My story made him feel good, and Babenco at first thought that was because it had been his pioneer reading achievement in the English language. “But three, five months later,” he said, “the book wasn’t leaving my system—the anguish and pain of the characters, the compassion for them. And I decided to move forward.”
The novel had been optioned by two producers, Gene Kirkwood and Joe Kanter. Babenco went to see Kirkwood, found that another director was also interested in the book but a year away from actually making a film from it. Kirkwood tried to interest Babenco in another project.
“But I wanted not to be denied,” Babenco said. “It was unbearable when I felt so deeply about the material of Ironweed.” He went back five or six times to Kirkwood. “It was an emotional decision, not rational. I fought like a desperado.”
Then one day Babenco called me, we arranged to meet in New York, and we talked for three hours about Ironweed and about literature, on which he had been raised. I knew nothing about his work so he arranged a screening of his fourth and latest film, Kiss of the Spider Woman, which was opening in New York two days hence.
I thought it a wonderfully intelligent film, and successfully structured on levels of reality and fantasy, both of which were also elemental to any film that might be made from Ironweed. We then went to lunch and in the midst of it I called Kirkwood and said we could make a potentially fine film with Babenco now, not a year hence. He agreed, I went back to the table, we shook hands, and that was that. That night the rave reviews for Kiss of the Spider Woman came out in the New York papers, and Babenco began to get calls to make other movies.
But he was already booked.
A recurring question asked of me is how does it feel to translate your novel into a film, and how do you do it? Let me begin with an authoritative negative vision of any such effort, this from Ingmar Bergman: “… we should avoid making films out of books. The irrational dimension of a literary work, the germ of its existence, is often untranslatable into visual terms—and it, in turn, destroys the special, irrational dimension of the film.”
This has been historically true so often that all we can do is hunt and peck for the exceptions. Consider a handful: Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, made by Stanley Kubrick; Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath and Liam O’Flaherty’s The Informer, both made by John Ford; James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, made by Fred Zinnemann; Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, made by Robert Rossen. I believe these are all major achievements in American film art, yet none come anywhere near expressing the fullness or complexity of the novels on which they were based. How could they? An elephant cannot become a horse. But, then again, what does that have to do with breeding horses?
The novel, as receptacle of the entire spectrum of the imagination—visual, linguistic, poetic, spiritual, mystical, historical, etc., etc., etc., until the receptacle is full—can be duplicated only in its own mirror image, not in any other medium. Allow me to use this fragment of a paragraph from Ironweed:
Francis watched this primal pool of his own soulish body squirm into burgeoning matter, saw it change and grow with the speed of light until it was the size of an infant, saw it then yanked roughly out of the maternal cavern by his father, who straightened him, slapped him into being and swiftly molded him into a bestial weed. The body sprouted to wildly matured growth and stood fully clad at last in the very clothes Francis was now wearing. He recognized the toothless mouth, the absent finger joints, the bump on the nose, the mortal slouch of this newborn shade, and he knew then that he would be this decayed self he had been so long in becoming, through all the endless years of his death.
I would like to have that paragraph budgeted for filming.
I’m with Bergman that it is rather literarily irrational and doesn’t translate into visual irrationality. I don’t doubt that some elements of it could be translated (“soulish body” would be difficult), but it would be through special effects, probably cartoonish in their final form and, as such, reductive, with no place in this film.
There are irrational elements in our film: ghosts, fantasies, and hallucinatory sights, sounds, and behavior. But these things do translate. Babenco and I decided on what would work, what wouldn’t. If folks say they don’t work, he’ll take the rap (so will I, somewhat, and that’s all right). If they say they do work we will both bust our buttons.
Film is a director’s medium. Yes, yes. East is east. A rose is a rose. Who would doubt it? Well, producers sometimes, writers sometimes, actors sometimes, also critics, charwomen, and rachitic, one-eyed shutins, who all know how to do it better. But if Babenco isn’t in charge then it’s the committee system at work, the bureaucratic underworld: Casey, North, and Poindexter, doing a soft-shoe imitation of Ronald Reagan shuffling off to Managua.
