Which Lie Did I Tell? (48 page)

When I get to the stage of putting the movie on my wall, I pretty much have the movie in my head. I don’t mean I’m some weird memory automaton with the commas all in place. I mean that when I say kidnap/rescue I know he’s going to climb up, get in, get her out.

That’s the
spine of that scene.

I was not remotely that far along on
The Big A
when I started because I knew I was not going to write the entire flick. The purpose of this exercise was not to do that, but to write enough of it so my experts would have the tools to come and expose me.

An aside now (but I think this is about how writers’ minds work)—if you will go back to the original idea, printed above, there is something that will make little sense:

That’s Bruce.

And somehow that’s got to get into the screenplay.

Explanation. I came to New York City in ’53, with still a year to go in the Army. But my brother and I gave Johnny Kander a few dollars to share his really crappy dump on Eighty-fourth Street, for when we could get down on weekends. I was at the Pentagon, my brother at the Army Chemical Center in Maryland, Shangri-La for lovers of poison gas.

Come ’54, and my hero days done, I return (hopefully) forever. I am dating a girl for a while and I want to be a writer and she has dated this guy before me who also wanted to be a writer and she thought we might like each other.

We did.

Bruce was tall and dark and a great smoker who looked like
Jack Palance. I was the novelist, while Bruce, a native, wanted Broadway. He was a gifted lyricist.

Also liked sports. Bruce was one of the four who watched the Podres World Series together, 1955, in a small room, two of us Dodger fans, two Yankees, and we would change positions, gum, everything to try and destroy the power of the enemies on the TV screen.

One night Bruce and I are talking, probably in a bar, probably drunk, and I remember he made, softly, this incredible admission: “I always wanted to be called ‘Flash.’ ” No need to ask why. If you were a kid, how could you not want to be called Flash?

Imagine that. Being legitimately called Flash.

Well, I harassed him some about it over time, but I was also sure that
somehow I had to use that.

When he died (killed young in some stupid flying accident), I knew it even more. Not that we were best friends. Bruce was married and had a couple of kids and you couldn’t make much of a living writing lyrics, so, even though he hated it, he picked up and went Out There, wrote some westerns for the tube, then hit it very big indeed when he invented
Mission: Impossible.

His father was a famous New York City judge and I remember talking to Judge Geller once and he was all excited and I asked why and he said that two brilliant lawyers were going against each other in his courtroom
on the following Monday and it was going to be so terrific. (You see? Everybody reveres talent.)

I didn’t know, when I did the first act, where to put Shirley’s dream. There were places, but it would have meant stopping dead so I let it go. If I ever rewrite this, bet I’ll find a place next draft around.

Do you know why I told you about Flash and the Judge? Because I wanted Act I to sink a little bit into your heads. Here it is again.

I decided that the second act was this:
things going bad.
There is a harbinger when a strange tinted car goes by. Then Trip is at the Kabuki performance. Then the biggie when Echo confronts Climber and ends life as they have known it.

Here’s what I had on my wall for what you’ve read of Act II:

That’s where we are.

Into the second act, the first four sequences done. Here is my problem at this point:
What comes next
?

Understand, I can go
anywhere.
I can cut to Mount Everest ten years later and have Climber on his way to the summit. I can cut to the White House, where Echo is being given an honor for her selfless work for charity. I can cut to a graveyard and all you see are these words:

Phoebe
1992–2000

I can cut to a hospital for the insane, with a lot of young people just staring with that awful look the crazed manage, and there is Shirley, lost and by the wind grieved. I can cut to Venice at midnight and here comes a gondola and there they are, Phoebes and Shirley, dressed as gondoliers, as Climber and Echo hold each other and smile at the kids, who smile at their parents, glorious familial contentment. I can cut to Trip in his Manhattan penthouse, terrified because we pull back and see Climber, pistol in hand, ready to fire and kill.

I don’t want to go to those places a whole lot, but I
can
—because the story has come to a wrenching moment of change—Climber walking out, dying, as his father points out. The kids can no longer be in his life, not as they were, and I think it’s pretty clear he cherished their time together.

