Which Lie Did I Tell? (35 page)

I don’t think that’s
too
terrible. Might hook someone.
(Maybe at the end of the day, if they were tired.) How’s by you?

My personal feeling is that neither
The Great Waldo Pepper
nor
Mr. Horn
lend themselves easily to this process. They are more character studies, they are darker, their heroes die.

You pitch them for me, see how you do.

One last crucial thing: the better known your work is, the higher your reputation, the more likely you are to receive a positive response. This whole deal is a ridiculous crapshoot, thriving today because most executives do not know how to read screenplays. And hate having to read them.

But if you are starting out, it’s a quick way to solvency. So get your story comfortably inside you. And tell yourself you’re going to go into that office a nothing but you’re coming back a star!

You must always be aware of the
kind
of movie you are telling: romantic comedy, high adventure, family drama, bloodbath action (don’t), special-effects thriller, horror, farce, whatever.

Each genre has a set of unwritten constraints. If you’re writing a farce, you must be skilled at basic plotting, because farce, to be really funny, has to be really real. The minute you stretch things in a farce, it shatters. If I am visiting my best friend and my wife is hiding in a closet because she’s been having an affair with him, there must be a totally sound reason for me to be
needing
to get into that closet
right now.
The minute it’s a frivolous reason, the farce dies.

I know you must be sick of the jump-off-the-cliff scene, and this is the last time I will mention it, but as terrific as it was with
Butch,
it would have totally destroyed a movie such as, say,
Casablanca.

You could set it up in that picture very easily. At the end, the Nazi
Conrad Veidt is chasing Bogie and Claude Rains.
They are in cars racing across the airfield. The cars crash into each other and they are forced to continue the chase on foot.

And Rains is old and let’s say Veidt was a runner at Nazi school, and he’s closing the gap, closing the gap—

—when up ahead is this cliff and down there is Vichy France and freedom and the chance to battle injustice and they shout
Horseshit
and over they go, splashing down into the river and the current carries them to safety while old Conrad can only snarl down from the top of the cliff.

Kills
the movie, right?

When you are dying in the night trying to plot your screenplay, you might do well to remember Bogie and Claude, so ridiculous. And remember the
kind
of story you are telling.

And don’t go wandering, you’ll kill the babe while it’s still in swaddling clothes.

Two war movies help us understand the
duality of the movie business: one,
Saving Private Ryan,
written by
Robert Rodat, directed by Steven Spielberg; the other,
Shame,
Ingmar Bergman handling both chores. (If you have never heard of
Shame,
sad for you, and please believe that.)

The Spielberg gets more and more awful for me the more I think about it; the Bergman is just what it was when I first saw it: shattering. It deals in eighty-eight minutes with a married couple, musicians (
Max von Sydow and
Liv Ullman) whose country has become a battlefield. Never mind which side is advancing or retreating, they don’t know, why should we? In the course of their story, Von Sydow, the wuss of the duo, toughens up, kills. Ullman, the strength, weakens. The movie ends with the two of them trying to escape, in a crappy boat stuffed with other desperate people, going nowhere across an unforgiving sea.

War is, to coin a phrase, hell.

Saving Private Ryan,
with its justly famous twenty-four-minute early battle sequence, its fine
Homer-like
Odyssey
hour where Ryan is sought, becomes, once he is found, a disgrace. False in every conceivable way possible, including giving the lie to its great twenty-four minutes. That sequence told us war is hell, too. The last hour tells us that war can be a neat learning experience for little
Matt Damon.

In other words, Hollywood horseshit.

I would like to explain what I mean by that phrase. I love Hollywood movies. I was brought up in the thirties and forties with Hollywood movies. I have spent half my life writing Hollywood movies.

There are really two kinds of flicks—what we now call generic Hollywood movies, and what we now call
Independent films.

Hollywood films—and this is crucial to screenwriters—all have in common this: they want to tell us truths we already know or a falsehood we want to believe in.

Hollywood films reinforce, reassure.

Independent films, which used to be called
“art” films, have a different agenda. They want to tell us things we don’t want to know.

Independent films unsettle.

Understand, we are
not
talking here of art and commerce. Hollywood films can be, and often are, art. Independent films, most of them, for me anyway, are pretentious and boring.

And yes, I know my definitions are simplistic. Hollywood films can unsettle, Independent films can reassure. But in general, for this discussion, let’s go with them.

One quick example to be mentioned here
—Shakespeare in Love,
art flick or Hollywood?

I might be tempted to say, my God, it’s Shakespeare, how can it not be an art film? Plus those costumes, Dame Judi, all the other British accents. If ever there was an art film, doesn’t it have to be this baby?

Not even close. Because what
Shakespeare in Love
tells us is that
the love of a good woman makes everything wonderful.
Well, I don’t know about you, but I want to believe that. I want to have a shot at Gwyneth’s sweet boobies, because I just know they can change the world.

If only t’were so. How many hopeless drunks are out there not married to Lady Macbeths but to a good woman? How many fucked-up people are clinging to their sanity with a good woman right alongside, helpless?

Listen, Bill Shakespeare and I both write for a living. And I have been blocked, too. Days when nothing happens, weeks when you just sit there, months when you storm around the city, cursing your lack of talent and your helplessness.

And nobody’s boobies are going to make God smile.

We
want
to believe. Life would be just so much happier a place if only that were so. But alas, it’s Hollywood horseshit. (Although I sure wanted to believe it when I was in the theater.)

Does the fact of the two Hollywoods affect screenwriters? I have never waffled for you before and I sure won’t start now
—it does and it doesn’t.

