene was originally filled with ten-year-olds' banter. Some good, some awkward. Alfonso replaced the scene with swirling tracking shots. In his attempt to make their first encounter more magical, he left out the dialogue completely, which he felt, I assumed, pulled against the intensity of the moment.

The situation became clear. Mitch's take was more comical and conversational; Alfonso's version was more visual and romantically seductive. A collision was inevitable. As we delved further into the film, Alfonso increasingly went for the visual moments. He either avoided the dialogue or kept insisting that Mitch rewrite much of it. What was interesting as the producer (the mayo) in this situation was that I had no particular point of view on who had the better approach. Mitch, being a close personal friend of
mine, was encouraged by me, implored by me, to stay in the trenches. Which he did. I felt we had to try to accommodate Alfonso. The director, after all, is the final eye between the performance and what ends up on film. Hell, he
must
be accommodated. We were deep in the middle of shooting a movie. The alternative would be to get another writer, a move I was loath to make. To stay the course was to put two cats in a small paper bag.

With the pressure of the schedule and the ever-present fear that we might be making a heaping pile of garbage, the director gets openly temperamental. And so does everyone else. When things were going swell, Alfonso was charming and gracious. When things got ugly, he lurched out and blamed the script, the cast, and of course, the producer. It got so fucking weird that Alfonso, as time went on, would demand more and more pages and Mitch would keep writing. Mitch would bring pages to the set, and Alfonso, reading them in his director's chair, would let the pages fall slowly to the ground, one at a time, to show his displeasure. Mitch looked at me with that baleful expression ‘I got married at your house, asshole … do something!' I looked back nonplussed, thinking, ‘Who do I have to fuck to get off this set?' This did not augur well for ongoing working relationships. Mitch was disappointed with me for not completely supporting his effort, which is another way of saying ‘This director is destroying my script.' Alfonso was disappointed with me for not helping him get the script exactly as he wanted it or enough money to make the masterpiece he was carrying around in his head. The studio was disappointed with me because we were over schedule and over budget, and I was disappointed that I ever got in the middle of this in the first place.

De Niro, as you might have assumed, enjoyed the experience immensely. He did end up, however, working more than seven days. I believe it was closer to twelve days, but this was hardly burdensome. He showed up at the beginning of the schedule in Florida, surprising us all with a shaved head, and went on to portray the escaped convict with his customary precision. Months later, at the very end of the schedule, he returned to the set for his death scenes. Unwittingly, he missed the agonizing middle.

By the time we were shooting nights in downtown Manhattan, everybody's nerves, except for his, were on red alert. De Niro's painstaking preparation for this sequence of scenes was taking several hours—something we had not taken into account when we planned the schedule. The crew was already in their final death dance. This phenomenon happens to all crews as a movie winds down. Their concentration already deadened and their eyes sunken from the ennui, they had begun their incessant chatter with each other about their next job, stopping only when Cuarón or I would brush past them on our way to the set. If the company were shooting in a swamp, we might have moved faster.

Bob was almost finished with his makeup when I entered his trailer. His long, gray-haired wig was in place, but only half of his full beard was stuck on. With the exposed padding around his waist, which was added to give him age, the overall look was almost clownlike. I had been pacing for the last half hour hoping my presence would speed things up. Ilona, De Niro's makeup artist extraordinaire, was slowly fussing with his beard. Out of frustration, I wanted to grab the glue and stick the fucker on myself. She looked at me warm and calm as if to say, ‘Isn't making movies fun?' As I tried to tell Bob of all the pressure I'd been subjected to, how horrible the life of a producer was, he looked at me quizzically. I wasn't sure he was actually listening. I felt like Al Jolson on bended knee about to sing ‘Mammy.'

‘No more time, babe,' I said, looking at his reflection in the makeup mirror. ‘We got no more time.'

‘That's why you're great,' he said.

‘Bob, you don't get it.'

‘Do you want Ilona to make you something to eat?'

‘No.'

‘You sure?'

‘We scheduled this scene of yours in two days … and the way we're goin' …'

‘That's why you're great.'

‘I need this one, Bob.'

‘That's why you're great. I tell everyone.'

He smiled. He knew. It was going to be over when it was going to be over. We ended up losing another three days. The studio was freaked. Rothman even showed up on the set. He was wearing a baseball hat backward, but to no avail. The crew kept whispering, ‘There's the suit, there's the suit.' By this time Rothman knew it was too late to salvage the schedule; he was just hoping to get an introduction to Gwyneth Paltrow.

De Niro, of course, impervious to it all, died with grace and style as a bum on a New York subway car and was paid like a king.

Throughout, the dailies looked excellent, but the internal chaos had had a broader effect, one not easily detected during filming. When the editing of the picture was completed, some holes remained in the story. I still don't know if it was because of undetected glitches in Glazer's script or because of Cuarón's ceaseless reworking of the script, but the connective tissue that linked the story was sorely lost. It became apparent that we would have to supply narration to smooth the transitions and to provide a Dickensian shading to the final cut. Again, I encouraged Mitch and Alfonso to take a crack at it and see if they could work together. Once the pressures of filming had ceased, Alfonso had considerably mellowed, but the damage was done. Putting Mitch and him in the same room was just too sweaty. Even though they attempted to lick it, Mitch, understandably, didn't have the heart for it and the effort was compromised.

I called David Mamet.

‘What are you doing?' I asked.

‘Nothin'.'

‘Good. I got an idea.'

‘Uh-huh.'

‘I need your help.'

‘Like a charity thing.'

‘Not quite.'

‘This help, do I get paid for it, or does “help” mean I don't get paid?'

‘The latter.'

‘Oh.'

‘Well, maybe I can get you a little money.'

‘Okay, what is it?'

‘D'you remember me telling you I'm producing
Great X
?'

‘Yes, that's why you couldn't be in Canada the whole time looking after our bear movie.'

‘That's right.'

‘Well?'

‘I need you to write some narration.'

‘Oh, God.'

‘The thing is crying for help.'

‘Oh, no.'

‘Consider it a favor.'

‘Send it to me.'

‘I already did, you'll have a tape of it tomorrow.'

‘Okay.'

‘Dave … I need this one.'

‘If I do this … if I do this … hear me, I don't want
anyone
to know.'

‘You have my word.'

All right. Here's a bit of the narration that opened the picture. The last line seems to have a prophetic resonance.