Off to the Side: A Memoir

  I was unnerved by the intensity of Melissa’s structural probing, a problem I had later with my daughter Jamie who, when we were intending to write a script together, was far ahead of me before she had written a single line of script. While talking with Melissa I dully reflected on my deficiencies which, of course, I decided never to admit. By the time we mutually threw up our hands on Dalva and I had the drink I had been waiting for, Melissa asked, “My husband wonders if you might want to write a Western for him?” Being broke at the time I felt an urge to sail across the room, grab the phone, and call the number she gave me but I waited until she left. Shortly after, we met at Harrison Ford’s ranch in Jackson, Wyoming.

  On the phone Harrison had asked me if I had a producer in mind for our project and I said no, because I never had a producer in mind. He suggested his friend Douglas Wick with whom he had done Working Girl, which was nominated for an Academy Award. Our first meeting in Jackson was less than auspicious what with everyone but me coming down with flu though I suspected martini flu. Amy Irving was there and the evening got out of hand, to put it in its mildest terms, and I was accused of being an enabler for at least the hundredth time. The first meeting wasn’t conclusive except that we decided to work together. I had already decided I wanted to set the film in the Sandhills of Nebraska in the 1920s. I quickly understood in a meeting with the top studio people at Columbia that this was a good idea because no one had ever been in the Sandhills of Nebraska, thus I was given a great deal of freedom of expression. Movie people are more likely to know Europe than our vast interior.

  This project went on intermittently for seven years and seven drafts, which shows you the world is in balance. Wick and I enjoyed working with each other. Wick is an actual rather than an invented Yale graduate, witty like John Calley, and well read. He also likes to eat which gave us something very solid in common. Often while meeting he would call Orsini’s to deliver lunch which I found to be a fine morale booster. He’s married to the brilliant Lucy Fisher, whom I had met years before when she was running Coppola’s company and who later provided the good sense in Warner’s top brass. It took me years and three projects to wear out Wick. After we parted company as coworkers, though we remained friends, I envisioned him wanly hanging out around the Writer’s Guild building hoping to meet a real and ordinary screenwriter.

  * * *

  During our abortive project with Ford (though I think at least three of my seven versions would have made fine movies, far better than some of his recent questionable choices), Wick and I were on a plane from Jackson to L.A. when I told him a story that piqued his interest about one late night at my cabin during which I had actually become a wolf.

  Minimal research told me that the experience was an attack of lycanthropy, which, though extraordinary, was not all that rare, especially in the Middle Ages and among Native Americans. Wick, anyway, was intrigued but I was a little hesitant about going public with the experience, thinking it might be personal “medicine” in Native terms. My solution to the qualms I was feeling was to write the script with a New York City background and to leave out totally any material related to Native shape changing. There was certainly a strong enough European background to the material to give it a tinge of universality. Logically enough I called the script Wolf.

  I had told Nicholson about the experience soon after it happened and a year or so later when I told him I was attempting a script he was interested. Wick wasn’t overenthused with my first version, which was too broad, but by the time I finished the second we were ready to go. Nicholson, needless to say, is very hard to pin down and Wick had been pleased to hear that Jack and Jim Brooks, the director, had spent some time talking about the idea though Brooks deals with his own work exclusively.

  I flew to Paris with the script and met Jack at the Plaza Athenee on his arrival from a vacation in southern France. We had lunch and dinner and then next midmorning when we met for a walk he said he had stayed up late and read the script. “Let’s do it,” he said. We celebrated for a few days and I flew home a bit deranged. The plane was off the tip of Greenland before it occurred to me that I had forgotten to stop by to meet my French publisher, Christian Bourgois. I had been close with Huston and Nicholson for Revenge but then I lost one and consequently the other.

  * * *

  Of course I should have known not to offer up my heart’s affections. From my point of view the project began to disintegrate almost immediately with the choice of director. Wick and I discussed several who were acceptable to Jack, and Wick settled on Mike Nichols, who was a friend of both of them. Mike Nichols had directed a number of brilliant movies but I had doubts that he was appropriate for Wolf. I wanted him to be but he wasn’t.

