Adventures in the Screen Trade (11 page)

Late afternoon. I got off the plane at LAX and started for the baggage claim area. Then I stopped. Dead. A uniformed man was standing by the gate exit, holding a cardboard sign with the name GOLDMAN written on it. It was a paranoid moment for me, because my last name isn't all that uncommon, and I stared at him, wondering what the hell to do. Should I approach him or not? No one had told me I would be met at the airport. What if I pissed him off? The scene might have played like this:

ME

(perspiring lightly) Pardon me, sir, but are you, by any chance, waiting for William Goldman?

HIM (affronted)

No, you fool, who's William Gold- man? I'm here to pick up Max Goldman, now get away.

Finally, I went up to him and said, "Pardon me, sir) but are you, by any chance, waiting for William Goldman?" and he smiled and said, "Yes sir, Mr. Goldman," and then he took my under-the-seat bag and led me to where the luggage would come belching down the chute. (I know everybody thinks their bags always come toward the end. Well, mine do. I sometimes am convinced that there is this insidious worldwide plot. All those bag-smashers have some kind of code, and one of their pleasures is to sneak my stuff out of line, hold it, chuckling all the while, before reluctantly letting go, never last but, say, fourth from last. I travel solely with an under-the-seat bag now, if it's at all possible. It's not a really soul-satisfying revenge, but it's the best I can do.)

Eventually, fourth from the end or so, my suitcase came clumping down and he bent for it, my driver did, easily beating me to the task, and then he said, "Just follow me) Mr. Goldman," and I did, hoping nobody I knew would see me.

We trooped out to the sidewalk. He put my stuff down, smiled, and said, "I'm just parked over there, 'sir, wait right here, I won't be a minute."

I waited until this giant Cadillac appeared. Before I could make a move, he bounded out from the driver's seat, raced around, opened the back door for me. "Watch your head, Mr. Goldman," he advised,

I got in. I sat back. He put my luggage in the trunk. Then he hurried around to the front, gave roe a little kind of salute, moved in behind the wheel. (It's crazy the things you remember, but believe me, I remember all of this.) What I remember mostly was sitting in the back of that big

car, alone, feeling very close to panic. "What the fuck am I doing back here-I'm not Jackie Kennedy-1 shouldn't be here- what docs this have to do with writing?"

The motor turned over perfectly, he looked back to see that all was well, and then he skillfully began piloting the car into the stream of airport traffic- -and I yelled "Stop!"

He stopped, glanced at me. "Forget something?" "Can I sit up front with you?" I said. He looked at me, I thought, kind of weirdly. "Of course, Mr. Goldman. Anything you want."

Before he could even start to come around and open things for me I threw open the back door, got in alongside. And then we began the drive to my hotel.

Dusk now. The end of it, just before it loses out to night. We're tooling along in the limo and l'm, naturally, lost: I have absolutely no sense of direction; even when I know where I'm going, I don't know where I'm going. On both sides of the street now are houses, cheek to jowl, contiguous. I can't make them out clearly, except they're all about the same height and, like I said, all huddled together. I turned to the driver and said, "Is this a housing development?"- -and he burst out laughing. Because we were right smack in the middle of one of the fancier sections of Beverly Hills. He explained that these were all half-million-dollar houses (probably two million today), and as be went on, I squinted out, trying to make it jibe, because I'm from outside Chicago-and in the Midwest, when people have money, they have property-and I couldn't help thinking, "Be careful: These people are strange out here."

I bought a bottle of Kaopectate as soon as I reached the hotel.

No joke. For the first several years, whenever I was in Los Angeles, I went nowhere without a bottle of Kaopectate hidden in a brown paper bag.

The summer I spent working with George Hill on Batch C^- sidy, I rented a house in Santa Monica for my family and I com- muted every day to the Fox lot in Beverly Hills. I hate to drive As I've indicated, I get lost, but worse, my mind wanders. So most mornings that summer, I took a taxi to work.