It does not remotely affect how we tell our stories.

It totally affects which stories we choose to tell.

Famous cartoon from fifty years back. A couple are at the original run of
Death of a Salesman.
The man turns to the woman, here’s what he says:
“I’ll get you for this!”

The point is that most of us work all day, often at something we don’t much love anymore but we do it till we drop. At the end of our average days, we want peace, we want relaxation, maybe a bite of food, a few kind words.
We do not want to watch Willy Loman’s suicide.

What we are really dealing with when we talk of the two Hollywoods is
audience size.

Most people want to be told nice things. That we really are decent human beings, that God will smile on us, that there is true love and it is waiting for you, just around the next corner. That the meek really will inherit the earth.

Most people want to be told nice things. I cannot repeat that too often to anyone who wants to screenwrite for a living. You can be Bergman if you have the talent, you can tell sad human stories—but do not expect Mr. Time Warner to give you $100 million to make your movie.

The studios are in business for only one great and proper reason: to stay in business. If you want to tell a reassuring
story, no reason not to shoot for a studio flick with all the, yes, good things that entails. If you want to tell a different story, write it wonderfully but write it small. Avoid car chases and star parts and special effects.

Great careers are possible in
Independent film. The Coens and
John Sayles are as good as anybody operating anywhere.

Join them. God knows we can use you.

I get movie ideas all the time. Stories just appear, sometimes from the papers, sometimes from some distant blue when suddenly a couple of connectives happen and there it is: a movie.

I am, alas, a totally instinctive writer, with—please believe this—next to no idea of what I’m doing. I do not think well, wish I did. That poetry section you read at the start of Part II (“Heffalumps!!!”)—that’s as deep as I get.

But yes, I am a veritable wellspring of movie ideas.

My friend
John Kander, who laughed at me in short-story class? John has been a first-rank composer all his life. In the theater, no one has the melodic gift John Kander has. You have been humming him for decades, “All That Jazz,” “New York, New York,” “Cabaret,” and on and on.

You know how Kander comes up with those melodies? He wakes up every morning of the world with music playing inside his brain. Every waking moment. And when he is given a lyric to set, all he does is dip into the constant flow of music, and there it is, a song.

Now the hitch is this, as Kander puts it:
“Sometimes the most awful horrible music you ever heard is going on inside my head all day.”

Same with me and stories: occasionally one will pass muster, but mostly, the next day, not even close.

You have already read the only two pieces of real material that seemed to me to be great and wondrous movie stories when I first came upon them, the Butch Cassidy saga and the tale of the killer lions I tried to make work in
The Ghost and the Darkness.

One leaped to the head of the class, the other kind of slowly made its way along, never quite getting there. Glorious stuff of lion violence, but like any special-effects flick, when you can’t care about the story, not enough.

I truly believe I did not tell that story as well as I should.

This part of the book is about figuring out what movie stories are, and trying to tell them as well as they should be told.

When I say ideas drop into my head, that’s true. But only twice have they ever immediately become something. (That’s in forty-five years plus of sitting here, a stat I always give young writers who wait around for inspiration.)

In 1963 I was living on Eighty-sixth and York, had a writing space in a guy’s apartment two blocks north. And an article in the
Daily News
said that up in Boston, where the Strangler case was
the
crime of the decade, a new theory was evolving:
namely, that the murders might be the work of two different madmen.

On the two short blocks’ walk uptown that morning,
No Way to Treat a Lady
literally dropped into my head. Based on the premise that what if there were two stranglers, and what if one of them got jealous of the other. (This was changed in the movie totally, so I am not its biggest fan.)

In 1982, I was on a water bus in Venice with Ilene. We were leaning over the railing looking out at the fabulous street that is the Grand Canal and, as we passed a couple of gondolas with silent gondoliers working the oars I turned to Ilene and said these words:
“I know why the gondoliers don’t sing.”

And then it was a mad rush trying to get off the vaporetto and back to the hotel so I could write down this story that had just suddenly appeared and I can still remember the race back because I knew if I didn’t get it all down
right then,
it would leave me. The book,
The Silent Gondoliers,
written by
S. Morgenstern, the great Florinese author of
The Princess Bride,
came out the following year.

The story involved this not even remotely handsome gondolier, who could make a gondola dance like no other gondolier in history, who loved music so much, but who, alas, was tone-deaf. He does everything to try and change his fate, but you can’t do that, so finally he risks his life to save the Gondoliers’ Church during the worst storm in the history of that great city.

We are talking here a
fable, but not the simplest-plotted one on the block, and where it came from I will never begin to understand. Or what would have happened if we hadn’t taken the water bus. Or if the gondoliers we had passed had been singing.

Suddenly in this case, connectives clicked in and two books were the result.

I am at the mercy of
connectives. By which I mean, I guess, narrative bits that hook together, taking us deeper into whatever story we’re struggling with. When I said before I am totally instinctive, I was serious. I cannot logic my way into making these connectives happen. (I can do it with other writers’ work, just not my own.) Sometimes I will get
x
bits into a story, then a connective hits and I am twice as far along, twice
x,
say—

—and then it ends.

I have written a couple of novel beginnings—a hundred pages here, more there, and … nothing. And you change, time etches on us all, your pulses change and the story turns out to be … nothing. Soon you wonder, what the hell was
that
supposed to be? And who were you then … ?

Okay. The first of the three crime stories. Printed exactly as I read it in the
San Francisco Chronicle,
April 26th, 1999. You’ll have to squint, but I think you’ll find it worth the effort.