The scene where the line takes place is a big Hollywood-type party. Bogart is playing backgammon with his wife. Gardner sits and watches them.
Now a drunken blonde intrudes.
She is jealous of Gardner, whose personal sex life is a mystery. Who are you sleeping with, she asks. Great big sex number--she hasn't even got what I've got. Now comes that wonderful line--
... what she's got, you couldn't spell, and what you've got, you used to have....
--only Bogart doesn't say it, his wife does.
Mankiewicz is one of the masters, and the line works in the scene. But that was 1954; studios still had power. Today, that simply isn't the case.
And giving that line to the wife, in today's movie world, is not just incorrect screenwriting, it is lethal.
Today, you must give the star everything.
There is no single more important commercial element in screenplay writing than the star part. As we've seen over and over, studios crave stars, and more likely than not, what will make stars commit is not necessarily the quality of the project as a whole but the part they're going to play.
Some movies have three stars, but they are uncommon--Gunga Din, 9 to 5. A lot have two--"buddy" pictures, most romantic comedies. The majority have but one, and that vehicle role is what we're going to talk about now. How do you best go about protecting the star? There are no concrete rules here any more than anyplace else in the movie business. But here are some thoughts on the subject.
(A) GET THE STAR IN EARLY
There are exceptions to this--Paul Newman in The Sting, for example. But when Newman got that script, Hill was already committed to direct; Redford was aboard. They had done Butch. So I don't think it's illogical to assume that Newman was saying yes to a package, not an unattached script that came his way.
Stars count pages. If you're fifteen pages in and the star has yet to make an appearance, maybe you've misstructured.
(B) DESCRIBING THE STAR
If any part of your screenplay requires skillful writing, it's this. Because you've got to indicate a lot with a little. The reader must know the vehicle role has just appeared on the page. But you can't go overboard in loading on attributes. Plus, you've got to be, if at all possible, vague. Here is an example of a damaging description:
CUT TO
CHALK BROCKTON IN CLOSE UP.
CHALK stands silent, a dead cheroot between his lips. Fifty years old, six foot four, you get the feeling there's not a lot his blue eyes haven't seen. Nothing nowadays surprises him anymore, and nothing ever has made him feel fear.
What's so terrible about that? He's obviously not the water boy: Anyone reading it would know the star has just put in an appearance. And it fits the general mold for most star parts--the Byronic hero. (The Byronic hero, to oversimplify, is this: a tall, dark, handsome man with a past.) So what's the problem?
Here's another star description that has the same flaw--this time the female lead.
CUT TO
DAHLIA GRACE IN CLOSE UP.
DAHLIA stands in the doorway a moment before joining the party. She is simply beautiful, but there is no ego about her. She has, instinctively, a model's grace. Seventeen years old, blonde, very tall, she is the most beautiful girl in any room she's ever entered.
Dahlia's obviously some cutie. And she hasn't let it go to her head. (We like her for that.) Maybe she's even going to turn out to be perfect. (Remember, all stars are always perfect.)
The problem with both descriptions is this: They're too specific. Chalk can only be Eastwood; Dahlia, Brooke Shields.
Do you know what a studio executive might do if he had some interest in the Chalk Brockton script. He would try and get a reading from Eastwood's agent or, if he could, from the man himself. And if the answer came back in the negative, your script would suddenly develop all kinds of heretofore hidden but fatal flaws.
Which is why you must be vague.
Most stars are, relatively speaking, interchangeable. If you can't get Jane Fonda or Streisand, there's always Keaton or Streep. The same is more true of the men, because there are more male stars. Burt Reynolds recently announced that he would do a role originally slated for De Niro, not an uncommon kind of occurrence.
So what you must do is make your description something that can encompass any of them. Don't make Chalk fifty, don't make him tall. (Most stars aren't tall.)
This is a less damaging description for the man--
CUT TO
CHALK BROCKTON IN CLOSE UP.
CHALK stands silent, but he doesn't ever have to say much; the man has presence. He's long since been a kid, but he moves with the grace of a young athlete. And he sure isn't old, but there's not a lot he hasn't seen.
And then you can go on, if you want, and load up some adjectives. If you don't want, that's okay too. But we can go to damn near anyone with that description. Reynolds, Eastwood, Redford, Travolta, Pacino, De Niro, Newman, Bronson, Nicholson, on and on.
They all think they have presence because they do. They all fantasize they move with an athlete's grace because we all do. And they've all been around.
If you can, make your star description like stretch socks--one size fits all.
(C) EXPOSITION
Stars, without exception, hate carrying the plot.
And they're dead right--it's a bore. There are few goodies awaiting the performer who has to stand there and tell us the requisite information we need to get on with the story. But since that requisite information is what enables us to get on with the story, problems arise. What's a mother to do?
