Disturbing the Peace

  “Are they out here now?” she inquired. “Jerry and Julian?”

  “Either here or in New York. They’re probably working on new things; I imagine they’ll be very busy young men from now on. How do you people feel about dessert? Rum cake or chocolate parfait?”

  “God!” Pamela said when they were out in the parking lot. “Beach pictures, bike pictures, horror pictures. So much for Mr. Edgar Freeman.”

  “Never mind. He’s not the only man in Hollywood.”

  But he was the only one they knew, and that knowledge made their ride home a cheerless one. This was an appropriately desolate part of town – an Orange Julius stand, gas stations, a mammoth drugstore, the grubby white edifice of the Hollywood Palladium – and Wilder drove with great care because he wanted to get home safely, as soon as possible, and have a drink.

  “Even if Jerry and Julian are here,” Pamela said, walking around the apartment with a tinkling glass, “how do you suppose we’d ever get in touch with them? And even if we got in touch with them, what could they do?”

  “I don’t know, baby. We’ll just have to – you know – play it by ear.” He wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that (Play what by ear? What did they have to “play”?) but it sounded like a good answer, and he trusted the whiskey to ease them both through the rest of the afternoon.

  *

  Burn All Your Cities opened in a great many theatres across the country the following week – they read about it in the Los Angeles Times – and there were very favorable reviews.

  In his first time out, young Julian Feld displays a formidable directing talent. Jerome Porter’s muscular screenplay is a faithful rendering of the Chester Pratt novel, and Feld makes the most of it. Few viewers will come away from Burn All Your Cities unmoved; many are sure to find it one of the top cinematic experiences of the year …

  Pamela wrote letters to both of them, addressed in care of the production company, and while waiting for answers they explored the city. Beverly Hills looked suitably rich, but the houses – at least those that could be seen from the road – were too close together. The Hollywood hills were prettier and some of them commanded nice views, but the canyons led too quickly into the enormous suburban waste of the San Fernando Valley. Downtown Los Angeles held no surprises and seemed to promise that the best parts of town must lie to the west, but when they drove out to the beaches they found only sandy, weatherbeaten slums. Time and again they came home weak with hunger and the need for a drink, feeling oppressed. They had plenty of time and plenty of money, but neither was much consolation.

  “Go home for a drink,” Pamela said one afternoon. “That’s all we ever do. We go home for a drink, or three or four, and then we try a new restaurant and have two or three more, and then we go to bed. If only there were someone to call; someone to go and see – just anyone.”

  He might have reminded her that the whole crazy idea of coming out here with no prospects had been hers, but he didn’t want to risk a quarrel. It was bad enough being in this together; it would be unendurable if they were at each other’s throats.

  “Take it easy, baby,” he said. “Something’s bound to turn up.”

  A letter from Jerry came at last, with a New York postmark, and she tore it open with trembling fingers.

  Glad you’re both in L.A. and hope to see you if I come out again. Cities was something of a hit, as you may have heard, and Julian and I are deep into other projects now….

  I do know a man out there who might be interested in co-producing “Bellevue.” He is very rich, a kind of gentleman producer, always on the lookout for what he calls artistic properties, and not a bad guy at all. His name is Carl Munchin and he lives in Malibu. I’ll write him today and tell him about you two; you can take it from there …

  And they were still counting the days before it would be safe to call Carl Munchin when Carl Munchin called them – the nicest thing that had happened to them in Los Angeles so far.

  “… Why don’t you drop a copy of your script in the mail to me, Mr. Wilder?” he said. “Then I’ll read it and get back to you.”

  That meant a few more days of waiting, and of being afraid to leave the apartment because the phone might ring, but Munchin did get back to them.

  “I think it has possibilities,” he said. “I knew it would be well written because Jerry Porter’s a good writer, but I didn’t expect the material to be so interesting in its own right. Listen: can you come out here this afternoon, so we can talk about it?”

