Which Lie Did I Tell? (29 page)

And I know this: that is going to be some fucking bowling match. I don’t know if either Goodman or Turturro is going to survive the thing, but
I cannot wait.

Guess what? Not only is there no bowling contest, the Coens never even
thought
of having one. For them, it was just background for character. Well guess what?—they’re
wrong,
because I want to see Goodman kick Turturro’s ass.

The Coens, whatever their billing says, both do everything—write, produce, direct. They show up pretty much every day at their office on
the West Side, do a kind of nine-to-five thing, but most of the time they wouldn’t glorify what they do by saying it’s writing.

They often set scripts aside, as they did
Fargo,
after about sixty pages were done. They wrote a stage direction—“Interior. Shep’s apartment. Carl is banging an escort.” There it stood for a year and a half. They may have as many as half a dozen scripts stashed away around their office. I don’t know about you, but if they’re close to being
Fargo,
I wish they’d get cracking.

Fargo
is the story of a complicated crime that goes very wrong.

An automobile dealer needs money. What he decides to do is have his wife kidnapped and split the ransom money—courtesy of his father-in-law—with the kidnapers. (His wife is wealthy, he is not, and his father-in-law openly despises him.)

The kidnappers do not know each other well, and when they spend time together, it turns out they despise each other, too.

The dealer gives the kidnappers a car as the first installment of what they will eventually receive. In the meantime, he is harassed at work by people trying to buy cars from him, and at home, where he is trying to put together a deal with his father-in-law that will render the kidnapping unnecessary. He strikes out.

The kidnappers abduct his wife. They are driving through the area of Brainerd, Minnesota, with the wife in the backseat. They are in their new car. A cop stops them—the chattier of the two has forgotten to put tags on the car. The cop leaves his motor running, his lights on, and comes over to the car where the wife is lying on the floor in the rear. The chatty one tells the silent one that he will handle things. He tries to bribe the cop, who will have none of it, and when the officer asks the chatty kidnapper to please step out of the car, the silent one shoots him dead.

The chatty one is stunned at this, but he gets out of the car in the snow and starts to drag the dead cop off the road.

At this moment, another car drives by, slows, sees the chatty one dragging the cop away, and then takes off.

The silent kidnapper pursues them, and after the car chase has gone on a while, realizes they have pulled off the road. He does the same, finds them, kills two more.

Blackout.

We hear a phone ringing, a couple are in bed, it’s the middle of the night. The woman answers, says she’ll be right there. The man, her husband, says he will fix her some eggs, she needs her strength.

We see, as she gets out of bed, that whoever she is, she is pregnant.

Now, in a quick breakfast scene, we see she is also a police officer. And it’s clear she is going to the crime scene. Where she has zero chance of ever solving the madness we have just seen unfold.

Why did I say that the work is done in this movie about one-third of the way through?

No logical reason, but I remember that when I saw
Fargo
the first time, after that scene I felt a sense of peace. I have seen everything the Coens have done, and I know they are perverse. But I could not conceive that even the Coens could kill Marge. (My God,
Frances McDormand is
married
to Joel. No way he offs his wife.) Which means I have faith I can give her my heart.

And that whole insane opening? I thought the whole
movie
was going to be about unraveling that baby. So when she nails it right out of the chute, you bet I relaxed. How could I not? I was going to spend another hour with one of the major movie characters of the decade. And I didn’t
care
if at times she was less dazzling than here. I just wanted to be along on the ride.

So, yes, for me, here, even this early, the work is done.

Decades past, Bob Towne and I had the same agent, the late and very great
Evarts Ziegler—we are in the ’60s now—and Towne was already
the
script doctor. He was this mysterious figure and he seemed to have fixed
everything,
but his cover was blown at the Oscars in ’72 when
Francis Ford Coppola thanked him from the microphone for his help with
The Godfather.

The odd thing about his writing—I can still hear Ziegler trying to
make sense of this—was that when he doctored, he was
fast,
met deadlines, etc., but on his own stuff, death. Paint dried more quickly.

Chinatown
took a while.

Towne had the two rapes from the start—the rape of the land and the rape of the woman. His problem was which to lead with, how to knot them together, and that was hard.

The scene that follows, the confessional if you will—one of the most famous in modern films—amazingly enough
did not work.
It was in a couple of different places in the script. And one day Towne was meeting with the director,
Roman Polanski, and they both knew there was something wrong, it was no fucking good, and suddenly they both realized that a confession of this depth is not casually spoken, it is bled, battered out of someone, and the force of revelation struck Towne: Nicholson would have to beat the truth out of Dunaway. The moment he knew that, the scene was written in half an hour.

Remember that no film, before it comes out, is a classic. We fantasize, sure. But usually only in the privacy of our own rooms. I remember when George Roy Hill and I were working on
Butch;
during a break we started talking about our hopes for the film. One of us, could have been me, said, “I just want it to be remembered as being as good as
The Gunfighter.
” (Check it out at your video store.)

And when you luck into a classic, as
Chinatown
turned out to be, certain moments and actors take your memory. Here, obviously, you think of Nicholson with his cut nose, Dunaway trying to control her crumbling world. But the great performance in the movie, for me anyway, and the greatest role, is neither of those.