Which Lie Did I Tell? (16 page)

LUTHER hears the cars, realizes he is in trouble because it’s too late to escape. So he hides in the vault, shuts the door, sits in the chair.

Footsteps come closer and closer and the bedroom light is turned on and LUTHER is shocked and blinded and for a moment, he thinks he’s been found out. Then he realizes this:
the door is a two-way mirror.

From the bedroom, it’s just a mirror. But from where he sits, it’s a window on the room—he has a life-sized view of what’s happening in the bedroom just a few feet beyond—

—and what’s happening is this: two very drunk people are clearly going to fuck.

LUTHER recognizes the two people: THE WOMAN is the gorgeous twenty-five-year-old CHRISTY SULLIVAN, wife of WALTER SULLIVAN, the ancient billionaire. THE MAN is clearly not her husband—and LUTHER is stunned when he realizes who he is …

Pretty terrific start.

I had no idea where the story was going, but I knew I wasn’t about to stop reading. I also had no idea who the main characters would be, but I guessed this trio would be around:

A total of three.

The reason for the detail here is because of one simple truth: movies are not Chekhov. You have your star part, that’s essential. And depending on what kind of flick it is, you have your love interest or your villain. Or often, both. Those are your key roles.

But you cannot have even half a dozen main characters.
The Big
Chill,
sure.
Peter’s Friends, Return of the Secaucus Seven.
But the glory days of the all-star MGM movie is, because of budget primarily, as removed as the Ice Age.

That same night, JACK GRAHAM, an attractive, athletic young Washington attorney, returns home from a fancy party. JACK has pretty much everything going for him, but be careful what you wish for, you might get it.

JACK is engaged to JENNIFER BALDWIN, who is gorgeous and the heiress to the Baldwin fortune, run by her father, RANSOME BALDWIN. JACK has a job at one of the top Washington law firms, which happens to handle the Baldwin interests. JACK is new there, having taken the job at JENNIFER’s urging, and because of his connection with the Baldwins he will become a partner at the next review.

JACK goes to bed, where he takes down a picture of his former fiancée, KATE WHITNEY. They have not seen each other in four years but he knows she is now a State’s Attorney. JACK loved KATE, still misses her, but also misses, and almost as much, her father, LUTHER, with whom he was very close.

JACK decides to call KATE, dials her, then hangs up after the beep sound on her phone machine as he loses his nerve …

Short, helpful, very tense—because while you are reading, what you are thinking is this:
Get back to the bedroom.
There were also several new characters I knew I would be meeting again.

Back to the vault.

LUTHER, helpless, watches as the sex begins, heats up, gets violent, gets bloody. THE MAN tries to strangle CHRISTY but she slashes him in the arm with a letter opener and is about to stab him in the heart when he screams and TWO WELL-DRESSED MEN race in and blow her brains out.

Now to a new place.

At this same time, KATE WHITNEY is working late in her office. She thinks momentarily of her hated father, LUTHER, calls her home for messages but there is only a breather who hangs up. She goes back to work, watched by a photo of herself and her mother from which LUTHER has been unmistakably ripped away.

Back in the bedroom.

The naked and bleeding ALAN RICHMOND, THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, is staring dumbly at the bloody letter opener in his hand that almost killed him. BILL BURTON, the older of the two Secret Service men, who did the shooting, is almost sick at the sight of blood and brains. His partner, TIM COLLIN, steadies him. PRESIDENT RICHMOND passes out as Chief of Staff GLORIA RUSSELL, the other woman in the limousine, races in.

COLLIN reports the facts to RUSSELL. RUSSELL plans a coverup. The room is sanitized and they all leave. But unknown to RUSSELL, the letter opener, which she commandeered, has fallen from her purse behind the bed.

THE PRESIDENT, RUSSELL, BURTON, and COLLIN hurry down to the waiting cars, preparing to get the hell gone—

—which is when RUSSELL realizes the letter opener isn’t in her purse.

LUTHER, who has left the vault, has taken it with him as he uncoils a rope and goes out the window.

