My Movie Business: A Memoir

  jokes. Like many comics, he had a gift for one-liners. The first draft of the screenplay was riddled with wisecracks.

  I don’t do one-liners.What’s comic in my novels is not what my characters say; my comedy is not the comedy of quips. The whole situation is comic; the entire reaction of the characters to their situation is what’s funny, if anything is.

  In subsequent drafts, Steve laid off the one-liners, but a few survived; they still make me wince whenever I see the film, although for the most part, George (as he said he would) directed over them. He instructed the actors to soften those lines that appeared to me to jump off the page.

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  The principal success of the film of The World According to Garp should be credited to Marion Dougherty’s good instincts for casting and how George directed the actors. I thought that all the characters, minor to major, were perfect. What was missing from the movie was chiefly miti-gated by the performances of the actors.

  George was right to have faith in Robin Williams; Robin was an excellent Garp. His only noticeable discomfort with the role was that he had too much body hair to convincingly play Garp as a teenager; hence, for those scenes, he was waxed. The sounds of Robin screaming from the trailer, where he was being waxed in preparation for the blow-job scene, are memorable to this day.

  My eldest son, Colin, was assigned the task of coaching Robin to wrestle. Robin was a good athlete, and he took to the daily workouts with unbridled zeal. Maybe too much zeal; Colin’s chief concern was that Robin might get hurt.

  George was very stern with Colin on the subject of not breaking Robin’s arms or giving him a mat burn on his forehead, but Robin remained injury-free and unmarked throughout the filming.

  When I first met Glenn Close, who played Jenny Fields, Garp’s mother, I thought she was far too young and sexy for the role—Jenny’s sexual abstemiousness is essential to her radicalism. Yet, with or without her starched nurse’s uniform, Glenn’s militantly upper-class voice made her a

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  believably sexless Jenny. Mary Beth Hurt was also perfect, as Garp’s wife, Helen, and John Lithgow (as the trans-sexual Roberta Muldoon) was magnificent. Even the

  minor parts were matchless—Swoosie Kurtz as the prostitute, whom Garp’s mother buys for him, and Amanda

  Plummer as the tongueless rape victim, Ellen James.

  It was a movie experience that spoiled me because I was able to remain detached from it. It was not my screenplay and no longer my novel; it was a George Roy Hill film, and I liked George Roy Hill films. I was very well treated, but—at the same time—I was never truly involved. That I accepted a cameo role as the referee of a wrestling match was an accident; I just happened to be on the set when the scene came up. I’d been certified as a referee for twenty-four years; it wasn’t as if I was called upon to act. As it turned out, I did have to remember a couple of lines, which I found difficult to say; they were Steve Tesich’s lines, not mine.

  Now Steve is dead, and George has Parkinson’s disease; it’s sad to think we’ll never see a new George Roy Hill film. I still get together with Robin Williams and John Lithgow, but only occasionally; we exchange Christmas cards, silently observing (with the shock of all families) how our children have grown.

  Most of the others from the Garp film have slipped away. Sometimes, looking through my address book, I

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  come upon a phone number that I haven’t called in years.

  It may not still be a working number; I’m tempted to call, just to see. But I never make the call. I never cross out the name and number, either.

  A film is a fast family, almost an instant family. It is also quickly over. In the working life of a novel, the supporting cast is relatively small—my wife (my first reader), a friend or two, my editor. Occasionally, depending on the degree of research necessary for the novel, there are a few “ex-pert” readers—doctors for a novel about a doctor, for example. These relationships generally endure beyond the writing of the particular book; something remains. But with a movie, there is this sudden, intense grouping of a lot of people, many of whom will never see one another

  again.

  Then one night, on the television, I am searching for a film or a ball game, and there are Glenn Close and Robin Williams—the unlikely mother with her unlikely son.

  Seeing them is not like taking one of my books down from the shelf and encountering a specific and familiar passage.

  Glenn and Robin may be familiar in the predictability of their behavior, but they are also strangers, merely wearing the clothes I gave them, which they are only borrowing for a while. One has seen them wear other clothes.

  George Roy Hill also directed the film of Slaughterhouse-

  Five, from the Kurt Vonnegut novel. Kurt was my teacher

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  at Iowa, and an old friend.We went to see an early screening of Garp together. Before the screening, Kurt warned me: “It’s like seeing your characters get their hair cut.”

  (And they’re prettier, they smell better, they don’t swear as much. I suppose they’re more presentable to the rest of the world.)

  In the case of Garp, George followed a clean narrative line through the domestic story of the novel, which was the story of a mother and her son, and of the son’s mar-riage.What George left out was what Vonnegut called “the rough stuff ”—the more unseemly, more sordid parts of the story.

  What Kurt said wasn’t offered as criticism; it was just an observation, and I think it’s true. (Well, okay, maybe you liked them a little better when their hair was long and shaggy.)

