Hollywood Animal (15 page)

“Why am I off the project?” he asked.

I’d learned my lesson. I wasn’t about to tell him that the UA executives felt
The Gambler
was “unwatchable.”

I said, “I don’t know, Karel. You’ll have to ask them.”

Fourteen years later, on a set in Lethbridge, Canada, I met Karel Reisz’s wife of many years, Betsy Blair, a distinguished and gutsy woman who defied the blacklist. I asked about Karel’s health and mentioned how much I’d liked him during our
F.I.S.T
. discussions.

“You know,” Betsy Blair said to me, “I remember you were supposed to come to London and then you didn’t. Karel still doesn’t know what happened to him on that project.”

By then I had learned the truth about why Karel Reisz was suddenly gone from
F.I.S.T
. It had nothing to do with
The Gambler
being unwatchable. It had everything to do with a man named Norman Jewison and his former agent, the head of production at United Artists, Mike Medavoy.

At the time I met him, Norman Jewison was forty-eight years old and one of the superstar directors in town. He’d had big-hit movies—
The Cincinnati Kid, The Russians Are Coming, In the Heat of the Night, The Thomas Crown Affair, Fiddler on the Roof
—and he’d directed them without condescending to his audiences. A Jewison movie was accessible, it was
about
something, and was never pretentious.

Medavoy had been his agent years ago and had somehow managed to get my “treatment” to him. When Norman finally read it and liked it, Mike Medavoy dumped Karel Reisz, poor Karel’s new movie became “unwatchable,” and Gene Corman was no longer “in awe.”

The first thing Norman Jewison said to me, holding my seventy-some-page exegesis of
F.I.S.T
., was, “I don’t know what the fuck this is. It isn’t a treatment, it isn’t an outline, it sure as hell isn’t a screenplay. It’s neither fiction nor nonfiction. It’s some sort of bastard mutation.”

I liked him personally immediately. There was an orneriness about him, a feistiness. He viewed himself as a combatant against the studios, but his combat was not only confrontational, more often it was charming. He mainly lived in Toronto, had another place on a lake in Ontario, but he also often stayed at his house in Malibu next to Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews on the beach.

One early morning he was staring at the surf and when I came up behind him he fixed me with those elflike eyes and said, “Do you know why I live out here at the beach?” He turned back toward town and the eyes suddenly narrowed. “So I don’t have to look at those fuckers over there.”

By “fuckers” he meant the world of the studios, the world he’d succeeded in but tried to keep at arm’s length, the world that he was convinced was a creative enemy but could occasionally be either beaten or cajoled into being a temporary ally.

“I’ll tell you what they’re good for, kid,” he’d say. “They put up the money.”

I
was
a kid. I’d come off
Rolling Stone
, watching Hunter shoot ether into his navel or hearing about Hunter spraying fire retardant on Jann, into this world that I didn’t understand and that I often found intimidating. As it turned out, Norman Jewison would become my mentor and, through the years, my internal guide. I often found myself thinking: Well, what would Norman think about this? How would Norman play this? Would Norman tell ’em to fuck off or would he put his killer grin on and take them out to lunch?

I didn’t know that then, though. All I knew was that I liked the man, I liked his movies, and while there was a whole worldful of stuff I didn’t know about, I took pride in being a writer and intended to be one on this screenplay. A writer who would write a script out of his own heart and gut the way he wanted to write it. Norman, a shrewd judge of people, knew what he was dealing with quickly, of course.

A kid with a chip on his shoulder looking at Hollywood warily while at the same time ready to be seduced by it.

The first step was to take my bastard mutation exegesis of a treatment and talk it to death, which is what we proceeded to do.

I marvel at Norman’s patience now. This was
my
script and no one was going to push me around, including Norman big cheese Jewison, so I said a lot of things about making a movie that didn’t
sell out
, that wasn’t
Hollywood
, that had true
street smarts
—using words that I hoped would push buttons on a man who was a big “commercial” director.

He took it all in stride but he let me see him in action. We had an early meeting with Gene Corman. Also present was Norman’s producing partner, Pat Palmer, a man I subsequently learned was one of the best line producers (he did the actual on-set production work) in the business.

