Read Which Lie Did I Tell? Online
Authors: William Goldman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Film & Video, #Nonfiction, #Performing Arts, #Retail
Which Lie Did I Tell? (41 page)
There’s a lot of other stuff I’d use, too. I love it when there he is in a neighbor’s kitchen, banging away with the milk carton. And the disappearance, searching for Chee•tos, I’d sure put that in. (Foreshadowing, as they say.) Plus maybe a family outing where you see what a dolphin he is, how happy and tireless he is in the water (Foreshadowing II).
And I think you have to have a scene, maybe in the family, maybe at school, where you talk about Taylor and what his limitations are and
why his mother is raising him this way, with as much freedom as he can handle. And I’d probably want something in school, to show that he wasn’t the most popular kid on the block.
Note: this story cannot be cute like
Rainman.
You betray the heart of the material if you phony it up. Look, I liked
Rainman
too, was glad it won the Oscar that terrible year—but I was always aware that I was watching Hollywood Horseshit. I knew nothing was going to happen to poor little Dusty. And that he and Cruise—who for me gave the performance that made the movie work—were going to tug at my heartstrings and leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling.
I want more from
The Dolphin.
I don’t mean more in terms of accolades or box-office glory—I want you to be rocked by the fucking glory of Taylor’s survival and at the same time be aware that this kid is not going to turn into Cary Grant and have
Katharine Hepburn chasing after him. And his family is always going to suffer pain. End of note.
Back to Taylor. I think you throw in as much as you can of what everyday life was like for him before he went floating away. But I also think this: that is not going to take very long. I would guess that at the latest, by the twentieth minute, Taylor has begun his journey. This is a hundred-minute flick.
Now here is what you must know: I cannot write this picture. I do not know remotely how and I’ll go further and say this: I don’t know that it
can
be done.
There is a legal phrase that is used in music-plagiarism suits, the kind of thing that always seems to swirl around
Andrew Lloyd Webber. You know, someone appears from somewhere and claims they wrote “Memory,” or something along those lines.
The money part.
That’s the phrase, “the money part,” and it means this: the heart of the song. That part of the song that makes it what it is. Well, movies have money parts, too—not all of them, maybe, but a lot. And in this case it is clearly not the looking after cows or the milk carton.
It’s the trip.
That amazing four-day, fourteen-mile trip.
By a ten-year-old.
An autistic one, please.
Through an area where four Rangers
died.
Through thunderstorms.
And snakes and alligators.
That is the money part. And a fabulous one it is. With but one problem—
—how do you write that in a screenplay?
Remember, earlier, when I talked of the
limitations of the form? Well, I think we have run smack into one. I don’t want to make this mechanical, but listen—for me, the climax is when he is found. From there until the end cannot take more than a couple of minutes, five at the most. We have to fill eighty minutes of screen time, remember. Eliminate the end, and we’re down to seventy-five.
We need and will want some family scenes. There’s the “Have you seen Taylor?” scene. And the calling-the-police scene. And the planes-leaving-their-airstrips-and-going-looking scenes. And the search-on-foot scenes. And a couple of family scenes.
But they all must be
short.
Because our heart is not here, we want to be with Taylor and what
happens to him.
Give all these scenes together fifteen minutes. Want to make it twenty? You’ve got twenty.
We still have an
hour
to fill with Taylor.
And all he does is dolphin along.
Sure, sometimes there is the thunder. But how many nights of that can you have? And sure, a couple of snake scenes. And the same number of alligator scenes.
But nothing happens to the kid.
He gets scratched, period. He can’t get bitten by the poisonous snakes or he would die and if they are nonpoisonous, who gives a shit? The gators can’t catch him or they would munch him. And how often can he just barely get away?
How do we fill the time?
There is a similar true event that has a similar problem, the single most famous act of courage of the twentieth century—
Charles Lindbergh’s solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.
It was made into a movie thirty years later,
The Spirit of St. Louis.
Written mostly and directed by one of the all-timers,
Billy Wilder. Wilder miscast his picture fatally—the almost fifty-year-old Jimmy Stewart as the twenty-five-year-old Lindbergh. (For
The Dolphin
we are not going to get
Matt Damon.) He also gave the Lindbergh character flashbacks.
But we can’t give Taylor flashbacks. In the first place, he probably can’t remember much, and if he could, how much suspense can we build into a memory of him blowing out his candles when he was, say, six?
Wilder also gave Lindbergh—and this is not, let me preface quickly here, something Mr. Wilder wants festooned across his tombstone—
a fly.
You got it right, a common housefly that somehow gets into the plane and gives Lindbergh someone to talk to. (Stewart, apparently less than thrilled with the device, once told Wilder, “Either the fly goes or I go.”)
But impoverished as the fly might be, we can’t even do that—
Taylor
doesn’t talk.
And if you give him words, how often can you hear him say “Want Chee•tos”?
