The View from the Bridge (5 page)

After dinner I got into my car again and began driving before I realized that I had no idea where I lived. I had forgot to learn my address. All my possessions (my music collection! my Ross Macdonald books!) were resting comfortably in some anonymous location, but for the life of me I couldn't recall where it was.

In my panic I began driving faster and faster up and down streets and boulevards, like a rat trapped in a maze. It dimly occurred to me that I would now be due for a fatal car accident in the wake of which all the authorities would find by way of identification would be my Colorado driver's license with its nonexistent address.

My parents would take it that I had simply disappeared from the face of the earth.

In a sweat-stained condition bordering on all-out hysteria, I stumbled on the place somehow, driving past it at about sixty miles an hour, U-turned, parked, went in, and lay on the bed, hyperventilating.

But things improved. The many and generous friends about whom Walter Mirisch spoke after Verna Fields's funeral began to make their appearance. A young man living in the apartment across from mine, originally from Illinois, was a film critic for
Variety
. He was so good that they booted him off the paper for having standards that were too high.

My little
Love Story
book came out, and that was a kick. They'd tried to make the cover look as much like Erich Segal's source novel as possible, which was embarrassing, but still I had written the thing and it had paid my way to California. I remember seeing the first copy in the drugstore across the street from my apartment about nine o'clock one evening.

A young mother was shopping with her child, stopping before the magazine rack. I pointed out the book and said I had written it.

“You wrote
Love Story
?” Her eyes widened slightly.

“Well, no, not
Love Story
,” I explained. “See?
The Love Story Story
.”

“Oh.” She looked at me dubiously. “No kidding . . .”

I pulled out my driver's license, which had my name, after all. She brightened.

“You're from Colorado . . . I went skiing there. . . .”

This was getting too complicated. I just bought her the damn book.

My first job was working for no money, developing a treatment for Elliot Silverstein, the director of the hit film
Cat Ballou
and later the amazing
A Man Called Horse
. I learned lots of stuff from Elliot, a former theater director from Boston who had staged the original production of Bernstein's opera
Trouble in Tahiti
. Silverstein was a sort of amalgam between Bill Schwartz and Howard Stein, my playwriting teacher at Iowa. Like them, he did not suffer fools gladly. Elliot had a short fuse and piercing blue eyes that glared at you from behind steel-rimmed spectacles. Working for him I began to realize that my background in theater was actually a sort of impediment to screenwriting.

“You want to solve all your problems with dialogue,” Elliot observed bluntly. “But movies aren't dialogue, they're pictures. Contrast
Star Trek
with
Mission: Impossible
,” he went on, ever the pedagogue. (
Star Trek
again. What was it with
Star Trek
?) “Turn off the video on both and listen.
Star Trek
works fine; it becomes a radio play—because it's all dialogue. On the other hand,
Misson: Impossible
without the visuals is just a series of sound effects. Now try it the other way round: if you turn on the picture and turn off the sound,
Star Trek
becomes essentially a series of talking heads.
Mission: Impossible
, by contrast, looks like a movie.”

Compare and contrast, and remember, neatness counts. Elliot lived on a largish motor yacht in the marina, an area I got to know well, as well as his friends, a collection of Hollywood types, good, bad, big (big bosomed), small, and no account.

What surprised me was how generous Elliot's friends all were, how interested in a newcomer. They plied me with questions and encouragement. Later, more cynically, I could place another construction on their amiability: if the new boy had something to offer, they wanted to get in on it sooner rather than later, when the line got long.

But I don't think it was that cut and dried. Los Angeles just turned out to be a friendly place—more friendly than I had imagined. People were enthusiastic about things, excited about new people with new ideas. . . .

HIRED

When I began
to focus on work I made myself a new rule: no speech in a screenplay by me was going to be more than ten lines long. This restriction was a killer. I was going to have to learn to write all over again, write in a way where literacy itself was a disadvantage. Later, watching the work of Steven Spielberg, I understand how much my verbal facility worked against me. It's better if you can
think
in pictures. What happens to your scene when you turn off the sound in your head?

Another rule: how many pages can you write of a screenplay before it is absolutely necessary for someone to speak?

I was certainly lucky. After three months my agent got me a job writing a movie for two producers at Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers! I was “on the lot.” I had an office in the dream factory, I was one of the chosen few who was admitted by the guard at the gate. I even had a parking space, though the white-stenciled name on it read a sobering VISITOR. No matter. I trudged happily, deliriously, through the rows of soundstages and wardrobe departments, on my way to work in the movies. The first thing I did when the door was shut was slide a piece of Warner stationery into my typewriter and punch out the following:

Don't let anyone tell you that being “on the lot” is not a thrill.

I was part of the circus at last.

Warner Brothers back then was still a real studio, complete with backlot. Although it has more recently been converted to office buildings and parking spaces, in the early seventies you could still wander around back there and see “medieval” wrought-iron chandeliers from which you knew Errol Flynn had swung a million “Action!”s ago, all stacked in neat configurations next to submarines, airplane fuselages, spiral staircases, doors of all sorts, and even a huge castle, which had variously functioned in
Camelot
(in the eponymous, ill-starred musical) and as a monastery in the
Kung Fu
television series. There was a “New England” town square, an “Elizabethan” street, a generic “European” street, an Andy Hardy All-American type
Meet Me in St. Louis
street (the real one at MGM was already apartment houses in Culver City), and several “New York” or “big city” streets with brownstones, stores, and movie theaters. And of course your basic “Western” town street was still in use, though fading fast, even as I explored its dusty storefronts.

