The View from the Bridge (3 page)

The last thing worth mentioning in this brief account of my Iowa years was my first, glancing encounter with
Star Trek
. I had made friends with two New Yorkers from the Bronx, a husband and wife, both in graduate school. She was in the workshop and he was getting a PhD in American Indian studies. He was, among other things, a terrific pianist and also addicted to the
Star Trek
television series, then being broadcast daily in Iowa City. My friend watched
Star Trek
daily, for fifty-four days, at the end of which time his wife left him. A couple of times I tried to watch along with him. For whatever reason,
Star Trek
flew by me at Warp Speed. I think there is something “earthbound” in my temperament, a kind of flat-footed literalness that made me concentrate on the cheesy sets and silly costumes—to say nothing of the pointy ears—a lack of sympathetic imagination, if you will, the absence of which might have allowed me to dispense with all that literalness and open myself to what was going on underneath all that cardboard.

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

Following Iowa, I
faced the the choice of heading east or west to continue my life, and I chose to go back to New York. I had never heard anything good about Los Angeles and knew no one there, so my hometown seemed a more sensible possibility.

I landed a job in the publicity department of Paramount Pictures, then located in picturesque Times Square, i.e., before its Disneyfication, when you had to run the gantlet of unhappy-looking ladies on your way to work. (They were already
at
work.) I didn't actually know what a publicist did but that seemed beside the point; it was a job and it was vaguely connected with the movie business. I had joined the circus at last. Sort of.

The old Paramount Pictures building was a massive stone affair with gorgeous elevators whose gold-paneled doors were crafted in some eerie echo of Ghiberti's
Gates of Paradise
in Florence. There's plenty of irony in Hollywood, but no one ever gets it—which is also ironic, I guess. The older I become, the more I decide that irony is generally a cheap shot, anyway.

In any event, those gorgeous doors didn't open onto Paradise, or anything like it, not if you hit the eleventh-floor button. They opened onto something called the Snake Pit, a huge area with a two-story ceiling subdivided at the floor level by translucent cubicle walls with little desks within each cubicle. There were no windows anywhere and the lighting was atrocious. Why this dismal arrangement should have gained the name Snake Pit I am at a loss to explain, but somehow it fit.

It was here that the publicity department toiled away, doing—what? With my limited powers of observation and even more limited gifts of analysis, it was almost impossible for me to figure out. I knew what my job was (sort of), and I knew my boss.

His name was Bill Schwartz and he kept a pencil over one ear, the tip jutting past his right eye as though it was a permanent feature of his physiog nomy. He was cynical but not bitter, or perhaps it was the other way around, but this certainly was not the life he'd planned as a graduate of CCNY. He was a decent man, highly intelligent, and he wrote novels that didn't get published.

On the other hand, he did know how to write a simple declarative sentence, a skill that I had apparently failed to master during four years at the University of Iowa.

My job was a curious one. It was to write “press kits” for each Paramount film, these “kits” to contain a synopsis of the film's plot (in case the viewer couldn't follow it?—actually I discovered this failure was far from uncommon), production “notes,” assorted biographies of the stars, writer, director, producer, etc., plus various “human interest” articles, anecdotal items regarding alleged incidents that took place during the production that newspapers might use for column fillers. (These fillers were always lies and were interchangeable: simply substitute the title of the film you wished to promote and keep the anecdote as is. The one that sticks in my mind dealt with a pesky tourist, who insisted on photographing the actors on the set of movie “X”—change title here, ad lib—until an assistant director explained that his color shots would be useless, as this was a black and white picture. Great, huh?)

Actually, writing “press kits” was not my job. In fact, these “kits” had already been written in Hollywood (a place somewhere to the left of me as I faced the Harlem River), but they had been composed in “Hollywoodese,” a separate argot, untranslatable to the layman. If you don't believe me, try reading
Variety
sometime and see if you can understand what they are talking about.

