Which Lie Did I Tell? (50 page)

I never went on with that thought, never explained. I just wanted to plant that there was
something
very unusual about Phoebe’s memory.

A few pages later, Climber has put Shirley to sleep, kisses Phoebes, and with a troubled look, goes to his bed, watches my beloved Sprewell, and we

You were supposed to think that was just what it was: a worried father with a child who cannot sleep. But it was more than that.

When we screenwrite, things should hook into one another. One thought moving forward while often, at the same time, if needed, referring back. I knew Phoebe had this miracle memory. But I wanted to surprise and please you when you saw it in action.

I also
thought
she might have seen the kidnapping. (If you will look back—and remember this is a For Our Eyes Only first draft—it is not totally clear what she sees from her room. At one point I remember she and Shirley were looking out front, waiting for their father to arrive.)

I had no idea I would need her memory to make the scene play. But it was another fastball I felt I had, to be used if necessary.

By the time Act III started, I felt it was necessary.

I wrote an exchange you probably paid no attention to—you’re right, you shouldn’t have. Climber comes into the mansion, Echo is there to meet him. The dialogue goes like this—

Echo goes on a while about the time, but that’s just filler—once Climber hears Phoebe was asleep,
he knows everything.

He knows she is hiding something because he knows this:
she never sleeps.
My God, at his house she was up in the middle of the night, here it’s eleven, what could she be hiding?

She must have seen the kidnapping. Has to be that. And what he has to do is give her the confidence to tell what she actually did see. He knows of her memory,
he knows the case is in her head.

When I can write a scene like the memory scene, it may be dreadful—as I write this explanation, no one else but me has read it—but as the one doing the writing, if I can have a hook, a connective, it gives me great confidence. Once I decided I was going to use Phoebe, I felt, shit, I can make this play, because if art should be both inevitable and surprising, that scene—forget the word “art”—that scene has both. A great detective inevitably burrowing his way into a difficult case. And help coming from a surprising source, a genius child.

There is a magician’s expression I like—I’ve already mentioned it—and it is this:
the work is done.
Again the explanation:
magic tricks fall into three parts. The
illusion
of the trick—how it looks to us, the audience. The
preparation
of the trick—that’s all the stuff the magician has to get ready before he begins, pinning things inside his magic suit, crimping cards, everything he needs to create the spell.

Now if the preparation has been done properly, magicians feel that sometimes—it could be halfway through, it could be even before they start
—the work is done.

It is inexorable. You keep going forward and nothing can stop you.

Sometimes, I feel that way about screenplays.

In
Butch,
for example, there is a preparation moment early. Butch and Sundance have decided to go to South America. Sundance tells Etta
Place (
Katherine Ross) that she can come along if she doesn’t whine. She agrees to go. But then she adds this:

For me, that speech was there for but one reason: when she says she won’t watch them die. It hits a chord, is gone.

Maybe half an hour later, after they have killed for the first time getting the payroll money back, and they are at the bottom, she suggests they find other ways of going straight. They don’t know how. They lie by the campfire in silence. And this dialogue happens.

The scene goes on a while longer and the movie goes on for twenty-plus more pages—

—but I think the whole work was done. I am talking in terms of story. I meant for us to care for the two guys as much I did. By now the audience should know they are goners. And a sense of sadness should have begun to pervade the story.

Now, it sure helps that the shoot-out is the greatest action scene I’ve ever been around. Hill just did it so brilliantly. But I think the screenplay would have been proper with a scene of far lesser impact.

And maybe I’m nuts—we’ll see; my doctors are about to descend and tell me—but I think the work is done here, too.

If I have structured a proper screenplay.

No question, if I could come up with dazzling stuff, it’s that much better than ordinary stuff.

Here’s what I want to happen: everybody lives and Echo and Climber get back together. And, sure, they’ll probably screw up again, but maybe not, they’re wiser and sadder than the first time.

Here’s a couple of things I have vaguely in mind:

I think I want a scene with Jimmy in a bar, middle of the might, with the most incredible group of other guys who try and help—ancient retired cops, old tough detectives, retired Mafia guys.