I love this story so and it moves me continually and we all know that anything can be a movie, but I’m not sure about Taylor and his Odyssey. Oh, you can cheat it. You can make the mom the hero or, if you get a star, he’d love to be the one who fought the snakes and killed the alligators as he swam through this deadly terrain for his beloved son.
But that is not the story that moved me.
If you can make this play, if you can fix it so I can see this story and have it be honest and simple and all that good stuff, I would probably give you my Knicks tickets.
Or at least think about it …
Whenever I am offered a movie job, I always view it with two very different hats—my artist’s hat and my hooker’s hat.
My artist’s hat asks: Can I make it wonderful?
The hooker wants to know only: Will it get made?
If I can’t make it wonderful, obviously I can’t accept. The reasoning is pretty obvious: Why struggle knowing you will fail from the beginning?
In truth, I cannot remember ever having turned down something I loved because I felt it was too uncommercial. If I were given a brilliant novel dealing with six octogenarians in the death ward of a cancer hospital, I’m sure I would pass. But not before trying to get the producer to get it done on television, especially someplace like HBO, which doesn’t have to deal with the problem of selling in the same way.
When I am offered a doctoring job, however, neither hat is necessary. Doctoring is about one thing only:
craft.
I am dealing with a maimed and dying beast and the only question is: Have I the skill to surgically repair it?
I should add this here: except in very rare occasions, I never doctor a flick that isn’t gearing up for production. So often, executives will tell me that if I just doctor their invalid, they can almost certainly promise we will become a “go.”
Screenwriters get blamed for most failures anyway, and the great thing for me about doctoring is that for once,
I am the fucking hero. I
am the stud with the white hat who alone can bring peace to Dodge.
Doctoring, you should know, is not new. Studios in the thirties and forties, when everyone was under contract, jobbed in writer after writer as a matter of course. The reason you are reading about it now in the media is because of cassettes and residuals. There is real money attached to being given a screen credit now. If the movie is a hit, I should think hundreds of thousands of dollars.
When
Stepmom
opened to less than glorious reviews, the critics had a problem: they couldn’t blame Julia, couldn’t blame Susan, they never blame the director. So who was responsible? Obviously the
five
listed screenwriters. Easy target. It’s so easy to write something like: “It took five screenwriters to turn out this piece of shit?”
Let us pause and think, but for a moment, of the logic behind that. Why would a studio keep spending more and more money for screenwriters unless there is a very good reason? I know nothing about this movie but I do know the reason:
ego clashes. I will bet the farm that Julia had to have her person fix up her part, then Ms. Sarandon (whom I adore and have ever since she ruined a movie I wrote called
The Great Waldo Pepper
by being so entrancing and sympathetic she threw the movie out of whack) brought in her pet. And there’s
Chris Columbus, the most successful director of the decade whom you never heard of (I think he ranks just behind Cameron and Spielberg in terms of movie grosses)—well, he had to direct the thing, so he had to bring in his guys. On and on.
I haven’t read the screenplay but I’ll bet this: the movie got worse with each new writer.
A lot of top directors never change writers. Lean and George Roy Hill didn’t. Kazan didn’t. Eastwood never does. And if God cursed me and made me be a film director, I wouldn’t dream of changing. Part of the adventure is who you go into battle with.
Who cares.
Script doctors do not care.
Because most critics and media writers still think screenplays are dialogue, I don’t care how often I tell you this—dialogue is one of the
least
important parts of any flick.
So if doctoring isn’t about flashy talk scenes, what is it?
There’s no one answer possible, it depends on why the movie is in trouble.
Jerry Belsen is famous Out There for helping
Back to School
be a huge hit for
Rodney Dangerfield. Belsen supposedly said three words that changed everything:
“Make Rodney rich.”
That’s good doctoring. And if he didn’t write a word of dialogue, it’s
still
good doctoring. I worked on
Twins
for four weeks and if you asked
Ivan Reitman what I did that helped make it a worldwide success he would say two things.
I wrote the credit sequence where the twins are born—and in the crib, one of them is already tormenting the other. Reitman feels that got the movie off to a solid start.
Twins
was a story when I got there about these two mismatched guys who came together and went looking for their mother, who was dead.
The big thing I did was convince Reitman that the mother had to be alive. If you look at the movie today I don’t think you can imagine it with the mom already among the departed.
Twins
took in close to a quarter of a billion dollars worldwide at the box office. Allowing for inflation, double that. A monster. What was that one idea worth? You decide.
When Richard Attenborough asked me to come in and help with
Chaplin,
I read several books about the man. And I thought it might make a terrific flick.
Because of his childhood.
Charlie had one of those lives even Dickens wouldn’t have dared dream up. Poverty, sure, lots of that. Love, nope, none of that. But a lot of people are poor and unloved, no big deal.
It was the madness that rocked me. Chaplin had madness in his family. His mother was insane. And when he was a teenager,
he had to put her in a lunatic asylum.
