Hollywood Animal (33 page)

We made a formal offer to Glenn Close, who wasn’t a star, who’d never had a box office hit, but who, we both felt, was a brilliant actress. She accepted it but wanted to have a “discussion” with me.

We met in L.A. She was wearing a baseball jacket from
The Natural
.

“The only thing that bothers me,” she said, “is that this is a revenge piece.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she kills him at the end. It’s almost like a vigilante thing, a right-wing thing.”

It was the first time in my life I had ever been accused of writing a “right-wing thing” … I had been involved in the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and I tried to explain to her that it was a “self-defense thing.” Jack Forrester tries to kill her at the end of the movie and she kills him in self-defense.

“But she knows he’s coming to the house and takes a gun up there to wait for him.”

“She doesn’t use the gun until he comes at her to kill her.”

“But do you think people are going to focus on this as a vigilante movie?”

“It’s a mystery-thriller,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll focus on it politically. It’s a genre piece.”

“Well, I know some of my friends in New York will.”

“I can’t help what your friends in New York will do,” I said. “We’re not making
The Song of Bernadette
here.”

“No,” she said with a half smile, “we’re not.”

Richard and I were both great admirers of Jeff Bridges’s work and pushed Guy to make him an offer to play Jack Forrester.

“He’s a great actor,” Guy said. “There’s no actor I admire more. I personally love to see his movies. But he’s death at the box office. Anything he’s in, it bombs.”

We thought Jeff would be ideal casting. He could play Jack Forrester with boyish charm, innocence, and warmth. The more he played him that way, the more startling our ending would be.

“What the hell,” Guy said after a while, “Glenn Close isn’t a star, that’s for sure. We might as well make it an all-nonstar team.”

Marty Ransohoff adamantly opposed casting both Glenn and Jeff.

“Have you ever seen her sexy?” he kept saying about Glenn. “She’s a matron in training. There’s a love scene in this movie. Would you want to fuck her? I wouldn’t want to fuck her!”

And about Jeff: “Sure, put him in a cowboy movie. Put him in a farm movie. But he’s supposed to be the editor of the San Francisco newspaper! He can play a T-shirt. But he can’t play a suit!”

Partly to assuage Marty, we agreed to his choice to play Sam Ransom, Teddy’s private eye sidekick. Marty was an old friend of Robert Loggia, an actor known more for playing the Beverly Hills dinner circuit than for playing great parts. We felt Loggia was shopworn, “a TV face,” as Richard said, but Marty wanted him, and the Craig Baumgarten Moral of the Story was that it wasn’t a bad idea to try to keep Marty at bay.

“Thank God I’ve never done any porn films,” Richard said.

For a small but significant part—a woman who had had an affair with Jack Forrester and was now testifying against him—we chose Leigh Taylor-Young, who just happened to be Guy McElwaine’s most recent wife … the seventh or eighth, no one seemed to know for sure.

Richard and I knew there were already strains in their marriage. We were both present one night at Guy’s house, sipping Jack Daniel’s and talking about casting, when Leigh came in and asked Guy to sign a check.

Guy looked at the check and the bill and said, “Jesus Christ! You spent
ten thousand dollars
at Fred’s?”

Richard and I sat there in pained discomfort as they went back and forth about the bill until Guy said, “Goddamn it! I can’t believe this!” and signed it.

A few days before the shoot was to begin, Jeff arrived looking trimmed down and lean. He had put himself on a regimen of diuretics and vegetables and had lost twenty pounds in three weeks. And he looked just sensational, never mind Marty, in his Armani suits!

He was having trouble figuring out the part, though. As Richard and I listened to him, we realized that he was over-intellectualizing it. He was reading Scott Peck about the nature of evil.

“Just play it like you didn’t do it,” Richard told him. “Play it like you’re innocent.”

“You mean I shouldn’t try to get into the psychology of it?” Jeff said.

“You’re not evil,” Richard said. “You’re Jeff Bridges. You’re a sweet man. Play it like that.”

“Don’t act?” Jeff smiled.

“Don’t overact.” Richard smiled back.

One of the early scenes shot was the lovemaking sequence between Glenn and Jeff. “She’s nervous about it,” Richard told me. “She’s not comfortable with the nudity.”