  In the ensuing year I did three more complete drafts after extensive meetings with Nichols and Wick in New York City which had the palliative that I was close to my mind doctor, Sullivan. My nerves had become virtually peeled. The essential problem was that the story was Dionysian and Nichols’s point of view was thoroughly Apollonian. Given the hero’s problems in my versions of Wolf I thought it was a fine solution when his psyche changed him into a wild animal, an actual wolf. Nichols said he felt it was unbearable to give up Mozart, which I agreed with up to a point what with my being a Mozart obsessive, but then all the truly wild behavior I created for the character, and I know wild animals, was rejected by Nichols.

  There was nowhere to go and one day I quit within what I thought was seconds from being fired. It didn’t matter by then. Before I left New York Wick and I had a goofy breakfast of caviar and vodka, Dover sole and Meursault, something soothing. Jack offered on the phone to back out but I didn’t think he should. I held on to the idea that there was still a good chance the movie would be good, and also Wick and I had become friends. A month before in Hollywood I had insisted that we all eat at Chasen’s before it closed. Wick arranged to get Ronald Reagan’s old table, which pleased me for captious reasons. Though Doug was a Democrat his father, Charles Wick, had been Reagan’s head of the USIA. Harrison and Melissa Mathison Ford and Jim and Heidi Brooks joined Doug, Lucy, and me. The point here is that evening we all decided that Doug looked like he had recently emerged from Buchenwald. Our project was destroying his mind and body and that’s one reason I wanted the movie to be made. In recognition of my “goodwill” the studio gave me an unsolicited check and a thoroughly meaningless credit as an “associate producer,” which was thoroughly misunderstood by my literary friends.

  Good-bye to all of that. I ended up doing another version of my Ford Western to finance the writing of my novel The Road Home. Wolf was essentially the end of my screenwriting career. When Wick sent me the ensuing scripts by others I became so unhappy I couldn’t bear to read them. I fixed on the smallest scenes, one of which I had discussed with Michelle Pfeiffer, in which she was on her hands and knees in a half-slip taking off Jack’s handcuffs in a closet. Shot from the rear, of course. Mike didn’t use it! My survival technique was to walk literally hundreds of miles over a period of months in the virtual wilderness of the Upper Peninsula though by then I was so tired I barely made more than five miles a day. At the beginning I mostly thrashed around but finally I walked.

  “Let that be a lesson to you,” we used to say. I didn’t mean to go on at such length about my screenwriting but then it was my livelihood for twenty years, since I was unable to survive on the income of my novels. Now I can, with some journalism thrown in. Five years away from Hollywood I see all of my mistakes with painful clarity. Since it’s essentially a director’s medium I should have tied myself to a series of directors sympathetic to my writing. I went large when I should have gone independent and smaller.

  Much of the difficulty is built in to the business and has been so long ingrained that it’s incurable. The relationship between Hollywood and the writer is basically adversarial. The film business acts as if it wishes it could do without writers but it can’t, and it has accepted the fact without grace. The traditions of storytelling
are as old as humanity and the talent for doing it well is rare indeed. This talent is utterly undemocratic and is definitely not liberally spread among producers and directors. It’s the writer who must create the story for the film and the dialogue for the actresses and actors. It has been demonstrated countless times that they can seldom create their own good dialogue. Meanwhile this pathetically adversarial relationship often makes writers act in defense like nitwits. It is one thing to brook no substantial editing interference in a novel, but then no one is spending fifty to a hundred million dollars to publish your novel. In the best filmmaking a balance between writer and director has been achieved but the best is a scant few percent.