Now that fact probably doesn't seem like it's worth a paragraph, except that in L.A., you just don't do that. It's bizarre, every bit as oddball as strolling the sidewalks of Beverly Hills. I am not by nature flamboyant, but I think I have never been as colorful as during that Butch Cassidy summer, when I got out of the taxi each day, a script of Butch clutched in one hand, my bottle of Kaopectate in the other. To repeat: Los Angeles terrifies me. But my particular crazies are not why I find writing so difficult. It's more this: Everything's so goddam nice out there. Sure, they bitch about their smog, but unless you're a Hawaiian Born and bred, the weather is terrific. And so many of the basic necessities of life are made so easy for you: The markets are often open twenty-four hours, nobody snarls at you in the stores when you're trying to buy something. It's all just . . . swell. But writing is essentially about going into a room by yourself and doing it. Writing isn't about meetings and it's not about backhands.

And when you have sunshine. And the beach. And a pool. Or access to a pool. And the public tennis courts are open all the time. And the golf course is nearby. And the drive to Big Sur always beckons. Who the hell wants to go into a room and shuffle papers around? Maybe you can do it breezing. I can't. . . .

The danger of Los Angeles comes with success. (If some of you just groaned, "Is he crazy?-gimme some of that danger, lemme at it," I wouldn't blame you a bit.) Sure, success is what we strive for; it's what's drummed into our little heads from the playpen on. And yes, success is better than failure. And "I been poor and I been rich and rich is better." Here is an alphabetical list of eight successful movie people:

Woody Alien Paddy Chayefsky Francis Coppola John Huston NunnallyJohnson Ernest Lehman

Joseph Mankiewicz Billy Wilder

These were the first eight names that came to me when I asked myself which screenwriters I admire. I'm not saying they're the eight best: If I thought for a little longer, I could come up with eight more I admire just as much. But these will do. What they have in common is this: They all began as screenwriters in movies, but if the names are familiar to you, it's as directors or producers or stars. They all became hyphenates as soon as they could. Why? Strictly guesswork on my part, but I'll have to go with it. More money? Maybe. More power. Absolutely. But I'll bet the primary reason is neither of the above. It's because just being a screenwriter is simply not enough for a full creative life.

And I'm not using the word creative in a loaded sense-I mean, shit, someone "created" How to Stuff a Wild Bikini.

Creative in the dictionary is defined as "having the power to create," and create means "to bring into being, to cause to exist."

The primary success available to a screenwriter is financial, and that's all well and good for bankers and businessmen, how else would they keep score? But if you are the kind of weird person who has a need to bring something into being, and all you do with your life is turn out screenplays, I may covet your bank account, but I wouldn't give two bits for your soul.

Those of us who were permanently altered by the little engine bringing the toys over the mountain, or Piglet getting rocued with the honey jar, or whatever else it might have been never daydreamed as we grew, of becoming Jacqueline Susann. We were after the giants-we wanted to make wonders Screenwriting isn't about that.

There is a Women's Liberation term called shitwork and it means work that when it is well done is unnoticed. Like dusting or cleaning. Rare is the husband who walks in from a hard day at the office and says, "Darling, the windows just sparkle, how lovely." But he may well walk in and say, "This place is filthy, what am I breaking my ass for, to come home to a zoo?"

Well, screenwriting is shitwork. Brief example: Waldo Pepper. Waldo was basically an original screenplay of mine. I say "basically" because the pulse of the movie came from George Hill, the director, and we worked for ten days on a story. So Waldo wasn't as "original" as Batch, but it was a hell of a lot more mine than any adaptation I've ever done. Okay, we open in New York and three daily papers are split two terrific, one pan.

In neither of the laudatory reviews was my name even mentioned. But you better believe I got top billing in the pan. I had screwed up George Hill's movie.

Nothing unusual at all about that-it's SOP for the screen-writer. That is simply the way of the world. You do not, except in rare, rare exceptions, get critical recognition. But you do get paid.

And as you get hotter, you get paid more. (Now we're in- to the danger zone.) You don't get banished to Siberia at Chasen's.

