Ten Days in the Hills (54 page)

“Al,” boomed the third guy, a forty-four for sure.

“Al, and Sergei.”

Sergei nodded.

They pulled out chairs and sat around the black-walnut library table. In the middle were two silver pots of coffee, and in front of Mike was a silver pot of tea that looked like a crouching cat. The handle was the tail, curving upward, and the spout was the cat’s open lips. Next to the teapot, on a plate, was what appeared to be an antique glass cradled in a silver holder. It didn’t seem to be part of the same set as the cat, because the holder was shaped to look like a trellis of leaves bearing a single five-petaled flower. After they all sat down, they all cleared their throats. Stoney cleared his throat.

For most of the night, in the Amber Room, which he considered dark and bizarre but which Isabel liked (at least the bathroom and the dressing room were not paneled in amber, but were mostly white with tigereye accents, like handles and knobs and mirror frames), he had lain awake attempting to imagine Jerry doing this deal. Jerry had perfected a sort of tall-agent method. Loud voice, in-your-face manner, and actual arm-twisting, if he had to go that far. He didn’t present it as arm-twisting. He only happened to grab your hand enthusiastically, as if he were about to shake it, but if things didn’t go to his satisfaction, as they so often had not when Stoney was in high school and not operating on the most responsible level possible, arm-twisting could ensue before you knew it, either lateral arm-twisting, where he simply turned your hand and wrist until it hurt and you couldn’t get out of it, or four-way arm-twisting, where he maintained his grip on your hand no matter what you did and suddenly stepped behind you. Jerry had been tall for a Jew. If you saw him palling around with Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner and some of those old comics he liked, they looked like a set of superannuated wiseguys, and you always stepped aside. Jerry could tell you that he knew best for you, and often, out of sheer fear and even agony, you would agree to what he suggested, and there you were, rich and famous. Or, if you were Stoney, at least not flunking out.

And Jerry had a partner, also successful, also now dead, but very far from tall, named Milt Perera. Milt might have been five feet, and Hispanic-looking, but volatile and Jewish to the core, and his technique was to appear to be about to explode. He would say it—“You don’t take this deal, you don’t sign on the dotted line here, and you’re gonna have to scrape me off the windas and sweep me out the door; I mean it, if you are that stupid so as to not take this deal after I’ve put it all together for you, who do you think you are, I’ve got to ask myself, but it’s gonna be me that suffers, because I’m not gonna be able to stand it, at the very moment you do not sign this deal, at the very moment you do not say, Milt, this is the best deal I ever saw, at that very moment something will happen to me, I can’t say what, but I feel it right here.” And then he would make a fist and hit himself on the breastbone, produce a large burp, and say, “That was nothing. Just don’t light any smokes in here.”

But imagining Jerry and imagining Milt only reminded him that many many things were riding on this deal, not least the future of Hollywood, if he might be so bold as to think that, and possibly the future of the world, or at least East-West relations and the fate of the Middle East, because he had sat up through the night in the Amber Room with all those candles lit, and he and Isabel had read that book
Taras Bulba
back and forth across the bed to one another for an hour, after that strange anime thing Mike had financed before (best not mention that to Max), and they had seen the whole movie as if it were taking place right on the screen behind the mirror in the wall opposite the bed.

What had struck Stoney about
Taras Bulba
were not the same scenes that, judging by the talk they had had in the kitchen last week, had struck Max—the battle scenes, the scenes inside the besieged Polish city, the romantic scenes with a woman who looked (in Stoney’s imagination) like a combination of Zoe and Isabel. What had struck him were the scenes in the Cossack encampment in the middle of a huge plain, under, in some sense within and surrounded by, sky. A wide camera angle could get that feeling of a landscape so large that it curved as the earth did, and men riding across it at the gallop. And then tight shots could capture the tips of the grasses grazing the ears of the horses, the lines of mounted Cossacks parting the flower-decked stems as they galloped through, not over, the grass. Moviemaking technology had arrived at a place where that kind of detail embedded in that kind of panorama was possible—and Max had very much liked
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
and once had expressed an interest in doing something similar. Of course, he hadn’t expressed it lately. But Stoney had imagined how it could be, and Isabel had gotten enthusiastic, too—according to her, you wouldn’t have to change the book one bit in order to show the way religious conflict destroyed relationships and families and towns and settlements and the ecosystem. Just one shot of bloated bodies of horses and townspeople and children and Cossacks floating down the river (all done by digital imaging, of course—“No children or animals were harmed in the making of this film”) and people would be walking out of the theater as pacifists. Isabel had gotten very enthusiastic.

