Poldek gave his version, of course, and it was the beginning of a communication between Poldek and Spielberg which would last for fifteen or sixteen years.
We were not far into the lunch before Spielberg told Sid Sheinberg he’d like to use his bathroom. Sheinberg gave directions, and Spielberg was barely out of hearing before dapper Poldek appealed to me, “Grossing two million a day, he has to wear sneakers? I ask you!”
But despite Poldek’s perception that Spielberg lacked nattiness, in the conversations we had that day the director showed himself an urbane fellow, soft-spoken but still with urgency in his voice. He proved also an accurate reader of the import of the book. And the truth was, grossing two million a day, he was entitled to wear sneakers. He had no concern for fashion.
The lunch drew to a close without any firm undertakings. Poldek assured Spielberg, “I tell you, Steven, you make this film of humanity man to man, it will win you an Academy Award! Guaranteed! No doubt at all!” I had not dared achieve first names with Spielberg myself, but it seemed to present no challenge for Poldek. And Poldek had no problem naming the unspoken entity, the film. “You’ll get an Oscar for Oskar!” In case Steven did not understand, Poldek made a similar case to Sheinberg. Spielberg shook my hand. “Fine book, fine book,” he murmured. But that was all. It might have been a farewell.
At the little hotel in Rodeo Drive that December, I also met one of the Goldcrest producers. I had greatly admired Gandhi, and was convinced Goldcrest, if they made an offer, would do a subtle job not only on Oskar but on the SS’s fresh-faced boys and young men who, between unspeakable acts, sent home to their mothers items of Polish linen bought in the Sukiennice. Hollywood did not have as good a record for creating three-dimensional Nazis.
I went back home for another antipodean Christmas, vigorously celebrated by Judy, who took Christmas as seriously as Dickens. Suppressed excitement, astonishing wrapping paper and ribbon, and presents which genuinely did take one by surprise were all part of her Australian Yule-craft. Though it is often a day of some eighty-five to ninety degrees Fahrenheit with considerable humidity, the Australians celebrate Christmas with a thoroughness which leaves them exhausted and hung-over.
In the New Year, a young woman named Kathy Kennedy, executive producer of E.T. and before that Steven’s secretary, made an occasional call about the progress of plans. The usual parsimonious word option was thankfully not mentioned. With Universal behind it, Amblin would either buy the rights or not.
As these events were shaping, I got a call on a Wednesday morning, Sydney time, from Amblin, asking me if I could come that night to Los Angeles and sign a contract with Universal. The idea of a contract at once put paid to my skepticism about films. I told Spielberg I would need to be back in Australia on Sunday to give a lecture. That was fine, he said, I could leave Australia Wednesday night, arrive in Los Angeles Wednesday morning by grace of the dateline, sign the contract, confer with my friends Poldek and Glovin. If I caught the Thursday night plane back to Sydney, I would be home on Saturday morning.
It is twelve hours from Sydney to Los Angeles and the flights were then all overnight. Though I was tired, I did not worry about that. I was on my way to what every writer sometimes secretly dreams of: payday. I knew of writers whose rights had been violated and who had been neglected and underrewarded for their films—Ken Kesey, who claimed to have received a mere $10,000 for what he saw as the violation of his book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I had asked Anthony Burgess, two years before at that BBC studio in Shepherd’s Bush, whether it was true that he had received something like fifty pounds for the film rights to A Clockwork Orange. He claimed it was. He had been living in Malta, and for some mysterious reason to do with taxes, a rock group had been buying up film properties for small amounts of money and had bought the rights to his brilliant book.
Kathy Kennedy and Steven Spielberg, however, did not seem to intend any malice toward me.
The necklace of bumpy storms always strung across the Pacific between Sydney and California barely woke me in my ample seat—no one in the American film industry flew at the back of the plane, it seemed, the cramped region in which Poldek and I had made all our research trips. Indeed, I was to learn that first class was actually considered hardship travel by Universal’s standards, and that one’s own private jet was the only ultimately reasonable way for a mogul to get around.