  He lived in a part of Malibu they could never have discovered on their hopeful visits to the shore – many miles north of the public beaches, in a big house that was well hidden from the road. The house itself was a wondrous blending of out-and indoor luxury: there was so much furniture on the broad patio that it seemed like a living room, and so much vegetation in the living room that it seemed like a patio. He was a big, tan, bald man with a small tan wife, and they wore matching safari jackets. Helen Munchin never took her eyes off her husband’s face when he was talking, and she looked wholly absorbed. Only in the intervals of his speech did she allow her gaze to stray from him, and then it met the visitors’ eyes in a way that said Isn’t Carl wonderful? Aren’t I the luckiest girl in the world?

  “… The way it stands now you’ve got a nice little art-house piece,” he said. They were drinking gin and tonic on the patio while the sun set in the gleaming Pacific. “It could fill out the bill with some short foreign film. Probably get a few bookings in New York, maybe one or two in San Francisco, and forget the rest of the country. Might do better in Europe, but not much. Whereas what I have in mind would be a selling proposition as well as an art piece; I mean a commercially viable property. Let me fill you in. First of all, there’s one central weakness in your script. Your protagonist – the man all this Bellevue business happens to – is never really characterized.”

  “We planned it that way,” Wilder said. “We wanted him to be a sort of nameless observer, you see, a kind of Everyman.”

  “Impossible. You can’t start with an Everyman.” And Carl Munchin wagged his forefinger from side to side, smiling cannily, like a high-school English teacher about to make a trenchant point. “Only through the particular can you find the universal.” He paused to let that sink in; then he got up and began pacing the flagstones in his clean desert boots. “I mean who is this guy?” he demanded. “What’s he like when he’s not in Bellevue? How does being in Bellevue change his life? I want a revised, shortened version of this script of yours to serve as part one, you see. Then I want to see a part two and a part three. You follow me?”

  “I’m not sure,” Wilder said. “What would happen in parts two and three?”

  “We’ll have to get ourselves a good writer and work it out. Just as a guideline I’d say build him up for another breakdown – a real breakdown – in part two, and then in part three let him have it. Pull out all the stops. Oh, if this were Nineteen Fortyfive or Forty-six I’d say play it differently; put him in the hands of a brilliant psychiatrist, let part three be his struggle to a miraculous recovery – the analyst helps him remember some childhood experience that clears up all his problems – but people aren’t buying that stuff any more. Today’s audience is more sophisticated. I say let him go crazy. Wipe him out.”

  “Would he commit a crime?” Wilder said. “Like assassinating Kennedy or something?”

  “That might work except everybody knows who assassinated Kennedy. Besides, I don’t think he has to commit a crime. Just let him get so he can’t live in civilized society any more. Make him a real paranoid schizophrenic. If our writer doesn’t know how to handle that we’ll send him out to Camarillo with a tape recorder.”

  “Where?”

  “Camarillo. The state hospital. Go out there with a tape recorder, listen to the way those people talk. Might pick up some good ideas.”

  “Mm,” Wilder said. “Well. What do you think, Pamela?”

  She took a neat sip of her drink before answe
ring, and then she addressed Munchin. “I’m afraid I still don’t see why something can’t be done with the picture as it is,” she said. “I don’t know if John made this clear to you, Mr. Munchin, but it’s already been filmed. It was never finished – never cut, that is – but it was filmed and directed by Julian Feld, the man who did Burn All Your Cities. And even if it were limited to an art-house distribution, isn’t there a good chance that it might lead to other things? Bigger things?”

  “Sure it might,” Munchin said. “You’d always have that hope. But just for now we’re talking about what’s of interest to me, right?” He smiled engagingly, displaying many clean, strong teeth. “The three-part version is of interest to me. The short version is not.”

  She wouldn’t let him go. “Well then, do you know anyone – or know of anyone – who might be interested?”

  “Honey,” he said, still smiling, “even if I did I wouldn’t tell you.”

  She looked stung for a second, until Helen Munchin’s happy laugh announced that he was only teasing, and over the pouring of fresh drinks he went back to his plan.

