Which Lie Did I Tell? (8 page)
Read Which Lie Did I Tell? Online
Authors: William Goldman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Film & Video, #Nonfiction, #Performing Arts, #Retail
We went to
William Hurt—
—didn’t want to do it.
We rewrote it, went back to William Hurt—
—didn’t want to do it yet again.
Kevin Kline—
—didn’t want to do it.
Michael Douglas—
—met with Rob, didn’t want to do it.
Harrison Ford—
—didn’t want to do it.
Dustin Hoffman was called in London—
—liked Castle Rock, liked Rob, didn’t want to do it.
Understand, this entire casting process took maybe six months, and we are well into it by now and this is where my respect for Mr. Reiner reached epic size. Because you must understand that well before this point,
all
the major studios would have had me in for rewrites or fired me, because they would have known the script stank. It had to stink. Look at those rejections.
Reiner simply got more and more bullheaded.
And, secondly, he
needed
a famous face as Paul Sheldon, because Paul Sheldon
was
famous, just as Annie Wilkes was unknown. On he trudged.
DeNiro—
—didn’t want to do it.
Pacino—
—didn’t want to do it.
Dreyfuss—
—WANTED TO DO IT.
Yes, Lord.
You see, Rob and Richard Dreyfuss had gone to high school together. And more than that, Rob had offered
When Harry Met Sally
to Dreyfuss, who said no. Biiiig mistake.
This time when Rob called him, Dreyfuss said this: “Whatever it is, I’ll do it.” Rob was, of course, amazingly relieved. But he felt it was silly for Dreyfuss to take a part without first at least reading it. Rob gave him the script. Dreyfuss read it—
—oops—
—didn’t want to do it.
Hackman would have been wonderful—
—didn’t want to do it.
Well before this point, Mr. Redford was sent the script. He would have been extraordinary. He met with Rob. He felt the script would make a very commercial movie.
Long regretful pause—
—didn’t want to do it.
How many is that? You count, it’s too painful. Understand, this is not the order of submission. My memory is that
William Hurt may have been first but his second rejection came well after a bunch of others had passed. Anyway, it is all a swamp to me now.
Enter Warren Beatty.
Kind of wanted to do it. Met and met with Rob and Andy. Had a number of wonderful suggestions that helped close holes in the script. He was definitely interested. But there was this wee problem with
Dick Tracy,
which he was producing, directing, and starring in and which conflicted. To this day, I don’t think Warren Beatty has said no.
Andy one day mentioned Jimmy Caan. Who had been in the wilderness. Rob met with him, asked about his supposed drug problem. Caan replied that he was clean. “I will pee in a bottle for you,” he said. “I will pee in a bottle every day.”
He didn’t have to.
The reason for detailing the above is because there is a lesson here. Two, actually. First is this:
we will never know.
Would
Kevin Kline have made it a better flick? We will never know. Would any of the skilled performers listed? We will never know. They never played the part. They might have been better or worse, all that we can be sure of is that they would have been different. Jimmy Caan did play it and he was terrific.
One special thing Caan brought to the party is that he is a very physical guy, he is like a shark, he has to keep moving, he cannot be still in a room. And playing Paul, month after month trapped in that bed, drove
him nuts. That pent-up energy you saw on screen was very real. And it was one of the main reasons, at least for me, the movie worked.
Second point. When we read about
George Raft turning down
The Maltese Falcon
because he didn’t trust one of the great directors of all time, John Huston, it seems like lunacy. The movie, of course, went on to make Mr. Bogart a star. But Bogart was a nothing then, a small bald New York stage actor who was going nowhere. And Huston had never directed. The same is true when we read of all the people who were offered the lead in
East of Eden
or
On the Waterfront
or
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Careers are primarily about timing.
Paul Sheldon is an attractive, sensitive man in his forties, a writer of romance fiction. If you ask me what star best describes that guy I would answer with two words:
Richard Gere.
Why didn’t we go with him?
Wrong question.
The real question is this: How is it possible for us to spend six months looking for an actor for a part for which Richard Gere would have been perfect and never once,
not even one time mention his name
? That’s how dead he was at the time we were looking. We were looking before
Internal Affairs
revived him and
Pretty Woman
put him back on top. We were looking in 1989, seven years since
An Officer and a Gentleman.