Pat Palmer was thirty-eight. He had a goateed wooden face. He spoke rarely but when he did it was with laserlike precision. He had a shit detector that was foolproof. He and Norman had partnered on several movies together.

The meeting began with Gene Corman’s empty, echo-chambered niceties. How happy he was that Norman was doing this, how deeply he respected Norman’s
work
, how he thought Norman was the ideal director to do this epic movie, how he hoped we’d all work together happily.

“We’re not working together,” Norman said.

Pat Palmer’s face was so wooden that I knew if you touched it, you’d get splinters.

Gene Corman cleared his throat. It seemed to me that he wasn’t as nearly surprised by what Norman had just said as was I. He didn’t look Norman in the eye. His gaze wandered to the posters of his brother’s movies on the wall.

“This is the way it’s going to work,” Norman said. “Pat and I will produce it. You’ll be executive producer. You don’t have any input into the script. I don’t want you having any contact with Joe. I’ll shoot the movie, I’ll do the cut. I look forward to seeing you at the premiere.”

Okay, I thought, here we go. You don’t treat a producer like this. You don’t tell him who he can and can’t have contact with. This guy was a Corman. It was a name
known
in this town.

Gene’s eyes wandered into Norman’s now. Norman’s eyes were stone. I wasn’t even sure Palmer was breathing.

“That’s fine with me,” Gene Corman said, “whatever you say, Norman.”

The meeting ended with Gene Corman repeating the same echo-chambered niceties. Incredibly, now he seemed to mean the words praising Norman more than he had at the beginning of the meeting.

As we got to his car in the parking lot, Norman turned to Pat Palmer.

“Good meeting, huh, Pat?” Norman smiled.

“Great meeting,” Palmer said.

“He’s really a nice guy, Gene,” Norman said.

Pat said, “
I
like him.”

I said, “You fucked him.”

Norman and Pat laughed like it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

“What do you mean, kid?” Norman said.

“You fucked him, you cut his balls off, you stuck ’em in his mouth, and it made him smile.”

They thought that was even funnier. They were nearly bending over laughing.

“Dead men smile sometimes,” I said. “It’s rigor mortis.”

On the way back to Norman’s house at the beach, he and Pat would turn to each other occasionally and say,
“It’s rigor mortis,”
and start to laugh again.

We started talking about the story that would wrap itself around all of my research. The discussions would begin early in the morning and go all day. Norman had been asked to direct
Ragtime
, E. L. Doctorow’s best-seller, and he often took calls during the day about that project.

“I thought you were doing
F.I.S.T
.,” I said to him.

“I don’t have a script of
F.I.S.T
.,” he said. “I don’t have a script of
Ragtime
, either. I’ll do whichever script I like.”

“You want me to compete with
Ragtime
? It’s an international best-seller,” I said, “written by one of the great writers of our time.”

“What are you,” Norman asked, “chopped liver?”

“I don’t
think
so.”

He grinned. “I don’t think so, either, but we’ll see.”

What fascinated him at the core of my bastard mutant exegesis of a treatment was the shadow of Jimmy Hoffa, who, as far as I was concerned, wasn’t even in the damn bastard mutant exegesis of a treatment.

“This guy Kovak, your hero,” he said, “he’s Hoffa.”

“He’s not—I took him as far away from Hoffa as I could, considering that he heads a truckers’ union.”

“That’s one of the things that’s wrong with it—get Kovak closer to Hoffa.”

“I’m not writing a roman à clef.”

He held the treatment up. “So far I haven’t seen you writing anything except this mutation.”

When we were finished with our discussions, he said—“Remember this, kid. We’ve talked about a lot of things. You’re a writer, I’m not. Use what you think will help you and discard the rest. Write it with your heart, put yourself into it. I can’t ask you to do more.”

Then he said, “Call me when you’re done.”

A week later he called me.

“They’re really pushing me on
Ragtime,”
he said. “I’ve got a first draft that’s pretty good. Send me the pages you’ve got.”

“That wasn’t our deal,” I said. “I said I’d send you
the script
when it was done. I’m not going to send you pages and then listen to your suggestions on the pages as I’m writing.
I’m
writing this—
you’re
not.”

