The View from the Bridge (10 page)

Ted Ashley, then the head of the studio, saw the film in a screening room, talked on the phone most of the time as it ran, and then fled, saying, “Great job, talk to you later.” Herb and I didn't hear from him for months. The word was out that we had made a stinker.

That
I
had made a stinker.

By the time we were due for our first preview, I was a total wreck. I had insisted and resisted, I had fought, I had refused so many of their suggestions, their well-meaning, but (to me) wrong-headed ideas, and now I was paying the price, my directorial career over before it had properly begun.

We previewed in Woodland Hills, just outside LA, because no executive could be bothered to travel anywhere to see this film. Some of them didn't even bother showing up in Woodland Hills. Those who did glared at me or pointedly ignored me. Even my two stars, demoralized by helpful remarks from their agents, wouldn't speak to me. I sat down behind them as the house-lights dimmed and felt as though I was going to my execution.

One of the fights I had had with Warner involved the use of their old logo (the Warner Bros. shield) and the fanfare written by Max Steiner to go with it. Warner was then using a logo that looked as though it should be stamped on office furniture; I had an old-fashioned film and I wanted an old-fashioned beginning. In the end (that is to say, the beginning), I had my way but they were enraged about it.

Now the Warner shield burst forth upon the screen, accompanied by the Steiner fanfare, and the audience erupted with applause and cheers.

And that was just the beginning. As the film unspooled, the audience responded enthusiastically in all the right places and applauded for some time when it was over. The picture was unquestionably a crowd pleaser. I can still remember Malcolm and Mary in the seats in front of me, staring at one another in disbelief as the film splashed across the screen behind their astonished silhouettes, to the accompaniment of laughter and cheers. I still remember a Warner exec looking at me in the lobby as I walked out and tearing up his notes like so much confetti, tossing them in the air.

People loved the film. At the end they didn't want to leave but milled about the theater, a sure sign of approval. The “cards,” those terrifying mini-reviews by audiences that can result in a film's being recut, reshot, or even shelved, were more wildly favorable than they had been about anything Warner had released in the previous three years.

I stood in the theater lobby, unable to grasp what had happened. And stranger things were to follow. A second preview in Toronto the next day was even bigger than the first in terms of audience size and enthusiasm. Woodland Hills, after all, was a suburb of Hollywood, and the audience must have been half industry. In Toronto, it was just folks, and they were much less inhibited about manifesting their approval. The following Monday Frank Wells, chairman of the company, introduced himself to me by saying, “Failure is an orphan but success has many fathers. Congratulations.”

We even got a handsome letter of apology from Ted Ashley, who quoted Fiorello La Guardia—“When I make a mistake, it's a beaut. You've made a great film,” he went on. “Now the only question is whether the people will come—whether you get the tom-tom factor,” by which he meant word of mouth.

Later still, Bob Shapiro, head of production at the studio, genially confided over Diet Cokes in his office, “We admired you when you were flexible and we admired you when you held firm.”

Admired me? While I was trying not to heave with terror for having defied them? I had absorbed all these body blows personally, agonized over my career prospects with every stand I took and all the while, from their point of view, it was—what? Just business?

Ultimately, our film may have been victimized by its early success. Buoyed by those preview results, the studio opened it very wide, perhaps too wide. The movie needed time to build, time for those tom-toms to spread the word. We were in so many theaters on day one that there was no time for word of mouth to take hold. We also didn't have a big star, on the strength of whose name alone people would hear about or be interested in the film. We had Malcolm and we had Mary, with whom Malcolm had fallen in love. After the film they were married and had children. Perfect casting. In the end the picture did do well, if not quite as well as those previews had led everyone to hope.

