Often, a movie sinks or soars on the choice of the leading man. The character of Paul Brenner in the novel is a wisecracking and slightly smart-assed Irish-American from South Boston. I pictured Bruce Willis for the part and so did a lot of people at Paramount, but Bruce Willis wasn’t available. Then one day, my agent, Nick Ellison, called me and announced that John Travolta had signed for the part. John Travolta? as Paul Brenner? John Travolta is incredibly talented, but I couldn’t see him as the character that I’d created, or even as the character that the scriptwriters had created. But I soon learned what it means when they say that an actor or actress has range and depth.
I recall many years ago that when I heard that Marlon Brando had been picked to play the title role in The Godfather, I thought it was a bad choice. So did a lot of other people who’d read the book. But now, for all time and for all people, Marlon Brando is The Godfather.
The role shapes the actor, and the actor shapes the role. So it is with John Travolta as Paul Brenner. Travolta is Brenner.
John Travolta brought with him his longtime manager, Jonathan Krane, who became the executive producer. Travolta and Krane became involved with the script and also in the casting of the movie.
The leading lady presented a problem of scheduling, and the entire movie had been cast before Paramount was fortunate in signing Madeleine Stowe who starred in The Last of the Mohicans. As with Travolta, I did not picture Stowe as Cynthia Sunhill (now Sara Sunhill) or Sunhill as Stowe. But once again I was pleasantly surprised at how a talented star can mold a part so that it seems a natural choice.
The supporting cast is nothing short of spectacular. James Woods was born to play the part of quirky psychiatrist Colonel Charles Moore, Timothy Hutton is the uptight provost marshall Colonel Bill Kent, James Cromwell, who plays the general, “Fighting Joe” Campbell, told me he was an antiwar activist during the Vietnam War, but he acts like he had been an Army general once, and Clarence Williams III as the general’s aide, Colonel Fowler, is so convincing that you believe he and James Cromwell served together in the military. The alchemy among all these people is every director’s dream.
Last but not least, Leslie Stefanson, who plays the title role of the general’s daughter, is a newcomer to feature films, but the performance she turns in makes her look like a seasoned actress. This is a young woman who has a great film career ahead of her.
I don’t often picture any specific actor or actress playing a part I’ve created in a novel, but I had an eerie feeling when I saw Woods, Hutton, Cromwell, Williams, and Stefanson on the screen. These were the people I’d created, right down to their physical appearances and mannerisms. This is not to say that they didn’t define and expand on the characters and the roles—they did. But they also seemed as if they’d stepped out of the pages of the novel.
The movie was shot during the summer and fall of 1998, and I chose not to visit the set in Savannah during the hot and difficult summer shoot, but I did, with my agent, Nick Ellison, visit the set in October, when the shooting had moved to Los Angeles.
I should point out here that the Department of Defense was not involved with this movie. Mace Neufeld has a good relationship with the DOD from his past films, but he felt that he should not seek government cooperation for this film. He said, “Over the years, I’ve worked with many wonderful people from the DOD who’ve played an invaluable role in certain projects, but I also know when the project is inappropriate and when to back off. It’s a relationship of mutual respect.”
My book was not antimilitary, and neither was the screenplay. But both book and movie raised controversial and sensitive issues that perhaps would make the military uneasy. In any case, shooting a movie about the military without military cooperation can be a little more difficult, and a little more costly. But it also has a liberating effect, both creatively and practically.
This is not to say that there are any glaring lapses of verisimilitude in the movie. In fact, Paramount hired a number of military advisors to ensure military accuracy. I met several of these advisors on the set, and they seemed pleased that their suggestions were acted upon by Mace Neufeld and Simon West.
The chief military advisor was Jared Chandler, a longtime associate of Mace Neufeld’s and a career reserve Army officer. Jared worked on Mace’s Flight of the Intruder and Clear and Present Danger, and was always available on the set of The General’s Daughter when questions of verisimilitude arose. Veterans, like me, who like to pick apart Hollywood’s version of the military, should find little to complain about in The General’s Daughter.
Regarding my visit to the set, these visits can be unhappy occasions. There are legendary tales of East Coast novelists visiting Hollywood—tales that go back, probably, to the days of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1920s. Some novelists, like Fitzgerald, are seduced by Tinsel Town and stay on long enough to ruin their careers. Most novelists come, look, and run back to their relatively normal existences.
The movie business is like no other business on this planet, and Los Angeles is like no other city in America. Having said that, I will say that no novelist should miss the opportunity to see his or her novel made into a film.