Understand something—my story is in jeopardy at this moment, just as
Butch
was before the Superposse arrived. The fun-and-games robberies were done at that point. Just as the fun-and-games detective stuff is done at this point.

This is what you could call a hinge moment.

All movies are always in jeopardy all the time, that I hope we know. But there is a particular danger here, because
a change has to come.

How big a change, though? That’s my problem, Doctor.

All those cuts I mentioned above, I can make them all play.

But they’re all too much of a jump.

You’d never see Phoebes as Phoebes again. She’d be a different person. And do you want to see Shirley as a junior at college? I don’t.

Anyway, this is what I put on my wall.

5)
First Visit

Clearly what I decided to do was show the first visit. What you are about to read now is only one page of that scene.

I really hate that scene. Not because it’s such a terrible start—I mean, the kids still sound like the kids. But I stopped it where I did for one good reason: I don’t have the least idea who Climber is here.

One of the worst parts of being an instinctive writer—of having to go with “feel” rather than logic—is the sense of helplessness that overwhelms me at moments like this.

I am convinced that scene is a proper place to start.

I also have no idea what it is or how to write it.

So I stopped.

And what I am waiting for is the arrival of what I call a
connective.
Something that will take me out of this scene and into the next. Once I have that, I will have a notion of who Climber is and how I enter this first visitation. I have certain notions in my head, even at this awkward time.

1. I feel there must not be a villain in the scene. That means the woman from the state isn’t out of James Bond. I think I might even give her a moment when she says “Hey, I hate this too.”

2. I feel it should be the first visit, not the 9th or 63rd. This has to be right out of the chute, so that it’s clear no one has the least knowledge of the terrain.

3. I believe they all have to try like hell to make it work.

4. Most important is this:
it must go badly.
Terribly,
even. We must believe that this trio, who I hope have provided us pleasure, will never be together again. Not as they were under the good Queen Cynara.

Because, you see, I know something you don’t know
—I have a fastball.
I don’t know if it will work, I don’t know if the world will hate it. But it’s what gave me the confidence to get this far. And, yes, you’ll know what it is in a page or two.

But that’s for later, my problem is now. I want to write this scene—I feel it is crucial for the movie to work—and I have no idea how to make it play.

Where should I enter the scene? I chose to do it with the drive up and
the kids watching and then the line we’ve heard twice before, “Children, you father’s here,” except now it’s a strange and different voice.

But did I enter too early? Would it have been better if I’d come in after, say, a half hour of stilted talk? Or maybe that talk isn’t stilted, it’s just somehow
wrong
—what if Shirley asks if Spade found out who murdered his partner and Climber says, “It was a woman done him in”—meaning Echo—and does that cast a pall?

Or are they laughing and having just
so
much fun, and on they go, the laughter nutty and seemingly sincere and the woman from the state tells them time’s up and they are just crushed—but then you look in their eyes like the camera can do for you and you realize they are exhausted from the effort and it was all false and phony, then a cut to the kids waving happily and Climber waving back and it’s all so great and then you cut to him out of sight and the look of failure and despair on his face, and cut back to the kids and they are dying and after a pause it ends like this.

The fact is this: as I write this down on the tenth of June, just after the Knicks have vanquished the hated Pacers, I don’t know, as the French are so fond of saying, whether to shit or wind my watch.

But if I don’t know the answers to that scene, I do have a bunch of Act II stuff I do know.

I know that some time passes, a season. If we started in summer, now it’s fall.

I know there’s a picture in the paper—an engagement snapshot, Echo and Trip.

I know that Climber sees it, dies a little more.

I know the kids are in despair.

I know that Climber is working on some crummy case, Jimmy with him, Jimmy pissed at him because he’s drinking again.

I know the kids are growing more despondent.

I know Climber’s drinking is close to out of control.

I know there’s a shot of the woods in Central Park, daylight, the colors dazzling.

I know there’s a shot of the woods in the Estate, night, and shadows are seen moving.

And, finally, and most of all, I know this: we have just seen Shirley being kidnapped.

That was my fastball.

End of Act II.