Adventures in the Screen Trade

  Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back belong to Lucas. Spielberg directed Jaws and E. T. The fifth, Raiders of the Lost Ark, was a collaboration, Lucas being the inceptor, Spielberg calling the shots.

  Not only have these films made the two among the richer young men in America, the four released prior to this year have all won various prizes and awards and been nominated for a lot more. But none of the four has won the Oscar for Best Picture.

  E. T. will change all that.

  This is the middle of '82, and next year's awards are nine months away. And half the films for this year have yet to be released. I don't care.

  There's no doubt in my mind that E. T. will win.

  So?

  Just this: What the five films have in common, besides their worldwide appeal, is that they are all comic-book movies.

  If you think I am putting down comic-book movies, you could not be more wrong. Not only have I written my share of them, my favorite movie of all time is a comic-book movie: Gunga Din. (I have seen it sixteen times, still start to cry before the credits are over, and will return to it shortly.)

  But first, the matter of definition.

  Having used the term "comic-book movie" several times now, I think it's only fair that I tell you precisely what it means--

  --except I can't do that.

  Primarily because we get into matters of personal taste: What I find a comic-book movie you may totally disagree with, and you may be right. For example, I think The Deer Hunter, that searing indictment of American involvement in Southeast Asia, was a comic-book movie, and I think Bambi--yes, I know it's an animated cartoon--is not.

  But if I can't give a precise definition of what the hell I'm trying to say, at least I am able to give a few parallels, which should help set the parameters of what I'm after.

  Food: empty calories. (Not, underlined not, junk food, which has a pejorative connotation. Please remember that in none of this am I making a critical judgment against the comic-book movie.) But as an example of empty calories, put down potato chips.

  Television: The only prime-time entertainment series that is not a comic-book program is M*A*S*H. Not because of its outstanding quality, but because every scene in M*A*S*H, no matter how wildly farcical, is grounded in the madness of death. That is what gives it its tone, that is the heart of the piece. You can make M*A*S*H into My Mother the Car easily enough. Just keep those same wonderful actors and stick them in a giant Army training camp here in the States. And the wounded are simply guys hurt in fights or drunken-driving accidents--of which, by the way, there are more than plenty near any major Army post.

  And what you've got then is a bunch of goofy surgeons grousing because they're stuck in the service and not out in the civilian world, making a fortune. It might be just as funny, and just as successful, and absolutely would be exactly like every other series on the air.

  Music: bubble-gum songs. Billy Joel, Elton John, etc. The kind of singer-songwriter who basically appeals to pop music's target audience, the teenyboppers who buy albums. (The Beatles began as bubble-gum musicians--"I want to hold your hah-hah-hand" and the like. Then they changed. Lennon, in his solo albums, did not write bubble-gum music; McCartney, the most successful songwriter in history, still does.)

  Now let's try and take some of this and apply it to comic-book movies. None of these are meant to be strict rules, but more often than not I think they're true:

  (l) Generally, only bad guys die. And if a good guy does kick, he does it heroically.

  (2) There tends to be a lack of resonance: Like the popcorn you're munching, it's not meant to last.

  (3) The movie turns in on itself: Its reference points tend to be other movies. If, for example, there had been no Saturday afternoon serials, there would have been no frame for Raiders of the Lost Ark.

  (4) And probably most important: The comic-book movie doesn't have a great deal to do with life as it exists, as we know it to be. Rather, it deals with life as we would prefer it to be. Safer that way.

  Let me briefly explain now my feelings about Bambi and Deer Hunter.

  Does anyone remember, say, the last part of Deer Hunter? Saigon is going up in flames and Robert De Niro, an ordinary guy with no contacts in high places, is out of service and back in Pennsylvania. He hears about his old buddy, Christopher Walken, who's still back there.

  Shazam--De Niro's in Saigon. Now the entire world is trying to get out, but somehow De Niro gets in.

