Which Lie Did I Tell? (10 page)

For those of you who don’t know, here is what generally happens today at test sneaks.

The audience comes in. They have been recruited by whatever company is running things. And usually the people selected are moviegoers who have been to this kind of story before.

They sit down and get comfortable.

Somebody from the
focus group goes to the front and greets them, thanks them for their help. Then the usual excuse about the quality of what they will be seeing: there are no credits, the print is scratchy, etc., etc. Then the test leader asks them a favor—when the movie is done will they all
please stay in their seats and fill out a short survey.

A focus group of twenty-five or so has already been selected and will stay after the theater is empty and talk to the group leader, answering more specific questions.

Final thanks for coming.

Lights out.

Magic time.

And it is exciting. When I’m involved and when I’m not. Because so much is riding on this special evening.

Not that these groups are without flaw. The highest-rated film I’ve been involved with was
The Princess Bride.
I was told by the man who runs these things that it was the second highest movie of its year. That would indicate a huge hit, which
The Princess Bride
was not.

But these nights, as well as draining you, tell you a lot.
Have you got a shot?
That’s what you know by the end of the night and your head hits the pillow.

Okay.
The Year of the Comet.

What you do at the start when you write a movie is this:
you set up your universe.
The audience needs to know what world it’s entering. Comedy, drama, horror, what.

I was very careful with this baby. So I opened in London—gorgeous romantic London—at a wine tasting.

I did it for several reasons. Get the people familiar with where we were going, of course that. But also to set up my lady.
Penelope Anne Miller played a brilliant but loveless wine expert at a family auction house. Her father treated her with coldness—this was London, after all, and she was a woman. And her older brother treated her with disdain—she was smarter than he was and he was frightened she might inherit.

Not only am I properly setting up the world of the movie, I am also adroitly setting up this fact: we have a maiden here who sure as shit could use a Prince Charming.

This was not ever intended to be a blockbuster beginning—I was a long way from
Sunset Boulevard.
But I knew it was solid. That Yates had directed it well. And it looked terrific.

Only now I begin to catch sight of really the most amazing thing: a couple is walking out. Not ninety seconds into it, and a couple is leaving. Probably baby-sitter problems, I told myself. Perhaps one or the other has an upset stomach.

That must have been it.

Now in the far aisle,
four more
are up and about.

Even I could not believe it was an epidemic of food poisoning.

I am gripping the seats now, because the nightmare was just beginning. A dozen are now up. Now a dozen more. Waves of people. In the first five minutes,
fifty people left the theater.

Left a
free movie.

Left a chance to be a part of a big Hollywood
sneak.

Hated what I had written so much they would rather face the reality of their own lives than what I had to offer.

Death. Death. Death.

We tried to fix it. We quickly did a new opening scene where we meet the hero first, in a steam bath, as his boss shows up and drags him off to the wine tasting, which the hero
hates
—and says so and calls them boring and phony.

Guess what?

Death. Death. Death.

There was nothing we could do.

Here’s why: when I saw a wonderful failure called
Searching for Bobby Fisher,
you would have thought you were seeing
E.T.
Wild and constant applause. You could feel the adoration in the room.

So how come the movie stiffed?

Because
Bobby Fisher
was a movie about chess, and the audience I saw it with was made up entirely of
an invited group of chess experts.
My God, they even applauded the
moves
on the chess board during games. Fucking surreal. You see a hand take a knight, move it here or there, and “Bravo!” from all around me. But there weren’t enough chess players on earth to make the movie work for a mass audience.

Maybe if you had seen
The Year of the Comet
at a sommeliers’ convention you would have thought you were seeing
E.T.
too.

There was nothing we could do because no matter how we fussed, this was a movie about red wine and the moviegoing audience today has zero interest in red wine. They felt ignorant and they hated us.

Now, no one knew that before we went into production. And if we had done a study that showed as much, we would have gone right ahead anyway. Because the studio who originally developed
E.T.
did a survey that showed—without doubt—that there was no audience that would want to see that movie.

Those five minutes of that first screening will be with me forever. If you ask me on my deathbed, have I ever been to Sherman Oaks, I will rise up and cry, “How could those bastards choose real life over meeee?”

But hope, as I wish I had said, is the thing with feathers.

Because after the test screenings and the audience reaction that never
climbs out of the nether world, after the early reviews that do not mistake my screenplay for Kit Marlowe or the movie for anything worth anything, you still have hope.

Other people have gotten lucky, you tell yourself. A couple of summers ago, the Farrelly brothers’ glorious comedy
There’s Something About Mary
didn’t reach the top box-office slot till the
seventh
week. Amazing. And
Bonnie and Clyde
stiffed at first, later found glory.

It is
not
a flop, you tell yourself. Oh, others may scoff at you, may turn away from your glorious and talented presence, but you know this: miracles happen every day.

Maybe—the odds are against it, but just maaaaybe—the gods will smile on you.

The movie opens around the country. Business is not anyone’s definition of robust. But you refuse to admit the possibility that you, in all your splendor, have written a flop.

Here is when I finally gave up all hope.

