Which Lie Did I Tell? (5 page)

I think I must have looked at them for a long time.
Westley lay dead by The Machine.
He was perfect and beautiful but it hadn’t made him conceited. He understood suffering and was no stranger to love or pain, yet the words were still there.

Westley lay dead by The Machine …

You killed him, I thought. You killed Westley. How could you do such a thing? I stared at the words, and I stared at the words some more, and then I lost it, began to cry. I was alone, you see, no one could help me get out of where I was and I was helpless. Even now, more than twenty years after, I can still truly feel the shocking heat of my tears. I pushed away from my desk, made it to the bathroom and ran water on my face. I looked up and there in the mirror this red-faced and wracked person was staring back at me, wondering who in the world were we and how were we going to survive?

I tell you this because I guess I want you to know that although I
don’t think it is a good life, writing, not insofar as having relationships with other people, having loves, all that emotional stuff we all long for, or say we long for, still, there are worthwhile times. And if you were to ask me the high point of my creative life, I would say it was that day when Westley and I were joined.

The rest of the book went the way it’s supposed to but never does.
Hiram Haydn, my editor, loved it, but more than that, I loved it. After it was done I got very sick, was hospitalized, thought I was going to die.

Here is how the movie
The Princess Bride
happened.

The Greenlight Guy at Fox liked the book. (Note: those Premiere 100 types Out There have all these different titles. Vice President in charge of this, Executive in charge of that, on and on. All salad. In movies, there is but one power, that of being able to greenlight a picture. Each studio has a grand total of one
greenlighter. Understand, most of us alive in the Continental United States can greenlight a picture. Of course, a movie can cost five thousand dollars. That is an affordable sum for a lot of us to be, at least for a little while, a mogul. Now, what kind of picture will you get? You will not have car crashes. You will not enjoy the services of Mr. Schwarzenegger. It may not be what sets hearts aflutter on Saturday night in Westwood. But, if you can purchase enough film stock, it will be a movie. That’s
our
movie. At each major studio there is a guy who can greenlight
any movie,
and today, “any movie” can mean up to $100 million. Those other executives at that studio, regardless of their titles, they are only oil slicks.

As I was saying, the Greenlight Guy at Fox liked the book.

I was in.

Problem: he was not remotely sure if it was a movie. So an odd deal was struck. They would buy the book and I would write a screenplay but they would not buy
that
unless they decided to make the movie. In other words, we each had half of the pie.

I wrote the screenplay. The GG at Fox liked it but wasn’t 100 percent convinced yet that it was a movie. So he sent me to London to meet with
Richard Lester, who was just coming off a considerable success with
The Three Musketeers.
Lester, most famous for the Beatles pictures, is a brilliant man, a Philadelphian who lives in England.

We met, he had some suggestions, I did them, he liked what I did, but better than that, the only man of true import in the whole matter, the GG at Fox, liked what I did.

Home and dry.

Except: the GG at Fox was fired.

Here is what happens when that happens. The old GG is stripped of his epaulets and his ability to get into Morton’s on Monday nights, and off he goes, rich—he had a deal in place for when this happened—but humiliated.

The new GG takes command with but one rule writ boldly in stone:
nothing
his predecessor had in motion must ever get made. Why? Say it gets made. Say it’s a hit. Who gets the credit? The
old
GG. So when the new GG, who can now get into Morton’s on Mondays, has to run the gauntlet there, he knows all his peers are sniggering, “That asshole, it wasn’t his picture.”

Death.

So
The Princess Bride
was buried, conceivably forever.

Of course, I was upset by this, but I was too frantic to give it the weight it deserved. Because there had been a reaction to my sickness, and it was that I realized I was forty-two years old, had zero money in the bank, and a wife and two kids I had to provide for. So I provided. Movies and books and rewrites of books and endless rewrites of movies, and it was all honorable work, I wasn’t throwing a bag over my head and doing it for Old Glory. I
cared.
(There are no rules to writing, but if there were, caring would be up there. Or, as we intellectuals are fond of saying, you had better give a shit.)

But none of it meant to me what
The Princess Bride
did. And I finally realized that I had let control of it go. Fox had the book. So what if I had the screenplay, they could commission another. They could change anything they wanted. So I did something of which I am genuinely proud. I bought the book back from the studio,
with my own money.
I think they were suspicious that I had a deal or some plan. I didn’t. I just didn’t want some idiot destroying what I had come to realize was the best thing I would ever write.

After a good bit of negotiating, it was again mine. I was the only idiot who could destroy it now.

I read recently about the fine
Jack Finney novel
Time and Again,
which has taken close to twenty years and still hasn’t made it to the screen.
The Princess Bride
didn’t take that long, but not a lot less either. I didn’t keep notes, so this is from memory. Understand, in order for someone to make a movie, they need two things: passion and money. A lot of people, it turned out, loved
The Princess Bride.
I know of at least two different GGs who loved it. Who shook hands with me on the deal. Who wanted to make it more than any other movie.

Who each got fired the
weekend
before they were going to set things in motion. Believe this: one
studio
(a small one) closed the weekend before they were going to set things in motion. The screenplay began to get a certain reputation—one article listed it among the best that had never been shot.

The truth is that, after a decade and more, I was always waiting for the other shoe to come clunking down, and it always did. But events that had been put in motion a decade before eventually would be my salvation.