I said, “She knows there won’t be any real nudity up on-screen.”

Richard and I had agreed that the scene wouldn’t be explicit—that less was more. Their lovemaking would be shadowed by lighting and camera angles.

“She’s not comfortable with being nude just for the shoot.”

“I don’t blame her,” I said. “I wouldn’t be comfortable naked in front of a bunch of strangers and bright lights, either.”

Richard closed the set and limited the number of people in the room to the essential camera and lighting people.

Marty wanted to be in there.

Glenn Close said absolutely not.

“I’m the producer of the movie,” Marty said. “Nobody can tell me I can’t be there during a shoot.”

“She’s not comfortable with you …” Richard began.

“I don’t want to fuck her for Christ’s sake,” Marty raved. “Who’d want to fuck her? I’m not gonna get any jollies looking at her. I want to make sure there’s heat in the scene.”

“That’s
my
job,” Richard said.

“You need all the help you can get,” Marty said.

The issue went all the way to the top: to Guy.

Guy denied Marty’s demand.

From that moment on, the Wild Boar started telling everyone at Columbia that Glenn Close looked awful and the movie was going to be a disaster. He openly criticized the dailies. He called Richard a “traffic cop.” And he kept undermining Glenn Close.

Word of what Marty was saying got back to Glenn, of course, and now she began being critical of the dailies—more specifically, of how she looked …

Marty was urging Guy to fire Richard. Glenn was urging Guy to fire the cinematographer. Richard was being critical of Glenn’s costume designer, Ann Roth, who was there because Glenn had chosen her.

“I’m not firing anybody,” Guy said. “I think Glenn looks fine.”

It is not an exaggeration to say that everybody was at everybody’s throat. Marty was angry at Richard and Glenn and Guy.

Glenn was angry at Marty and the cinematographer and at Richard—for not firing the cinematographer.

Guy and Richard were angry at the costume designer.

And Marty and Glenn were very angry at me because all I was doing was backing Richard up.

“You’re destroying your own movie, Bananas,” Marty railed. “All because you’re so in love with your boyfriend. You’re blind. Your boyfriend is destroying what you’ve written.”

On a more sinister note, he said: “I thought maybe you’d learned your lesson
with
your first boyfriend [Craig Baumgarten]. Now you’re just as much in love with your second one. Didn’t you get the postcard I sent you in London?”

In a courtroom scene one day, I saw Glenn Close get even with Marty Ransohoff. He had brought his daughter to the set. Marty was excited about having her there. He was in an unusually jovial mood and, the proud dad, introduced her to everyone.

Glenn was doing a scene in which she paces across the courtroom, making a speech to the jury. Marty and his daughter were out of camera range, watching Glenn. Marty had his arm around his daughter.

As Glenn paced across the room, she stopped dead suddenly and, on this packed set, pointed at Marty and his daughter. “I can’t do this with them in here!” She was spitting her words. “They are in my line of vision!
Get them out of here!
”

Marty looked mortified. His daughter was frozen. He put his arm around her and, with their heads down as everyone stared, they left the set.

Glenn watched them leave and turned to Richard with a satisfied smile.

“Are we ready now?” she said.

“The cunt!” Marty raged. “She does that to me with my daughter there! She’s gonna regret what she did till the day she dies!”

He knew what he wanted to do in revenge. The love scene, he told me, was terrible. It would have to be reshot.

“I’m gonna make that cunt go in there and take her clothes off,” Marty Ransohoff said, “and I’m gonna be standing there watching her fat white ass and I’m gonna be fucking it with my eyes. She’s gonna know it, too. She’s gonna know I’m standing there, fucking her with my eyes!”

He launched a campaign. He showed everyone at Columbia the love scene. He made sure that as many people as possible at Columbia saw Glenn Close naked. He tried to convince everyone that the scene lacked “heat” and had to be reshot.

Richard and I knew what he was doing and went to Guy.

“Forget it,” Guy told Marty, “the scene will not be reshot.”

When the shoot ended, Richard and I felt we had a good movie. Guy was just happy that the shoot was over.

The Wild Boar said, “This was all your fault, Bananas. You and your three boyfriends, you put me into a gang bang.”