So here they were, sitting in the
My Fair Lady
study, and Mike, Al, and Sergei looked to be about as far from pacifism as it was possible to be, but who was to say what their true ideals were?

Stoney cleared his throat again and said, “Well, I read through the book again last night, and it really is a wonderful piece of work. Of course, I don’t read Russian, so—”

Al said, “Gogol was truly a man from Ukraine. The Russians never understood him, though they were always eager to claim him. The Orthodox, the Soviets, the Tolstoyans. They all said this, that Gogol led directly to them, that he prophesied their coming. My own opinion is that he had stories bursting out of him like rockets. An incident goes in, rolls around, can’t help it, must come out, as a great funny story or a great tragic story, and Gogol himself has little control over this. Have you ever driven a Maserati?”

Stoney shook his head.

Al said, “The first time you drive a Maserati, you touch the accelerator and the car is already beyond you, a mile down the highway. Very dangerous. This is what I think it was like being Gogol.”

Sergei said, “Al used to be a professor of Russian literature at the university in Tula.”

“And now he drives a Maserati,” said Stoney. “I appreciate that.”

“I appreciate that, too,” said Al, straight-faced until everyone laughed.

“This is what is hard for me,” said Mike. “I read this book, and I see something that you can only see from reading this book—”

“What would that be?” said Max. He sat behind an empty coffee cup and saucer, and made no move to pour himself a cup. Of course this was a bad sign, as far as Stoney was concerned.

Mike glanced at Max, and paused, then said, “I see beautiful pictures that have never been painted, but have only been thought of. Look at these books here.” He waved his arm toward the upper balcony of shelves. “That side is the Russian. That side is the French. The English are right up there. I am a man who likes books. I read something every day. Those French books and those English books, it doesn’t matter whether they have been painted or photographed or not. The English books, most of them, you could act out right in this room and not feel that you were missing anything. The dialogue would be witty and the interactions of the actors full of innuendo and tension. The words are the most important things about them. But these Russian books, it is not sufficient for all of them that they are books. Some of them, yes, but not all of them. Merely being books is too private for them. They are asking to appear in front of us and show us something. I thought this one, a great book by a great writer, but one which is not the biggest one, though of course a very magnificent one, should be the first in my project. Then there would be others, of course.”

Stoney cast a sidelong glance at Max, who did not react to this, but Al and Sergei suddenly nodded. What business were they in, again? Mining or oil, Stoney thought Ben Avram had said, but it was always the case that everyone wanted to be a movie mogul.

Mike went on, “People in the East hunger for this, to be shown something about themselves that looks better than what they see around them. Here in America, you have forgotten what the effect of movies is, because you are so used to it. You think that it is entertainment, but, really, it is seeing yourself. Seeing yourself so much, all the time, not because you are required to but because you want to, and then you say that that is who you are. Look at these old American actors we think about. Let’s take this man Clark Gable, who was not a handsome man, at least to my eyes. He walked and talked a certain way and had a certain easy manner, making jokes and smiling to himself, and being quite tall and yet not being frightening, and people in America said, yes, he is like I am, and so America became great, because Americans used the movies to talk to themselves about who they were.”

Stoney looked at Max. Max was nodding at this. That was reassuring.

Mike warmed to his subject. “Henry Fonda and Marlon Brando were cowboys one day, and so those in the audience talked to themselves about that cowboy history. In Russia we did not have this. The movies only talked to us about being a good Soviet citizen. No Russian in his right mind said, Oh, I am a Nikolai Alexandrov type from that movie
I Gave My Life for a Tractor,
and my girlfriend is a Nina Murmanskova type from that movie
Six Fishing Boats Harvest the Northern Sea.
Who would want to be that type? But it is time now, when Russians and Ukrainians, too, wonder about themselves, to give them something to think about.”

“Maybe it’s too late for that,” said Max. “Maybe the newness of movies has passed everywhere, not just in the U.S.”

“Maybe, but, you know, in Saint Petersburg many people still go to the ballet and the opera and the theater. People are used to going out and sitting in chairs and watching a show together, and they have not gotten used to something different, the way Americans have gotten used to staying home. Russians are sociable, Ukrainians are sociable, Kyrgyzians are sociable. If there is something on, good or bad, they will see it, even if they complain about it for the next week. Going out to a theater that is decorated in an elaborate way is much preferable to staying home. So—I think it is still possible to impress them with a thing to look at that is magnificent.”

