The View from the Bridge (2 page)

I happily absorbed everything that was thrown at me—theater, music, books—until it was time to go to school. It was there that my difficulties commenced. Today, I would've been diagnosed with some form of ADD, but at the time there seemed merely a mysterious disconnect between an evident intellectual capacity and an ability to translate it into any sort of academic prowess. I had difficulty focusing on anything in which I was not passionately interested. This certainly included math, where the numbers went all fuzzy and refused to stay steady in my head while I tried to add them, but also other issues and subjects that required concentration, organization, or the citing of specific examples to illustrate my point. I could read for hours and did—but only the books that I wanted to read. I loved building model boats and could likewise spend hours at a time on them. Talk about concentration. I was crazy about plays, opera, ballet, art, dinosaurs, movies, and musicals—all of which you could trip over in New York—but my eyes would glaze over when the teachers started to talk. It's not that they were bad teachers, either; I went to a very sophisticated school. They were very good teachers; I was just a very bad pupil. I couldn't keep up. My mind wandered into narratives, some of my own invention, others culled from Jules Verne, Dumas, Arthur Conan Doyle, the Hardy Boys, the Lone Ranger, Rodgers and Hammerstein. I repeated fourth grade, which didn't do wonders for my self-esteem.

Occasionally, I was taken to places or events where my parents thought a necktie was de rigueur. This article of apparel I loathed at first sight, and many red-faced struggles were involved in slamming me into it. I sometimes think I longed to make movies because I was sure you didn't need to wear a necktie. (In fact, old photos of many directors at work reveal them to be wearing neckties, so perhaps the dispensing of neckwear was more a generational transition—my time had, simply, come.)

When I was about ten, my mother was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, though this dreadful fact was kept from both of us by my father. She was told, instead, that she had a cyst removed. My father edited a volume of essays by doctors entitled,
Should the Patient Know the Truth?
He contributed an essay of his own to the collection, in which he asked, “What Patient, What Truth?”, pointing out that how and what is communicated to the terminally ill patient may ease or increase his distress and ability to cope with his fate. He used the (unidentified) example of my mother, in which, encouraged by her cyst diagnosis, she did not die within the predicted three months but instead lived almost three
years
before succumbing (hideously) at age forty-five. I was in the room with her when she drew her last, gasping breath at around ten in the evening. In trying to prepare me for this moment, my father had explained some months earlier what was going on and said he would need me to be strong. I interpreted this—wrongly, I now suspect—to mean that I must not cry. And so I didn't. I told myself, as I listened to her rasping breaths in the low-lit room, surrounded by sorrowful relatives, that I must remember everything that happened, so one day I could write about it. The result, I think, was not a fortunate one, for in that moment of decision, I converted myself from a participant to an observer. When she was dead—the rasping abruptly ceased—I reached out and placed my hand on my mother so that I would know what it was like to touch a dead person. (It was like touching a dead person.) I did indeed remember everything, though, interestingly, I never did write about it.

Years of psychotherapy followed, paralleling my high school years. My grades were never cause for congratulation, though I gradually attained my own cachet. By the time I was a senior and all that peer conformity had begun to wear off, one or two girls actually began to take an interest in me. If high school had gone on another year, I would have ruled.

My mother and I were never particularly close—I don't think she ever quite knew what to make of me, especially since, while I was crazy about music (where my knowledge was becoming encyclopedic), it was clear that, with my numerical dyslexia, I would never become a musician. But my father and I had much in common. True, I exasperated him with my forgetfulness and academic failures—he was a Harvard man, class of '32—but we loved music and movies and books together. We were dedicated Marxists. He preferred
A Night at the Opera
but I knew
Duck Soup
was funnier. When I was twelve he took me to see the Mike Todd movie of
Around the World in Eighty Days
, and I had my first religious experience. I had always loved movies, even other Jules Verne movies (I was nuts for the Disney
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
—still am), but this was different. The theater lobby sold a souvenir program book, which I still have, in which can be found an article titled: YOU TOO CAN MAKE A MOTION PICTURE—NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE NECESSARY. Rereading the article now, I recognize that it was a sort of sarcastic piece, intended to trumpet the staggering statistics behind Todd's production. All you need is six million dollars and 68,000 people in fourteen different countries . . . etc. But the sarcasm at the time was lost on me.