I ended
All the President’s Men
on a fuck-up by Woodward
and Bernstein. My logic was that time had proven them right, had made them rich, famous, media darlings of their time. So the audience, I hoped, would carry that out with them so we did not have to tell them how wonderful were Bob and Carl.
Chaplin’s horrible early life stayed with him as he performed and came to America and got to Hollywood and—this is true now—for reasons no one will ever know, he was doing a movie and wandered into a prop-and-costume shack, tried this on, that on—and exited as the tramp. Arguably the most famous image in the first century of film was born full-blown that day. He went in as Charlie, came out a little later with the shoes and the hat and the cane, and stood there blinking in the sunlight.
That’s
how I wanted to end the movie. This unknown little guy, blinking and maybe experimentally waving his cane around and walking that most famous of all walks.
My logic was the same as the Watergate flick—the audience
knew
what happened to the tramp. Let’s leave before that.
Attenborough, a very bright man, understood my point. He had a different problem. He loved the childhood, yes, but he was just as moved by the end of Charlie’s life, when, ancient and infirm, he was at last allowed back to Hollywood for his honorary Oscar in 1977. If you have seen that real footage, you know how moving it was. If you haven’t, try and find it somewhere. It will rock you.
So Dickie loved the childhood, yes, but he also loved the old man’s return. The movie had to include both.
Problem: sixty interim years had to be covered.
I once met
Stanley Kubrick and we got to talking about what he hoped he would do next (alas). Napoleon, he said. I asked what part and this was his reply:
“Everything. I want to do the whole sweep of a man’s life.”
Problem: movies don’t do that well.
I would love to know how Kubrick would have attacked the problem. Because it’s not just the makeup that bothers you in time passing. The script I was handed for
Chaplin
was full of moments where some guy you never met would come into a scene and say this kind of thing to Charlie:
“Charlie Chaplin, how are you, I’m Major Dorsey, I worked in the lunatic asylum where your mother is and she asked me to say she forgives you and is doing fine.”
Or: “Charlie Chaplin, my Lord, it’s been ten years since we last saw each other, back in London it was, when my daughter played the ingenue in that West End revival of
The Importance of Being Earnest
and you liked her and we met backstage. This was just before you got her pregnant.”
In other words, it was
clunky.
Sir Dickie wanted me to come in and somehow, to use his word, “declunk” it.
I came up with the Tony Hopkins part. I decided that since Chaplin wrote an autobiography, and since he was a famous man living in Switzerland, it would not be ridiculous if his book editor came from London to discuss final revisions. The editor could ask whatever questions we wanted to get us to the next dramatic sequence. And could also, if possible, shoulder some of the dreaded exposition that infiltrated the story.
Chaplin
was a worldwide commercial flop. What was one idea worth? You decide.
Doctoring is tricky, particularly when it comes to taking credit for success (or blame for failure). Of course, what I’m best known for of late is the the doctoring job I did on
Good Will Hunting.
If you go on the Net and look up my credits, there it is, the previously uncredited work on that Oscar-winning smash.
The truth? I did not just doctor it. I wrote the whole thing from scratch. Though I had spent at most but a month of my life in Boston, and though I was sixty-five when the movie came out, I have been obsessed since my Chicago childhood with class as it exists in that great Massachusetts city. My basic problem was not the wonderful story or the genuine depth of the characters I created, it was that no one would believe I wrote it. It was such a departure for me.
What’s a mother to do? Here was my solution—I had met these two very untalented, very out-of-work performers, Affleck and Damon. They were both in need of money. The deal we struck was this: I would give them initial credit, they would front for me at the start, and then, once we were set up, the truth would come out.
You know what happened. Mirimax got the flick, decided to use them in the leads, decided I would kill the commercial value of the flick if the truth were known.
Harvey Weinstein gave me a lot of money for my silence, plus 20 percent of the gross.
Which is why I’m writing this from the Riviera.
I think the reason the world was so anxious to believe Matt Damon and Ben Affleck didn’t write their script was simple jealousy. They were young and cute and famous; kill the fuckers.
I remember when a national magazine called and said they had been told I wrote it, I literally screamed at the writer. I have had this kind of thing on occasion before and I hate it a lot. If you write something and that something has quality, how awful to have the world think the work belonged to others.
The real truth is that Castle Rock had the movie first, and Rob Reiner, no fool he, was given it for comments. Rob had one biggie.
Affleck and Damon in an early draft had a whole subplot about how the government was after Damon, the math genius, to do subversive work for them. There were chases and action scenes, and what Rob told them was this: lose that aspect and stick with the characters.
When I read it, and spent a day with the writers, all I said was this: Rob’s dead right.
Period. Total contribution: zero.
But I’ll bet in some corner of your little dark hearts, you’re still saying bullshit. I mean, it’s been five years and what else have they done?
Nada.
Now I’ll tell you the
real
truth. Every word is mine. Not only that, I’m the guy who convinced James Cameron that the ship had to hit the iceberg …