My job was essentially that of translator, taking the Hollywoodese version of the press kit and rendering it into normal English. I would take phrases like “The Walter Matthau-Jack Lemmon starrer” and reconfigure it as “The film, which stars Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon . . .” and so on. There was little room for improvisation, either. Billing was always in contractual order and repeated ad nauseam. When the film's title changed, every piece of paper in the kit had to be retyped and rephotocopied. This was before the days of computers, and we chopped down an awful lot of trees for no good reason. One film—a picture that actually interested me—started out being called
Fräulein Doktor
. Then someone somewhere decided it should be called
Betrayal
. Then they decided to call it
The Betrayal
. Then they called it something else and then they went back to
Fräulein Doktor
. It did no business under any of these titles but we had to change the press kits no one was interested in every time.

One would have thought I could do this stuff with my eyes closed. Hadn't I written those four hundred film reviews, hadn't my column been judged (where I can't remember) the most popular in the Big Ten newspapers? Wasn't I then and therefore about to be a Big Asset to Paramount Pictures?

But my inflated sense of brain got the better of me, as did my stash of cinematic lore and my sense of mission, the certainty that I was about to change forever this mundane job into something that every newspaper editor from here to Omaha would cherish when our press kits crossed his desk.

After I had finished a piece I'd turn it into Bill for his okay. I can still remember the blank astonishment with which I viewed my copy when he first returned it to me. The text, so erudite and witty, so knowledgeable and insightful, was scored all over with heavy black pencil. Where had all my scintillation gone? All the adjectives, adverbs, fun or arcane phrases had bit the dust. There was virtually nothing left.

When I had the temerity to protest this butchery, I was told bluntly, “Look, this isn't film school. Just write a simple declarative sentence, why can't you, and stick to
The New York Times
copy style book.”

It was months before I learned how to do this. I am not a fast learner, but I do learn thoroughly, if anyone is still speaking to me by the time the process is concluded.

During this period, Paramount made a number of terrific films, all of them for about two million dollars each. Lindsay Anderson's
If. . . .
, Franco Zeffirelli's version of
Romeo and Juliet
, Haskell Wexler's
Medium Cool
, Richard Attenborough's
Oh! What a Lovely War
, and Larry Peerce's
Goodbye, Columbus
were among them. They were good films or interesting or intelligent and it was fun to work on them. It is hard to imagine a studio making such a varied and ambitious slate of films today when each movie has the budget of a small country.

In my spare time I continued trying to write screenplays and using the Paramount photocopying facilities to assist me.

“Remember,” Schwartz would intone, solemnly tapping me on the shoulder when he passed my desk and caught me at it. “Everything you do here belongs to Paramount.” I never caught him working on any of his novels, although he had a door to his office, whereas I didn't even have a cubicle but sat in the center of the Snake Pit, my life exposed for all to see.

The Paramount staff were an interesting crew and included old Adolph Zukor himself, the founder of Paramount Pictures, who, at one hundred years of age, was still shuffling along the corridors of the eleventh floor in short white shirtsleeves, carrying bundles of paper that no one but he knew anything about. One intuited the old man must have been a tiger, but now his comings and goings were ignored, or at best viewed with a patronizing tolerance by the young wheeler-dealers who rushed past him in the halls.

“Good morning, Mr. Zukor,” Charlie Bluhdorn would say, without pausing for an answer, which was just as well because Zukor turned to me, who happened to be walking next to him at the time and asked who that man was. I told him I didn't know.

One of the folks in our department creatively suggested in a meeting that we have Otto Preminger slugged at Kennedy Airport when he got off the plane by way of promoting his latest turkey, something called
Skidoo
.

That was one of his better ideas, but it made my eyes pop.

Another trick we had was getting books Paramount owned onto the bestseller lists. In those good old days all the people who worked in the building were presented with fifty dollars cash to take with them to various bookstores on their lunch hour. We were to purchase ten copies each of
The Godfather
, or whatever else we were pushing that week, at these emporia. As to what we did with the books themselves, that was our business. Chuck 'em in the garbage, if we wanted. (Paramount was not unique in this activity; later, working at Warner Brothers, I can recall everyone being sent out to purchase copies of
Summer of '42
, with similar results.)

