Which Lie Did I Tell? (52 page)

We’ll see if you bless me when I’m done.

Opening scene:

Climber—hate the name. Echo—ditto. All the cute stuff about them never makes it to the screen. I know this trick too well. Hype hype hype. Way too much.

Where are we? Is it the thirties? Is this a radio serial? Is this the frigging Shadow or something?

Answer—his apartment—ESPN. Shit, this is
now.
I like the TV in every room. My favorite thing so far. My only favorite thing.

Is he a cop? He’s not a cop.
Is
he a cop? Why aren’t you telling me this?

Okay, antisocial shlub hero goes to the mansion.

God, I really hate the name Climber. Is this gonna have some purpose?

So he’s desperately in love with this unattainable rich girl. Dad’s a jerk. (I’m bored, Bill.)

Six, seven pages of her saving him in the ocean. (Tough to shoot to make sense of this, I don’t like the pace, I want other things to be happening and I’m in another action piece that’s not really setting the world on fire …)

And now the credits?

Okay—here’s what I’m thinking. This is a movie about a team. He’s got all the detective experience but his soul is dead. She’s the daredevil rich chick with money to burn who’s been trapped in this mansion since she was born. He’s gonna break her out. She’s gonna elevate his spirit, appetites, and cases. They’ll travel the world. What a team they’re going to make. Hell, who knows, maybe she staged the kidnapping herself just to meet him. Better yet, maybe her father did …

And now the credits?

Okay. Stop. Reset. I’ve just read through to the bodega shootout. I want to change gears. I want to call my little thing here:

Bill’s Little Family Thriller

I want to talk about tone.

You mess with tone all the time. It’s your right. Short of inventing an entirely new, undiscovered plot, maybe the next most heady discovery is an entirely new, unique tone.
Butch Cassidy
was that creation. A whole
new stink on the western. A completely unique attitude to some very heavily trod territory.

This was big stuff. So you’re the King of Tone.

Sometimes it’s dazzling
—Princess Bride.

Sometimes it’s
Year of the Comet.

For every
Strangelove
there are dozens of
Batman IV
s.

You know I love to mess with the rules. And I want to keep at it. It’s all gonna keep evolving and I don’t want to get bored or get caught short.

But tone? Tone scares me.

Why? Because when it goes wrong it just sucks out loud. I think the audience—the reader—I think they make some critical decisions in the opening movements of a film. How deeply do I invest myself here? How much fun can I have? Should I be consciously referencing the rest of my life during the next two hours, or is this an experience I need to surrender to? Are you asking for my heart or my head or both? Am I rooting for the hero or the movie? Just how many pounds of disbelief are you gonna ask me to suspend before this is through?

When it’s done right, it makes no difference. They all work. They’re all of value. They’re all worth writing and seeing.

The audience just wants to know.

When you fuck with tone, you risk squandering that spark. You risk losing the one thing the audience brings with them.

The noir-comedy. The romantic-spoof. The gothic-farce. This is very tricky, alchemical stuff to play with. And what it seems to me you are trying to pull off here is a something we’d have to call …

The family thriller.

Dangerous
and
cute.

Who the hell is this thing for, anyway? I mean, not to sound like the lowest MBA Hollywood scum here, but who’s supposed to be watching this? If it’s for kids, it’s way too boring. If it’s for adults, then where’s the meat?

I start in the shitty apartment. The lonely TVs. The bag-a-doughnuts Toyota.

Why’s he pulling up to a mansion?

Why does it seem like he knows his way around?

Why won’t anybody talk to him?

Omigod, it’s a custody thing. These two awful brats are his progeny. And that beautiful bitch is his ex-wife and there’s her grim, fortune-hunting fiancé.

Sure, do the tickets and the cook, and pre-visit nausea.

Climber (man, I hate that name) doesn’t want to be here. Kids don’t want to be here. Everything sucks.

And now, on page seven, you get your one decent surprise in this whole thing. You get the moment that sums up the whole damn story. You get something that
might
appeal to both kids and parents.

They pull out and, holy shit!—it’s all okay.

The kids love their dad and they’ve all got a secret.

Put the credits here.

You want the marital backstory?

You already have it—let Dad tell the brats before they go to bed. Let him change it every time he tells it. Break my heart all the way. All we need to know is that once it was perfect.

Other stuff that sucks—splitting Trip’s catching them into two beats is just a waste of real estate. Jimmy—use him—change him—or lose him. Since when is sketching the cornerstone of detective work?

Okay, so now you want me to stop and tell you what I think comes next?

Big, wild balls-out guess …

They get back together.

I mean, come on, there’re kids and you’re being cute, and it’s Hollywood and everybody knows you’re gonna have a happy ending.

You want a victim? You’ve got Jimmy with a heart attack in the middle of the rescue.

I don’t know. And you’ve got me thinking very formula here, which I’m always trying to fight, but this thing—and it’s the damn tone that’s screwing it up—this thing just doesn’t get me excited.

Okay, I can fix this, but I don’t know if I can save it.

So reset. I’m backtracking here.