  When I left Hollywood our exhaustion was probably mutual but scarcely noticed by them. The industry is fortunate in that our culture has created at least a hundred thousand young people who want to write for the movies, doubtless some just for the money, but many in the same way I was obsessed beginning as a child. A bigger problem in Hollywood starts at the white-bread top among the few dozen people who can green-light a potential movie. The struggle to get where they are has narrowed their vision of American culture, thus the industry fails to represent the population. I keep thinking how cheaply a studio could hire ten black, ten Latino, and a few Native American novelists, give them a month’s scriptwriting lessons, tell them to go for it, and send them home. A studio could do it for the price of an executive or two.

  It’s hard to sculpt the essential shapelessness of twenty years of life. To put Aristophanes in the past tense, “whirl was king.” The most laughable word in our current culture is “closure.” Closure is talked about before the blood is dry on the cement. Only ninety-nine percent of me has quit. If the remaining three hundred million brain cells came up with a startling film idea I’d probably go out there and pitch it. Meanwhile, it’s unlikely that our daughters will ever be homeless.

  BACK HOME

  What is the meaning of a single human life? It is apparent that we don’t really know. As to its events the haunting and consistent refrain is “Everything could have been otherwise.”

  We don’t seem to remember one another very well. Perhaps part of the impulse in novel writing is to remember people who didn’t exist in detail to reassure ourselves that such remembering is worth the effort, to reassure ourselves, too, that all of us were in a near miss with not existing. I had the disturbing experience before I began writing Dalva where I dreamt her into existence on two consecutive nights. Later, when I thought that matter over, I came to accept this experience as not so extraordinary. I had done a lot of research and had traveled a number of times to the Sandhills of Nebraska where I intended to locate the novel for a number of reasons, the first that it is relatively unknown and to me overwhelmingly beautiful with the grand Niobrara River bisecting the northern section. I was drawn to the rolling emptiness. The largest county, Cherry, is a hundred by fifty miles with a population of about five: thousand. The landscape aches with an unknown mythology. Except for the late phases of the Apache uprising in the Southwest, the Sandhills, and just north to Wounded Knee, is the site of the last collision of Native cultures and our own. Because of the lack of population density the history of the area is quite naked, though history is only the skeleton on which we hang the hopefully living flesh of our stories.

  With the character of Dalva I had the vague sense of the nature of her great-grandfather, her grandfather, and her father, before I discovered that “she would be a she.” There was the Jungian question of what have we done with our twin sister whom the culture forces us to abandon at birth. In the first dream she was vividly naked in my studio, and in the second, clothed on a balcony in Santa Monica looking at the Pacific Ocean and thinking of home. Just before I begin a novel I am especially addled and have observed that the fuel, the mental energy behind the book to be written, is either unknown or not fully known. When her character arrived at my door I naturally wondered about the nature of my subconscious invitation. It is at this point in writing I’m most fearful of that “fugal” state I have entered several times wherein all the material I’ve invented, plus the entirety of my own history, marry and are filled with quite uncontrollable mental energy so that if I close my eyes hundreds of images whirl past. With Dalva I filled a couple of boxes of yellow tabs of images and then didn’t need to look at them again because they were already part of my consciousness.

  Back to the thought of nonexistence which translates to the fragility of our individual appearances here, the very slender and accidental lineages, the fatal interruptions of war and disease that denied so many existence. I have often thought while traveling in France how some earthen cellars might still be damp with the blood of World War II, and consequently the thousands who didn’t exist because this blood had been so liberally shed. And in our own mundane lives the thought “everything could have been otherwise” keeps showing its face. Those of us who are married, divorced or not, remember the thoroughly haphazard and sometimes accidental way we met and married our mates, the days or hours, often unknown, when we made love, and then the singular sperm that met the singular egg that created so much of the nature of our children. In fiction, if you don’t leave out the evidence, the nature of the story imitates the confusing nature of our own lives and, more remotely, the nature of nature.