“There are Russian directors, both here and in Russia. Why don’t you go to one of them? Or a Ukrainian director.”

This was the obvious question, so Stoney was a bit surprised that he himself hadn’t bothered to ask it.

Mike said, “You are thinking of whom?”

“Well, Konchalovsky, of course. And I saw that movie about the Hermitage, which you must have seen. His name starts with an S. Sukurov.”

“And there is Mikhalkov,” said Mike. “We have thought of them, and others, too.”

Al said, “I talked to Sukurov. He is not out of the question. We are not interested in Konchalovsky, for various reasons. And Mikhalkov is very busy. He never stops filming. For this movie, we need a meticulous planner, which we understand is true of you, Mr. Maxwell, but also someone who seems to be in sympathy with a Russian way of looking at things. I have seen your movie
Grace,
and Mike has seen it twice. To write that movie, you would have to have that sympathy.”

“When I was a boy, my grandfather told me those stories, but I’m not that boy any longer, as you can see. I’ve made lots of other movies since that one—”

“I think,” Stoney pushed his way into this remark, “that there is something else going on, if you don’t mind my saying so. I think that you do not want this production to be parochial or provincial, am I right? I think that you want it to be world-class, a great Hollywood movie that reeks of Hollywood, that is unapologetically a kind of
Doctor Zhivago
of our day, am I right?” Mike nodded, followed by Al and Sergei. Everyone was saying what they truly thought, but the thing they truly thought that they were not saying, Stoney suspected, was that they were steering away from Russian and Ukrainian directors because those directors would have their own ideas about Gogol and the book, and would be quick to elbow the moneymen aside. As well they should. Max, the best compromise, would be quick to elbow the moneymen aside, too, but as far as Stoney was concerned, he could do that later. He had to make a deal with them first.

“Anyway, as I said,” Mike cautioned, “Gogol was not Russian. He wrote in Russian, but he was a man from Ukraine. This is a story about Ukraine that takes place at a time before Russia was Russia and Ukraine was Ukraine. Here are the Cossacks and the Poles and the Turks and the Jews. All of these people have very long memories, as Gogol did. To see this, for them, is to see something that happened the day before yesterday, or a few springs ago. If you go to the steppelands, you see roads and towns, of course, but you also see just what Gogol would have seen and Taras would have seen, and it is not worth seeing only because they would have seen it, but because it is beautiful to see and should be put on film—”

“Before it’s changed forever,” said Stoney. Then he added, “That’s what Isabel thinks. Isabel is Max’s daughter. I don’t know if you met her.”

“Perhaps. But what I was thinking was that a painting of this place is not big enough. Cinerama, or even IMAX would be almost big enough.”

“Yes,” said Sergei, “I have often thought that
Taras Bulba
in IMAX would be a worthy project.”

Max said, “You gentlemen have ideas of your own. You have a vision of your own. This is your movie. Why don’t you make it yourselves instead of trying to find someone to make it? I mean, produce it and direct it.”

How could this idea be insulting? Stoney thought. And yet there was some way in which it did seem like an insult, as if Max were saying that this was not an interesting enough project for him, that he had better things to do, but also denigrating whatever it was that they did do for a living and implying that he could not be bought. But of course he could be bought, he had been bought many times. Directors in Hollywood of Max’s sort rather prided themselves on being bought, because if you could be bought to direct a project that you had not conceived yourself, and you did a good job with it, as Max usually did, then that meant not only that you were technically proficient and a good executive, but also that you could see the look of every subject you were given—in some sense, of every subject in the world. You could read the material and visualize not only how it would play out but also what there was about it that had a certain sort of meaning. With this actor here and this actor over here and these objects in between them and this wall and ceiling and window in the background and this chair with a certain slipcover on it in the foreground and this shot before and this shot after, you could evoke not only specific feelings and sympathies in the audience, but also specific thoughts and pieces of knowledge. A director who could be bought was above all things intelligent, and not every director was, some were more instinctive. But the sort of director Max was combined a lively curiosity about all sorts of subjects and ideas with strict visual integrity that was similar to, but in some sense more active than, a decided sense of taste. Each shot had to look right, and Max knew instinctively and immediately whether it was right and how to make it right. This was a mere talent, probably a brain function, and yet it brought together all of those other things that Max could do, and it made them all hang together and, always important, look classy. He had made good movies over the years and he had made dogs—
Southern Pacific
was a prime example of a movie of Max’s that Stoney considered a stinking dog—but with all of them, the sum of the parts was better than the parts, because of his intelligence and this visual thing he always had.