Film is Babenco’s medium and I sit in the front row of the loge and cheer. I did not expect a full translation of the novel. The novel is the novel, and that’s still that, no matter what else happens. The fact is, however, that when a writer undertakes the writing of a script from a novel of his own, it is tantamount to self-amputative surgery. You eventually pose in front of the mirror without a left ear, a right thumb, with a thigh partly sliced away, the left leg dangling at the ankle, and then you decide that you’re ready for the premiere. Just comb the hair a little to the left, wear gloves, bulky trousers, and a high shoe, and who’ll notice? You may even set a new style.
This is not serious. Cutting a novel to pieces is not serious. But shaping a story for another medium can be a totally different sort of artistic exercise of the imagination. Consider Bergman’s imagination prior to his writing the screenplay for Fanny and Alexander. There lay his whole life to be culled for a final, celebratory, five-hour movie. (Three hours and a half in the United States.) A fifty-hour movie would not have been able to tell his story, but he singled out episodes, shaved history here, amputated his psyche there, and he produced a masterpiece for the finale (we still hope he changes his mind) of his career as a filmmaker.
He found harmonies, in the editing of his life and imagined times, that conformed to film size, just as I hope Babenco and I found the same when we structured our movie. That is how it was for me at the start, at any rate: the writer believing he is significant in shaping the film. And he is. But, of course, the process has only just begun. There follows the shoot, and then the editing, and then the screenings.
Listen to Raymond Chandler, noted literary hard-boil, speaking on behalf of beleaguered screenwriters:
If you oppose the routine minds, they are angered by your opposition. If you do not oppose them, they say you are a hack without integrity. What Hollywood seems to want is a writer who is ready to commit suicide in every story conference. What it actually gets is the fellow who screams like a stallion in heat and then cuts his throat with a banana. The scream demonstrates the artistic purity of his soul, and he can eat the banana while somebody is answering a telephone call about some other picture.
Chandler bade a qualified farewell to lovely Hollywood with that essay, and spoke volumes for the eloquent but powerless underdog. But here I arrive in a later year, working not within the studio system but with an independent producer, Keith Barish, of Taft Entertainment Pictures/Keith Barish Productions (and we will get to him), and with a contract that gave as much control to a writer as my lawyer has ever negotiated, or seen.
Would that control have been there if push ever came to shove? I can’t say. The issue was never tested. At dinner after a screening I made a remark that included the phrase “commitment to the writer,” and another writer-director who was present laughed himself into a colonic spasm.
“Commitment to the writer? In Hollywood? There’s no such thing,” and he resumed his spasm.
Well, let’s put it this way then: this film is the exception that proves the rule. The key has been in Keith Barish’s desire to make a serious movie (he also co-produced Sophie’s Choice from William Styron’s novel) from a literary work that the major studios in
Hollywood were afraid to touch. Barish, who personally monitored the shooting of the film in Albany, also showed great (and justified) faith in Babenco, letting him run his own shop with a minimum of interference, and letting him cut his own movie.
During the early months Babenco was approached by several major actors who were interested in playing Francis, but we always had one eye on Jack Nicholson, whose Irishness, toughness, and wit were perfect for the part. No one could remember Nicholson ever evincing the sensitivity or vulnerability essential to Francis’s character, but then again had any role ever tested those traits in him?
Babenco visited Nicholson, found he’d read the book and wanted to play Francis. Nicholson then read the script and liked it, and so began the quest to raise the money to pay him his price. I met Nicholson at a saloon in New York one night when negotiations were under way but breaking down. “I don’t want a nickel more than the Bank of England will give me on my name,” he said with a smile.
But no Hollywood studio was willing to meet that demand for a film like Ironweed. And then Marcia Nasatir, who would become a producer of the film, introduced Babenco to Keith Barish. Barish, in partnership with Taft, met Nicholson’s price, agreed to finance the film, and became the principal producer.