  He finds Walken. Do you know what Walken has been doing all this time? He's been playing that game of Russian roulette with real bullets. (The Russian roulette ploy was made up by the movie's creators, by the way; it didn't happen in reality.) For months and months, Walken has been taking on all comers in this loony tunes Russian roulette, and guess what?--

  Whappo--he's undefeated, untied, and unscored on.

  It would take a computer a while to give the odds against that happening, but never mind, because now we're into the confrontation scene.

  De Niro versus Walken at Russian roulette.

  If you looked at the billing of the picture on your way in, did you ever doubt who was going to win?

  Zap--De Niro is unscathed but Walken dies--with a touch of the heroic smile on his lips.

  All this was exciting, and I enjoyed it every bit as I used to be enthralled by Batman having it out with the Penguin--

  --and precisely on that level.

  What Deer Hunter told me was what I already knew and believed in: No matter how horrid the notion of war, Robert De Niro would end up staring soulfully at the beautiful, long-suffering Meryl Streep.

  So I say in spite of its skill and the seriousness of its subject matter, we have here a well-disguised comic-book movie. Nothing shook my world.

  Okay, Bambi.

  If the shower scene in Psycho was the shocker of the sixties, and for me, it sure was, then its equivalent in the entire decade of the forties was when Bambi's mother dies.

  And what about that line of dialog: "Man has entered the forest"?

  And the fire and the incredibly strong antiviolence implications. (The National Rifle Association would probably picket the movie today.)

  I know it was a cartoon, I know Thumper had one of the great scene-stealing roles, I know there was a lot of cuteness.

  But I left that movie changed.

  It had, and has, a terrifying sense of life to it, and not life as we like it to be. You may think I'm crazy and you may be right, but Bambi still reverberates inside me.

  Now let me circle back to Gunga Din and make strictly a judgment call: It is my absolute opinion that in every conceivable way--direction, script, star performances, special effects, emotional power--it is infinitely superior to any of the five Lucas-Spielberg prizewinners.

  Gunga Din was released in 1939, and when it came time for the Oscar balloting, it received a grand total of zero nominations.

  Granted, 1939 was an exceptional year for Hollywood. (I am going to start playing games now, but please bear with me, I hope and believe there's a point to it all.) You probably don't remember the Oscar winner for '39, but let me list five movies and then you guess:

  Golden Boy

  The Hunchback of Notre Dame

  Intermezzo

  Juarez

  The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex

  To help you along, a few refreshers: Golden Boy introduced us to William Holden; Intermezzo to Ingrid Bergman. Charles Laughton played the Hunchback, Paul Muni starred in Juarez, and Bette Davis was Elizabeth, one of her more famous performances.

  The envelope please.

  Answer? None of the five. In fact, none of the five even got a Best Picture nomination.

  But here are the five that did:

  Goodbye, Mr. Chips

  Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

  Ninotchka

  Of Mice and Men

  Stagecoach

  Again, please, the envelope.

  Same answer: none of the above. (They nominated m
ore than five pictures back in those days.) And one of the five I didn't list was Wuthering Heights.

  Which also didn't win because '39 was also the year of The Wizard of Oz.

  Which also didn't win because Gone With the Wind did.

  Pretty impressive year.

  So impressive that in spite of my passion for Gunga Din, I can't complain. It's a glorious adventure film; I may prefer it to any other, but I don't think it belongs up there with the prizewinners.

  And I don't think any of the Lucas-Spielberg films do either.

  The subject here, remember, is the ecology of Hollywood. Ecology, as I am using it, means balance.

  Hollywood has always made great comic-book movies. The Great Train Robbery was not intended as a sonnet, and let's not forget that early wonder that was these two little girls having a pillow fight.

  But traditionally the money made from pillow-fight pictures was ploughed back in, and sometimes what emerged was Citizen Kane.

