I Remember Nothing (10 page)

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Help! I’m drowning. I have 112 unanswered e-mails. I’m a writer—imagine how many unanswered e-mails I would have if I had a real job. Imagine how much writing I could do if I didn’t have to answer all this e-mail. My eyes are dim. My wrist hurts. I can’t focus. Every time I start to write something, the e-mail icon starts bobbing up and down and I’m compelled to check whether anything good or interesting has arrived. It hasn’t. Still, it might, any second now. And yes, it’s true—I can do in a few seconds with e-mail what would take much longer on the phone, but most of my e-mails are from people who don’t have my phone number and
would never call me in the first place. In the brief time it took me to write this paragraph, three more e-mails arrived. Now I have 115 unanswered e-mails. Strike that: 116. Glub glub glub glub glub.

Yes. No. Can’t. No way. Maybe. Doubtful. Sorry. So sorry. Thanks. No thanks. Out of town. OOT. Try me in a month. Try me in the fall. Try me in a year. [email protected] can now be reached at [email protected].

Call me.

I have had a lot of flops.

I have had movies that were total flops.

When I say total flops, I mean they got bad reviews and they didn’t make money.

I have also had partial flops: they got good reviews and they didn’t make money.

I have also had hits.

It’s lovely to have a hit. There’s nothing like a hit.

But it’s horrible to have a flop. It’s painful and mortifying. It’s lonely and sad.

A couple of my flops eventually became cult hits,
which is your last and final hope for a flop, but most of my flops remained flops.

Flops stay with you in a way that hits never do. They torture you. You toss and turn. You replay. You recast. You recut. You rewrite. You restage. You run through the what-if’s and the if-only’s. You cast about for blame.

One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there’s no confusion about who’s to blame: you are. But before I became a director, when I was just the screenwriter, I could cast blame everywhere. There’s a movie I wrote years ago that didn’t work. In my opinion. You may have seen this movie. You may even have loved it. But it was a flop when it opened; it got exactly one good review in all of America, and then it sank like a stone.

For years I tried to figure out where I’d gone wrong and what I should have done. What should I have said to the director? What should I have done in order to fight for the original draft of the script, the best draft, the one with the voice-over? What could I have done to prevent the director from inserting the fun-house sequence, or from cutting the flashbacks, which were really funny? Or were they?

I spent years wondering about all this. Then, one day, I had lunch with the movie’s editor. I was about to direct my first movie, and I was looking for advice. At a certain point, we got around to the flop. He must have brought it up; I never would have. That’s another thing
about flops: you never talk about them afterward, they’re too painful. But he assured me that nothing could have been done; the problem, he said, was the casting. This calmed me down temporarily. This was at least a solution to the riddle of why the movie hadn’t worked—it was miscast. Of course. So it wasn’t my fault. What a relief.

For quite a long time I comforted myself with that theory. Then, recently, I saw the movie again and I realized why the movie hadn’t worked. There was nothing wrong with the cast; the problem was the script. The script wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t funny enough, it wasn’t sharp enough. So it was my fault after all.

By the way, one of the things you hope for when your movie hasn’t gotten good reviews is that some important critic will eventually embrace it and attack all the critics who didn’t like when it opened. I mention this for two reasons: first, so that you’ll understand how truly pathetic you become after a flop; and second, because, astonishingly, this actually happened with a movie I wrote called
Heartburn. Heartburn
flopped when it opened. A year later, Vincent Canby, the eminent movie critic for
The New York Times
, saw the movie for the first time and wrote an article calling it a small masterpiece. Those were not his exact words, but close. And he claimed to be mystified that other critics hadn’t seen how good it was. But this was cold comfort, because I couldn’t help wondering if things might have been different had Canby reviewed the movie in the first place. I’m not suggesting that the movie would
have sold more tickets, but a good review in
The Times
cushions the blow.

One of the saddest things about a flop is that even if it turns out to have a healthy afterlife, even if it’s partly redeemed, you remain bruised and hurt by the original experience. Worst of all, you eventually come to agree with the audience, the one that didn’t much like it to begin with. You agree with them, even if it means you’ve abandoned your child.

People who aren’t in the business always wonder if you knew it was going to be a flop. They say things like, “Didn’t they know?” “How could they not have known?” My experience is that you don’t know. You don’t know because you’re invested in the script. You love the cast. You adore the crew. Two or three hundred people have followed you into the wilderness; they’ve committed six months or a year of their lives to an endeavor you’ve made them believe in. It’s your party, you’re the host. You’ve fought hard to improve the on-set catering. You’ve flown in frozen custard from Wisconsin. And everyone is having the most wonderful time.

I now know that when you shoot a movie where the crew is absolutely hysterical with laughter and you are repeatedly told by the sound guy that you are making the funniest movie in history, you may be in trouble.

The first time this happened, I had no idea. The crew loved it. They were on the floor. The camera operator and focus puller were stuffing Kleenexes into their mouths to keep from laughing. And then we cut the movie and it tested poorly. Let me be more explicit: it
tested in the way many comedies do, which is that the audience laughed at the jokes and nonetheless didn’t like the movie. This is the moment when you ought to know you are approaching flop, but you don’t; you think you can fix it. After all, they laughed. That must mean something. And there are so many stories about movies that were fixed after they tested badly. There is anecdotal evidence. They fixed
Fatal Attraction
. Not that your movie is remotely like
Fatal Attraction
. Still, it gives you hope.

So you recut. And you reshoot.

And it still tests poorly.

At this point, you surely know you’ve got a flop. You’d have to be a fool not to know.