YOU TOO CAN MAKE A MOTION PICTURE—NO PREVIOUS EXPERIENCE NECESSARY. I showed the article to my dad and told him I wanted to make a movie. As it happened, we had an 8mm wind-up Revere camera that my father used for our home movies. I wanted him to help me make my own film of—what else?—
Around the World in Eighty Days
. I would write the script and play Phileas Fogg, of course; my best friend, Ron Roose, son of a psychoanalyst colleague of my father and oddly born on the same day as me, would play the loyal valet, Passepartout, etc.

I am not sure why my father fell in with this plan. It is certainly true that he was an artist manqué himself, who would later publish two splendid full-length biographies (one of Joseph Conrad, the other of Houdini), and something of my scheme must have stirred promptings he had long ignored. Ultimately, the film took five years to make. It was shot on weekends and over Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations and involved my father driving a host of hyperkinetic kids in costume to various locations—Central Park, Cape Cod, Cowboy City, New Jersey—and somehow pulling the thing together. He told me he would lie awake at night devising shots and silly bits of business, clearly enjoying himself. We shot out of sequence, of course, like a real film, compelled by necessity, so that the cast aged and shrank as we assembled the scenes. I edited the film with my cousin Bob on our kitchen table. The result was an eighty-minute masterpiece that seemed to charm everyone who saw it. Now matter how hard I fought with my father throughout my fraught adolescence, work on the film went on, and I think it held us together as well as setting my feet on the path they would follow for the rest of my life.

My movie schooling was completed when my father remarried. Leonore brought few material possessions with her when she moved into our house, but one of them was choice, and I got custody of it: a large Zenith (black and white, of course) TV found its way into my room. Any chance of academic advancement went right out the window with this part of my stepmother's “dowry.” In those far-off times, television stations ran endless late-night movies from all eras, and I sat and watched every one of them, staying up till all hours and learning about . . . what? Damned if I know. Having a good time. Escaping. Memorizing the names of the actors, the cameramen, the composers and directors, whoever they were. With my memory and capacity to absorb what interested me, I shortly became an autodidact of this arcane world. Who cared? Nobody except me.

I could probably write a(nother) book entitled
Everything I Know I Learned from the Movies
. (Or
Everything I Know I Learned from the Backs of Record Jackets
.) Unlikely as it may seem, I was one of those people who actually derived knowledge from the
content
of movies. I did the same thing with comic books. There used to be something called
Classics Illustrated
, a series that was more or less what its name implied, comic book versions of every great book you ever heard of. The optimistic idea of whoever was behind the project was self-evident: if you liked the comic, try going on to read the book, which was exactly what I did every time. To this day—for better or worse—many of the original illustrations in those comics still inform my visualization of
Moby-Dick
or
A Tale of Two Cities.

IOWA

In the summer
of 1964, following my surprising graduation from high school, I sailed to Europe on the
Queen Mary
and backpacked all over the place, alone, as usual. In the fall, I entered the University of Iowa, which may seem a strange choice for a Jew(ish) New Yorker, but with my academic record the possibilities were not limitless. Harvard was not holding its breath and Iowa did boast the Writers' Workshop, the foremost place in the world to study guess what. I did meet New Yorkers in Iowa who didn't care for the place, thought it too remote, too provincial, were put off by the food, etc., but I was not among them.