Even though Australians have plenty of practice in sleeping on long flights, the well-rested still arrive in foreign parts a little dislocated. It is as if the brain is somewhere near Hawaii and has not caught up. There is a tendency to slight blurring of vision, accentuated by the smudged air over Los Angeles. There was a booking for me at the Sheraton in Universal City, and I received the room key in the midst of families departing the hotel for a big day in the theme park of Universal Studios.
My friend Poldek visited me. “They get you to come from Sydney for two days? It means they must want to make the film straightaway.” That certainly seemed a reasonable proposition.
Chiefly I was full of a quiet anticipation. It seemed that I would be freed from want for some years, from the anxiety of waiting, an overdraft in place, for publishers to accept a manuscript and pay an advance on royalties; of sweating for a release date, when the payment on publication became due.
There was still a little light-headedness and sense of dislocation on the second day, when I was taken across by car to Universal’s legal department, an entire white office block in Universal City. All parties were there, under the chairmanship of a Universal lawyer. There was a prenuptial stillness in the room. I wondered if the lawyer was one of those functionaries who kept films in notional debt so that future earnings were not squandered on such people as writers. But this morning the fellow seemed like a kind uncle. In front of him, Spielberg, Sid Sheinberg, Poldek, Glovin (as Schindler’s lawyer) and myself all affixed our signatures to the contract. A sweet part of the deal was that I would write the first screenplay, and so I would not need to leave the Schindler story yet—it had become something of a home, even with its foul pit of nightmares and its chancy rescues.
Glovin signed a contract as associate producer, Poldek one as technical adviser. Sid Sheinberg made some pro forma remarks about the day being a happy one, and Spielberg thanked me for coming so far for so short a time. At that moment he was, I believe, editing the first Indiana Jones movie, and its needs pressed on him. We all said farewell to Spielberg, expecting to see him again soon.
I boarded the Los Angeles–Sydney flight and reencountered my distrait and overstimulated brain in the dark air somewhere east of Tahiti. In Sydney, I was met by my wife and daughters at the airport and we went and had coffee, and the universe seemed an abundant place, with the only serpent in the garden being that unarguable reality that all this fruitfulness was based on the mulch of lives taken or closely threatened in the Second World War.
At everyone’s insistence, and in the face of my doubts about being able to handle such a mysterious implement, I now acquired a grossly annoying and inscrutable personal computer. The personal computers of the day, 1983, were large, clunky and erratic. But they had something I had always needed—the cut-and-paste facility. It would help a lot with the writing of the screenplay. With the coming of PCs, Barbara, the woman with the office in Avalon who had previously done my and other local transcription work, acquired a video store, and I began to help her make her modest fortune out of late return fees on films.
Fourteen
* * *
In the office by the beach, I began writing the screenplay from the familiar material of the book. Naturally, I knew I would find it hard to combine characters, or to get the tumultuous conglomeration of tales contained in the book down to the compass of the screenplay. I particularly did not want to sacrifice the interesting connections Oskar had with the Abwehr, or such incidents as his journey to Budapest to meet Mr. Springmann and company and tell them of the monstrousness being practiced in the camps. I
did not, either, try to introduce any false suspense or melodrama, at least no more than that huge amount that existed in the tale already. The film, I felt, should have that feel of intimate experience. And it must have paradox. If Schindler were turned into a stock hero, an unalloyed saint like Raoul Wallenberg, the particularity of Oskar’s experience, and that of his prisoners, would be lost.
Obviously, I did not quite know how much of his full story a character like Schindler should carry with him into a film script. For example, could his motorbike rally-racing stand as a model for his later daring? It was my suspicion that a film audience would accept a greater degree of initially unexplained facets of a character than is normal in a novel. And I didn’t need to go into such things as why he was a civilian, and thus had escaped conscription, or why he was married to Emilie, a local farmer’s daughter in his hometown. The ambiguity between them could be revealed by events inside the film—the arrival of the wife in Kraków, for example. Was this why film stars were so dazzlingly handsome, or had such presence—so that their beauty could sustain the tension of audiences not knowing who they were until events revealed the answer?