If the exposition has impact, that's terrific. If, say, John Wayne is explaining to a group of helpless settlers what lies ahead of them on their trek, it may go something like this:
WAYNE
Well, first there's the rapids. They ain't known as Deadman's Rocks for nothing. And if we get past them, there's gonna be a month on the desert, and we can only carry three weeks worth of water, and there's no water holes along the way, so don't get your hopes up. The desert ain't known as the Killer Sands for nothing. Beyond the desert, if we get beyond the desert, is Comanche country, the Bloodbath Comanches run things there. Some Comanches can be reasonable, but no one knows about the Bloodbaths, 'cause no one's ever got past 'em alive. Okay, let's mount up.
Don't worry about that kind of exposition. The scene will play off Wayne talking and then cuts to the helpless settlers, showing them growing increasingly disconsolate. The scene also reaffirms the superhuman qualities of Wayne. We sit there with our popcorn, marveling. Because we know he's going to get the settlers through.
But a lot of the time, there's no excitement under the exposition. It's just something you have to get past. Cary Grant was famous in his films for trying to get other people in the scene to do the expository talking. Grant was a brilliant listener, and often scenes would be shifted to suit him.
He was no fool. If you can give the exposition to a secondary character, do it. It's just another way of protecting the star.
Sometimes it's a bitch. I was the (I think) original writer on Papillon. (One line of mine, the last in the picture, is all that remains of my contribution to the film.) Anyway, it was a Devil's Island picture.
The problem was this: Steve McQueen was being sent via ship, along with a bunch of other prisoners, from France to the prison. And it was imperative that he know about Devil's Island before arrival. But he had never been there before.
Well, you couldn't have Steve McQueen going around asking a bunch of dopey questions. Stars don't like doing that a whole lot.
I don't really remember the solution, but I think we had another prisoner, more craven than Steve, badgering some guy who had been to Devil's Island before. And the veteran answered. And as the cowardly guy grew more frightened by what he found out, McQueen just sat there, quietly unperturbed. Listening confidently. No prison, not even one surrounded by sharks, can hold a movie star once he sets his mind to escape.
Recently a major s
tar said the following, and it sums up this point (and a lot more about their needs) as well as anything:
I don't want to be the man who learns--I want to be the man who knows.
(D) MOMENTS
I believe it was the late Rosalind Russell who gave this wisdom to a young actor: "Do you know what makes a movie work? Moments. Give the audience half a dozen moments they can remember, and they'll leave the theatre happy."
I think she was right. And if you're lucky enough to write a movie with half a dozen moments, make damn sure they belong to the star.
Let's go back to the Mankiewicz line from The Barefoot Contessa, the one the wife says to the drunken blonde. There is no way that happens in the eighties. Either the line would be gone or it would be said by the star. And since it's such a strong line, it wouldn't disappear.
But the star would never come up to you and say, "I want that line." His agent might, or if the producer was the star's gofer, he also could bring you the message. But if it was a face-to-face, it would happen either in rehearsal or during a preproduction script discussion. And the dialog might go like this:
STAR
(casually)
Listen... about the party scene... I've got a problem....
ME
(panicked)
Problem? I thought you liked the party scene.
STAR
Hey, I'm crazy about the whole script, why else do you think I'm here?
ME
Right, right.
STAR
Let me drop the shoe: You know that zinger my wife says to the bimbo?
ME
Sure.
STAR
Well... I can't justify that line....I don't know who the woman who says that line is--but she's not my wife.
ME
(the light bulb has now gone on--or should have. The rest is rote)
Not your wife.
STAR
Look, my character, at least the way I see him, is he's this director-writer and he's seen it all. And he hates all the smart-ass Hollywood crap.
ME
That's what I was trying for.
STAR
Good. Well, the reason I marry my wife is because she's--I don't know, different, maybe even pure. None of the smart-ass stuff has touched her.
ME
Pure, right.
STAR
Okay--maybe I'm too obtuse to get it, but the woman who comes out with that zap line--I would never have married her. I don't like her. She's just like all the rest, and that line fucks up my characterization.
ME
I hate to lose that line, though. But the last thing I want to do is mess with your characterization.
STAR
Just thought I'd mention it is all.
ME
(excited)
Wait a sec--
STAR
--what?
ME
What if you said the zinger? That way I could keep the line. Could you justify yourself saying it?
STAR
(thinks a bit)
I could give it a whack....
And a good whack it will be. Because not only is it a strong line, the star is absolutely right. He should have the dialog. It's a nice moment and, sure, we want our secondary roles to be as distinctive as we can make them. But movies are not Chekhov. There are not nine people we root for.
Studios need stars and screenwriters need studios, and that, said John, is that.
One final example of protecting the star. Before Steve McQueen broke through in The Great Escape (1963), he scuffled like other actors. One of his earlier efforts, in 1958, was a low-budget horror movie, The Blob, in which the following badly conceived scene occurs.