THE SECRET SERVICE chase him on foot, almost catch him in a thrilling footrace, but he manages to make it to his car and zooms off.

RUSSELL, BURTON, and COLLIN return to the bedroom, realize two facts, neither of them good for the Jews: (1) the letter opener is gone, complete with fingerprints of both the PRESIDENT and the murdered CHRISTY SULLIVAN on it; and (2) there was an
eyewitness.

They know they are in very deep shit indeed. And will be until they have murdered the eyewitness and have the letter opener back.

LUTHER knows the power of his enemies—he returns to his home, packs, flees into the night …

Whew.

It was clear at this point why $5 million had been spent. I thought it was just about the best
opening of a commercial novel I had ever read. It was also clear that I was not reading the book strictly for pleasure. Sure, that’s present and crucial—

—but I was also being asked to turn it into a movie. And clearly, it was not going to be easy money at the brick factory.

More new characters who weren’t leaving soon:

GLORIA RUSSELL, the Chief of Staff

BILL BURTON, the veteran Secret Service guy

TIM COLLIN, the young hotshot

And let us not forget—

JACK GRAHAM, pretty clearly to be the hero

KATE WHITNEY, even though she hasn’t done much yet

JENNIFER BALDWIN, the rich and beautiful fiancée

Along with, please remember—

LUTHER WHITNEY, the great old thief

CHRISTY SULLIVAN, the philandering blonde

THE WELL-DRESSED MAN, now revealed as PRESIDENT ALAN RICHMOND, whom she was philandering with

Nine
characters now.

And counting.

I finished the book and then did something I have never done before when offered an assignment—I read the whole thing again. And as I did, I became convinced that more and more characters who appeared were crucial to the story. Here are some of them:

SETH FRANK, the detective trying to solve it all,
maybe the lead

WANDA BROOME, who conceived the break-in with LUTHER

WALTER SULLIVAN, the good billionaire and wronged husband

SANDY LORD, SULLIVAN’s lawyer and a power in Washington

LAURA SIMON, SETH’s top aide, who ties LUTHER to the crime

MR. FLANDERS, a bystander who photographed the attempt on LUTHER’s life

MICHAEL McCARTY, world’s top assassin, hired to kill LUTHER

And just in case you went to the kitchen for a snack—

GLORIA RUSSELL, the Chief of Staff

BILL BURTON, the veteran Secret Service guy

TIM COLLIN, the young hotshot

And let us not forget—

JACK GRAHAM, pretty clearly to be the hero

KATE WHITNEY, even though she hasn’t done much yet

JENNIFER BALDWIN, the rich and beautiful fiancée

Along with, please remember—

LUTHER WHITNEY, the great old thief

CHRISTY SULLIVAN, the philandering blonde

THE WELL-DRESSED MAN, now revealed as PRESIDENT ALAN RICHMOND, whom she was philandering with

You
add it up, it’s too horrible.

You simply cannot have that many characters in a movie today. It’s confusing, it’s a turnoff, and in terms of movie storytelling, it’s just wrong.

And wrong more than ever
now,
when the hunger for a
vehicle role, a locomotive (as they sometimes refer to the male lead Out There), has reached hysterical heights.

Even worse than the number of characters was this:
there was no star part.

LUTHER was the best character, but he could not be the star, for many reasons, chiefly this: in a great shocker, he is murdered halfway through by order of the President.

No to LUTHER.

JACK GRAHAM, the young lawyer, was maybe the biggest part. But he didn’t come into the story till very late, and the star must enter early.

No to JACK GRAHAM.

SETH FRANK was the cop on the trail. But he didn’t solve all that much.

Couldn’t be SETH FRANK.

What’s a mother to
do
 … ?

I called Shafer and said I would like to try it, and I would try to write ten good roles—because that was what the material called for. Shafer said this: “It’s okay. We’ll go with ten one-million-dollar actors rather than one ten-million-dollar one.”

All I had to do now was write the bastard.

