The View from the Bridge (26 page)

“This is ridiculous,” said Tanen. I rolled and foamed some more a week later, and he upped the offer—“all this for a movie we'll never make,” he growled.

The London agent held firm. I asked my wife if we could kick in some of our money. She said yes; Paramount said no.

And that was the end of it.

For a time.

 

 

 

It must've been late 1986 when one of the producers of
Kramer vs. Kramer
, Stanley Jaffe (no relation to Steve), dropped into my office and asked me to give my opinion of a script called
Deception
. I had known and liked Stanley from the time when I'd been the office boy at Paramount in New York. He could be prickly, too, but funny, and I always looked forward to our encounters.

Deception
was a really good script with a nifty, gut-twisting plot, well drawn characters—including one genuine original creation, a latter-day riff on Hedda Gabler named Alex Forrest. My only real problem with it was the ending, which didn't seem to quite go with the rest of the story. You have smart days and dumb days. This was one of my smarter days, and I punched out a four-page, single-spaced memo on how to fix the script. Over the next day or so, I got some more ideas and threw them in, too. I sent my revised letter off to Stanley and thought no more about it.

Some weeks later he invited me to lunch. As I walked to the commissary, I suddenly wondered if he was going to offer me the movie to direct, but this was not the case. At lunch I was introduced to Adrian Lyne, who had already been signed as director. We chatted, and I had another smart day, said some clever things I cannot now remember, and went home that night feeling pleased with myself.

Two days later I received a summons to Dawn Steel's office, toward which I headed with a slight case of dread. What indiscretion had I committed now? On her otherwise immaculate black basalt desk I spied, to my alarm, a copy of my memo.

“Listen, Nicky,” she said without preamble. “Here's the straight dope. We're not making this movie unless you rewrite it according to what you put in this memo, and you can have anything you want, and yes, that means we'll even buy your stupid fucking IRA book.”

Dawn never meant anything by these locutions; that's just the way she talked. Around this time
California
magazine ran an article about her entitled, “The Queen of Mean.” I wrote a letter protesting the smarmy piece, pointing out that if Dawn had been a man, they never would have commissioned, let alone run it. They responded by revealing my screenwriting salary, as though that was the reason for my defense. Dawn's reaction was, “If I've done half those things (in the article) I'm goddamned ashamed of myself.”

As for
Deception
, I thought it was silly on Paramount's part to spend all that money—first on my revisions of their script, then on purchasing the rights to
Field of Blood
at an extortionate price, then for my full freight to write a screenplay they never intended to film—but what did I know? In the event, it worked out for everyone. Paramount's movie, now titled
Fatal Attraction
, turned out to be a big hit, and I got to write
Field of Blood
, one my best scripts, even if they didn't film it.

(Until later. Live long enough and you'll see all your movies made.)

That same year I agreed to direct Michael Hirst's script of John Masters novel
The Deceivers
for Merchant Ivory, a task that would take me and my new family (which now included a daughter) to London and to India for a year.

It was in early '87 when I heard rumblings about the next
Star Trek
film. Taking a leaf from Nimoy's playbook, William Shatner's quid pro quo for participating in the new movie was directing it. I was again asked to write the screenplay. When I asked what the film was to be about, I was told, “the search for God.”

This did not strike me as an especially promising premise. How could such a search possibly conclude? Fortunately, I had the multiple excuses of my
Fatal Attraction
chores and my imminent departure abroad.

TILTING AT WINDMILLS: A DIGRESSION

Movies get made
not by accident, but because the planets align. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, and sometimes it takes a long time before they do. As
Don Quixote
falls into this category, it may be worth recounting the story thus far.