“Well, okay,” he said, “but they’re really pushing me to do
Ragtime.”

I said, “Fine. Do
Ragtime
.”

He laughed. “I’ll make a deal with you. This script is going to be in two parts [we envisioned an intermission in the middle of the movie], send me the first part when you’re done.”

“What if you don’t like it?”

“Then I’ll do
Ragtime
.”

“What if I don’t send it to you?”

He laughed again.

“I’ll still do
Ragtime
.”

· · ·

About a month and a half later, I sent him the first half of the script. I was petrified. I felt like I didn’t know what I was doing. This wasn’t journalism, which I’d done all my life. This was making things up out of the air.

“Well, I read it,” he said when he called me.

“And?”

“And keep writing.”

“Did you hate it?”

“No.”

“Did you like it?”

“No.”

“Are you doing
Ragtime?
”

“No.”

“What are you doing?”

“I’m waiting for the second half of it,” Norman said.

A month and a half later I sent him the rest of the script. The two halves of the first draft came to 387 pages. A page of script, I’d learned, equaled one minute of screen time. Three hundred eighty-seven minutes: a six-hour-and-some-minute movie.

Pat Palmer asked me to come down to L.A. and see Norman three days later. When I walked into his office, Norman was grinning like a loon. “Three hundred eighty-seven minutes,” he said.
“Three hundred eighty-seven minutes!”
He ruffled through the script. “A monologue that goes on for eight minutes.” He started to laugh, holding the script up—“It weighs like
War and Peace
, kid,” he said, “but it doesn’t read like it.”

I said, “What’s wrong with an eight-minute monologue?”

He said, “They’ll throw tomatoes at the screen, that’s what’s wrong.”

“Not if the words are good.”

Norman and Pat Palmer thought that was hilarious.

We started to go through the script page by page, scene by scene, over and over again—at his house in Malibu, at his house by the lake near Toronto. We argued incessantly. I was green at this and I knew it, but I wanted to save the script from the kind of slick theatricality that I hated in Hollywood movies.

Gene Corman, meanwhile, was desperate to know what was going on. Did Norman like the script? Was he going to direct it? Was he going to do
Ragtime?
Were Norman and I getting along? Gene didn’t know anything. He was out of the loop. Even UA wasn’t talking to him. I finally agreed to see him, Norman or no Norman. Gene had been friendly to me. I thought he at least deserved to know how things were progressing. He was nervous about Norman finding out about the meeting, though. He asked me if he could meet me on a street corner two blocks from Norman’s Malibu house and take me out to dinner.

I stood in the dark waiting for him. His Mercedes swooped by, I jumped in,
and
we went to eat. He dropped me off at the same spot afterward and begged me not to tell Norman that we’d met.

As Norman and I continued working on the script, we continued arguing. He could have said thank you very much and moved on to another project. He could have replaced me with other writers and kept working on
F.I.S.T
. I really have no explanation for why he didn’t do those things except for the patience and generosity of spirit that epitomizes the man to me now.

We just kept going over the script, cutting, rewriting, restructuring. When I look back on it now I realize that what I was getting was a graduate seminar in film from a man who had more than proven his ability to make commercially successful and award-winning movies.

Oh, he did now and again give me some not so subtle hints to be less intractable. After a particularly difficult day of back and forth, exasperated with me, he took me out sailing on the lake in Ontario. I’d never been sailing before. A wind kicked up and a storm came in. The damn boat was flopping around in the water—this
thing
kept swinging by my head on the boat, barely missing me. I was dry-mouthed, scared shitless.

Jewison looked at me with his killer grin: “A little dry-mouthed, are we?” he said. “This will teach you not to fuck with me.”

In Malibu once, in the middle of our Sturm und Drang, I found an envelope on the table in my guest bedroom. It was addressed to Norman Jewison from an accounting firm. It said “Personal and Confidential.” The thing was just lying there on the table. It hadn’t been there before. It wasn’t sealed. I stared at it for a while, then turned away. All I could hear was the lapping of the sea but this envelope was screaming at me. I finally gave up and opened it. It was a statement from Norman’s accountant of his net worth.