Making Priscilla (11 page)

The conversation ends. Everybody wants to go home, wherever it is. As we walk towards the car, Stephan becomes aware
of a pattern in Schwartz’s proposed cutting of Charlene, Bernadette’s walk and Abba. ‘What he wants me to do,’ he says, struck by his discovery, ‘is to get rid of the beginning, the middle and the end of the film.’ We make a final detour to the William Morris Agency, where Stephan signs the contract that has been in discussion since the last Cannes Film Festival. It is probably the first important agreement in show business history to be executed lying on the floor of the agent’s office, without either a lawyer or a bottle of champagne present.

We arrive back in Sydney on Christmas Eve, as intended. Three days later, we will be back in the cutting room. On Christmas Day, Bondi Beach is host to thirty thousand people who have brought tables, chairs, fridges, sofas, miniature pine trees and a makeshift disco powered by a generator in a rented truck.

For a moment, we have forgotten about the film.

January 17. Three hours before we are scheduled to land in Los Angeles, as a brilliant ribbon of orange begins to settle along the horizon, the announcement comes through.

There has been an earthquake in the LA area, we are informed, its epicentre in the San Fernando Valley, its reading an unconfirmed 5.5 on the Richter scale. Sections of freeways have collapsed, the airport is closed, our flight may be diverted. Leaving behind the dying embers of the Sydney bushfires, we are flying towards another catastrophe.

When the lights are switched on in the cabin, there is a second announcement. The earthquake, which occurred at 4.31 a.m. local time, was more serious than earlier reports suggested. Its intensity was a formidable 6.6 (subsequently ‘upgraded’ to 6.7 and, in later reports, 6.8), making it the worst wake-up call Los Angeles has had this century. Stephan, whose appetite for
disaster borders on the pathological, can barely contain his excitement, unequalled since he flew into town towards the end of the riots nineteen months earlier.

At the airport, which has reopened shortly before our arrival, there is the kind of menacing hush one associates with those films set in cities that have suffered a population wipeout. A handful of immigration and customs people abstractedly go through their motions. We are out of the building in record time.

A second later, or so it seems, we are driving towards the city. The traffic lights are all blinking red, and the paucity of other vehicles gives an exhilarating edge to running the gauntlet. The scale of the devastation only begins to reveal itself with the first sight of the Hollywood Hills, which are nearly engulfed by the smoke which rises from fires in the valley and rolls across the sky towards us.

Continuous reports on the earthquake have taken over all radio stations, including those which customarily broadcast only music. A story about a motorcycle cop who died when he tried to switch freeways during the quake and found that the one he was transferring to
was
not there
anymore
is heard so frequently that it begins to take on a comic dimension, its tragic one having been eroded by repetition. An apartment building has collapsed and the death toll is rising. The airwaves are monopolised by the voices of seismologists, who speculate on aftershock prospects, and psychiatrists, who discuss post-traumatic stress disorder.

When we reach the part of the road which goes under the Santa Monica freeway overpass, we find it cut off by the freeway itself, which has completely buckled at various points, leaving the supporting pillars mangled underneath. As we navigate a way around it, we see people dismantling the wreckage,
others walking the streets in their dressing gowns, many sitting in armchairs on the manicured little lawns outside their houses.

At the apartment building where we are lodging with friends, there is a power cut, as there is in most areas of the city, so we carry our cases up seven floors in the dark, avoiding the rubble of the collapsed ceilings. In the apartment itself, where our hosts are still shaken, there is no structural damage but objects have fallen off shelves and a large wall mirror has collapsed.

Since we have worked over most of the holiday period to return here for a one-day stopover to show a re-edited version of the film, we assume that our afternoon appointment with Michael Kuhn and Russell Schwartz will not be affected by anything as trifling as the aftermath of a natural disaster.

I call Michael Hamlyn, who is not so sure that this will be the case. There is no electricity at the Gramercy offices where the screening will be held, and both Kuhn and Schwartz are apparently vacillating about whether they want to leave their homes at such a vulnerable time on what is in any case a public holiday. There is something primitive about an earthquake that unsettles everyone, but a popular theory postulates that it especially affects those who are most accustomed to being in control of their circumstances.