  Several years ago, a studio head told me this: "If I've got to come up with a slate of sixteen pictures a year, I know going in that four of them are turkeys. I just hope they're not too expensive and I don't lose too much on them. Eight or nine are going to be programmers--decent enough entertainment if I'm lucky; money-makers. The last three I have hopes for." (Italics mine.)

  He meant, he went on to explain, quality; the kind of movie he might be proud of.

  Now, I assume it's clear by now that 1982 is not 1939 in terms of quality.

  But let's go back twenty years: Lawrence of Arabia won Best Picture. I thought it was a great epic and deserved everything it got. But the following pictures didn't even get nominated:

  Birdman of Alcatraz

  Days of Wine and Roses

  The Miracle Worker

  Long Day's Journey into Night

  Sweet Bird of Youth

  David and Lisa

  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

  Freud

  Lolita

  I'm not suggesting any of them should have been nominated; I'm just saying that's a pretty good list of non-comic-book pictures. In a year that was not considered anything special.

  That was twenty years ago, now let's try again. Another unremarkable year, but these were some of the non-comic-book pictures that came out in '72:

  The Godfather

  Cabaret

  Deliverance

  Slaughterhouse-Five

  A Separate Peace

  Play It as It Lays

  Lady Sings the Blues

  The Heartbreak Kid

  Fat City

  The Candidate

  Jeremiah Johnson

  The summer movies of '82 are now half done, and by the time you read this, most of them will have blissfully faded from your memory. But this is what's come out so far: Conan the Barbarian and Rocky III and Poltergeist and Hanky Panky and Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid and Annie and Star Trek II and E. T. and Firefox and Grease II and Author! Author! and Blade Runner and The Thing and Megaforce and Tron and--

  --and they're all comic-book movies.

  Okay, let's put as positive a light as possible on things: Summer, after all, has always been the time for kids' pictures because that's when the kids are out of school. And Woody Allen has directed a film and George Hill has directed a film and there's a strong advance word about An Officer and a Gentleman.

  You can be as Pollyanna-ish as you want; me, I think it's scary.

  Why? Because in the entire first five months of this calendar year, there were almost no films you can think of that also weren't comic-book movies. A few: Victor/Victoria and Diner and Missing and Shoot the Moon.

  Maybe you can come up with some others; I can't. And none of the above four did the kind of business that tends to win at Academy time. Which is why E. T. will take the Oscar: There's nothing else.

  And why do I find this all scary?--

  --because the basic ecology of Hollywood is, I'm very much afraid, radically changing.

  Remember that italicized quote from the studio head: "The last three I have hopes for"? Well, those "last three" aren't being made anymore. The money made from E. T. is only going to give us, if we're lucky, something like Mandrake the Magician.

  Jaws began the present cycle: It did business far beyond what anyone dreamed possible. Then Star Wars shattered all the records set by Jaws. And now every executive in Hollywood is trying to figure out how the hell to topple Star Wars.

  Which, of course, is only right and proper: It's their job. But in their quest, they have altered the tradition of ploughing back profits in pursuit of an entire range of different sorts of films. Right now--today--comic-book pictures are only breeding more comic-book pictures, something that has never happened to this extent before.

  Will the ecology shift back to what it's been? "Absolutely," the studio executives will tell you. When? "When the public demands it."

  Of course, there's a certain element of truth to that--but basically it's a cop-out. Change will only come when the executives stop ignoring the churning in their guts. These are bright people, never forget that. They don't personally enjoy the movies they're okaying. Do you think they're happy going home and saying to their families, "Hey, guess what, a great thing happened today, we decided to make Megaforce."

  The ecology can only shift when these people decide that there's got to be more to life than a remake of The Creature from the Black Lagoon. When they suck it up and decide to find material like Ordinary People and Cuckoo's Nest.

  But this summer's three big pictures so far are E. T., Rocky III, and Star Trek II. So, for the present, I think we may as well prepare ourselves for seven more Star Wars sequels and half a dozen quests involving Indiana Jones. By the end of the decade, we may well be seeing E. T. Meets Luke Skywalker.