  Put a man in Bellevue, let him go back to whatever problems sent him there, let those problems work on him until he’s up to the breaking point and then watch him break – watch him go down beyond the reach of any psychiatric help – that, Carl Munchin said, was a story: the kind of material a good writer could sink his teeth into. And getting a good writer would be no problem. “This town’s crawling with writers. If we can’t get Jerry Porter we’ll go to an agent – I’m in touch with two or three of the top agencies – and we’ll have a first-rate writer working for us in no time.”

  “Well, I don’t know, Mr. Munchin,” Wilder said. “We’ll have to think about it and talk it over some more.”

  “Sure you will. You may not see the possibilities right away because you’re married to this short version, this Bellevue section, but keep an open mind. I think we have the makings of a very distinguished motion picture here.” And when he said “a very distinguished motion picture” his wife gave a little shudder of pleasure. Then she stood up to indicate that the cocktail hour was over.

  “We’ll get together on this again soon,” Munchin said. “Meanwhile, can you leave a copy of that script with me? I’d like to show it to a few people, kind of sound them out. Well, it’s been very enjoyable. Talk to you later.”

  “… And we don’t even know who the man is,” Pamela said as they rode back along the Pacific Coast Highway. “Jerry says he’s ‘a kind of gentleman producer,’ but what’s that, for heaven’s sake? Besides, I think his Big Idea is lousy, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. Still thinking about it.”

  “Oh, I’m so disappointed. I thought he’d want ‘Bellevue’ in its own right, and here he takes off on this whole new tangent. John, do you realize where we’d be if only Julian had finished this picture long ago? We’d have come out here with a whole finished thing to sell – we’d have been able to deal with distributors instead of groping around among the Edgar Freemans and the Carl Munchins.”

  He told her to forget Edgar Freeman. He said Munchin was different. Munchin had said he’d show it to some people, and that could lead to almost anything. “I don’t think it was a bad day’s work, baby,” he concluded, and as he steered down the highway he planned other ways to cheer her up: they would go to the best restaurant they’d found and drink just enough to restore the dwindling glow of Munchins’ gin; then they’d order whatever looked best on the expensive menu, with wine, and through it all he’d make her see that Munchin’s idea wasn’t necessarily so lousy after all….

  “Yes it is,” she insisted, turning the stem of her brandy glass between her fingers. “It’s asinine. It suggests that anyone who’s spent a week in Bellevue is destined for a life of madness. What kind of nonsense is that?”

  He felt as if he were trying to convince her, once again, that Gunga Din was the best boy’s movie ever made. “I don’t think it suggests that,” he said, “or at least it wouldn’t have to, if we got a good writer. Oh, I’ll agree Munchin was pretty silly today, but he was talking off the top of his head. A good writer could particularize the man, make him a flesh-and-blood character with problems uniquely his own. Then the story of his downfall would follow its own logic. Don’t you see?”

  “No.”

  “You’re just in the wrong mood. Look, I thought Munchin was kind of a horse’s ass too, but he could be valuable to us all the same. Let’s – you know – keep an open mind.”

  “Okay,” she said. “I guess there’s not much else we can do.”

  Within two weeks they were back on Carl Munchin’s patio, and this time four other men were there. One was a lawyer Pamela’s father had recommended, one was Munchin’s lawyer, and the other two – both short, dark men who seemed to look exactly alike – were introduced as Munchin’s business associates. And by the end of that afternoon, after the flourishing of several dense documents and the scribbling of several signatures, they had incorporated and formed a production company.

  “Is that really how these things are done?” Pamela said. “It all seemed so easy.”

  “It seemed easy because we have good lawyers,” Munchin said, tilting a martini pitcher toward her glass. “Now all we have to do is find the backing and make the picture.”

  “… So we’re in business,” Wilder said as they drove home that night. “We’re producers.”

  “I know; I suppose we ought to celebrate or something, but I still don’t feel right about it. I still don’t trust Munchin’s idea.”