And you get flattered in meetings. And at first you sit there thinking, "Can you believe this asshole, bullshitting me like that?" But the flattery continues as the heat rises. And at first, again, you remind yourself that none of the heat has to do with literary quality, it's because people lined up to see your last picture. But eventually, inevitably, you say to yourself, "Since so many people tell me I'm a terrific writer, what's my voice against the multitudes? Forget my voice-they're right. I am; check my box-office receipts if you don't believe it-terrific." And you're finished but you don't know it. That child who wanted to bring something into existence is long gone. And the only way to save him is this: You must write something else. Anything else.

Epic poems or rhyming couplets, novels or nonfiction, I don't care. But there has to be an outlet where quality matters, where the world is not measured by the drop in box-office receipts in the second weekend in Westwood.

Maybe I'm crazy; I may be dead wrong. Maybe you know people who have spent their lives doing nothing but writing screenplays. If you do, ask them about the road not taken. . . .

So why go to L.A. at all? For the same two reasons I would urge a young playwright to do his best to get to New York; one of the reasons being practical, the other emotional.

To begin with the practical: Simply put, they know things out there the rest of the country doesn't, and they get that information first. The movie business is a part of the fabric of life in Los Angeles, and that just isn't true anywhere else. It is, if you will, in the air. Take, for example, Porky's.

It is now the first week in May '82, and since I began writing, Porky's has opened. With no stars. And no name director. And less than flattering reviews.

It's still too soon to say what the final fate of the movie may be, but it's certainly a freak hit, and there are many who feel it will end up as the most popular comedy in the history of American films.

Now, if you're sitting in Chicago, or Miami, and you saw Porky's in April and you sat there thinking, "I can do better than this," and you went home and set to work on a screenplay dealing with the sexual awakening of teen-agers, and you did a wonderful piece of work, really quality stuff, and you had an aunt who went to grammar school with a kid who now works in the legal department of the William Morris office, and you asked her would she get it to him, and she did, and he loved it, and he got it to a top Morris agent, and he loved it, you know what?

It would all have been an exercise in futility. The Morris agent would read the script and think, "Too bad, if only I'd had it six months ago." Six months ago? The movie just opened. But they knew. They knew late last fall, the Fox people did, because they had test marketed the film and it had done sensationally. Now, they couldn't have predicted that it would become the present phenomenon. But they sure were aware they had something. And everyone else in the business out there knew the same damn thing. And you better bet that before Porky's opened, every studio had at least two Porky's rip-offs in development. And when Porky's 11 opens-believe me, there will be a Porky's II-it will have been preceded by maybe three or four similar films. The word on a film starts before the film starts.

"Hollywood" is basically a very small community, and there are precious few secrets. When a studio gives a green light to a project, before casting or crew is completed, a lot of people know the project well: Remember that the majority of films have been turned down already by the majority of studios. (Probably a slight overstatement, but only slight.)

Now, as principal photography approaches, there are hundreds of people working on it. And they know, collectively, thousands of people, the majority of whom work in the picture business. And these technicians are talkative and, since every- one's a critic, opinionated. "The director's on the sauce, brace yourself." "The goddam girl's all wrong, shit, we could have really had somethin'." "I don't know, it all feels awfully good so far." And tike that.

Then, when photography starts, any number of people are seeing the "dailies"-snippets of Film that make up the previous day's shooting. Most important of these people are the studio executives, and I have found they are shockingly honest, if you know them, about their product. If a movie's a stiff, they won't come out and directly say that, but they will say, "Per- haps our hopes were a bit too high on that one" or "There really is more, I think, than we're getting on the screen."

And when they really like what they're seeing, they're thrilled-because, among other reasons, we all would tike, from time to time, to be involved with something that isn't dreck.

And when they really like it, that word really spreads. (Obviously, "the word" isn't infallible. Sure, people in Sioux City knew that Heaven's Gate was in trouble while it was still shooting, and that turned out to be true. But in my experience, the movie that was in the most talked-about trouble-both real and imagined trouble-was the first Godfather. (There was a famous story, I suspect true, about Francis Coppola returning from a final location .trip in preproduction and getting off a plane where a wire from his agent awaited him, saying, "Don't quit. Make them fire you.")