And in those seven years, these were his choices:
The Honorary Consul, Breathless, The Cotton Club, King David, No Mercy, Miles from Home.
He was not just dead, he was forgotten. Happens to us all. Remember my leper period? There’s a good and practical reason Hollywood likes Dracula pictures—it’s potentially the story of our lives …
Misery
was Stephen King’s baby. He made it up. And we wanted very much that he like what we had done with it. He was in California and a screening was arranged, hundreds of people, and he sat unnoticed in the middle of the audience. (King, in case anyone is interested, is amazingly unpretentious. And real smart.)
Anyway, the screening starts and we are pacing around in the back or sitting in corners, because this book meant a lot to him. Near the climax, Annie Wilkes is bringing some champagne into Paul Sheldon’s room,
supposedly to celebrate, but as in the novel, she is planning to kill him. She puts a gun into her apron.
Now, by total accident, the person sitting next to King is involved with Castle Rock. And reported the following. As Annie takes the tray down to Paul’s room, an edgy Stephen King is hunkered down in his seat, muttering to himself. And this is what he is saying: “Look out … don’t trust her … she’s got a gun in her ayy-pron …”
(He liked it fine. As did we all.)
I think the ’90s are by far the worst decade in Hollywood history.
Many reasons, starting with the possibility that, being an old fart in good standing, I hate anything new. Let me throw in a couple of other possibilities.
Talent tends to cluster. We know
Aeschylus was not the only guy hacking out plays in Athens. We know that Balanchine had Robbins, that Placido had Luciano, that Chekhov and Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky and a bunch of other Russians all walked a similar earth.
And today, in every single art I can think of, is a time of low talent. When I took a modern novel course at Oberlin in 1951, we studied people who had published between 1900 and 1950 but who all had written something in the year 1927. So we read Dos Passos and Wolfe and Steinbeck and Faulkner and Hemingway and Fitzgerald—not, alas, the same today.
Not for painters or singers or writers or screenwriters.
But no discipline makes my point more than movie directors.
We had
one
great one until very recently—Mr. Kubrick.
What I came to town, in 1953, such was not the case. And remember, there are a lot of directors I am not counting, because they were not involved with Hollywood financing or Hollywood sensibility—Bergman, Buñuel, Clair, Fellini, Kurosawa, Renoir, to pick a quick half dozen.
And I am also not counting some old guys who were still capable of thrilling us—Capra, Chaplin, De Mille.
Following is a list of top directors and my favorites of their movies.
| Cukor | The Philadelphia Story, My Fair Lady |
| Curtiz | The Adventures of Robin Hood, Casablanca |
| Donen | Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Singin’ in the Rain (codirected with Gene Kelly) |
| King | Twelve O’Clock High, The Gunfighter |
| McCarey | The Awful Truth, Going My Way |
| Minnelli | An American in Paris, Gigi |
| Reed | Odd Man Out, The Third Man |
| Siegel | Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dirty Harry |
| Siodmak | The Killers, The Crimson Pirate |
| Walsh | High Sierra, White Heat |
Pretty impressive. Ten terrific directors, all of them operating at the same time. Are we agreed? Hope so.
Now here’s the shocker:
none of these guys made my first team.
I’m talking Ford, I’m talking Hawks and Hitchcock, Kazan and Lean, plus Mankiewicz and Stevens, not to mention Wilder and Wyler and Zinnemann.
All these brilliant guys turning out one film after another, some of them glories, some of them not—
—and don’t you wish they were around today?
But they’re not, and what we see suffers as a sad result.
It wasn’t just the directors, either. Here is a list of a bunch of young performers who all were in the
same acting class.
New York City, 1947.
Robert Lewis was the teacher and these were the faces he looked out on.
| Marlon Brando | E. G. Marshall |
| Montgomery Clift | Kevin McCarthy |
| Mildred Dunnock | Patricia Neal |
| Tom Ewell | William Redfield |
| John Forsythe | Jerome Robbins |
| Anne Jackson | Maureen Stapleton |
| Sidney Lumet | Eli Wallach |
| Karl Malden | David Wayne |
The talent in that room was enough to change the entire world of acting. To this day.