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  I G A V E A W A Y

  Then there was Tony Richardson,the nonpareil.I’ve

  never felt as flattered as when Tony told me he

  wanted to make a movie of The Hotel New Hamp-

  shire, my fifth novel. I loved Tony Richardson’s films. He had a range like no one else—violent or austere one

  minute, wildly comic the next. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and The Loved One, Tom Jones and The Bor-der. I had no doubt what Tony Richardson would do with The Hotel New Hampshire—a macabre comedy and a fairy tale, not half as realistic as Garp. Tony didn’t even pretend to be disappointed when I told him I didn’t want to write the screenplay; he wanted to write it himself, which he did.

  It was a brilliant screenplay, but Tony’s original vision of

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  The Hotel New Hampshire was of a film in two parts. Some critics of the novel had recoiled at the degree of sexual farce. Not Tony. The film couldn’t be sexual or farcical enough to satisfy him. His was an uncompromising vision.

  He would leave nothing out; he would capture the whole novel, he said.

  But now that I’ve had more experience in the movie

  business, I accept that most films are exercises in compromise. Tony was unprepared to compromise. When Orion

  Pictures insisted on making one movie, not a film in two parts, Tony refused to significantly cut the script; he shortened scenes, he used a lot of montage, he increased the voice-over, which fastforwarded many scenes, but in

  essence he deleted not a single story line or minor character from his two-movie screenplay. The rousing choice of music (Jacques Offenbach) gave to the film the lunatic, ex-uberant pace of the cancan.

 
Many good films, like Garp, are toned-down versions of the books they come from; Tony Richardson’s The Hotel New Hampshire is a deliberate exaggeration of the novel. By speeding up the story to the Offenbach score, Tony heightened both the comedic and the fairy-tale qualities of the book; he enhanced the hectic narrative momentum of the novel. But he paid a price. Many of the minor (and even the major minor) characters were reduced to carica-tures—they became cartoon versions of themselves. (An-

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  other oft-heard criticism of the film is that you need to have read the novel to know who many of the characters are. Knowing the novel as well as I do, I can’t speak to that charge.)

  In addition to fastforwarding many scenes, the voiceover imitated the novel’s persistent foreshadowing accurately, but many film critics have a knee-jerk objection to voice-over, and both film and book reviewers are often suspicious of flashforwarding. (Note: this is not a typo-graphical error. Fast forwarding and flash forwarding are two different things.) In the narrative voice of a novel, or in voice-over, what I mean by “flashforwarding” is any voice of authority that does this kind of thing: “Ten years later, I would regret running over Mrs.Abernathy’s cocker spaniel, but at the time it seemed that the episode would quickly pass.”

  In a recent review of A Widow for One Year, a book reviewer went so far as to say that the flashforward has a

  “lesser ontological status” than the flashback; furthermore, the reviewer concluded, the flashforward is “a subversive, supernatural process.” You bet it is. If a novelist or a movie director can’t play God, who can?

  Whether in the narrative voice of a novel or in voice-over, what the flashforward does is invite the audience to have a look at the storytelling mechanism itself. Rather than label that process “subversive” or “supernatural,” I

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  would contend that most readers and moviegoers like to be given hints of the future. One of the pleasures provided by storytelling, in both a novel and a film, is anticipation.

  In the film of The Hotel New Hampshire, Tony Richardson made a purposeful choice—heighten the farce. He

  fastforwarded and flashforwarded like crazy. In the novel, John Berry (Rob Lowe in the film) is in love with his older sister, Franny (Jodie Foster); John’s infatuation with Franny is both agonizing and bittersweet. In the movie, Tony chose to make John Berry’s incestuous obsession with his sister a comic romp. As for Franny, a rape victim who is later seduced by a terrorist, Tony gave her a tomboy’s enduring toughness and a kind of in-your-face sexual swagger.

  But John’s infatuation with Franny was hard for me to see. In the film, I could never convince myself that Rob Lowe, a gorgeous boy—prettier than most girls—could

  be head over heels for Jodie Foster. Ms. Foster was not nearly as attractive as a young girl as she has become; she is a good-looking young woman, and a terrific actress, but she was not a pretty girl. In the movie, I could have been more easily convinced that Jodie Foster was obsessed with Rob Lowe.

  That said, if the incest wasn’t convincing, Jodie Foster and Rob Lowe were otherwise right for their roles, and

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  their supporting cast was first-rate. Beau Bridges as the heedlessly dreaming father was superb; he was exactly as I’d imagined the father of that unfortunate family. And Tony’s decision to make Franny’s rapist and her terrorist-seducer the same actor (Matthew Modine) was shrewd.

  Mr. Modine was especially good as the terrorist without a conscience, as was Amanda Plummer in her role as the terrorist with a conscience. (Ms. Plummer, who is tongueless in Garp, is also handicapped in The Hotel New Hampshire, where her nickname is “Miss Miscarriage.”)

  The more eccentric characters, Iowa Bob (Wilford

  Brimley) and Freud (Wallace Shawn), suffered less as cari-catures than did some relatively more realistic minor characters, and both Brimley and Shawn were wonderful.