The truth is that I knew, at least at the rational if not the emotional level, that to make a film from a book, I must ruthlessly limit the action of the film, so that it is a river of semi-mysterious derivation with no backwaters or billabongs to delay the traveler. And I had to write so that people under forty would not even ask themselves how this man escaped conscription. Or, if they did, the potent momentum of Oskar’s adventures must allay such concerns.
I was not a complete screenplay virgin. I had written the screenplay for a television drama named Essington, in honor of an ill-fated attempt to create, on the northern Australian coast in the nineteenth century, an alternative port to Singapore. I had written a few other things which had never been produced. I’d dabbled with plays. But in narrative terms, I was temperamentally a novelist, likely to break out into subplots and sub-narrations even when telling a story in dialogue. I enjoy the technique of the screenplay, the rationed description, the attempt to get a complex subtext into what is quite often sparse dialogue. But it was not necessarily natural to me.
At the end of three months, by mid-1983, when I had edited and reedited the screenplay, it was still two hundred and twenty pages long. I delivered it to Spielberg in Los Angeles. Loyal Poldek thought it was exactly what was needed. He would ever after say, “They should have made your screenplay, Thomas!” But in his office at Amblin, in the Universal lot, Spielberg told me that perhaps I was too close to the material. I should give it one more try. I should pretend I hadn’t written the book, and that I had the task of making someone else’s work—work in which I felt no proprietary right—viable for the screen. And I should try to get the length down. Two hundred and twenty pages were nearly two and a half hours of film. Look at the films in the video stores, said Spielberg. They were 118 minutes up to about 125 minutes tops—the average endurance of the human bladder.
Though I begged him not to, Poldek kept calling Spielberg’s office and telling them, “Just make Thomas’s script, Steven, and you will have an Oscar for Oskar.” Indeed, I could not see what the basic film narrative problem was with what I had written, but then I suppose the screenwriter never can.
For the next eighteen months, I kept working on the screenplay, and on the beginnings of a new novel. Time evaporated, as ever when one is writing hard. Even so, 1985 rolled in without my finding a satisfactory resolution to the writing of the screenplay other than to reduce it in length. It was now that the writing school at the University of California at Irvine asked me to come as a visitor. Oakley Hall, the founder of the program and of the Squaw Valley Summer School to which the nation’s notable young writers and top editors and agents were invited, was having a semester’s rest and wanted me to take his place.
I went to this campus among the old orange groves of Orange County, inland from John Wayne’s Newport. There were some splendid writers among the students at that time. They included Michael Chabon and Whitney Otto, of whom one heard that they wrote astonishing novels in class. Indeed, the most astounding thing about this program was its capacity, built up by Oakley Hall and MacDonald Harris (Don Heiney), to put the students in contact with agents and publishers. The students seemed very companionable, tended to be in their late twenties and upward, and had in most cases already been toughened by the American workshop process, which I found rather harsh, if not brutal. There were twelve graduate writers chosen from all over the country, one of whom—a very engaging young working-class man from San Jose, James Brown—already had a novel, Hot Wire, published, and would produce many more.
The process was like this: we met in a dedicated seminar room named “The Writers’ Center,” and in consultation with the twelve graduate writers—chosen, in theory, from all around the world, but chiefly from North or Central America—worked out who would present a chapter of his or her novel, or a short story, at each of the weekly sessions. Then, for that first week, the visiting writer gave a lecture on his own experience of writing. In subsequent weeks, each novice would have provided us with his chapter/short story and have gotten twelve written critiques, including mine. On top of that I was meant to sum up the responses. Many of the writers in the workshop had been through this experience as undergraduates as well. As a published writer who had never been to any such class, I was nonetheless considered quite up to scratch for managing this situation.