Why did I say yes?

Because I had not done a flat-out thriller since
Marathon Man,
twenty years earlier, and was anxious to try another. Because it was Castle Rock, the best movie studio for writers in my third of a century of writing screenplays.

And because Baldacci, bless him, had written
three
sensational sequences. The opening sixty-page rough sex with the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES; the double assassination attempt to kill LUTHER, with both COLLIN and M
C
CARTY having point-blank shots at the old guy, and, maybe most moving of all, LUTHER’s shocking murder by COLLIN, which comes at a time when the reader thinks LUTHER is finally safe.

Wonderful stuff.

These three, I felt—they had to run a total of fifty pages at least—were so strong they would support the remainder of the screenplay, no matter how badly I might screw things up.

Aside to young screenwriters: no, I am not bullshitting when I say this last. I am always terrified I am going to screw everything up. The most hideous advice—and at the same time the most releasing—was given to me by George Roy Hill, still and always the greatest director I ever worked with. I had just taken on the job of trying to make the famous Woodward-Bernstein Watergate book somehow translate to screen. Hill, a world-class sadist, looked at me, and these were his words: “
All the President’s Men
? Everybody’s going to be waiting for that one.” And here he smiled. “Don’t fuck it up.”

At a Knicks game recently I ran into Ben Stiller, who has his own demons trying to figure out the glorious
Budd Schulberg book
What Makes Sammy Run?
Naturally I was kind, told him this: “Don’t fuck it up.”

He kind of smiled …

May, 1995.

I called this draft
Not Executive Power,
because I thought Baldacci’s title so damaging—there were already several other movies ahead of us in the pipeline that also were called “Executive” something or other.
Even more important, at least to me, was this: I kept forgetting the name of the novel when people asked me what I was working on.

The first script ran 145 pages—too long, I knew that, but I also knew that the crucial thing for me in this initial pass was to get the story written. And then read it.

I never read anything I’ve written till I’m done. If I did, I would be so appalled at the crimes I’d committed, I would never be finished rewriting the first scene.

I wrote it.

I read it.

Ugh.

It looked like a screenplay. If you lifted it up, it hoisted like a screenplay.

But it just kind of laid there.

No one to really root for—

—except old LUTHER, who died halfway through.

Not having someone to root for is a terrible problem.

But an even bigger problem was this: the story didn’t end, it just stopped.

Endings are just a bitch. (Tattoo that behind your eyelids.)

The best
ending of mine, I think, is
Butch Cassidy.
And I like the “As you wish” in
The Princess Bride.

Endings in thrillers are particularly brutal. At least they have been for me. I’ve tried several
—Marathon Man, No Way to Treat a Lady, Magic, Control, Brothers.
If you read any of them, chances are, if you remember them at all, it’s not for the way they concluded.

Maybe it’s because the initial pulse for the story was played out before the ending came.
Marathon Man,
at least as I remember, came from two ideas: (1) What if someone in your family whom you knew and loved wasn’t remotely what you had thought? (Babe—Dustin Hoffman in the movie—has no idea his beloved brother, Doc—
Roy Scheider—is a spy and not a businessman); (2) What if the world’s most wanted Nazi came to Manhattan? (Szell—Olivier,
yesss
—has to come here to retrieve his diamond fortune from a bank, if it was safe for him to go there.)

Well, by the time blood had been spilled, by the time Olivier had slaughtered Scheider and Hoffman had cornered Olivier, it was just a matter of mixing and matching. I had nothing much more up my sleeve.

David Baldacci (curse him) didn’t have a sleeveful either. The manuscript I read ended like this: in the last chapter, SETH FRANK, the
detective who’s been in charge of the CHRISTY SULLIVAN murder case, comes to the White House along with a bunch of law enforcement officials and arrests PRESIDENT ALAN RICHMOND. RICHMOND says that as President, legally he can’t be served with anything. SETH replies that after his impeachment he’ll be plain ALAN RICHMOND again and when that happens, he’s going to trial.