He’d been working at NBC and had shopped the script around in New York, but there hadn’t really been a movie colony in New York at the time, and he hadn’t wanted to go to L.A. Tutored by bitter experience, he finally decided to make the film on his own. He and a group of friends pooled their resources and rented a 16mm Arriflex M camera from a movie-supply house on Tenth Avenue and drove down to Atlantic City to do the exterior shots.
The gambling interests had begun to take over, and many of the old hotels had been torn down to make room for casinos, but the Dennis was still operating and Mr. Busbee, the manager, remembered Michael as a little boy and gave him permission to shoot the café scenes in the outdoor restaurant along the boardwalk.
When Michael and his parents and his sister, Jordan, had vacationed in Atlantic City, before the war, they’d been picked up at the station by a carriage and taken to the Dennis. Michael couldn’t afford to shoot a period film, but he could remember the carriages and the special wheelchair track along the boardwalk and the auctions at Wing Fat. One night his father had bid three hundred dollars on a huge Chinese rug that was eventually knocked down for three hundred fifty, and right after the auctioneer banged his gavel, the manager of the hotel, Mr. Busbee, came running out and burst into tears. “That rug was worth a million dollars,” he said. “You sold it for three hundred fifty dollars.” And Michael thought the manager was going to fire the auctioneer.
Walking back to the Dennis that night, Michael was on the edge of tears, but he kept his thoughts to himself. It wasn’t till he tried to borrow money from his father for The Lady with the Pet Dog that he brought the subject up. “A million dollars, Papa. If you’d bought that rug at Wing Fat . . .” And his father explained that it had been an act. The rug was worth about three hundred dollars. Tutored by bitter experience.
Back in New York, everything went wrong. There was a fire on the set, a warehouse in the south Bronx that they’d fitted up for the interior shots. The actress who played Gurov’s wife got a role in a feature film and left for L.A.; there was a break-in and the thieves stole a work print, which they tried to ransom.
His assistant, Beryl—who’d become his girlfriend by this time—got her father, an Episcopal priest, to come all the way from Troy, New York, to bless the set. Everything was okay after that—no more fires, no more actors leaving, no more break-ins or ransom demands.
The film got into some festivals, was a strong contender at Venice, got distribution, did quite a bit of business. Critics called it remarkably “mature.” In retrospect Michael could see that he’d skipped over the “Young Turk” stage of his career and gone straight to middle age. Lady was his best film. He got plenty of offers after Lady, and he made a lot of films. But Pauline Kael, in an offhand remark in a review of someone else’s film, had lumped him together with a group of “middling” directors. And the word stuck to him as if it had been a clever nickname, like Meatball or Shorty or Red. He made films that got great reviews but didn’t do much business; and he made films that got panned by the critics but did a lot of business. But he couldn’t get shut of “middling.”
Even so, he always expected the film he was working on to be his best. So maybe he hadn’t been tutored by bitter experience. Because in the editing room at the convent, looking at some of the scenes that Eddie had already cut together, he felt the old flutter of excitement that you get when you see a really great film for the first time.
His plan for the week was to go over all the scenes that Eddie had cut together. Eddie himself had gone to Palermo, but Michael had lined up an Italian projectionist, and he thought he could find his way around the editing room, which was in one of the dormitories on the second floor. His confidence in the film was becoming stronger every day, as one great shot followed another: the dogs in the piazza, Zanni’s face in the window of the taxi during a rainstorm, Zanni walking across Piazza Santa Croce, Zanni’s face in the cheval glass as he removes Miranda’s underthings. Zanni brought out the best in everyone, kept the tone consistent, even when he wasn’t on camera, so that all the actors seemed to be making the same movie. And when he was on camera, he confronted you, even in the rushes, as if the screen were not there, as if there were no artifice, as if he were about to confide some delicious secret.