My first question—always
—Where’s the movie?
Not the pitch or what goes on the one-sheet, or any of the rest of that crap, but where is it? Where does this thing live? So when I read this, at least the first half I’ve read so far, I’m thinking Bill is really walking past the movie here.

Wrong opening. As evidenced by the credit sequence on, what is it,
this page
?

The action sequence up top is a bore. Could Bill really do this scene right? Absolutely. But his heart’s not in it, because he knows that the real thing he’s got doesn’t start for another many pages. So he hypes the hell
out of it, and I don’t know where I am, like I said, is this The Shadow or Spiderman or Serpico …

And what happens anyway?

He saves the girl.

Bore.

And the walk through the mansion. Stock.

The pictures. Stock.

The beach.

So for me, so far nothing …

And now you’re gonna try and tell the story of their marriage through this montage? Wrong. And it’s worse than that—it’s worse than just bad storytelling, because the montage does nothing for me except muddy the emotional waters of this thing beyond redemption.

If she’s so great how does she turn into such a bitch?

If he’s so tough, how does he get dragooned into this marriage that is so clearly wrong?

Every moment in a movie counts
—I’m depending on what you told me about them up top. I’m in the audience, I’ve been to the movies before, I know that information means something. What you told me is this—he needs to turn off the television and get personal. She needs adventure and romance.

Better to have told me nothing than this.

Here’s a miracle of storytelling. If you
don’t
show them getting together—if you only show the result, the audience will write the best courtship ever, the best dialogue, the best sex—the worst fights, the biggest heartbreak—anything. All you have to do is get out of the way.

I open the movie with him going to pick up the kids.

I’m annoyed now.
this Page
of this manuscript [
this page
, above]. You’ve got all these questions about the characters. The acts and the rules and all this great theoretical pondering. You’re asking me all these questions about the characters and most of it’s based on a deep understanding of this marriage and as I said before, I don’t know what this marriage was about.

I don’t have a clue about Climber. Or her.

And now you tell me this is supposed to be a romantic comedy?

Insight
—this tone you’re using buries character.

Now I’m convinced.

My opening is definitely, absolutely on the money.

I skip the climbing and the beach. I get right to it. I let the past in
as I need it. I get to work on these characters. I try and find a level of reality—tone again—that works best. I get Jimmy up and running so that Climber has someone to talk to about what the hell’s going on with him.

My beats?

—Kids have a secret life with dad.

—Secret life drives family apart for good.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·  

On to the back end …

And here’s the worst of it.
Two kidnappings.

What kind of generational crime vortex has this poor family stumbled into? And like a fool, I’m thinking there’s some point to this—that maybe it’s the same guys who grabbed the mother years ago have come back for the kid. Maybe that’s why you left things sort of unresolved at the opening. Maybe it’s the father again …

Something.

But no.

Obviously this can be fixed.

I did it already with my opening. I don’t need the climbing up top, so it wasn’t a kidnapping he saved Echo from. Maybe it was her gambling debts from college that needed straightening out. Maybe she ran away from home and he had to track her down.

·  ·  ·  ·  ·  

Anyway, my spitball version.

It’s a completely real film. Feet on the ground.

Climber has some real problems. He’s kind of a nut. Who else but a nut would let Echo go? What kind of father encourages this kind of bipolar behavioral life for his kids? He loves the kids. Desperately. Loves them so much he’s gotten more and more isolated. Maybe he used to be a lively outgoing guy. Maybe he loves them a little too much (if that’s possible)—loves them so much he can’t take any job that works over the weekends. This has crippled his career recently, because detective work is anything but regularly scheduled.

So this once-dazzling detective is on his ass because he loves his kids so much.

And it’s more than sketching he’s teaching them. I mean, I’d really go
for it here. They know it all. Phone tracing and stakeouts and how-to-do-this and how-to-do-that.

He and Jimmy arguing about old-school vs. new-school techniques.

And Echo has hired a series of private detectives to try and monitor these weekend visits. And Climber has managed to know/persuade/ threaten all of them to file a phony report.

Until now.

Okay, so the bodega or something like it. The bottom line here is that Echo finds out what’s been going on and the kids are inadvertently but unconscionably put into real jeopardy.

Climber can’t see the kids no more.

Now what?

The boy is kidnapped.

Here’s a big gift for you in
any
version …

Echo thinks Climber had something to do with it.

I mean, come on, you’ve got her calling him first. I don’t think so. He’s so nutty. He’s so desperate. He’s so capable. He’s got to be a suspect, doesn’t he?

Make it hard.

Cops don’t want him working the case. Cops hate him. Echo doesn’t want him around the scene. Daughter is his only ally and she’s going crazy to talk to him, because she’s got info that’s crucial …

·  ·  ·  ·  ·  

Okay, so that’s as far as I’m going, because the next question is who are the bad guys and I’m not so sure that the landscaping crew is worthy of my time, but who knows?

And I’ve got my own deadline here this week and this is probably way more than you ever wanted to hear anyway …

·  ·  ·  ·  ·  

In summary.

My version is real. Much more character. Nobody’s close to perfect, including the kids.