  Soon – almost too soon, it seemed – there was a conference with the writer Munchin had secured from one of the two or three top agencies, a tall, fat, nervous man named Jack Haines.

  “… I see him as a married man,” he said, soundlessly treading Munchin’s patio in a pair of desert boots that must have looked just like Munchin’s when they were new. “He’s unhappily married and he’s got kids he can’t relate to and he feels trapped. He’s solidly middle class. I don’t know what he does for a living, but let’s say it’s something well paid and essentially meaningless, like advertising. When he gets out of Bellevue he’s scared and lost but he doesn’t know where to turn. Maybe he gets involved with a quack psychoanalyst, that’d give us an opportunity for some humor – black humor – and then he meets a girl. The girl—”

  “Hold it right there, Jack,” Carl Munchin said. “I can see you’ve given this a lot of thought, but I can’t help feeling there’s a quality of cliché about everything you’ve said so far. Unhappy advertising man, gray flannel suit and all that. We can’t have a character who meets his downfall out of some cockamamie, two-for-a-nickel Weltschmerz. This is a dark story. We need a man who’s doomed.” And Helen Munchin said “Oh, yes.”

  Jack Haines blinked and looked wounded, but not for long. “Well, Carl, I think the quality you’re looking for will be there in the writing. All I’m giving you now is the briefest kind of summary; I don’t see how you can make a judgment like that on the basis of – look, can I go on? Okay. The girl tries to help him. She offers him hope, and for a little while it’s a happy affair – that gives us the upbeat flavor we need for the ending of part two; then, zap! In part three everything falls to pieces. He can’t handle the hope the girl’s given him; he’s emotionally tied to the past. He is a ‘dark’ character, as you’ll see, and he brings on his own—”

  “Does he commit suicide?”

  “No; worse, in a way. He systematically destroys everything that’s still bright and promising in his life, including the girl’s love, and he sinks into a depression so deep as to be irrevocable. He winds up in an asylum that makes Bellevue look like nothing. And I think you’ll see, Carl, when the whole thing’s on paper, that there’s an inevitability to it. The seeds of self-destruction are there in the man from the start.” His performance was over, and only his trembling hands – quickly corrected by the lighting of a cigarette – betrayed his anxiety.
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  “I don’t know,” Munchin said. “Something’s missing. Something’s lacking. What do you people think?”

  Wilder had been made so uneasy by the first part of the writer’s recital (Who the hell was this Jack Haines? How did he know so much?) that he almost welcomed the chance to reject him – then they might get another writer with a whole new set of ideas – but he didn’t want to say anything precipitate. “I see what you mean about clichés, Carl; still, it’s hard to judge something that hasn’t been written yet.”

  “I think it sounds interesting,” Pamela said, and Wilder looked at her in surprise. He’d been sure she would think it sounded terrible.

  “And where’s all this going to take place?” Munchin inquired. “In New York?”

  “Mostly; I haven’t really worked that out. If you want a change of scene he could take off somewhere with the girl. Could be anywhere.”

  When Jack Haines had been cordially dismissed (“Talk to you later, Jack,” Munchin said) he drove away in a dusty white Volkswagen that looked too small to accommodate his legs.

  “What did you really think, Pamela?” Wilder said.

  “I told you; I thought it sounded interesting. It’s the first time I’ve really been able to picture Carl’s idea for a three-part story.”

  “Well, all right,” Munchin said, “but remember, Haines is expendable. All I know about Haines is that he published two obscure novels some years ago and he’s got a list of television credits as long as your arm. We can do better. I saw in the trades this morning that Chester Pratt’s in town. He may be tied up with other things, but I intend to find out. Get a writer of that calibre, you might really see some imaginative work.”

  “No, that’s out, Carl,” Wilder said, afraid the rush of heat in his face must be visible to them all. “We don’t want Chester Pratt.”

  “Why not, for God’s sake?”

  “I met him once. I’ve heard he’s not reliable. He’s a drunk.”