Nowadays, of course, such a dreadful piece of manipulation could never occur.

We had our own Sammy Glick too, a kid from Fordham with insane blue eyes that looked at you but saw something else. He had spent some time in a monastery, and I knew for a certainty he was off his chump. In the Snake Pit it was passed off as Ambition and therefore regarded as harmless.

There was also Winifred Gibbons, the office beauty, an English girl a year or three older than myself with a delicious Oxbridge accent and a lot of jewelry that jangled teasingly whenever she moved. She specialized in organizing our society and charity benefits and was, as you might expect, hotly pursued by a lot of high-powered executives, none of whom ever entered the Snake Pit, but one of them sent her a
dozen roses every day
. I was crazy about her.

There was even a novel about the Snake Pit that was circulated surreptitiously among new inmates. Called
The Wall-to-Wall Trap
, the book fascinated me as the nightmare of all I hoped to avoid and feared I wouldn't. Bill Schwartz pressed a battered copy into my hands with something like glee. I can't say I remember it well, but I seem to recall that it featured a protagonist who wants to write novels, or otherwise distinguish himself, and who winds up instead toiling forever in the Snake Pit, where conditions described in the book spookily paralleled my own (even to the screenplay the hero attempted to work on between times). The cast of characters might have different names or genders, but they were strikingly similar to those around me.

Once in a while a filmmaker in town to promote his movie (we learned never to call them movies, they were always
films
or
motion pictures
) might wander into the Snake Pit by accident, looking for an office in the real world. It might be Martin Ritt or Richard Attenborough or Robert Redford or who knows? My heart would start jumping out of my chest, and I'd be on my way to buttonhole the poor guy with a display of my cinematic erudition when Schwartz would nab me by the collar of my jacket.

“Back to the salt mines, kid.”

And I'd watch whoever it was being gently led away, his head twisting back on his neck in surprise, likely as not, getting one last glimpse of our particular circle of Hell.

It began to seem I was destined never to escape that circle except at night when it was time to go home. Home was now a one-room apartment, three flights up, that I had rented at 88th Street and Second Avenue.

Next door to my building was a restaurant called Elaine's. I had no idea of the place's reputation and all unaware went in one night to have a beer. Meet the Invisible Man. After five minutes, even
I
understood. In the midst of Marlon Brando, Woody Allen, and Jackie Kennedy, all of whom happened to be there that evening, they simply weren't about to take my order. I slunk out and climbed my three flights back to
la vie de bohème.

At home at night, still within earshot of the demi- and haute mondes at Elaine's below, I'd peck away at my screenwriting efforts. The first script I wrote was a life of Heinrich Schliemann, the amateur archeologist who discovered Troy. The world was obviously waiting for this one with bated breath. If I'd been working at Warner Brothers in the late thirties they would have made the picture, no question. Paul Muni would've played Schliemann.

Next.

BABY STEPS

My father had
recently introduced me to an essay in a psychoanalytic journal, written by a fellow shrink, Philip Weissman, on why John Wilkes Booth had shot Lincoln. The piece intrigued me, and with Weissman's permission, I set about dramatizing its thesis, namely that the real target of Booth's rage was not the president but Booth's own brother, the highly successful tragedian Edwin Booth. I produced my best piece of work to date, a thriller that informed at the same time as it entertained, a combination that was to become my specialty—also, on occasion, my curse. The structure of the piece was what made it work: I juxtaposed an hour-by-hour account of Booth's movements on the day of the assassination with flashbacks to earlier portions of his life, thereby suggesting psychological connections of which Booth himself was not consciously aware but which seemed to explain the true motives behind each of his actions on the fatal day. I called my movie
The Understudy.