  As Bette Davis advised us, I think we all ought to fasten our seat belts. Because it looks from here like we're entering a long and bumpy night....

  Part Two

  Adventures

  Introduction

  I suppose what follows is the most autobiographical part of the book. I have had some wonderful times in the movie business--Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, rehearsing with Laurence Olivier--but scratch a screenwriter and you're bound to find horror stories, and some of those are in here too.

  The movies are taken in chronological order--with the exception of A Bridge Too Far. I've saved it for the end because it was, without question, the most unusual experience I've ever had....

  Chapter Three

  Charly and Masquerade

  Cliff Robertson got me into the movie business, in late 1963. I had been a published novelist and failed short-story writer since 1956; I had been a movie nut all my life. But looking back on it now, I truly don't believe the thought of combining my writing career with my love of movies had ever surfaced. I grew up before the prominence of "film schools." Like my peers, I assumed that the directors did it all, and when they came up dry, the actors made up their lines.

  My meeting with Robertson was no more circuitous than most people experience when there is a shift in career direction, but it probably ought to be mentioned here, because if I have managed to maintain any sanity at all after nearly two decades of movie work, it is mainly because of this: I was a novelist first and I am a novelist now, but one who happens also to write screenplays.

  My first three books had all been, relatively speaking, short. And, like a great fool, I thought it might be interesting to tackle the problems of a genuinely long piece of work. All of my friends at this time in New York seemed to be coming apart at the seams. I discussed this with my beloved editor, Hiram Haydn. I said I was distraught with the world around me, that I wanted to write about it at length, but that I hadn't the least notion what the hell the shape of the book would be. He told me just to put it down, everything down, and eventually we would find some kind of order in the chaos.

  So, for my sins, I began Boys and Girls Together. (Note to fledgling writers: Under thr
eat of torture, never write a long novel. I once met James Clavell, who only writes monsters, and asked him how he got the courage to start when he knew what was going to happen to him before he reached page 1,500. His answer was simple: Each time he began he genuinely believed this one was going to be short. And that once he was into it and it began expanding, he was trapped.)

  I wrote for maybe a year and a half and I suppose I had six or seven hundred typed pages, the piece perhaps two-thirds completed, when I stopped to do two Broadway shows, a play and a musical. Both died bouncing, which was not a lot of fun. (Note to fledgling writers: Never never write for Broadway. Nothing is as wracking as a show that stiffs in New York. Because of the immediacy. When a novel dies, or a movie, it's usually at least a year between when your work is over and disaster overtakes you. But in the theatre, you've just finished that week and you have no defenses. If you ever have an urge to write for Broadway, be kind to yourself and write a long novel instead.)

  After my mourning period, I returned to Boys and Girls Together and discovered, to my genuine horror, that I was, for the first time in my life, totally and completely blocked. Perhaps only other writers can understand the panic that takes hold then. You go to your desk, you sit for two hours, six hours... and nothing. A week, a month... nothing. You try to trick your demons, perhaps by going to the movies instead of to work, and casually, after a double feature or two, you slide in behind your typewriter at the end of the day when there's absolutely no time to write anyway, so all the pressure is off.

  ... nothing.

  You read what other writers have done to win their similar battle.

  Doesn't work for you.

  Nothing works for you.

  And then you enter into despair. Because drying up permanently just may be the ultimate nightmare if what you do for a living is battle empty pages. For almost without exception, this happens to every writer. Few of us drop in our traces. Mostly, our energy goes; we fiddle awhile, try this, that, and then it's over, and how do you fill the rest of your days? (Please understand that I am aware of the melodramatic content of these last paragraphs, but in a very real sense, the end of creativity is for a writer not unlike Altsheimer's Disease: You don't know for sure it's going to happen, but you know it's there. Waiting.)