By the time the meeting is finally called off, Stephan and I have lost interest in having it. We drive up Sunset Boulevard in search of a restaurant that will serve us lunch. The few places that have a functioning kitchen are doing unprecedented business. Ben Frank’s, a round-the-clock diner where I have never waited for a table for more than thirty seconds, has a ninety-minute wait, so we appease our hunger with a visit to Book Soup, a store so intoxicating in its abundance that one loses all track of time. Then it happens.

There is a low rumble and everything begins to shake: bookcases,
walls, windows, light fixtures; worst of all, the ground itself. For a moment I consider the ignominious possibility of dying under an enormous pile of overwritten film biographies that have crashed down from the shelves. As the other customers drop their books and run into the street, Stephan, browsing in the crime section, is struck by a flying hardback, which turns out to be the biography of a serial killer. The aftershock measures 5.5, which would be a significant earthquake in any place that has not already experienced a 6.8 earlier in the day.

While seismic unrest is a long-acknowledged part of life in Southern California, the unexpected severity of this earthquake has dislocated everybody. There is a social historian on the radio saying that unlike urban riots, which are divisive, earthquakes are an act of God that consistently bring out the benevolence in people.

This is not in evidence at Ralph’s supermarket where the management — disturbed both by the prospect of post-quake looting and by the litigation which would almost certainly follow an injury caused by falling groceries — has decided to allow nobody into the store. Instead, assistants collect shopping lists at the entrances and return with loaded trolleys. Standing in a parking lot full of people waiting for their food to materialise, we decide that starvation is preferable. Fortunately, our dinner companions have decided otherwise.

The household — one of whom sleeps in a jogging suit and tennis shoes to save time if they need to abandon the building — awakes the following morning to a 4.7 tremor and to the data of the past twenty-four hours: 46 dead, damage estimated at $30 billion and — the ‘upbeat’ note — 73 arrests, compared with 534 on an average day.

Californians are a tirelessly explicit breed, for whom the world constantly needs to be assessed and quantified. What becomes clear from the tone of reporting is that, while the pioneering spirit that brings people to Los Angeles also makes them uniquely equipped to deal with disaster, part of the understanding is that the disaster should rapidly recede. The strength of the aftershocks reveals it is not to be the case.

The film business has come to a standstill. Warner, Disney and Universal, the three studios closest to the epicentre, have closed for the day.

Its favoured grazing holes, however, are open for lunch, including the Ivy, the restaurant whose location scene in
The
Player
was
not
left on the cutting room floor. It is virtually impossible for a stranger to reserve a terrace table here, but today most of the restaurant’s regular diners are too busy surveying damage or making insurance claims to show up, so there is no difficulty.

The screening at Gramercy has been rescheduled for this afternoon. We discuss our plans with Michael Hamlyn and decide that if Kuhn and Schwartz approve the cut of the film there is no need for me to travel to London, where Manifesto’s endorsement of this approval will by then have become a formality. Since we are in a city where wisdom and banality become indistinguishable in their reductive mutation into slogans, I propose that this afternoon’s be ‘Collusion not collision’. Having bristled with pugnacity at the slightest criticism on our last visit, I have resolved to let people speak without interruption, to listen to what they say, to consider before responding, to accommodate their good ideas. Then to do whatever we believe is right.

We know that we have at least dealt with the question of overall length. The picture is running at just under a hundred
minutes without end titles, nearly ten minutes shorter than the version we showed four weeks earlier.

When the first laugh resonates around the room a few minutes into the picture, I exhale silently, relieved that it will not require arm wrestling over pits of scorpions to convince them that this is the final cut of the film. A friend of Kuhn’s, who has otherwise enjoyed it, says it may have three minutes or so of ‘air’, which means he thinks it is still a little long. But there are no complaints about the pace of the middle section or about the musical numbers, and Schwartz chortles heartily at the now truncated, and funnier, child-molesting-uncle flashback, deflating Kuhn’s remaining reservations. Schwartz also believes that we may have a hit movie, and tells Stephan this as he accompanies him out to the parking lot.

Preparing to drive away, we realise that the curfew announced earlier in the day has already begun and that it will be impossible to find anywhere to eat. Kuhn, who recognises a pathetic sight when he sees one, invites us back to his house for pasta and red wine.

