Which Lie Did I Tell? (17 page)

Not heart-pounding, but solid enough.

The epilogue is the quagmire.

JACK GRAHAM, KATE’s onetime lawyer fiancé, has gone on a trip and come back to Washington and
knows nothing
of recent events, such as the murder trial of the PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. “Inconceivable,” as
Vizzini used to say. SETH FRANK comes to visit him and fills JACK in on what’s been happening. COLLIN got twenty years to life, GLORIA RUSSELL got 1,000 hours of community service, RICHMOND lied on the stand, was torn apart on cross, was found guilty and given the death penalty.

Clearly, I had to come up with an exciting ending.

My brain chose this time to go on holiday.

So did I, and on Christmas afternoon of 1994 I found myself walking around a polo field in Barbados with John and
Alyce Cleese, whining about my ending problem. One of them, I think it was Alyce, said, “Why doesn’t another woman kill him?”

I wrote it as soon as I got home.

Not Executive Power
ended this way: SETH the detective hero and JACK the lawyer hero go to the White House and meet with the PRESIDENT, who denies everything and has letters (false but sworn to) backing up his case. He then explains why they can’t touch him. And indeed, they can’t. He has too much power, too many who will lie for him. JACK and SETH leave in wild frustration.

Then we cut to the exterior of another mansion. Then inside, to the corridor outside the master bedroom. COLLIN paces, RUSSELL works on her appointment book.

Now a woman’s cry comes from inside. They glance at each other, shrug. Nothing they haven’t heard so many times. Then another feminine cry, louder. They go on as before.

Then
gunfire
from the bedroom.

COLLIN and RUSSELL rush inside to see a naked, drunk blonde holding a gun. “He dared me,” she says.

And RICHMOND lies alongside her, shot in the heart.

Finally and briefly, a cemetery. We hear Bernard Shaw telling CNN viewers that RICHMOND’s sudden fatal heart attack has shocked the nation but we’ve been through worse and we’ll come through this, too.

We’re at LUTHER’s grave now. JACK and KATE, LUTHER’s daughter, pay their last respects to the old guy.

Final fade-out.

Stephen Sondheim once said this: “I cannot write a bad song. You begin it here, build, end there. The words will lay properly on the music so they can be sung, that kind of thing. You may hate it, but it will be a proper song.”

I sometimes feel that way about my screenplays. I’ve been doing them for so long now, and I’ve attempted most genres. I know about entering the story as late as possible, entering each scene as late as possible, that kind of thing. You may hate it, but it will be a proper screenplay.

This first draft was proper as hell—you just didn’t give a shit.

I met with the Castle Rock people. They still wanted to make
Absolute Power
(by now, Baldacci had come up with the better title). They just didn’t want to make
this
version of the story.

Yes, they knew they had said write ten terrific parts, we’ll be fine. But the problem with doing it the way I had done it was this: there was no one to root for. Couldn’t I write someone we could care about besides LUTHER, who dies so soon? In other words, was there somewhere in the material—please, God—a star part? Because that’s what the movie needed.

I agreed with them.

But the same problem still haunted me—

—there was not now and had never been a star part.

October, 1995.

I must explain something about the way I work. I have always only done movies I wanted to do—which means caring for
and being faithful to
the source material.

I had never changed a story this much.

If
I could figure out how to do it at all. I pored over and over my three star-part choices.

Still by far the best character in both the book and the movie.
But he had to die.
Not just because of a wonderful chance for a strong scene. LUTHER’s death provided the impact the story needed to sustain itself. Morally and viscerally.

Definitely could not be LUTHER.

The logical choice, really. He ends up with the girl, LUTHER’s daughter, KATE, so he carries that emotion with him. Also, he is close to LUTHER—he’s the one LUTHER turns to when he decides to try and expose PRESIDENT RICHMOND.

Problem: That happens literally halfway through the novel (and on
this page
of my 145-page first draft).

Could I bring JACK in earlier?

Sure. This wasn’t a documentary, I could do anything I wanted. There
was
no JACK. He was a character in a novel, for chrissakes. I could open the damn movie with JACK being born if I wanted to.

But if I did bring him in earlier, he would have just stood there. He had nothing really to do till LUTHER came to him for help.

So could I
really
bring JACK in earlier?

Not without totally changing everything and making it JACK’s movie—but it
couldn’t
be, because
JACK wasn’t in the goddam vault,
and what was seen from that vault, and its consequences,
had
to be the story.

Definitely could not be JACK.

SETH, the detective trying to solve the murder, might seem even more logical. Detectives are traditionally there from the uncovering of the crime till the solution.

But not here.

The crime itself is not only a high point of the whole story, it also takes thirty pages of the first draft. And and and—SETH doesn’t detect all that much. JACK solves his share too.

Definitely could not be SETH.

A double hero would be best.

Problem: I’d already tried it that way in the first draft. With JACK and SETH. And failed.

“Sheeesh,” as Calvin used to tell us.

I went over them again and again.

LUTHER? No.

JACK? No.

SETH? No.

If you happened to be walking near Seventy-seventh Street and Madison Avenue during the early fall of 1995, that sound you heard was me screaming.

Finally, blessedly, I remembered Mr. Abbott.

One of the great breaks of my career came in 1960, when I was among those called in to doctor a musical in very deep trouble,
Tenderloin.
The show eventually was not a success. But the experience was profound.

George Abbott, the legitimately legendary Broadway figure, was the director of the show—he was closing in on seventy-five during our months together and hotter than ever. All in all, Mr. Abbott was connected with more famous and successful shows than anyone else in history, as producer, director, writer, or star. (We are talking about one of those careers—if you are a sports fan, think of the Babe or Wilt.)