At lunch Michael drank some of the red wine left over from Beryl’s last dinner party while he fixed himself a salami sandwich, though he wasn’t hungry. He mixed wine from different bottles—something that Beryl would never have allowed. Revenge of the Pink Panther was showing at Cinema Astro at nine. It was one of his favorites, the best of the series. He sat down in the poltronaletto and paged through Beryl’s paperback biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but he was tired and couldn’t concentrate. As he was sinking into sleep, he could almost see Beryl and Zanni in the hotel, unpacking their bags like two characters in a film. He could picture Beryl’s enormous suitcase wide open on the bed, Zanni looking out the window at the lagoon. A pair of middle-aged lovers, like Gurov and Anna in The Lady with the Pet Dog.
When he woke up from his nap he was depressed. He’d been dreaming of Sganarelle in Molière’s The Imaginary Cuckold, whose jealous rage is tempered only by his cowardice. Michael had directed a film version of the play, back in the seventies, but they’d never managed to get the language right. Outside, the accordion player was still playing his gypsy medley. Michael ignored his hopeful look as he walked past him. He walked without paying any attention to where he was going. He walked past the synagogue, where carabinieri with submachine guns were posted; he walked past the Protestant Cemetery. He thought he might go in and have a look at the grave of Shakespeare’s last descendants, but the gate was closed. He wound up at the Paperback Exchange.
Miranda was the last person he wanted to encounter, but there she was, glaring at him, at the end of the mystery aisle, just as he’d turned up a John D. MacDonald novel he thought he might not have read. He hadn’t spoken to her since the big blowup about the script at Sotheby’s.
“Do you know where your wife is?” she said.
Michael kept reading, trying to remember if he’d read this one before. Miranda’s voice seemed to be coming from a long way away. He couldn’t hear her words, but he could make out what she was thinking: You’re not a man. How can you let your wife go off for a week with that monster? You should have challenged him to a duel. They’re fucking up a storm right now. You know, don’t you? I don’t have to tell you. And you’ve let Zanni steal all the scenes. It was supposed to be a film about a woman, and now you’re going to call it The Italian Lover. You identified with the male lead. You let Esther walk all over you. Margot was right. And I knew it beforehand. I should have told her everything at the very beginning. You took everything away from me except the T and A scenes. Esther told me Margot wrote the screenplay, but that was a lie. She lied to everyone. As far as I’m concerned, you can all go to hell.
Michael looked up from The Lonely Silver Rain. “How old are you, Miranda?”
“Twenty-nine,” she said. “Well, thirty.”
“There are still some things you don’t understand about life.”
“That’s what your wife told me,” Miranda said. She started to cry, and he put an arm around her and invited her to go to see Revenge of the Pink Panther that night.
There were a lot of things about life that he didn’t understand either.
Beryl and Zanni arrived at Santa Lucia Station in Venice on Saturday afternoon and took the vaporetto down the Grand Canal and out to the Lido. Zanni had nothing but bad things to say about his native city: it was sinking into the sea; the Public Works Ministry had halted the controversial gates project that was supposed to protect the interior of the city from flooding; the young people were leaving; there were no jobs; Mestre—the industrial city on the mainland—was dominating the economy; Venice was a tourist town that had lost its soul, its raison d’être, like Christianity. On and on he went as they passed the Fondaco dei Turchi and the Ca’ d’Oro and th
e Rialto and the Accademia and then stopped at San Marco before heading out into open water.
The Lido was at the end of the vaporetto line, and the Hotel Buon Pesce was at the end of the bus line on the Lido. There were two bus lines. One went clockwise and one counterclockwise. Beryl remembered taking the wrong bus with Michael and getting worried, but then it hadn’t mattered because both buses went to the hotel and turned around in a circular drive in front. She’d forgotten about the military installation farther out, but the road was gated and there were NO ENTRY signs posted everywhere. It was not as fancy as Beryl remembered, but it had a view of the lagoon, and in the distance they could see the campanile and San Giorgio Maggiore and the lights along the shore.
The garden was bare, but Beryl remembered the bright blue and yellow fuchsia that had been in bloom during the film festival, and how the lobby had been full of flowers. She didn’t remember, though, that their room had been this small, almost cramped, and she had to wonder, what are we going to do all week? In this little room! Maybe that was the problem with being middle-aged.