Iowa was my chance to start over, and I did well there, almost from the beginning. I wasn't always or particularly a great student, but I did find a niche for myself, friends, and a measure of success. In the theater and film departments I met other people who were like me, and, as no one knew of my previous existence, I was approached with no particular prejudice. Since I had few preconceived ideas of my own, I was a blank slate on which there was room to write a great deal.

I don't think I'd been in Iowa City a month when a vacancy for a film reviewer occurred at the
Daily Iowan,
the school paper, and I landed the job. The paper didn't care about such things as film criticism, being preoccupied with sports, student politics, and the war in Vietnam (wherever that was), but I viewed the position as nothing less than a heaven-sent opportunity. I seized hold of that post in an iron grip and never let it go—for the next four years. Before my arrival, reviewers covered one or two movies before irate letters to the editor drove them figuratively out of town. With a thicker skin and a surprising instinct for the long-term possibilities of the post, I stuck it out and gradually the hostility dissipated. In four years I wrote four hundred reviews—averaging three a week—and had what was said to be the most popular column in the Big Ten newspapers. I remained in Iowa City even during the summers for fear of forfeiting the position. It was the beginning of the making of me. I got to air my opinions about film or anything else that was suggested to me by what I was watching. I experimented with my own aesthetic theories and enunciated my philosophical musings as they seemed relevant to whatever Paramount was releasing that week. I had a bully pulpit, and for once there was an audience ready to listen to what I had to say. They didn't always agree, but they got used to the idea of me.

I don't know if this is true for anyone else, but I can dissect my life in terms of conscious and unconscious goals. I seem to have had one of each. My conscious goal was to be an actor, an occupation that made a kind of inevitable sense, given my fragmented identity, lack of self-esteem, and other random personality disorders. If I can't be the King, let me play the King. Writing, on the other hand, was just something I always did; it never occurred to me to become a writer or that a writer was what I wished to become. Without actually denigrating my gifts in that direction (this would come later), I never gave them much thought.

Writing must therefore have been my unconscious goal; later, directing proved to be a bit of both. For starters, until I became an actor, I don't think I actually knew what a director did. It wasn't until I heard one shouting at me while he was comfortably nursing a cup of coffee in one of the orchestra seats that it occurred to me I was in the wrong line of work. Directors got to watch and criticize. And they were brought the coffee. More seriously, I think I had trouble acting because I thought I knew—more than the director—how scenes should be played.

I had a new career goal.

I wrote my first full-length screenplay at Iowa. I had read and been knocked out by a Jack Finney novel called
Assault on a Queen
. It was about a scheme to hijack the
Queen Mary
, of all things, and I was riveted from first page to last. What an amazing film this would make! I didn't have the rights, of course, but this never troubled me, as I knew my script would never be bought or filmed—it was simply the experience, the exercise, and the challenge of adapting the book, which, to my way of thinking, was absurdly simple. I didn't know anything about the format of screenplays (far fewer were published then than now), but I started with page l of Finney's novel, boiled it down into what I thought it should read like as a screenplay, and then went on to page 2, and so forth through the entire book. The result, I decided, was not bad. I telescoped here and there, tightened the dialogue a lot, and dispensed with a character or two, but I faithfully followed Finney's ingenious plot and preserved, it seemed to me, the narrative excitement of the book, albeit my Smith Corona had a lot of Wite-Out clinging to the keys by the time it was finished.

Two years later I found myself reviewing Hollywood's version of
Assault on a Queen
, which starred Frank Sinatra and Virna Lisi and had a screenplay credited to Rod Serling.

Everyone agreed it was about the worst film of the year. I sat in the theater, stunned by what seemed to me to be the arbitrary and utterly perverse departures from the novel that the film had made. I was unable to account for why the filmmakers (I had never heard of the director) had taken a perfectly serviceable, not to say ingenious plot and made it all-over dumb. I never did find out for sure but I feel fairly certain that Mr. Sinatra had a lot of ideas that wouldn't go away—unless he did. The six-hundred-pound gorilla sleeps where he wants.