Every movie mystery needs a McGuffin, a smoking gun, a clue that ties the killer inextricably to the crime.

In
Jagged Edge
it was the old typewriter that Glenn Close finds in Jeff Bridges’s closet, an antique machine which as she types the phrase “he is innocent”
inverts
the letter T and that matches the notes the killer had sent earlier.

The idea came from my own work process. I have always used a manual typewriter. I learned to type when I was twelve on one of my father’s discarded machines, using two fingers—the middle fingers of my right and left hands.

“If Marty’s got fuck-you shoes,” Richard Marquand once said, “then Joe’s got fuck-you fingers.”

But since I learned to type that way, I’ve been unable to use either electric typewriters or computers. I hit the keys so hard with the two fingers that I would destroy an electric typewriter or a computer in a week—besides bringing five other keys down for every one I intended to hit. Even the old manual machines I use are worn out at least once a year.

Through the years, when manual typewriters became scarce, I collected old ones at flea markets and office sales. Almost every machine I used had some sort of imbalance with the letters—either an up or a down. The old Royal I used to write my script of
Jagged Edge
had just such a natural inversion and as I typed my script, I came up with the McGuffin.

The McGuffin would be …
the typewriter itself
.

Not only the typewriter itself, but
the very same typewriter—the old Royal—I was using to write the script
.

I showed the old Royal to Richard at my home in Marin and he liked the look of it so much that when it came time to shoot the discovery of the McGuffin, he asked if they could use my machine itself for the scene.

I loved the poetry of it: here was an old machine that beat out a story about an old machine that leads to a killer … and now this old machine itself would be up on-screen.

“Please,” I said to Richard, “take care of this. I’ve written a lot of things on it and I’m very attached to it. It’s okay if it becomes a movie star, but I want it back to write other scripts with.”

“What do you want it back for?” Guy said. “Reading a script on it is like spending a weekend with the Vietcong.”

Richard understood the value and meaning of it. He assigned someone on the set to keep an eye on it at all times and when they finished the scene, he assigned someone to pack it carefully, swaddled in Styrofoam.

He didn’t trust regular mail or Federal Express, so he sent my old Royal back by private express. A messenger took it to the airport in L.A. and a messenger waited for it in San Francisco.

But the messenger in San Francisco was told it wasn’t on the plane, even though it had been put on the plane in L.A. At the last minute, he was told, it must have been rerouted somewhere.

A search was conducted.

“Nada,” as Robert Loggia said in
Jagged Edge
. “Zilch. Nothing.”

Instigated by Columbia Pictures, an investigation was begun by United Airlines.

Nada. Zilch. Nothing
.

My old Royal was gone. The typewriter which, as far as I was concerned, was a star in the movie, had been stolen.

McElwaine, pondering his weekends with the Vietcong, said it was a benevolent act of God.

Marty said, “It wasn’t a very good typewriter, and it wasn’t a very good McGuffin, either. Who the fuck cares?”

As Richard and I watched the rough assembly, we felt the performances were superb. Glenn had just the right amount of vulnerability combined with strength, Jeff’s boyish charm made the ending impossible to predict, and Robert Loggia was a diamond in the rough: Marty’s call was right; Loggia almost stole the movie.

Marty had distanced himself from the movie, even though Richard had agreed to hire one of his sons as part of the editing team.

“It’s your movie, you and your boyfriends’,” Marty said to me. “I never did like a ménage.”

We realized the movie would be controversial when, at an early screening, during the first scene, a woman got up in the dark and started to scream.

“I’m not going to watch this exploitative piece of shit!” she yelled. “Let me out of here.”

I followed her out to the lobby with Guy and some of the other Columbia executives. She was continuing her tirade.

“Who’s the drunken sailor who wrote this piece of shit?”

Guy thought that was funny and pointed to me.

“He’s right there,” he said.

The woman started coming for me and I ducked back into the darkened theater.

· · ·

We premiered the movie at the Toronto Film Festival. The two-thousand-seat theater sold out. Richard and I sat high up on the top step of the balcony and, at a certain moment near the climax, when a window unexpectedly shatters on-screen, we saw the audience practically levitate.