At some point in these negotiations I was walking with Babenco toward a Chinese restaurant in New York City when the reality of what was taking place reached him.
“We are going to make this movie!” he said. Then he clenched his fists, and with both feet leaving the ground, he leaped into the cinematic stratosphere.
He came down to earth in Albany, and why not? Production designer Jeannine Oppewall was sent to check out the terrain in North Carolina as an alternative, but discovered that Albany looks more like Albany than North Carolina does.
And so the movie people moved in and took over Albany’s imagination. Celebrity watches were inaugurated to get Jack’s and Meryl’s autographs. A Hooverville was constructed in the old freight yards behind Watervliet. River Street in Troy was magically reconstituted as Pearl Street in Albany. The trolley came back to Lark Street in Albany, on a block where it had never run. The local newspapers wrote two stories a day about it all, growing angrier by the hour at the absence of openness by the movie people, who were more or less sworn to silence (or else), the press only grudgingly coming to understand that you don’t talk about the movie until you are sure there is a movie to talk about.
Some 1,500 locals signed up as extras, and in time some of them would form into a social group and call themselves Weedies. The scriptwriter and his wife, Dana, would spend three days as extras, playing a pair of swells in the Gilded Cage scene, where Meryl so vividly personifies the lost Helen and her vanished dreams of musical glory. Eighty people—crew, extras, stars—would crowd into the long-abandoned Boulevard Cafeteria, which had been reconstituted as a Gay Nineties saloon.
We were all audience for Meryl’s film debut there as a singer. “He’s Me Pal” is her tune, which she sang for sixteen rehearsals and takes, the final take being, without doubt, the best, and the one that is used. But from the first rehearsal, she owned all of us—crew, extras, all—who wept, laughed, cheered her performance.
Please excuse this total breakdown of objectivity, which is a response to what seems a widely shared perception that Meryl Streep is the best actress alive. Sixty-four people from the production showed up the next day to see the dailies of her performance. Veteran film people, for whom dailies were usually a closed ritual for a select few hierarchs, found the recurring crowds at these daily showings an unusual phenomenon. A picnic atmosphere prevailed, with beer, soda, and popcorn for all, and heavy applause followed the screening of Meryl’s song, just as it had on the set.
“She rocked ’em,” said Jack.
I remember hearing Robert Duvall say once that people always think dailies are great, nobody knocks them; and this was certainly the general rule on this film. The excitement was cumulative as the film ripened, as the austere lushness of Lauro Escrorel’s cinematography unfolded, as the principals came to understand the characters they had been inhabiting over the weeks. Tom Waits is wonderfully comic as the mournful Rudy, and Carroll Baker, an age away from her Baby Doll persona, not only personifies the virginal Irish wife, she even looks like one of my aunts.
And then there is Jack.
He’s on screen maybe 85 percent of the time, in a role he was born to play. By his own measure, the only character from any of his films who is remotely kin to Francis Phelan is Randle McMurphy in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; but Jack is more complex, more diverse as Francis. Jack has been a screenwriter, and a director, and he seems always to be looking at himself as a set of specimens under glass: varietal strains of a single species. In four takes maybe he’ll repeat himself once, but the odds are against it. He willfully shifts nuances to give the director a choice.
Jack isn’t exactly what you’d call a family man. A nonfamily man is perhaps closer to how he represents himself, and there is certainly an overriding element of that in the psyche of Francis Phelan also. My objectivity falls by the wayside again as I remember Jack’s performance in the kitchen with his wife, twenty-two years after he’d abandoned her; and then on top of this his confrontation in the back yard with the ghosts of his entire life. Here is the range of a great actor made visible, the leap from contrition and self-abasement into a fierce and life-preserving anger at the haunting anxieties that are trying to drive him mad.
Francis hears the music of the ghosts in the yard and he moves toward, not away from, them. “You goddamn spooks,” he yells. “You ain’t real. You’re all dead, and if you ain’t you oughta be. I’m the one is livin’. I’m the one puts you on the map. So get your ass gone!”