But you don’t. Because you hope. You hope against hope. You hope the critics will like it. Perhaps that will help. You hope the studio will cut a trailer for the movie that will explain the movie to the audience. You spend hours on the phone with the marketing people. You worry over the tracking figures. You pretend to yourself that test screenings don’t matter—although they do, they absolutely do, especially when you make a commercial movie.

And then the movie opens and that’s that. You get bad reviews and no one goes to see it. You may never work again. No one calls. No one mentions it.

But time passes. Life goes on. You’re lucky enough to make another movie.

But that flop sits there, in the history of your life, like a black hole with a wildly powerful magnetic field.

By the way, there are people who have positive things to say about flops. They write books about success through failure and the power of failure. Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from a failure is that it’s entirely possible you will have another failure.

My biggest flop was a play I wrote. It got what are known as mixed reviews—which is to say, it got some good reviews, but not in
The New York Times
. It puttered along for a couple of months, and then it died. It lost its entire investment. It was the best thing I ever wrote, so it was a particularly heartbreaking experience. If I think about it for more than a minute, I start to cry.

Some plays flop but go on to have a life in stock and amateur productions, but not this one. No one performs it anywhere, ever.

You’d think I would have given up hoping that anything good would ever happen to this play, but I haven’t: I sometimes fantasize that when I’m dying, someone who’s in a position to revive it will come to my bedside to say good-bye, and I will say, “Could I ask a favor?” He will say yes. What else can he say? After all, I’m dying. And I will say, “Could you please do a revival of my play?”

How pathetic is that?

We have a traditional Christmas dinner. We’ve been doing it for twenty-two years. There are fourteen people involved—eight parents and six children—and we all get together at Jim and Phoebe’s during Christmas week. For one night a year, we’re a family, a cheerful, makeshift family, a family of friends. We exchange modest presents, we make predictions about events in the coming year, and we eat.

Each of us brings part of the dinner. Maggie brings the hors d’oeuvres. Like all people assigned to bring hors d’oeuvres, Maggie is not really into cooking, but
she happens to be an exceptional purchaser of hors d’oeuvres. Jim and Phoebe do the main course because the dinner is at their house. This year they’re cooking a turkey. Ruthie and I were always in charge of desserts. Ruthie’s specialty was a wonderful bread pudding. I can never settle on just one dessert, so I often make three—something chocolate (like a chocolate cream pie), a fruit pie (like a tarte tatin), and a plum pudding that no one ever eats but me. I love making desserts for Christmas dinner, and I have always believed that I make excellent desserts. But now that everything has gone to hell and I’ve been forced to replay the last twenty-two years of Christmas dinners, I realize that the only dessert anyone ate with real enthusiasm was Ruthie’s bread pudding; no one ever said anything complimentary about any of mine. How I could have sat through Christmas dinner all this time and not realized this simple truth is one of the most puzzling aspects of this story.

A little over a year ago, Ruthie died. Ruthie was my best friend. She was also Maggie’s best friend and Phoebe’s best friend. We were all devastated. A month after her death, we had our traditional Christmas dinner, but it wasn’t the same without Ruthie—life wasn’t the same, Christmas dinner wasn’t the same, and Ruthie’s bread pudding (which I reproduced, from her recipe) wasn’t the same either. This year, when we opened negotiations about when our Christmas dinner would take place, I told Phoebe that I’d decided I didn’t want to make Ruthie’s bread pudding again because it
made me feel even worse about her death than I already did.

Anyway, we settled on a night for the dinner. But then Ruthie’s husband, Stanley, announced that he didn’t want to be there. He said he was too sad. So Phoebe decided to invite another family instead. She asked Walter and Priscilla and their kids to join us. Walter and Priscilla are good friends of ours, but four years ago Priscilla announced that she didn’t like living in New York anymore and was moving, with the children, to England. Priscilla is English and therefore entitled to prefer England to New York; still, it was hard not to take it personally. But she and the kids were coming to Manhattan to join Walter for Christmas, and they accepted the invitation to our Christmas dinner. A few days later Phoebe called to tell me that she’d asked Priscilla to do one of the desserts. I was thunderstruck. I do the desserts. I love doing the desserts. I make excellent desserts. Priscilla hates doing desserts. The only dessert Priscilla ever makes is trifle, and when she serves it she always announces that she hates trifle and never eats it.

“But she will make her trifle,” I said.

“She won’t make her trifle,” Phoebe said.

“How do you know?” I said.

“I will tell her not to make her trifle,” Phoebe said. “Meanwhile, are you good at mashed potatoes?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Bring mashed potatoes,” Phoebe said, “because Jim and I don’t have any luck with them.”

“Fine,” I said.

Several days passed while I thought about what desserts I would bring to Christmas dinner. I read the new Martha Stewart baking book and found a recipe for cherry pie. I went on the Internet and ordered pie cherries from Wisconsin. I bought the ingredients for the plum pudding that no one eats but me. I was thinking about making a peppermint pie. And then a shocking thing happened: Phoebe e-mailed to say that since I was doing the mashed potatoes, she’d asked Priscilla to make all the desserts. I couldn’t believe it. Stripped of the desserts and downgraded to mashed potatoes? I was a legendary cook—how was this possible? It crossed my mind that Phoebe was using Ruthie’s death to get me to stop making desserts. She’d probably been trying to do this for years; it was only a matter of time before I would be reassigned to hors d’oeuvres, displacing Maggie, who would doubtless be relegated to mixed nuts.

I took a bath in order to contemplate this blow to my self-image.