In between pontifications on the art of the novel, I received from Spielberg my writing instructions concerning the script. Thus was the teacher taught. It was now a little more than two years since the contract had been signed. The urgency which had attended the signing had not seemed to translate itself into the pace of preparing it for production. When I went up I-405, exiting at Santa Monica Boulevard to go toward Beverly Hills to visit the Pfefferbergs, I would encounter a slightly glum Poldek, and a philosophic Misia. Though Amblin kept us well-informed of the progress of our film, we learned of Spielberg’s current projects generally through friends sending us clippings from Variety or other magazines or newspapers. Spielberg was about to make Alice Walker’s glorious The Color Purple into a film, it was said. In fact he already had it in the can. It was also said that he had acquired J. G. Ballard’s extraordinary book Empire of the Sun—indeed, what book of J. G. Ballard’s is not in its way extraordinary, or marked by reminders of mortality and the amorality it produces in the living?
In Spielberg’s eyes, I had not overcome the documentary feel of the book. I was still too attached to incidents which did not contribute to the direct line he wanted the screenplay to follow. Indeed, he had now come up with a formula for the film. There would be an SS man whom the charming Oskar could not “corrupt,” and who accumulated accusations against him and tried to destroy him. SS Inspector Javert would pursue Jean Valjean Schindler, who had everyone else enchanted, into the final moments of the war. This was not quite the story as I saw it.
Early in that northern spring of 1985, in the nicest possible way, I was sacked by Spielberg. He said he would try some other writers. I had taken to the meeting an E.T. doll that my daughter Jane wanted signed, and I got him to sign it. I was not aware of any bitterness at all, and there was none on my part. I had ideas for new books and felt, however ill-advisedly, liberated. Steven told me he intended to bring in Kurt Luedtke, who had won an Academy Award for the screenplay of Out of Africa.
Luedtke, formerly a journalist, brought to the Schindler story a journalist’s skepticism. He wanted to begin before the beginning, with the Schindler research itself. At a meeting with him and Gail Mutrux, a young Universal producer who was put in charge of briefing him, Poldek would say with exasperation, “Of course it’s all true, Mr. Luedtke. I saw it with my eyes.”
Ultimately, and for whatever reason, Luedtke was also unable to produce a screenplay Spielberg wanted to make. I never found out why, but there were rumors he had felt so overwhelmed by the ma
terial that he had been unable to produce even a first draft. In the meantime, every time newspapers or magazines mentioned Spielberg’s future projects—and there were generally two or three things on the boil at any one time, including the first Indiana Jones feature—Schindler went un-mentioned. “I call him and tell him this is his film to make,” Poldek would inform me regularly and with touching bemusement. “But can I make the boy listen? Has he ears?”
Back in Bob Hawke’s Australia after the Irvine stint, I had begun work on a novel about the very first European play performed in all the immensity of the Australian continent, which was staged by a group of convicts on June 4, 1789. A friend accused me, in my fascination with convicts and Holocaust victims, of being obsessed with the theme of imprisonment. There was certainly some justice to that idea. But though I had many alternative lives to deal with, for Poldek his one mission was Schindler, and as the film script failed to emerge, he was the terrier who kept barking as the rest of us got on with our sundry enthusiasms.
At home, I would receive evening calls—that is, late morning calls in Poldek’s terms—from his office in Los Angeles, during which he would detail his conversations with Amblin, and the messages he passed on to Steven via a good Jewish girl named Cathy Niebuhr, and the good Irish American girl Kathy Kennedy. One call in 1987 was different from the rest. Poldek and Misia were going to come and visit us in Australia. “I can’t get to see enough of your beautiful girls, and that beautiful Judy,” he declared.
With balloons and flowers, we met them in the early morning at Sydney Airport, as they descended from one of the increasingly numerous flights from Los Angeles. The girls had made signs welcoming them, a gesture which echoed Poldek’s unconditional affection for us. It was a joyous time, of course, a bright Sydney winter’s chance for reunions with Poldek’s fellow welder Edek Korn and his wife Leosia, one of the women who had escaped Auschwitz with Misia. There was a slightly later reunion with the accordionist Leo Rosner, a man after Poldek’s heart, and his wife in Melbourne. Poldek drew the interest of the local media and gave exuberant interviews, full of his standard predictions. A headline declared, AN OSCAR FOR OSKAR, SAYS SCHINDLER SURVIVOR. If only Spielberg would get on and make the film.