The film I was working on was nothing, in fact, to write home about. The producers wanted a horror film with a twist—a film in which men, and not women, were the victims. The idea pleased me. I recalled a letter to the editor I had read in the
Times
some years earlier, where a woman had complained about Hitchcock's
Frenzy
. “Just once,” she wrote, “I'd like to see a movie where the
man's
eyes widen in fear . . .” Armed with the producers' mandate to that effect, I dreamt up a story about an etymological experiment gone wrong at a remote desert think tank, in which all the women are turned into “queen bees,” whose biological urge to reproduce always resulted in the death of the chosen drone. As their colleagues start mysteriously dying off, the men become panic-stricken, have to resort to the buddy system at night, etc. while the girls grow redolent with health and well-being.

The film, as I finished it, was called
The Honey Factor
, a nice, oblique title for a film I felt could play the trendy Cinema I on Third Avenue or the Paramus drive-in with equal appeal.

The producers seemed pleased. By this time it was Christmas and I made my big mistake: never visit your parents during preproduction. When I returned from New York a week or so later, one of the producers made a big speech about how a screenplay is a blueprint for a building that hasn't been built yet, how there were always adjustments to be made, etc. “You know, maybe we need another window? A few more electrical outlets?” Made sense to me.

I sat down and read the revised script, puzzled to find that
The Honey Factor
by Nicholas Meyer was now
Invasion of the Bee Girls
by Nicholas Meyer and Amy Andrews.

Amy Andrews? Who the hell was Amy Andrews? Girlfriend of one of the producers, it turned out. All that had been witty and oblique (the Cinema I stuff) had been chucked in favor of dumbed-down stuff for the Paramus drive-in crowd.

I was furious. Mortified. Impotent. I rang my agent, bellowing like a wounded elephant.

“Get my name off these fucking credits.”

“No,” he responded, “get
her
name off the fucking credits.”

“You don't understand,” I whined, “this thing is a piece of shit.”

“
You
don't understand,” he corrected. “You need the credit.”

In any case, the assignment of credits wasn't up to me or the studio; assigning the final credits for a film is the jealously guarded prerogative of the Writers Guild (of which I was now a member). On this occasion the Guild decided in my favor.

We will come back to this topic of credits by and by.

I never did manage to see
Invasion of the Bee Girls
. Maybe one day. People who see it on my résumé keep telling me it is a camp classic but I never know what this means or if it's a good thing.

Meantime it was back to the drawing board.
Invasion of the Bee Girls
was not going to be my passport to immortality. Looking back on an enterprise of this sort, one is inevitably tempted to gloss over the dry spells and concentrate on the positive events, to telescope time so that good and bad are conflated to the point almost of overlapping. Not the case. There was a year when I made four thousand dollars, in all. My parents were still of the opinion I was heading nowhere fast, but mercifully I heard about their anxieties only secondhand, through my sister and her husband, also now in Los Angeles. Still, a secondhand vote of no confidence was demoralizing enough. TV dinners were the order of the day. As was self-doubt. I spent a lot of time on my own—it had begun to seem like my natural state—wondering if I was ever going to have anything to show for my efforts besides a stash of model boats. I had a chip on my shoulder, exacerbated by an arrogance that erupted when I felt ignored. At the same time, like Groucho, I would never have belonged to any club that would have me for a member.

I lost my agent, who didn't trouble to tell me I had lost him, a familiar if unpleasant repetition. One morning the phone rang and someone named Kevin Sellers informed me that he would now be handling my affairs.

“What happened to John?” I asked, naively surprised that an agent who had been unable to sell anything by his client should wish to dump same.

“He's very busy,” Kevin explained. He turned out to be a good kid, and I liked him a lot. He actually cared about writing and movies.

Of course he did not remain an agent very long.

Also I acquired a girlfriend. When I met Kelly she had been working for one of the two
Bee Girls
producers (not the one with the girlfriend-writer). I was instantly smitten. She had, after all, smiled at me, and we moved in together shortly thereafter, me shifting my Culver City digs for a small house in funky Laurel Canyon.

Kelly was beautiful, intelligent, musical, and neurotic, though I suppose I ran her a close second in that last department. It was a stormy romance, chockablock with scenes wherein she spoke long monologues about her life and times while I sat cowed and listened, wondering how had I gotten myself into this. Or could wangle my way out. The sort of thing Philip Roth describes so well. The affair last lasted two years, succumbing, finally, to a kind of attrition.

YOUR NAME HERE

Things weren't all
or always terrible. During this time, I wrote a couple of television movies that were actually filmed. It's hard to convey what a thrill it was to finally hear actors speaking my lines. I wasn't always happy with their performances or the editing or the direction, or the lines themselves, for that matter (always too many words; I was always mentally reaching for a pencil to scratch things out—picky, picky, picky), but I was far from unhappy. This was exciting stuff. I wasn't making a great living but I was managing to support myself in a minimal sort of way. A young director with whom I was friendly, Jeremy Kagan, asked that I write the screenplay for what ABC assumed was going to be a Kung Fu TV movie,
Judge Dee
. Actually, the film was a horse of quite another color. Dee Jen Jay, a seventh-century Tang Dynasty circuit court judge, was China's first detective of record, and a large amount of detective literature in which he is featured was Westernized by a Dutch diplomat, Robert Van Gulik. The Judge Dee books are popular all around the world, except in the United States, for some reason. I adapted
Judge Dee and the Haunted Monastery
for Jeremy and, using an all-Asiatic cast, we filmed on the Warner backlot, converting the old Camelot castle into our monastery. The film looked great, the actors struggled with my rococo Mandarin English (too many words), but the studio/network were pleased with the result—pleased enough to order up a second Judge Dee movie, which I also wrote. I was getting the hang of all this seventh-century Tang Dynasty stuff and greatly anticipating the second movie when, unfortunately, Khigh Dhiegh, the lovely actor who played the Judge (you may also remember his droll turn in
The Manchurian Candidate
) succumbed abruptly to a heart attack.