Mr. Abbott was a big man, six-two maybe, ramrod straight. Someone once wrote of him: “If he’s ever late, you figure there’s been an accident.” The most totally professional man that ever walked the earth.

And as I was going through my second draft of
Absolute Power
madness, I remembered a Mr. Abbott moment. He was coming from backstage during rehearsals, and as he crossed the stage into the auditorium he noticed a dozen dancers were just standing there. The choreographer sat in the audience alone, his head in his hands.

“What’s going on?” Mr. Abbott asked him.

The choreographer looked at Mr. Abbott, shook his head. “I can’t figure out what they should do next.”

Mr. Abbott never stopped moving. He jumped the three feet from the stage to the aisle. “Well, have them do
something
!” Mr. Abbott said.
“That way we’ll have something to change.”

The choreographer got off his ass, started moving the dancers.

As I remembered Mr. Abbott, I got off
my
ass, too. We were not going to shoot the second draft, I reminded myself.
So just write something so we’ll have something to change.

LUTHER could not be my guy for reasons of death.

JACK could have been—his love affair with LUTHER’s daughter made that appealing. Except for this: in the novel and in the first draft, too,
LUTHER and KATE never once talked to each other.
She betrays him, arranges for his capture; but that moment when she serves as decoy is their only contact in the Baldacci story. (They are estranged and have been for years when the story begins and stay that way after the murder; LUTHER is terrified to
ever
talk to her, for fear the Secret Service might kill her on the theory that she might know something.)

I didn’t want to mess with that.

No to JACK.

So SETH, by elimination, became my star.

There was still the problem of his not solving all that much. But I figured I could help that by having him do stuff that had belonged to other characters in the novel and the first draft.

One of the ways I did this was by giving him a family. I have two daughters, Jenny and Susanna, who loved Nancy Drew when they were kids. Guess what? SETH now had twin daughters with those names who were fifteen, had outgrown Nancy but not the notion of being detectives.

The family was a way to keep SETH around, and also to get rid of exposition that other characters carried earlier. And it made SETH vulnerable, so that, near the end, when he is closing in on RICHMOND, the PRESIDENT has BURTON and COLLIN “send him a message” by instructing them to hurt his family. Which they do, driving them off the road, putting ELAINE and the TWINS in the hospital. So SETH has a huge emotional score to settle when, in the last scene, he visits the White House and brings RICHMOND down.

Not Shakespearean. But maybe an improvement over the first draft. And SETH was now at the center of pretty much everything possible. I had certainly written a star part, which was primarily what I meant to do.

I sent it out. Fingers very much crossed.

Because this draft was going to Clint Eastwood.

His agent had called while I was writing this draft and indicated he wouldn’t mind taking a look at it when it was done. And I was desperate to work with Eastwood, had been for decades. He is quietly having one of the very greatest careers. He and
John Wayne are the two most durable acting stars in the history of sound. Plus plus plus the directing.

Eastwood as SETH set the blood racing.

I had given them
something.
So at least we had something to change.

Little did he know …

December, 1995.

The second draft got out to Castle Rock around the twentieth of October. Their reaction was good—not terrific, but certainly good—and they were very appreciative about the amount of work that had gone into changing it.

Now, nothing to do but wait for Eastwood.

On the first of November Martin Shafer called to report that Eastwood definitely was reading it.

Then he called later that day and this is what he said: Eastwood had already read it. He thought it was absolutely okay.

But—

—big but—

—he had already played detectives like SETH before, and didn’t want to play that character again—

—now Shafer dropped the shoe—

—Eastwood
was
interested in playing LUTHER. He thought LUTHER was a terrific character but—

—amazingly huge but—

—but Eastwood wanted LUTHER to live and bring down the PRESIDENT.

I was rocked.

During these days of waiting, my fantasies of writing a movie for Clint Eastwood grew out of control. I grew even more desperate to work with him—

—but I simply didn’t know if I could write what he wanted.

I asked Shafer if he would commit in advance. I was terrified
of changing everything so totally—always assuming I could figure out how—only to have him say no.

The answer was he would not. He would have to read it first. (I knew that, of course. I was just frightened and floundering.)

One other problem—it was now November, I was literally starting from scratch again and I knew this:
I had to get it in before Christmas.
His agent had indicated as much, because Eastwood had taken time off after
The Bridges of Madison County
and was ready to go to work again. After Christmas he would be gone to something else, leaving me dead in the water.

I told Shafer I would have to let him know.

These were the words I wrote in my journal that night:

I spent the next days trying to come up with anything at all that might spark me, give me the confidence (always the greatest enemy) to plunge ahead.

A few days later I wrote this thought down: “LUTHER could use his street contacts—beggars who work the streets—to find out where CHRISTY SULLIVAN spent the day before she was murdered.”

Baldacci is kind of vague on what CHRISTY, the billionaire’s wife who gets murdered, did earlier that day of her tryst. I figured maybe if I could think of something exciting, it would be a way LUTHER could get incriminating evidence on PRESIDENT RICHMOND.

Snooze.

Andy Scheinman, one of the heads of Castle Rock, came to spend a couple of days with me. We got some stuff, but not a lot, and none of it splendid.

On the tenth of November I told Andy that one of three things would happen: (1) I would figure out how to do it and write it, or (2) I would realize I couldn’t write it and bow out and they could bring in someone fast to replace me, or (3) we bring in someone now to help me figure out a way to make it work.

I was floundering terribly.

The Ghost and the Darkness
was going and I had to get to South Africa, and part of the remains of my brain was trying to deal with changes for that.

I knew, generically, my problem:
I simply was too familiar with ABSOLUTE POWER
—I could not free my imagination.

And I was going nuts—every empty day meant Christmas was that much closer and I had to get it to Eastwood before then or lose him. Here is something most people don’t understand:
you never get the fucking actor you want.