  Somewhat less successful in the film was the tragicomic character of Susie the bear (Nastassja Kinski). It was not Ms. Kinski’s fault, although her being visibly pregnant during the shooting did not help her cause. Perhaps she’d mis-takenly assumed that she would be wearing the bear suit in all her scenes—hence no one would know she was pregnant. But, alas, there was an all-important love scene between her and Rob Lowe, when of course she was out of her ursine costume—and any other costume—and which

  Tony was forced to shoot in the half-dark. It was a shame not to see more of her, I thought.

  It was Susie who suffered most from the cartoon effects

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  on the characters; she was the principal victim of Tony speeding up two movies to turn them into one. Only once, when Ms. Kinski is dirty-haired and shambling through the Prater in her bear suit (without the head, which she is tot-ing like a lunch pail in one paw), does Susie the bear look like the sexually wounded character she is. She is a symbol for all the sexually wounded, which is what The Hotel New Hampshire is about.

  I liked the movie nonetheless. Tony’s interpretation of the novel as sexual cancan is a much more suitable transla-tion of my sense of humor than Steve Tesich’s dialogue in The World According to Garp. But, to most audiences, The Hotel New Hampshire was not nearly as successful a film as Garp. Only in some countries in Europe was it more popular, which may have been the result of Hotel being more popular in parts of Europe as a book, too—I mean more popular than Garp. (The film’s success in Europe may also have been the result of Tony Richardson and Nastassja Kinski being better known there than they are in North America. I don’t know.)

  Earlier, before Orion Pictures was involved, there had been some effort to finance the film of The Hotel New Hampshire with money from an interested pizza billion-aire. “The pizza money,” Tony called it. But soon the pizza magnate began to behave like a producer. “Even the pizza man has an opinion!” Tony said.

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  Somewhere along the line, the pizza man’s money was

  spurned and Orion Pictures became the major player;

  maybe that was when Tony’s idea of a film in two parts was compromised. Tony’s old friend, and The Hotel New Hampshire’s producer, Neil Hartley, tried to explain the intrica-cies of film financing to me once, but I have never been able to grasp it. Neil was very kind and patient with me, but he might as well have been describing the pleasures and perils of hang gliding to a mole.

  Tony Richardson died of AIDS in November 1991. His

  memoir, The Long- Distance Runner, was found by his daughter Natasha on the day of his death; Tony had hidden it in the back of the same cupboard where he kept his Os-cars. I miss him. Like Irvin Kershner, Tony was a great reader and a good friend. He was not just another eccentric Englishman living in Los Angeles; he lived there like deposed but flamboyant royalty, like a king who relished his own exile.

  There is a picture that was taken of us on one of the locations for The Hotel New Hampshire, an abandoned school somewhere in Quebec. It’s raining. Tony’s poncho bal-loons around him like a sail. I’m standing in the archway of the massive door to the old school. Tony, standing a step down from me, is still half a head taller than I am. He is standing defiantly in the rain, in profile, his distinctive nose like the beak of an inquisitive bird of prey. For no rea-

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  so
n that I can remember, Tony is wearing black elbow-length gloves—like the fireproof, heat-resistant gloves of a man who works in a forge. He wore his eccentricity like that—baffling and absurd, but also with the appearance of something casually acquired, to which he was indifferent.

  (God knows what those gloves meant to Tony—probably

  nothing.) That he struck others as bizarre did not matter to him.

  I was teaching at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Ripton,Vermont, when Tony finished shooting the motorcycle scenes in The Hotel New Hampshire. To find a vintage motorcycle with a sidecar had not been difficult; a larger problem had been to make the sidecar strong enough to carry the bear. (I mean a real bear, not Nastassja Kinski.) In both the novel and the film, Freud drives the bear named State o’ Maine around in the sidecar. Wally Shawn must have loved that.

  To my surprise, Tony sent me the motorcycle. There

  was still bear hair in the sidecar. The motorcycle and sidecar had been boxed up and trucked from Quebec to Vermont. It was an illegal, unlicensed vehicle, and dangerous because its brakes were only equipped to stop a motorcycle less than half its power and size. On the dirt roads around Bread Loaf, my son Colin’s preferred method of stopping the machine was to drive off the road and wedge the sidecar between two trees—with my son Brendan in

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  the sidecar.As the father (at the time) of two teenage boys, I quickly decided what to do with the motorcycle; I gave it away.

  “Pity,” Tony told me later. “If I’d been able to arrange it, I would have sent you the bear.”

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  H E A L E D

  n early 1989, when my seventh novel, A Prayer for Owen Meany, was about to be published, I was at loose ends.

  IMy screenplay of TheCiderHouseRules was in its fourth year of not going into production, and I was a recently retired wrestling coach who was between novels. I don’t like being “between novels,” especially when a new novel is being published and I haven’t the next novel firmly in mind. (What would turn out to be my eighth novel, A Son of the Circus, was a long way from being “firmly in mind.”)