McQueen and his girl friend are sitting in a car. The Blob is menacing the neighborhood, and strong action is needed. McQueen asks the girl if she wants to go along, because tracking down Blobs can be dangerous. She says yes, and then adds that what they need are some other people to come along and help them. He asks, who? She says, what about your friends? He says, wow, what a good idea. End of scene.
Not much protection there.
Forget the fact that when the star goes after the monster, he would much prefer to do it alone. More important is that, in this scene, the secondary part does all the thinking and the star is this lump. One way to improve things would be this--assuming we need the girl along to be frightened and the friends to be eaten:
SECONDARY PART
I'm afraid to go after the Blob, Steve.
McQUEEN
We don't know where it is; you're safer with me.
SECONDARY PART
Just the two of us alone?
McQUEEN
Who said alone?
(and as he winks--)
CUT TO
HIS THREE FRIENDS, ready to follow the star.
Probably a better way still would be to cut the car scene entirely and just open on the friends and the girl, with McQueen saying something like "It's not going to be any picnic, going after the Blob; any of you don't feel up to it, I won't hold it against you."
To repeat: sock in the vehicle role, give the star everything you possibly can. And don't worry yourself about it being too much.
No matter what, it won't be enough anyway....
Believing Reality
I was riding in a car one afternoon with the Canadian director Norman Jewison. The next day, his daughter was to turn twenty-one. A large celebration had been planned, almost all of it to take place outside.
It was gloomy that afternoon, the threat of rain growing. If it rained the next day, the party would have to be considerably altered with very little notice.
We were driving along and Jewison said, "I wonder what the weather's going to be like tomorrow?" As he said this, he flicked on the car radio, and the instant he spoke the word tomorrow, the voice on the radio replied "Tomorrow's weather is for heavy rains, flooding at times, etc."
In other words, if you had closed your eyes and listened, you would have heard two run-on sentences without so much as a pause in between.
Jewison and I turned to each other and simultaneously said, "A movie moment."
What we meant was--and this cannot be stated too often or too strongly--that the reality of a movie has almost nothing to do with the reality of the world that we, as humans, inhabit.
But every movie--from a Robert Flaherty documentary to Raiders of the Lost Ark--sets it's own special reality. And once those limits are established, they may not be broken without the risk of fragmenting the entire picture.
Let me talk about a scene from Raiders, a wild adventure story full of sensational action.
Harrison Ford is the hero and he has just discovered the lost ark. It's in a giant archaeological dig run by the Nazis. Ford is sneaking out of the place in disguise. He is of good cheer, having discovered the location of the ark, but he's also blue, because Karen Allen, the heroine, has been blown to death in an explosion.
As he sneaks out, his discovery becomes possible, so he quick spins into a nearby tent--and there, alive and bound and gagged, is Karen Allen.
Not good.
Then Lawrence Kasdan, the screenwriter, does a terrific reversal. Ford starts to untie Allen, and as he does this, they talk, and as they talk, he realizes that bad as her situation may be, she's better off left there. So he ties her back up, gags her again, and goes on his way.
The whole scene could not be more charming. But if Ford had escaped with Allen, the movie would have been damaged. Because the entire weight of the plot would have then rested on a monumental coincidence and would not have been acceptable--because nothing in that movie, not a single one of the previous adventures, had used coincidence totally as a device.
Of course it's possible that he might have stumbled into her tent--just as it's possible that Jewison might have his question answered instantly by the radio weatherman; it might have been real, but it would not have been believable.
Believing reality is al
ways a tremendous problem. Because the screenwriter runs dead into the problem of audience expectation and what they will and won't accept. Two examples now, one invented, the second a problem I had to try and deal with.
Let's make up a caper film, the kind where the hero has to accomplish something that is clearly not capable of being done. We've all seen a million of these, ranging from Seven Samurai to Mission Impossible.
Paul Newman is our hero. And his job: to get to the most famous and richest woman in the world, never mind the reason; maybe to kidnap her, or exchange information, or whatever, it doesn't matter--getting to her is the problem.
Because this is not Christina Onassis, someone he might meet at Studio 54 and say "Hi, my name's Paul Newman, we have to talk."
If she's available, of course, his job is too easy, and there's no movie. Our rich and famous woman must be totally inaccessible. Not only must she never see or talk to strangers alone, she also is constantly guarded by an enormous number of trained men. Plus, she lives, let's say, in a walled castle that is forever heavily patrolled and contains maybe six hundred rooms.
How is Paul Newman going to accomplish his task? Obviously, first and foremost, he must have a plan. And not just any plan: It's got to be intricate as hell, and it also has to be something he can't pull off himself.
He needs, crucially, a gang. And not just any gang; he must recruit a group of specialists who may not be totally trustworthy, but their talent is of such international repute, he must take the risk.