It is difficult to determine how much of the evening is a consequence of alleviated quake anxiety and how much is simply the right combination of five people fuelled by robust cabernets, but Kuhn is transformed for a couple of hours into the best imaginary chat-show guest in the world, leaving us laughing helplessly with accounts of what happened when his mother met Diana Ross in Las Vegas, what the take-off and landing procedures are for private jets at various airports around the world, and what people really think of a foul-mouthed comedian who makes enormous profits for PolyGram’s video division.

By the time I am ready to drive out to the airport the following night, protracted exposure to earth tremors has begun to affect
my gait, which now resembles that of a man who believes his feet are about to be swallowed by the ground. I meet a friend for a drink at what appears to be the only bar open in the deserted concrete and glass wastelands of Wilshire Boulevard.

I ask if life has begun to function again in the valley. Many businesses have re-established trading that day, he says. Even the Universal tour has been running, except for one part: the earthquake ride is closed until further notice.

Reluctant at this stage to surrender the film to strangers in airline uniforms with their boundless potential for sabotage, we carry the print on to the plane and place it in an overhead locker, inviting a certainly fatal cranial fracture if the containers were to tumble down during some sudden flight turbulence over Tahiti. (The sitar player Ravi Shankar used to circumvent this problem by buying a first-class seat for his instrument, and keeping its belt fastened throughout the journey.)

There are few moments in the life of a movie when one is more
physically
protective of it than this. It is the final day before distributors and audiences begin, in their different ways, to subsume it; the eve of three crucial screenings which together will determine its future in the United States and, as a consequence, everywhere else.

The first, on the afternoon of the day of our arrival, is a private show for friends in Los Angeles and for our still vacillating American distributor Gramercy, whose official neutrality towards
Priscilla
until the picture has been finished and approved is
beginning to diminish the lustre of their privately declared enthusiasm. The second is a test screening, the results of which will be used to sanctify or vilify the movie, regardless of its fundamental qualities. The third is a presentation at the San Francisco Film Festival, where we are confident that on a Saturday night in a big, noisy, predominantly gay theatre the response will at least be demonstrative.

Still exhilarated by the tremendous reception the film received at its first screening in Sydney the previous week — to which we invited cast, crew and anybody we thought might be entertained — we are reassured to see that LA is still standing. The Santa Monica freeway, between whose collapsed pillars we had attempted to pass on the drive into town three months earlier, has recently reopened ahead of schedule and the city is buoyant with accomplishment. I am haunted for a moment by the receding spectre of a ‘video imaging unit’, which I realise is caused by our return to the same screening room in Beverly Hills where we showed the director’s cut on tape. If the film is not liked tonight, I conclude philosophically, I will continue to carry the cans. If it is, they will travel in their own limo.

Finally, there is sufficient money left in the budget to allow for paid accommodation. So, for the first time since we began travelling in connection with the film, Stephan and I can afford a hotel. I used to stay at Ma Maison, whose lively bar, pioneering voice-mail system and bewildering check-out gift of a baguette made it a singular experience. (One wondered what happened to the baguette when its recipient boarded a plane. Was it stored in the overhead compartment? Under the seat in front, where it might protrude mysteriously between the feet of the forward passenger? Or checked in, so that it turned up among the suitcases on the baggage carousel with a label around its crust?)

A more seductive deal, however, is offered by the Nikko,
about which, for reasons of complete recognition, I have wordperfect recall of Baz Luhrmann’s endorsement in an Australian edition of
Vogue
he once edited: ‘In the middle of a production, you’re fear-ridden, really. So you want to be in a place where you feel supported’. It helps that everything in the place works perfectly, much of it from a bedside telephone into which most of the hotel services are programmed. One can adjust the room temperature, for example, from a completely supine position.

The first person we meet in the hotel lobby is our French subtitler Henri Béhar, who picks up Stephan, twice his height, and twirls him around adoringly, to the embarrassed bewilderment of the Japanese businessmen waiting to check in. During the final days of last year’s Cannes, Stephan came across Henri pressed up against a wall outside a restaurant tongue-kissing the chef, whose toque was bobbing around with pleasure. Henri came up for air, greeted Stephan and returned to his business.

While they amuse each other, I wander over to the concierge’s desk, which is dominated by a large, decoratively presented basket of beers from around the world; a kind of United Nations of carbonated froth. ‘Bet you wish you were getting that,’ she quips mechanically, observing my curiosity. ‘I wonder who the lucky bastard is,’ I respond by rote. Later, in Stephan’s room — where he stands at the window spellbound by the network of enormous pipes on the roof of the tiny Fatburger shack across the road — I find that
he
is the lucky bastard, except for one thing: he does not drink beer. His ‘friends at William Morris’, by whom the gift was sent, have not researched him well.