I would like to throw in one more reason why movies are what they are. If you were to ask me, more than anything else, this is the reason:
studio executives.
Not that they are not bright—they are. Not that they’re not hardworking—they are. But from my point of view, precious few of them bother to read screenplays. They are far more interested in saving their asses with a deal than with a quality flick.
Here’s what’s far worse than the fact that they don’t read screenplays:
precious few of them know how.
What we have is a world, as former studio head
David Picker so wisely stated, where Hollywood is no longer making movies, they are selling a product. And the product they are selling only happens to be movies.
Ask not for whom the bell tolls …
In the summer of 1999, the most hyped art object in history (well, since Viagra, anyway) said “Here I am” to the world: George Lucas’s money machine,
The Phantom Menace.
And the reviews were mainly two things: surprised and bad.
Lucas countered that the critics have never liked him, that
Star Wars
got unfriendly reviews, too. (This pronouncement was reported as fact, another reason to wonder about the hardworking entertainment media, since
Star Wars
was nominated for eleven Oscars, won seven. Personally, I would like to get hammered like that each and every time at bat.) I
knew
the movie would be bad, so I was not at all surprised. Why?
Because sequels are whores’ movies.
And always will be. Understand, there is zero criticism of Lucas intended, nor should there be. Probably you didn’t see the
Butch and Sundance
prequel. I was kind of the producer. And that, too, was a whore’s movie.
Steven Spielberg, the most successful figure of our time, has six sequels to his credit so far: one
Jurassic Park,
one
Gremlins,
two
Indiana Jones
es, and two
Back to the Future
s.
With
Phantom Menace,
Lucas has tied him: one
American Graffiti,
two
Indiana Jones
es, and three
Star Wars.
But when the next two
Star Wars
sequels are in the can, he will have undisputed possession of the championship.
So the two richest film guys have the most whores’ movies. Class, take a minute and think real hard: Is there maybe just possibly some teenie-weenie connection between those two facts?
Let me talk about beginners for a second, which we all were. When that is who and where you are, and your prayer is someday to be in the movie business, your fantasies cannot stop going into overdrive. You’re going to meet Bergman or Fellini or Lean (or fill in your own master). And you’re going to be loved by the critics and the public. And
Cameron Diaz will fold herself into your strong arms. (Or Marilyn or Audrey or Kate. For me it was always
Jean Simmons.)
Our talent will fucking stun the civilized world. And when we start out to write our screenplay, it must be so original and dazzling, so different and glorious, people will have no choice but to love us. And why?
Because we are so wonderful.
The pulse of what we write
then
is always this:
creative.
The pulse for a sequel is always this:
financial.
So they are never of a similar quality.
Are there exceptions? I was on the Cannes jury a decade back, wandering with the Australian director
George Miller, the doctor. (So designated because there were two Australian directors named George Miller and the other one didn’t go to med school.)
Forgetting his credits, I gave him my whore theory just as I have to you.
Such a cry of outrage you have never heard. I had forgotten George had done
Mad Max
as his first flick,
Mad Max 2
(
Road Warrior
here) two years later. “I had no money for the first one,” he said. “I did the second one because I wanted, hopefully, to get it right this time.”
He did—it’s the one sequel that’s better than the original.
A lot of people will argue for the second
Godfather,
terrific, but I think the first is the one that echoes.
In Lucas’s case, I think there are precious few on the planet who preferred
Return of the Jedi
to
Star Wars.
Well, why, pray tell, should
The Phantom Menace
be any less boring and flawed than the last of the first trilogy?
People will come up with all kinds of bullshit for whoring. I remember telling people, Well, there was just so much great stuff about Butch and Sundance I couldn’t fit in the first one. Wonderful interesting new material.
Bullshit. That was a whore talking.
And whatever Lucas tells us today about why he did the deed, whatever excuse he comes up with, it will be bullshit. If you disagree, then answer this: Why didn’t he finance a sequel to
Howard the Duck
?