  My early novels and poems, like those of most writers, tended to depend on literary set pieces but beginning with Sundog I became quite impatient with anything I already knew. I became drawn to the idea of boarding a not clearly visible ship at night with no knowledge of its destination. I’ve wondered lately if it’s for this reason that I’ve loved being in port cities like Marseilles, Vera Cruz, Vancouver, B.C., or smaller ones such as Duluth, Minnesota, where the metaphor of arriving and leave-taking is visually alive. Maybe a writer is always a stowaway. Hidden, and well off to the side.

  In my Brown Dog series of novellas, three of them so far and a fourth coming, a picaresque character emerged who lives as randomly as the life he perceives around him. Living in some comparatively remote and economically poor areas I couldn’t help but study people who reminded me of the early van Gogh charcoal sketches, The Potato Eaters, many of whom work very hard but earn only enough to live the simplest of lives. They’re always behind in their pickup payments, everything they eat is fried, if they’ve been married their wives have left for greener pastures, if they’re horny a three-hundred-pound barmaid is entirely suitable. My hero, Brown Dog, usually lives in borrowed deer cabins. I’m aware that he’s become almost a survival mechanism for me, a creature I envy and whose life seems an alternative when I’m at desperate ends. My life at my cabin when I’m not working bears similarities. I might wake early and take a walk while my mind is still empty, which allows me to see the landscape more vividly and, at rare times, holographically with the additional illusion that you can see all sides of a tree or hill at once, the slightest filaments of time herself flutter in the air. After the walk I make a peanut butter and jam sandwich as a negligent gourmand, and then row my small blue-and-brown skiff counterclockwise around Au Sable Lake, which can take up to four hours. The little boat is blue and brown because they were the only colors the marine-supply store had left. The motions of rowing are hypnotic and the mind’s torments slide easily away with the passing water. Once when rowing in a local estuary I saw a bald eagle, two blue herons, a sandhill crane, the rare piping plover, and an errant male loon who, finishing his six weeks of nesting duties, tends to fly around several days wailing happily. Fully accepting the unlikelihood of reincarnation I admire the idea of becoming a waterweed, a muskrat, a tree, or hopefully a plover in the next life. The only problem with rowing is if a big wind comes up the high gunnels and short skeg make battling the wind arduous. If you’re dumb enough to light a cigarette you lose a hundred yards. A pint of the locally made ale at the Dunes Saloon after the hours of rowing restores drinking to a great pleasure rather than a stupid addiction.

  I don’t choose themes
for a novel, as such, but I’ve noted how often new characters tend to inhabit the area around problems that have bothered me. For instance, my parents had a pretty good marriage and the same with my wife and me though it requires a large amount of ordinary etiquette and avoiding stasis. Throughout my life I’ve noted a certain kind of man, essentially a restrained bully, often someone who was early on a radical idealist whose life has been diverted into other pursuits. The woman, probably unassuming at the time of the marriage, misses the man who was the college idealist. The bullying is seen in hundreds of daily gestures if you watch these couples closely in restaurants, airports, and during social occasions. In The Woman Lit by Fireflies I envisioned such a woman abandoning her asshole husband at a rest stop on Interstate 80 in Iowa. She simply climbs the fence and disappears into a cornfield. Curiously, after this novella was published in The New Yorker, I received dozens of letters from women who had done something similar.

  More recently in The Beast God Forgot to Invent I was speculating on the different perceptions of reality experienced by an idealized character who had suffered a closed head injury. The nature of the brain is so immensely various that a hundred victims of a closed head injury can each have a unique set of symptoms. I studied Harold Edleman’s preposterously difficult Neural Darwinism and the books of other brain experts like Damasio. I was quite floored for a couple of months because so much of the material was professional and beyond my comprehension, though I was pleased to learn that the workings of the brain are utterly unlike those of a computer. Of course it’s difficult to give a character absolutely fresh perceptions when we live in the thrall of our own habituation and conditioning. As I wrote I kept thinking of William Blake, John Clare, Christopher Smart, and an acute schizophrenic from Kentucky who wrote in his diary, “Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass.”