It was late 1986 and my producer friend David Foster (
McCabe & Mrs. Miller
,
The Getaway,
etc.) and I had always wanted to make a movie together. With typical perversity I asked if he'd ever read
Don Quixote,
and when he said he hadn't, I recommended the Samuel Putnam translation. After reading it David was hooked. “
Don Q
!
Don Q
! Gotta make
Don Q
!” became his mantra. Regretting my silly suggestion, I said it would never happen. There was a reason Hollywood had never tackled
Quixote
, that Orson Welles's fabled version was never completed, etc. The musical
Man of la Mancha
, inspired by an episode in the life of Cervantes, failed as a film. Still, Foster, nothing if not tenacious (a key virtue for producers), was not about to give up. We were lunching in the Paramount commissary when Ned Tanen walked by and said hello. “Never mind ‘hello,' ” Foster retorted. “This boy has done
Star Trek
for you,
Fatal Attraction
for you”—this was a gross exaggeration, to be sure, but exaggeration is the lingua franca of Hollywood—“what are you gonna do for him?”

“Anything he wants,” Tanen blithely replied, moving off. David swung round to face me. “That's it,” he stated. “We're taking him
Don Q
.”

“David,” I protested, “it's a fool's errand.”

“I'm making the appointment and I expect you to be there,” he shot back with the satisfied mien of a man who has just accomplished something difficult and intends to accomplish more.

So it was that a week or so later we found ourselves in Tanen's office.

“Well, boys, what is this about?” he commenced, after the usual preliminaries.

David turned to me:
Your department
, his expression plainly stated.

Forcing myself to look Tanen directly in the eye, I said to him, “We want to make a movie of
Don Quixote
.”

Tanen nodded, attentively. “And . . . ?”

I knew what that “and” meant. It meant, What's the gimmick? Is it Quixote in space? With music? Is he black? Does it have a video game tie-in?

“That's it,” I said. “Just the no-frills, brown-bag
Quixote
.”

He stared at me.

“Here's the thing,” I continued, provoked by his gaze and breathing in the wrong places. “
Quixote
's always played for sentiment.” I mimed a violinist at this juncture. “Whereas, if you read it, it's baggy-pants funny, the first road comedy, the first buddy picture. It's Laurel and Hardy, complete with fart jokes and all kinds of physical gags . . . I even know the line on the poster,” I concluded. “ ‘ You'll laugh . . . till you cry.'”

Tanen sat back and stared some more. On reflection it occurred to me that he must have been accustomed by this point to hearing all sorts of crazy ideas.

“That's crazy,” he said as if reading my mind, and then amended hastily, “but that's not necessarily a criticism.” He thought some more. It turned out that one of his daughters was currently reading and loving the novel.

“Okay,” he said at last. “People will call me crazy.” (People
had
called him crazy.)

I hardly dared glance at David. We were both holding still as hares in headlights. The planets were lining up . . . or starting to . . .

“Ned,” I said, as he showed no signs of further speech but sat staring at the ceiling as if asking himself what he had just agreed to, “I think I'll need to go to Spain to do some research. . . .”

“Go, go . . . Don't break the bank.”

We left him before he could change his mind and now, before heading to London and India, I had Spain on my itinerary. If it's not Mars, I always like to visit the places I am going to write about. With that experience you're not merely copying stuff from a book; you have some organic connection to the terrain, the culture. You don't exactly know what you're looking for but you find it anyway. It enters through your pores, and the script comes out better, somehow, as a result.

Lauren, baby Rachel, and I left for Europe, and Mari-Carmen Jaffe, Steve's wife, herself a Spaniard, took us to every place Cervantes had ever been on the Iberian peninsula and to some he hadn't but insisted Quixote had. I even went into the Cave of Montesinos, fabled and endless in the novel, a mere rocky indentation in reality. I doubt Cervantes would have written about it if he'd clambered into that damp, grubby space, as I did. We wandered around La Mancha, the arid province where most of the novel takes place, and visited El Toboso, a town of no particular distinction now transformed into something of a tourist mecca thanks to Quixote's alleged exploits there.