Michael met Miranda at the bottom of Via Tornabuoni, and they pushed their way through the crowds in the center to the little theater across from Vivoli, the ice cream place. Miranda started to apologize but he stopped her.
“It will be a good film,” he said. “You’ve got a career ahead of you. Don’t worry, all right?”
“All right,” she said, “but I really am sorry. It’s just —”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. He didn’t ask her “just” what? He was hanging onto his Godlike perspective vis-à-vis his wife and her lover, didn’t want to let it go. God with a sense of humor. It would be easy to lose that too.
“Everyone’s in love with Zanni,” she said. “I don’t understand it.”
“Because he enjoys being who he is. I could see that from the beginning, when he did his polenta routine at the first rehearsal. He takes whatever’s at hand. Like Falstaff. It’s his commedia dell’arte background. Improvisation. Everything’s fresh. He’s got the secret of life.”
“He’s good at catching flies,” she said. She put her arm through Michael’s. In the little piazza outside the Cinema Astro they ran into the dolly grip, his collar turned up against the cold. Michael was conscious of the fact that, like everyone else, the dolly grip—Guido—knew about Beryl and Zanni, and probably pitied him and found him ridiculous, but he was also conscious of the fact that his appearance with Miranda, who still had her arm through his, might look as if he and Miranda were having an affair, which would counter the Beryl-Zanni affair. If it were true.
“I’m here to practice my English,” Guido said.
They sat together on uncomfortable folding chairs, Miranda in the middle. The theater was shabby—more like a church basement than a proper movie theater—but Michael experienced the familiar thrill when the lights went out and previews started. Excalibur. Another old story tortured on the rack. He wished they still showed cartoons, but then, Revenge of the Pink Panther was a cartoon, and he was buoyed up by the movie, even though they showed the reels out of order. It didn’t really matter. His favorite part was when Clouseau disguises himself as the old Swedish sailor with an inflatable parrot on his shoulder. But there were so many great moments: the bomb sequence, Clouseau disguised as Toulouse-Lautrec, the kung-fu fight between Cato and Clouseau with the slow-motion ending.
Outside, in the cold, Michael, wanting to prolong the special companionable feeling you get after watching a movie with someone, offered to buy ice cream at Vivoli. He could see that Miranda was already forgetting Zanni. He could already see what was going to happen as surely as if it were the beginning of a romantic comedy.
There was a large crowd on the street in front of Vivoli and they had to wait.
“I couldn’t understand anything,” Guido said. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Were they speaking French?”
“It’s hard to hear in there,” Michael said.
“But this Pink Panther. I don’t understand . . .”
“He’s supposed to have a French accent.” Michael imitated: “It’s a bimb, it’s the lieuw.”
“Is it some kind of satire?” Guido asked.
“Movies are never about what they seem to be about,” Miranda said. “They’re always about how they’re about it.”
Guido looked puzzled.
“What Miranda means,” Michael said, not wanting to pursue this line of thought, “is that they showed the reels in the wrong order. They showed the third reel second and then the second reel last. Not that it makes much difference!”
“Oh.” Miranda covered her mouth with her hand.
“That’s why the credits showed up in the middle instead of at the end.”
“I couldn’t understand that,” Guido said.
Michael laughed. “I still know a thing or two.”
“The ice cream here is fantastic,” Miranda said.
“Almost as good as at San Crispiano, in Trastevere.”
“I’m sure everything’s better in Rome,” Miranda said.
They got their little cups of ice cream and their little wooden spoons and found a seat. Miranda had nocciola, Guido had the stracciatella, and Michael had pistachio. When they’d finished, Miranda asked Guido if he were working on anything.
“Working on anything? I’m pushing the dolly every day.”
“I meant a screenplay.”
“Why would you think that?”
“Because,” Michael said, “everyone in this business is writing a screenplay.”
“Not in Italy,” Guido said. “But if I were going to write a screenplay, it would be a romantic comedy, and I’d avoid all the clichés.”