The Aidikoff screening, comfortably full, is a success. People find the film both funny
and
touching, equally important factors if one is to have an American comedy hit. In the ’90s it appears that making people laugh is no longer sufficient, as
evidenced by the ingratiating soft-headedness of the final reels of even the better US comedies.

Like a spurned suitor unable to say goodbye, I take the print back to the hotel afterwards and hide it under the bed. The limo can wait.

A Sunday morning drive along nearly deserted streets up to Book Soup to collect the weekly edition of
Variety
is a pleasant ritual made more potent in this case by expectation. The colour transparency of the three drag queens with their backs to the camera at the top of Kings Canyon has been reproduced across half a page, and it looks terrific. It is the first major publicity for the film, and it is certain to create curiosity around the world in the thirteen days between now and the midnight screening in Cannes. Intoxicated with possibilities, I keep reopening the paper at the photograph.

We meet Michael Hamlyn at a restaurant in Venice which exhibits paintings by, among others, Joni Mitchell, the chronicler in whatever medium of a kind of free-floating LA reverie universes away from the gangs that stalk the adjacent streets. We agree on the issues which need to be resolved with Gramercy the following day, then walk around a neighbourhood in which territorial boundaries can be crossed in the length of a block.

What a strange city this is. The court case currently monopolising the press’s attention is about which of two men — a garment company proprietor or an actor-turned-songwriter — invented phosphorescent underwear. There are, of course, plentiful punning opportunities, from lawyers ‘filing unusual briefs’ to judge and jury ‘getting to the bottom of it all’. Experts are brought in to explain glow-in-the-dark crotchless panties and the lights are turned out in the court so that these can be demonstrated.

The sense of dislocated absurdity is infectious: there is a parallel version of every moment. Later, driving along Beverly Boulevard at night near the New Beverly Cinema where
Res
ervoir
Dogs
is often shown, Stephan sees a number of men in black suits walking along the road together. He thinks they are the kind of deranged fans that dress up like the characters in the movie, the way they do at
Rocky
Horror
Picture
Show
screenings. They turn out to be Hassidic Jews on the way back from the synagogue.

There are a few questions we want to ask Gramercy, so we do. Where do they recruit the people who are attending the recruited screening? (Shopping malls, mainly.) Why are there no seventeen-to-twenty-one-year-olds included in the otherwise demographically exhaustive preview audience? (Not our primary target group, it appears.) Why is nobody from the distribution company going to the San Francisco festival with us? (Two people volunteer to do so.) How are the ticket sales doing? (Quite well, but they would benefit from some promotion.) Is Gramercy releasing the film or not? (Everyone would like to, but first it must be tested. PolyGram corporate policy.)

It is a strange, rather fractured encounter, the kind shared by people who have much to accomplish together without yet knowing each other well. There is great enthusiasm for the movie, but one feels that until the preview validates everyone’s confidence, this will remain a little muted. When we are shown a rough cut of the proposed trailer, Stephan and I simultaneously fall out of our chairs with shouts of disbelief when we see it has revealed the fact that Tick has a son. The point of a trailer is surely to tantalise people into wanting to see the movie, not to give away everything that happens in it. While realising that the parallel is a
little strained, I point out that what they have done would be rather like Miramax letting everybody know in the trailer of
The
Crying
Game
that Jaye Davidson has a penis.

Quite rightly, Gramercy do not want to restrict the film’s wider potential by making the initial marketing too comprehensively gay, so we discuss single images that convey the tone of the movie without, as the term goes, ‘ghettoising’ it: frill-necked lizards, echoing the outfits our trio wears during the third costume change of ‘Finally’; the feather hitting the rock in the desert, which someone says looks sad. Until then, it has never occurred to me that a feather could look sad.