The movie has been out about a week, maybe a little more. I am talking to my eldest, Jenny, a Philadelphian now. We blab about the usual family stuff, the Knicks and the Sixers. Next, a pause. Then I hit her with the biggie; casually, I inquire: “So what did you think of the movie?”

Her reply was said with such sadness: “Oh, Dad, I meant to see it, I really did, but when I looked, it was gone from all the theaters.”

Final knife in the heart—because when your own kids don’t see your stuff, now that’s a flop.

I thought Linda Hunt was wonderful as The
Magician in
Maverick.
Crazy and weird and tough and different and if you wonder what it is that I am smoking as I write this because you saw the movie and don’t remember Linda Hunt being in it, well, we are both right. She was in it. She was wonderful. She was cut out of the finished film.

Shit happens.

Sometimes movies are amazingly difficult and time-consuming to get going.
Maverick
couldn’t have been easier. It went like this: I met Mel Gibson and his partner Bruce Davey, they said they had rights to the character and would I like to write the screenplay and I said, “Sure.” Truly as seemingly simple as that.

But I have secrets. I think all writers do. There are very few projects that I have been offered that I would always say yes to. My interests change, needs change, confidence ebbs and flows. A year earlier I night have not done
Maverick.
I said yes for four small reasons and one big one. Here are the four: (1) I loved the old TV show with James Garner; (2) I felt the material was in my wheelhouse; (3) I had never met Gibson but after five minutes I knew he could play the hell out of the part; (4) I had not written a western in twenty-some years, was glad for the opportunity to try again. And the one big reason? Shamefacedly, here it is:

I knew it would be easy.

That is actually the main reason I came aboard so fast. Because I had been writing
originals, and them are hard. The last thing in life I wanted was to try another original. This adaptation had to be a breeze—all I
needed to do was pick one of the old TV shows that had too much plot, expand it, and there would be the movie.

One of the shocks of my life happened in my living room, where I spent many hours looking at the old
Maverick
shows I’d been sent. Because, and this was the crusher,
television storytelling has changed.
These old shows had shitloads of charm, most of it supplied by Garner. But not only was the Garner character generally passive, there was almost no plot at all.
Nothing for me to steal.
I essentially had to write, sob, another original. It was not going to be easy money at the brick factory again (as it always is).

I set to work trying to figure out a story.

All I really had was that wonderful main character. A con man and gambler. Now, if you are given the job of writing a movie about an Olympic gymnast, you know going in that the movie has to climax with her going for the gold.
Rocky
had to end with The Big Fight.

So Maverick had to end with a poker game.

For some reason, the first visual I got was of Gibson sitting on a horse, hands tied, a noose around his neck. Rattlesnakes are thrown to scare the horse. As he is about to die, he says, in voice-over, “It had just been a shitty week for me from the beginning.” I liked that because I hadn’t seen it before and it also told us a lot about the feel of the movie and about the man. He wasn’t going to die, it said that much. He was humorous, it said that, too. For me, it set the style of everything that followed.

So Maverick would begin with him getting hanged.

To fill in the rest I made this assumption:
Maverick would be a movie about a guy who needed money.

Why the assumption? Well, this is a movie that has to stand alone, not as one of a thirty-nine-episode (they were in those days) TV season. So the poker-game climax couldn’t be just
any
game, it had to be the most important game of his life. (Had it been just one of thirty-nine episodes, the game would not have needed any particular weight.) Now, if the game is important, it must require important money to enter. And if he already has it, what’s the big deal? He would just have to lose it and spend the bulk of the movie getting it back. I didn’t like the feel of that. He would be tracking, avenging, and the essence of the TV character is that he is acted
on.
I decided he needed the money, so he could meet various people and have adventures, all building to The Big Game. My problem was to make getting there half the fun.

There is no mathematical logic to any of this, it’s just how I decided what the narrative might be against what you might decide. No right or wrong storytelling answer exists.
Ever.
I went with my answer for many reasons, but chiefly this: it gave me my spine for the movie. And until I have that, I am essentially helpless. Once I have it, I have the confidence to start to write.

In the first draft Maverick meets a banker friend who gives him some money and an Indian friend who gives him the rest. Then I figured a change had to happen—you couldn’t just have him going from success to success, this is a movie hero, he has to win but he should sweat a little along the way.

So I had him robbed by the bad guy.

By solving that problem, I presented myself with another: Maverick needed money to get in the game and I didn’t have a lot of time for anything elaborate. I needed something oddball and had no idea what, when I got this idea: What if somebody owned those rattlesnakes that are tossed from a sack at the start to scare his horse? Who, though? It had to be someone with a lot of money, obviously, because he’d end up giving a lot to my guy. But it also had to be somebody who lived in a desolate place, because that’s where the hanging took place.

I decided on a nut hermit. (Think of Elisha Cook, Jr.) It seemed logical in a lunatic way. A hermit
might
live in this terrible area, and since hermits are strange, he
might
also have pots of money to give to a wandering movie hero in a pickle. Following is the meeting between Maverick and The Magician. This might give you a sense of what I was after. Okay. Mel Gibson is hanging in space. He struggles. He can’t make it. His body hangs motionless. His eyes start to close …