When
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
was done, I took myself out of the movie business for a while. (We are back in the late ’60s now.) I wanted to try something I had never done: nonfiction. I got a very silly idea from listening to some very disturbed acquaintances talking of the pluses and minuses of their respective mental institutions. “The Hatches” was what I decided to write—a magazine-length piece based on the premise that mental institutions might send out brochures as if they were colleges and universities. “Our Manic-Depressive Department is known worldwide.” I decided to visit them and talk about the entrance requirements, class size, size of student body, quality of food, like that. I realized before I had gone much further that the piece was dead if Meninger’s didn’t cooperate. I dropped the idea. I have never liked being at anyone’s mercy.

I fiddled for a while, wondering what I could investigate where I knew someone would always talk. I decided on Broadway. I had been a failed playwright already, had three plays on by the time I was thirty, hated it—it was just too brutal. Unlike a movie or a novel, where there is often a year between when you finish and when the public is allowed in, on Broadway it’s immediate—you are often still rewriting as Opening Night comes thundering down. Your scar tissue never gets a chance to heal. Agony.

So I knew a lot about the theater, had a lot of friends and acquaintances who worked that side of the street, had done my graduate work in theater. Plus, the theatrical world is so filled with envy, hatred, and bile, I knew someone would always tell me what was going on. If the producer or writer wouldn’t talk to me, well, I could get to stage managers.

So I wrote a book about Broadway called
The Season.
In the course of a year I went hundreds of times, both in New York and out of town, saw everything at least once. But the show I saw most was a terrific comedy called
Something Different.

By Carl Reiner.

He was terribly helpful to me and I liked him a lot. When the book was done I sent him a copy. And a few years later, when
The Princess Bride
was done, I sent him the novel. And one day he gave it to his eldest son. “Here’s something,” he said to his boy Robert one day. “I think you’ll like this.”

Fortunately for all concerned, Carl was right. Rob was years away from being a director at that point. He was starring in the number-one TV show of the decade,
All in the Family,
created and produced by
Norman Lear. Ten years later Rob was a director and had formed a little company with his friend and producer Andy Scheinman. Rob had directed
This Is Spinal Tap,
had just finished a rough cut of his second movie,
The Sure Thing.
They were sitting around one day wondering what to do next, when Rob remembered the book, talked about it, reread it, got excited.

Eventually we met and the movie happened. But in between there was a lot of frustration because the movie that established him as a commercial director,
Stand By Me,
had yet to happen. But he can be magnificently stubborn, and eventually Norman Lear got us the money. I was grateful then, still am, always will be.

We had our first script reading in a hotel in London. Rob and Andy were there.
Cary Elwes and
Robin Wright were there, Westley and Buttercup.
Chris Sarandon and
Chris Guest, the villains Humperdinck and Count Rugen.
Wally Shawn, the evil genius Vizzini.
Mandy Patinkin, who played Inigo, was very much there. And sitting by himself, quietly—he always tried to sit quietly—was Andre the Giant, who
was
Fezzik.

Not your ordinary Hadassah group.

Sitting suavely in a corner was
moi.
Two of the major figures of my time in the entertainment business—
Elia Kazan and George Roy Hill—have both said the same thing to me in interviews: that by the time of the first cast reading, the crucial work was done. If you had gotten the script to work and cast it properly, then you had a chance for something of quality. If you had not, it didn’t matter how skillful the rest of the process was, you were dead in the water.

This probably sounds like madness to the uninitiated, and it should, but it is very much true. The reason it sounds like madness is this:
Premiere
magazine isn’t around when the script is being prepared.
E.T.
isn’t around for the casting. They are only around during the
shooting of the flick, which is the
least
important part of the making of any movie. Shooting is just the factory putting together the car. (
Postproduction—editing and scoring—is waaaay more important.)

But shooting is all most people know—from those awful articles in
magazines or stories on the tube that purport to be on the inside but are only bullshit. The movie company knows who is watching and they behave accordingly. Stars do not misbehave when the enemy is about. Directors do not admit their terrors when the enemy is about. Writers, to give us our due, are not even
there
when the enemy is about. (And when I am forced to be there, and the enemy is about, I lie. “Oh, this is an amazing shoot, it’s just been a dream.” “I don’t know where Dusty [or Barbra or Sly or Eddie or fill in your own blank] gets this bad rap about being hard to work with, he’s [she’s] been a dream here.” So it goes.)

I was there in London, at the script reading. And I was terrified. Not only is that my natural state when I am around actors, this was almost a decade and a half from when I helped scale the Cliffs of Insanity. Most of the people in the room I knew of. The others I had heard read. But there were two who were essentially new to me.

Robin Wright, our Buttercup, was new to everybody, except the faithful watchers of the soap
Santa Barbara.
A California kid of maybe twenty, she was neither experienced nor trained. She was being asked to be first a farmgirl, unspoiled and in love, then a princess, regal and emotionally dead, all this, by the way, with an English accent. (Turns out she has a brilliant ear.)

It also was important that she be the most beautiful woman in the world, and of course that is all a matter of personal taste, there is no single most beautiful woman. Except looking at Robin that London morning, watching her as she sat there with no makeup, she sure made one hell of a case. We started the reading then, and this is what I thought when we were done—

—I thought she was going to be the biggest lady star in the world.