I couldn’t have imagined a better performance. (And I did imagine it.)
I say bravo.
The film began shooting on February 23, and wrapped June 6, and during the entire time I was at work on the last quarter of a new novel, Quinn’s Book, which I’d been writing for five years. Ninety-five percent of the Ironweed script had been completed before the shooting began, we modified a few scenes as we went, and I spent at least part of almost every day on the set, involved in the production in myriad ways.
But I also worked every day on Quinn.
Somewhere in March I made a bet with Babenco that I would finish my novel before he wrapped the movie. If he won, he’d get the box of Cuban cigars I’d been given as a gift. (I no longer smoke.) If I won, he’d owe me a case of elegant Beaujolais. (I do drink a glass of wine now and again.)
I lost the bet by six days, Babenco is smoking the cigars, and I am buying my own wine. I do think, however, that this answers another recurring question of me: whether I will stop writing fiction, as have some novelists who worked in Hollywood. My answer is that I am a practicing novelist who once in a while writes a screenplay and tries to keep some semblance of control over what is done to it.
Late in September I went to Los Angeles and watched an early version of the movie on videotape, studying it for three days in my hotel room and offering cuts, elisions, restorations, and assorted gratuitous suggestions. I observed, with new incursions of pain, that certain favored scenes were no longer in the film. Alas, alas, Mr. Writer. Once the film is in the editing room your time of influence has passed. Now there remains only that inexorable problem of time, and it will not yield its hegemony over your space.
The full film came to three hours, was quickly slashed to two hours and forty-five minutes, then to two hours and twenty-four, then Babenco said he and editor Anne Goursaud (and with suggestions from Jack) had cut it to two hours fourteen. The editing was ongoing, the shaving proceeding apace. Soon it would be shorter.
I remember a conversation I had with a professor at Yale who said he thought all movies should be reduced to twenty minutes. Was this happening to my story? The worst scenario was Raymond Chandler’s vision of the Hollywood producer fifty years ago consoling the writer about c
uts: “… the scenes that regretfully had to be thrown away were graven on the producer’s heart, and in the lonely watches of the night he tells them over to himself and weeps.… How sadly will he drain the life blood from your story and hand you back the embalmed remains as if it was just what you wanted—or at least what you ought to want, if you are a reasonable fellow and willing to face the facts of life.”
Was this happening to me? Well, you knew all this going in, sap. Why are you having illusions about the process now? Welcome to L.A. Welcome to the movie business.
I went back to the beginning of the tape and watched the two hours and twenty-four yet again. Keith Barish said the distributors at Tri-Star were crazy about this version. Soon I would see the two-fourteen on the big screen. Babenco called to ask whether he should have an ambulance standing by for me.
And then I saw it, and as I watched I realized that all that was left for me to do was root for the home team. What I was seeing was concision in process, a winnowing of (if it succeeded) a work of art.
Film, it seems to me, yearns for coherence. The novel does also, but the novel can tolerate sideshows and excrescences that wouldn’t be allowed by most modern filmmakers. Because the novel requires an exercise of the intellect, an intimacy with the reader’s mind and reasoning powers, it can meander and ruminate, it can luxuriate in language alone, and gain in depth from these excursions. But because film is an exercise in immediacy, of raw life perceived in the instant that it happens, those meanderings are judged to be irrelevancies that dilute or divert the principal focus of the story. Stay in the center ring and never mind the sideshows, is the revered wisdom.
I watched the big two-fourteen.
And then it was over.
It was better than the two-twenty-four.
One of the scenes I’d missed most had been restored. Other things were gone and I missed them somewhat, but not much. The film did cohere. It was faster, better, sharper with ten minutes cut away. Jack thought it was still too long. I didn’t. There was talk of showing it to presumably dispassionate people with movie savvy to gain perspective. Babenco was against this. He felt he already had perspective and I agreed with him. To hell with the committee system. He had produced a work of art of a high order.