Time After Time
is not a great film, but, like
The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
, it is enormous fun and, I think, does not insult the viewer's intelligence. Between the two movies there is something that seems to characterize the best of my work (in my subjective estimate, anyway): the fusing of a strong, often fan tastical story with realistic characters, which makes the concept more plausible than might otherwise be the case. Looking at the movie today, I am struck by its homely appearance and its startlingly bitter social commentary. But both these aspects are easily—and mercifully—overwhelmed by the charm of Malcolm and Mary as Wells and Amy. Perhaps the fact of their falling in love as the cameras rolled didn't hurt. Movies are soufflés. Some rise, some don't.
Time After Time
, with all its first-time directing faults, is nevertheless a soufflé that rose and has remained aloft since its release. Steven Spielberg, producer of
Back to the Future
, told me that his team had studied
Time After Time
, running it again and again.

And to this day, all Warner Brothers movies start with the Warner shield.

We learn the lessons that life teaches us; sometimes they are the wrong lessons. The lesson I learned from
Time After Time
is that making good movies is easy, and that I knew how to do it.

I clearly couldn't distinguish between expertise and beginner's luck. Clever is not wise, as Odysseus learned to his cost.

Then it was back to the couch and more years of talking to myself. I was determined that my next film would be Robertson Davies's novel
Fifth Business
, for which I had written what I thought was a truly great script.

But the world wasn't ready for Robertson Davies's blend of mysticism and melodrama (it still isn't, apparently), and
Time After Time
was not so big a hit as to give me carte blanche. I waited for about two years, wrote a couple of other novels to pass the time, and got angrier and angrier.

Another thing about the movies and me; about art and me. I have always been more interested in content than in the form in which that content is expressed, which I believe is a defect on my part as an artist. Art is mainly about expression or execution and only secondarily about content.
Anything
can be made into art—even pornography or fascism, like it or not. (If you don't believe me, check out the wonderful
Carmina Burana
, which is comprised of both.) But I never was able fully to buy into the form-over-content argument. In my films, I care less for the photography and composition of the images than I do for what the people are saying and doing. I would a thousand times sooner direct actors and help shape their performance rather than work on special effects. I have this theory that the film can be anything but out of focus and audiences will tolerate it, so long as what they are watching is interesting. Ditto the sound. On the other hand, I, as an audience member, respond like everyone else to ravishing or original imagery in the movies, to nifty sound effects. I am as seducible as the next man. Even as I disapprove of the content-less image-makers, I envy them; envy their technical facility and their cheerful, absent-minded amorality. Hey, it's the movies—let's blow something up.

I had only half an idea what
Fifth Business
would look like; but I understood with perfect clarity that it was a terrific story, which was basically all I cared about, and I insisted on being allowed to tell it. Hollywood resisted. Time, meanwhile, was passing.

STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN

Looking back on earlier portions of one's life, one is surprised by the turns it has taken. Things and events no imagination could have predicted unfold in a seemingly random manner, leading to equally unexpected and improbable results. Like pinballs in one of those arcade games, we bang into things and ricochet off in unanticipated directions. Detours become highways. I certainly could never have anticipated my involvement with the
Star Trek
series, let alone where that involvement would lead.

Had
Time After Time
been a bigger hit, I might've got my shot at
Fifth Business
, but it wasn't and I didn't. In the meanwhile the film had netted me Hollywood's (then) über agent, Stan Kamen, who called and said he wanted to represent me. I responded that he wouldn't when he heard that there was only one project in which I was interested. Agents must be used to all sorts of quaint notions and obsessions from clients, and mine didn't appear to faze him: agents know how to wait . . . Kamen would patiently send me scripts; I would send them back.

Time passed. I sat in my house and went to meetings only if they involved
Conjuring
(the screen name for
Fifth Business
). Months became years. I met with all sorts of people but
Conjuring
stubbornly resisted my efforts to give it life.

I got all sorts of advice, including of the “Make one for them—something commercial” (again that word!) “and then you can get your film financed” bromide.

