Which Lie Did I Tell? (18 page)

I had a chance for Clint Eastwood in the Clint Eastwood part.
And I wanted that.

November 15 and good news—maybe
Frank Darabont would spitball with me. (Darabond had one of the great directing debuts with
The Shawshank Redemption
and wrote that remarkable script.)

Close—but he had other commitments.

November 25 and I haven’t started.

And I am drowning.

That night the Knicks beat Houston. (I am—not even arguably—one
of the four all-time great Knicks fans.) But even better than the victory was this: I took Tony Gilroy to the game.

Tony
(Dolores Claiborne, Extreme Measures)
is someone I have known for thirty years, since he was ten, which was when I met and interviewed his father, Frank, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright (
The Subject Was Roses
) for a book I was writing about Broadway,
The Season.

“So what’s with
Absolute Power
?” he asked politely; Tony had read the first draft months and months before.

I know Tony well, so I unloaded. I told him I was panicked. I told him of the impossibility of my ever sleeping again. I told him it was doubtful I would live beyond the weekend. And all because this, you should pardon the expression,
actor
had come up with the idea of having Luther live and bring down the President.

“That’s great,”
Tony said.

At the moment, death by thumbscrew would have been letting him off easy. “Why?”

“It’s so obvious why—Luther’s the best character. He’s always been the best character—and when he dies, he takes the movie down with him.”

Kind of casually I asked, “You think you could figure out how to do what Eastwood wants?”

He was intent on the game. “Haven’t thought about it,” he shrugged. Then this: “But it shouldn’t be hard.”

That night I called Shafer and Tony was hired for a week.

The next morning he came blasting in—“I know where Luther goes right after the robbery—he goes to see his daughter.”

“Can’t.”

“Why do you say that?”

“
They never talk.
Baldacci is very clear on that in the novel. They don’t talk before the murder because they are estranged, and they can’t after because he’s afraid the President will kill her—”

“Forget about the novel—I haven’t read the novel—my main strength is that I haven’t read the novel—
the novel is killing you.
”

“They can’t talk and that’s that!”

“Think about it, for chrissakes.”

Later that day, I not only thought about it, I wrote it. Here’s the first LUTHER-KATE scene:

I don’t think I can ever explain how freeing that scene was for me.

These two characters, whom I had been thinking about for six months and who had never been allowed to talk to each other, were suddenly ripping at each other. And there’s all that emotional father-daughter stuff working under, because
you
know LUTHER knows if he doesn’t run, the PRESIDENT will kill him—but he’s willing to risk all that just to hear his only child ask him to stay.

I am aware we are not talking about a scene that will change the
course of film history. But I was grateful to be able to write it. I think what I was dealing with was this: I started as a novelist, was a novelist for a decade before I ever saw a screenplay, and in part of my head at least, even though I haven’t tried one in a dozen years now, I’m still a novelist. And I guess I never thought I would do that to another novelist, change everything. God knows it’s been done to me—the novel
No Way to Treat a Lady,
for example, was based on this notion: What if there were
two
Boston Stranglers, and what if one of them got jealous of the other?

Guess what? In the movie, there’s only one strangler. And I hated that they had done that.

Now here I was doing it.

And thank the Good Lord.

Tony came over for the next few days, always bringing ideas with him. LUTHER should have a safe house. If LUTHER is one of the great thieves of the world—and he is—there can’t be too many like him, and law enforcement agencies must keep track of him—which meant SETH and LUTHER could meet without SETH doing a great deal of time-wasting detective work.

Most of all, Tony solved the ending—because the only person in the story who has the right to take revenge against PRESIDENT RICHMOND is the wronged husband, WALTER SULLIVAN. SULLIVAN is the reason RICHMOND made it to the White House, after all. In earlier versions, as in the novel, SULLIVAN is murdered by the Secret Service.

Guess what—not this time. He lives and he kills the PRESIDENT. SULLIVAN and LUTHER, two previously dead characters, bring down the most powerful man on earth. And JACK GRAHAM, the hero of the first draft?

Gone. Totally out of the picture.

On the fifteenth of December I was exhausted. But I was done. I sent the third draft of
Absolute Power
to California.

On the twenty-eighth of December, Eastwood said “yes” to playing LUTHER.

And right after that, I smashed my thumb.

I was closing the refrigerator door and forgot to pull my thumb away in time and I creamed myself and a blood blister formed beneath the nail and it took six months for the blister to work its way up, to finally disappear.

Every time I looked at it, I was glad—because it reminded me of two things: first, of my most difficult time as a screenwriter. Because I know
if I don’t take Tony to the Houston game, or if he can’t come, maybe the movie of
Absolute Power
never happens. Certainly, I would no longer have been involved.

And second, and most important of all: the fragility of writing careers.

Not entirely true. I had interviewed him nearly a decade earlier, for a book I was writing,
Hype and Glory,
about my experiences judging the Cannes Film Festival and the Miss America Contest. Eastwood’s flick that year,
Bird,
was the outstanding directing achievement of the fortnight and I tried to win that honor for him, was outvoted. (
Bird,
in case you don’t know, is one of the genuinely underrated films of the ’80s and as good a movie about music as any. Ever.)

He was, as he is, gracious, gave me the time I needed. He was, as he approached sixty, very much a legend—

—and then here’s what happened to him—

—he got hot!

In the Line of Fire, Unforgiven, A Perfect World, The Bridges of Madison County.
Starred in all four, directed three, got a directing Oscar for one, all of them enormous successes, in America, yes, even more in the rest of the world.

Never a career like it. (Others have been up there longer, but not without gigantic career dips and slides.) Having said that, it still doesn’t score to outsiders as it should. Maybe this will put it in perspective. He has been ranked the biggest box-office star five different times. Here are the performers who ranked second to him each year.

What I’m trying to tell you is this: we are not dealing with the guy who plays the butler.

He had decided in early January he would also direct
Absolute Power.
I fought mightily against this, lost the battle. (That was a joke, for any of you just in from distant lands.)

February was when we had our first script meeting. A couple of Castle Rock people and I drove over to Malpaso’s offices on the Warner Brothers lot, Malpaso being Eastwood’s production company. A lot of hits have come from there, and Hollywood people tend to be just a little ego-ridden about the positioning and size of their offices—sort of the West Coast equivalent of penis enlargement.

We walked into Malpaso. Tasteful. Fine. But by no means a spot where
Jack Warner or
Harry Cohn would have been happy. We were greeted by a young couple,
Tom and Melissa Rooker. I assumed the rest of the Malpaso staff was elsewhere. Turned out I was wrong.
They
were the rest of the Malpaso staff. “He’s in there,” one of them said and pointed to a small office. And in there he was.