“What kind of clichés?” Miranda asked.
“You know, the lovers meet in some funny way —”
“If you eliminate all the clichés,” Michael interrupted, “there’s nothing left. Isn’t that your experience?”
“Well,” Guido said, “you meet a woman at a party . . .” He stopped, pushed his lips out, and tipped his head to one side.
“What about Shakespeare?” Michael asked. “Benedict and Beatrice, Rosalind and Orlando?”
“Maybe everything’s a cliché,” Guido said. “If a man and a woman fall in love at first sight, that’s a cliché. If they can’t stand each other at the beginning, that’s a cliché, because you know right away that they’re going to fall in love later. If a man tries to kiss a woman and she slaps him, that’s a cliché; you know they’re going to fall in love. If she slaps him and then he kisses her, that’s a cliché. Look at Strega della luna. It’s all a cliché. They can’t stand each other. She slaps him. They jump into bed. If they go to bed and it’s fantastic, that’s a cliché. If they go to bed and nothing works right the first time, that’s a cliché too, and you know it will get better and pretty soon it will be fantastic.”
Miranda didn’t recognize the title—Strega della luna.
“With Cher and Nicolas Cage,” Guido explained.
“Moonstruck,” she said. “But that was a terrific movie.”
“And avoiding clichés is a cliché too,” Michael said. “Sometimes it’s even worse than the clichés themselves.”
Guido laughed.
“If it’s going to be a romantic comedy,” Michael said, “somebody’s got to fall in love.”
“I suppose.”
“Clichés aren’t the enemy,” Michael said. “Intentionality is the enemy. Don’t plan too much. Don’t think too much. Let things happen. Don’t try to illustrate a theory. Write your screenplay without stopping. Don’t try to squeeze it out, like toothpaste out of a tube. Don’t worry about originality. Don’t be afraid of clichés. Just let something happen.”
“Is that the way you work?”
“No, I’ve always planned too far ahead. I’ve always been afraid.”
“Afraid?”
“Afraid to steal what I wanted! Don’t be afraid to do that. If you like the way de Sica gets b
ehind his characters in The Bicycle Thief, framing them in windows and doorways, looking at them around corners, do it. If you like the way Claudia makes faces at herself in the mirror in L’avventura, go for a mirror scene. If you like the way Jewison sets up the bedroom scene in Moonstruck, learn from it.”
“That’s not a great scene.”
“No,” Michael said, “but you can learn from it. You can learn to shape a scene, to pace it. Use what you love. Don’t be afraid of clichés. But don’t just plunk them down—put them to work, make them sweat. The main thing is, don’t be afraid of what you don’t understand. Go for the deep truth.” Michael leaned forward and paused dramatically. “No, truth is the wrong word. Forget truth. Mystery’s what you want. At the center of every good story there’s a mystery that can’t be explained. If you could explain it, you wouldn’t need a story. Stories are for the things you can’t explain. If you stick to that, everything else will take care of itself. Don’t be afraid to break all the rules, and don’t be afraid to follow them either.
“And don’t be afraid to surprise yourself. You’ve got to put yourself in a discovery mode, do you know what I mean? When you sit down to write, or when you sit down to set up a shot, you want to leave room for surprises. Intentionality is the enemy. Let things happen.”
“This is very good advice. Maybe I will write a screenplay.” Guido laughed. “But what’s the mystery in the Pink Panther? What is it that you can’t explain so you have to have a story, a movie like that?”
Michael was stumped: it was a mystery film, but it didn’t really matter who’d committed the crime. There was something more. He thought about it and then it came to him. “It’s the inflatable parrot, isn’t it? What’s at the heart of things—silliness or rationality? The Iliad is a great story because life is war. The Odyssey’s a great story because life’s a journey. The Canterbury Tales are great because life is a pilgrimage. And The Pink Panther’s pretty good because life is a joke—the parrot. You can’t explain it. It’s just there. And you can’t get it into words either. That’s the key. You have to see it.”