It was on a Sunday afternoon in early 1982 and I was barbecuing hamburgers with a childhood friend, Karen Moore, now (i.e., then) an executive at Paramount, when she gave me a piece of blunt advice: “Nicky, if you want to learn how to direct, you should
direct
, and not sit up here holding your breath because you're not getting to make the film you want.”

Had this counsel come unsolicited from, say, my parents, I doubt I would have paid it heed, but originating in a disinterested friend, it resonated, especially when she followed it up with, “Why don't you sit down with Harve Bennett over at Paramount? He's in charge of producing the next
Star Trek
movie and I think you'd like him.”

I must have stared at her.

“
Star Trek?
Is that the one with the guy with pointy ears?” My experience of and exposure to the series had been limited to my Iowa City friend and since then had consisted only of seeing those ears flash by when channel surfing. One look and I kept going. The whole idea that, contrary to all scientific understanding and evidence to date, the cosmos was filled with other “life-forms,” most of them walking around on two legs, speaking English, and always landing on planets with breathable air, seemed utterly absurd to me.

“You'll like him,” Karen insisted, meaning Bennett, not Spock. With her earlier advice still ringing in my ears, I agreed to meet the man.

Each of Hollywood's studio lots has its own personality and feel. Warner is perhaps the most attractive, with a gardened, country-club sort of atmosphere; Universal most resembles a factory, while Fox and MGM are shadows of what they once were. Most of Fox's territory is now occupied by the high-rise office buildings known as Century City, while MGM, in some sort of irony, is now the home of another company entirely, Columbia (in turn owned by Sony), once known, due to its puny size, as Columbia the Germ of the Ocean.

The Paramount lot was the most “Hollywood” of the bunch, due to its location in the heart of that zip code, even though it shared space, eerily enough, with a cemetery. Aside from a “Western” street and some New York facades, there never had been a real backlot (exteriors had typically utilized the Paramount ranch in Agoura). In fact the smallish studio had actually been cobbled together from Paramount and what was formerly RKO, before it had been bought by Lucille Ball and turned into something called Desilu, combining Lucy's name with that of her Cuban husband, Desi Arnaz. Before the Desilu incorporation, RKO had been largely owned and controlled by someone named Howard Hughes. RKO (for Radio Keith Orpheum) was the place where they filmed
Citizen Kane
, and where Fred and Ginger had cavorted, personifying pure happiness. Over the wall that separated them, Paramount was home to Cecil B. DeMille, Ernst Lubitsch, and Billy Wilder.

Studios concentrated on different fare—MGM was wholesome and musical, Warner made gangster melodramas, biopics, and “premature” anti-Nazi propaganda, Fox concerned itself with great domestic social issues, Universal with Frankenstein et al., while Columbia relied on Frank Capra populism and Rita Hayworth.

Paramount went for Marlene Dietrich, European sophistication, and DeMille historical hokum, before going on to Hope and Crosby, then Martin and Lewis. By the time of my arrival that day in 1982, the wall that had separated the two studios had been long since been breached, and all was now Paramount.

Film studios not only don't look like one another, they tend not to look like anything else, either, with their huge soundstages and intermittent “bungalows.” Although periodically gutted and refurbished with the latest decor and technology, the old wood and stucco exteriors at Paramount look pretty much the way they do as Billy Wilder showed them in
Sunset Blvd
.

In one of those bungalows, after I finally located it among its lookalike neighbors, I found myself chatting with an unpretentious gent some years older than myself. Harve Bennett had thinning light reddish hair, a friendly smile, and a keen, analytic intelligence he was at some pains to conceal under the cloak of “I'm just a regular guy” affability. Perhaps he saw himself in this light—or at any rate, wished to see himself in it—but if so, he was kidding himself along with others. At some point I learned Bennett had been a child radio star on a program called
Quiz Kids
. A native of Chicago, he'd migrated to Los Angeles, where he'd found a great deal of success in the world of television, having produced
The Mod Squad
,
The Bionic Woman
, and
The Six Million Dollar Man,
none of which I had seen.