Discussing the best date on which to open the film, we agree that the original Gramercy preference of early October is out of the question because Johnny Depp in (and as)
Ed
Wood
is scheduled for release on October 7, and it is clear that once Depp has been seen in a skirt and an angora sweater — the favoured outfit of the eponymous cross-dressing director — our lot will not look so hot, or, more importantly, so surprising. September 2 is the opening date of
It’s
Pat
—
the
Movie
starring the androgynous character from
Saturday
Night
Live.
Paul Rosenfeld, the big man who runs Gramercy’s theatrical distribution, vigorously denies that it represents any competition.
‘Pat
the
Fucking
Movie,’
he snarls, ‘is going to be dead in a week.’ Amidst the slippery evasiveness of film business speculation, we appreciate his from-the-hip manner, and he will turn out to be right.

When the office clears of everyone but Russell Schwartz, I decide to conclude some important unfinished business. I remind him that, as we are not receiving an advance from Gramercy, we are entitled to shop the film around and, if offered an advance of a million dollars or over, we can accept it. How does he feel about this? He surprises me a little with his
speed and snap. ‘I won’t hear of it,’ he says imperiously. Given the rewarding back-end terms we have in the existing deal, his determination suits us fine. For the moment.

While broadly in favour of test screenings for the vital clues they can give movie makers in resolving areas of uncertainty, I resent the way that they have incrementally helped to squeeze the distinctiveness out of motion pictures, and the manner in which studio executives have used them as a scientific stick with which to beat directors around their artistic heads.

Since
Star
Wars
(1977) raised the threshold of aspiration on the financial return of a film, the use of research for everything from determining content to changing endings has created a pathological fear of deviating from the consensus, however often it may have been proved to be wrong. Although Hollywood has always used previews in some form — they were employed, famously, to justify the evisceration of Orson Welles’
The
Magnificent
Ambersons
— it is only in the past seventeen years that they have taken on some of the more unsettling qualities of organised religion.

Consider some of the extraordinarily diverse and individual studio movies made in the first half of the ’70s, before
Star
Wars
— Coppola’s
The
Godfather
(1 and 2), Rafelson’s
Five
Easy
Pieces,
Bogdanovich’s
The
Last
Picture
Show,
De Palma’s
Carrie,
Scorsese’s
Taxi
Driver,
Penn’s
Night
Moves,
Russell’s
The
Devils,
Malick’s
Badlands,
Nichols’
Carnal
Knowledge,
Pakula’s
Klute
or Altman’s
Nashville
— and think how easily the evaluation cards of a single unsympathetic movie audience in San Diego or Long Beach could have led to their statistically endorsed emasculation.

The first test screening of
I’ll
Do
Anything,
James L. Brooks’
ambitious musical comedy about the film business, was a disaster, with a reported seventy walk-outs. Brooks is an unswerving believer in the preview process, and has often said that he cannot cut a picture without it. Identifying the musical numbers as the problem, he removed most of them to see if the storyline and characters still came across. It helped a little, so his plan was to reintroduce the songs over successive screenings to assess which ones worked. Six previews later, he had only one song left in the film, which turned out to be a box-office flop anyway. It may well also have failed had the musical numbers been retained, but the erosion of Brooks’ confidence meant that it was worse than a flop: it was a compromised, truncated flop.

The company supervising our test is the National Research Group, and the appetiser-synopsis is lively with marketing bites: ‘A new comedy adventure is kicking up its heels … this road is not paved with asphalt but with sequins. Prepare yourself for a comedy that just may change the way you think, the way you feel, and most of all, the way you dress’. Paraphrased, the last sentence plainly has possibilities as a trailer and poster copyline.

A memo we received before leaving Sydney instructs us on how to drive to the Beverly Connection, where the preview is to take place. It is wasted on us as the theatre is a five-minute walk from the hotel. A new photo of my baby daughter has arrived, which I put in my inside pocket — absurdly close to the heart — for good luck. The lobby is full of men in blazers with walkie-talkies, which prompts me to wonder if we have taken a wrong turn and ended up at an electronic surveillance convention. I look around to check if the demographic conforms to what we were told: 25 per cent aged 21-24, 25 per cent 25-29, 25 per cent 30-34, 25 per cent 35-49. It looks about
right, although some are clearly younger than 21 or older than 49. There is a sprinkling of fistfuckers with moustaches and leathers — including one with a stetson — and I relish the prospect of one day having the film play to an audience consisting entirely of drag queens: a movie showing to its mirror image, rather like seeing
Die
Hard
with hundreds of men in grubby singlets with a weakness for climbing through the bowels of skyscrapers. Perhaps in San Francisco.