After Mari-Carmen returned to California, we stayed on in Spain, renting a house outside Marbella where a mountain outside my office window looked suspiciously like the Paramount logo and reminded me daily of what I was supposed to be doing there. It goes without saying that, other than the broad philosophical approach I had outlined to Tanen, I had no idea how to go about adapting a thousand-plus-page novel to the screen. All I knew for certain was that Los Angeles was not the place to try; the phone rang too often there. Here, away from all distractions, Rachel would learn to eat soft food, and I would fool around with
Quixote
, whose real subject, I realized on closer examination, was not the Don's monomania—chivalry--but Cervantes's:
words
.

One way you know that the Dark Ages have ended is each country's discovery—starting with Italy and working its way west—of its own vernacular for purposes of literature, hitherto the province of the classical tongues, Greek and Latin. But suddenly you have Dante writing
The Divine Comedy
in Italian; in France, Corneille, Racine, and Molière are discovering French; in England, first Chaucer, then Marlowe, Spenser, and Shakespeare are drunk on English; and in Spain, in the same year
Macbeth
is written comes the first part of
Don Quixote
, composed in colloquial Spanish. The book is likewise high on the possibilities of language. There are big plots, little plots, poems, short stories, anecdotes, jokes, asides, puns, more poems, more tangents . . . every kind of language was grist for Cervantes's mill. (This was true for Shakespeare, too: his vocabulary—the vocabulary of someone linguistically intoxicated—was fifty thousand words. It's been shrinking ever since; I daresay we're down to about five thou?)

What do you do with all those damn words?

Quixote is also a book about nonconformity and the price nonconformists must pay. The foolish knight became my hero.

I decided that I would make an outline of the book. For every page I would summarize the action. In this way I would memorize the book, trick myself into believing I'd written it (like the man who copied out all of
War and Peace
so he could tell himself he'd written
War and Peace
), attaching a page number to each summation. Along the way, I'd be picking and choosing what to include and what to omit.

The outline took forever and came to 150 pages, but at least I now had a manageable précis of the novel with page references for all of it and could begin forming my attack on the Rubik's Cube d'España.

Being in Marbella helped. Marbella is a completely depraved place. Filled with drug smugglers, white slavers, and dissolute sheiks, it is Miami Beach with a cockney accent, has nothing to do with Spain, and is no place for a nice Jewish boy. Other than occasional forays into delicious eateries, we stayed at our little house, where I kept my nose to the grindstone, trying to remember lessons I'd learned from
Volunteers
. My job was to make others laugh, not indulge myself. Quixote, stripped of all Cervantes's literary experiments and digressions, is a fascinating, three-dimensional character. Far from being insane, he is a model of rationality on every subject but one, and Sancho's curious combination of savvy and gullibility makes him a poignant complement to his mentor. On some gut level Sancho
knows
better; on another, he finds the Don's beliefs superior to the reality he's experienced thus far. Nabokov may be right to dismiss Quixote as a novel, but he's wrong in the same breath to dismiss these two guys and their vaudeville antics.

Somehow the script got written (how? Can't say; I was in my usual trance), and before I left for London and India, I
sent
it off to Tanen. Word came back: he loved it and would see me upon my return.

To be continued . . .

THE DECEIVERS

My little family
was now based in London and from there we went to India, where we had the time of our lives with Pierce Brosnan and company, filming
The Deceivers
. John Masters's novel chronicles in fictional form the true history of the notorious gangs of cult murderers known as thugs (the eponymous deceivers), roving bands of pseudo-travelers who attached themselves to itinerant merchant caravans only to strangle their victims by night with silken handkerchiefs before burying them in mass unmarked graves and making off with their goods. In 1825, when the novel is set, roads in India were so problematic that a man leaving on a journey might not be missed by his family for upward of a year. The cult was eventually broken by an enterprising English officer of the ruling East India Company (to be played by Brosnan), who penetrated the gang by successfully disguising himself as an Indian and becoming one of the killers, an action that in Masters's telling arguably causes him to lose his mind.