Aside: In what you have read, Jimmy isn’t much. I didn’t know if I needed him when I started, still am not sure. But I liked the idea of the kids’ grandfather being Cagney, one of my heroes. And I liked the possibility of—and I didn’t write this at all, it ain’t in what you read—the possibility of Climber, when he’s around his dad, regressing a little bit, be more like a kid around his father, seeking, as we all do, approval. End of aside.

Anyway, in this bar with Jimmy is all the crime wisdom of the past half century. Climber calls and asks, “Anything yet?” And Jimmy maybe says, “Believe it, two guys who tried a kidnapping in the Bronx a year ago. One of them’s missing a finger and the other one’s losing his hair.”

And Climber, on a note of triumph, roars to the address Jimmy gives him, bursts in and throws the two guys against the wall—

—only they’re the wrong guys.

(At one point in my insomnia last night I wondered if they could be Chinese. Probably not—we are dealing with a life in danger; laughter does not help our cause.)

I think I want a scene where the three of them have to wait somewhere. It’s tense and they’re liable to be there a long time and Echo and Climber haven’t really talked much yet—

—and Phoebe looks at them, says, “I wonder, how did you two meet?”

Neither answers—they don’t really want to go there.

But she’s relentless, because they never want to tell her, they’re tired of telling the story, but it’s her very favorite story in the world. “I’ve always wondered why you never told me.”

Still, no reply.

“Probably you put ads in magazines. ‘Detective wants to meet’—what were you, Mommy?”

“I was a college sophomore.”

“ ‘Detective—wants to meet college sophomore.’ Why did you put the ad in, Daddy?”

“It was a case, Phoebe. Now and forever. It was a case.”

But she’s gotten them talking and that’s a first and I think it’s the start of their reuniting. We know he’s in love with her and we think she might still be in love with him, so that journey shouldn’t be all that hard to make play.

(Aside: Another thing I didn’t put in is that the kids’ favorite movie of all time is
The Parent Trap,
a Disney hit from the ’60s where
Hayley Mills tries to get her divorced parents back together. I think Shirley
brings it up a lot. I think he’s got a tape of it at his father’s apartment and he and Phoebe play it all the time, driving Climber nuts. End of aside.)

I think the gardeners of the estate are behind the kidnapping—the guys we’ve seen who never wave at the car. I think the gardeners hired the guys who did the job.

I don’t know why I think that. Probably because we’ve met them in passing, and if I do decide they are the baddies, I should give them a little more screen time, not much, though. I want the surprise.

What’s appealing about them is that they’re handy. Look, this was never meant to be a great exercise in deduction. It’s a romantic comedy about an unusual family. If I don’t use the gardeners, I have to spend more time setting up somebody else. And if I have someone who’s around but not around
much,
it might be obvious he did it.

Besides, I’ve met some pretty weird gardeners.

I kind of think this:
that Shirley hasn’t been taken anywhere.
Maybe he’s bound and gagged and tossed in the corner of the gardener’s cottage.

If I go that way, I’ve already set up a way for our adventurers to figure that out. When Phoebe is talking to Shirley over the phone back in the house, he says he hopes that the family will be together again, and I quote, “
so soon you won’t believe it.
”

Well, that’s an odd manner of speech. And one of them could realize that just as the money is being transferred or some other time of high tension. Someone could realize,
he’s there.
And off they go to the final rescue.

I think that realization comes not from Phoebe, whom we expect to come up with it, or Climber either. I want Echo to have her moment. Because if it works, it shows that she belongs with them in their craziness.

Now the bad part of this is that at one time I thought I was repeating the opening rescue, the same only different. I wanted Climber wounded enough so he can’t, so maybe Echo has to do it.

But I have never seen a multistoried gardener’s cottage.

I believe that I have an ending. At least a start. It would come after the climactic scene when all hell has to break loose, when the rescue happens, when Climber is wounded, when Shirley becomes Flash. Here’s how I think I’d do it.