If fish and houseguests stink after three days, then novelists on a movie set stink after two. I spent two full days on the set, and I was warmly welcomed and just as warmly sent on my way. It was a great visit.
One afternoon, Nick Ellison and I sat with Mace Neufeld and watched about a half hour of cut and edited scenes of The General’s Daughter. As the first scene came up on the video screen, I was anxious, skeptical, and New York cynical. I was prepared to wince. Perhaps even have a cardiac episode. But from the first few minutes, I realized I was watching an exceptional production. The performances from all the members of the cast were enthralling, and the interaction between the actors and actresses was pure magic. When the lights went on in the small viewing room, Mace, Nick, the engineer, and I were all smiling. We had a winner.
The movie, The General’s Daughter, is not the novel, The General’s Daughter. It is an adaptation. It’s easy for a novelist to complain or get angry at how his or her book was treated or mistreated. In too many cases, these feelings are justified. The egos in Hollywood are big, and the story conferences are many. Studio heads, producers, directors, and screenwriters engage in a collaborate effort that the novelist neither comprehends nor desires. The result of collaborative efforts and compromises often lead to the proverbial committee-designed racehorse becoming a giraffe. This process is inherent in the motion-picture business and will never change.
Sometimes, however, the moons, the planets, and the stars all line up, and many visions become a thing of magic. As I write this, I have not seen the fully cut and edited movie, nor have I heard the musical score or the sound effects, or seen the ending of the story. But I liked what I did see, on the screen and on the set.
The most common and frequent complaint of moviegoers who see a movie based on a book is this: The book was better than the movie. One rarely if ever hears that the movie was better than the book, or that the novelist’s story and characters were changed for the better. And you’re not going to hear that now. But what I can say is that the essence of my novel was captured and conveyed on the screen through excellent acting, sharp and funny dialogue, and through the use of visual settings that even the best novelist can’t convey on paper.
Regarding the visuals, executive producer Jonathan Krane said, “The look of this film is almost supernatural. It’s the most staggeringly spectacular film I’ve ever seen.” A bit of hype, maybe, but the point is made that visuals are what American filmmaking does best. When you couple this with great acting and a great screenplay, you have a real movie.
As important as being true to the book is the often overlooked notion that the movie should be entertaining. The movie version of The General’s Daughter is entertaining. I was entertained, and if I was entertained, everyone else who sees it should be entertained.
My Hollywood exper
ience may be atypical, and I may not be as lucky or fortunate on my next close encounter with Hollywood, but this time, the heavenly bodies did align.
CHAPTER
ONE
Is this seat taken?” I asked the attractive young woman sitting by herself in the lounge.
She looked up from her newspaper but didn’t reply.
I sat opposite her at the cocktail table and put down my beer. She went back to her paper and sipped on her drink, a bourbon and Coke. I inquired, “Come here often?”
“Go away.”
“What’s your sign?”
“No trespassing.”
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?”
“No.”
“Yes. NATO Headquarters in Brussels. We met at a cocktail party.”
“Perhaps you’re right,” she conceded. “You got drunk and threw up in the punch bowl.”
“Small world,” I said. And indeed it was. Cynthia Sunhill, the woman sitting across from me now, was more than a casual acquaintance. In fact, we were once involved, as they say. Apparently she chose not to remember much of it. I said, “You threw up. I told you bourbon and Coke wasn’t good for your stomach.”
“You are not good for my stomach.”
You’d think by her attitude that I had walked out on her rather than vice versa.
We were sitting in the cocktail lounge of the Officers’ Club at Fort Hadley, Georgia. It was the Happy Hour, and everyone there seemed happy, save for us two. I was dressed in a blue civilian suit, she in a nice pink knit dress that brought out her tan, her auburn hair, her hazel eyes, and other fondly remembered anatomy. I inquired, “Are you here on assignment?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”
“Where are you staying?”
No reply.
“How long will you be here?”
She went back to her newspaper.
I asked, “Did you marry that guy you were seeing on the side?”
She put down the paper and looked at me. “I was seeing you on the side. I was engaged to him.”
“That’s right. Are you still engaged?”
“None of your business.”
“It could be.”
“Not in this lifetime,” she informed me, and hid behind her paper again.
I didn’t see an engagement ring or a wedding ring, but in our business that didn’t mean much, as I’d learned in Brussels.
Cynthia Sunhill, by the way, was in her late twenties, and I’m in my early forties, so ours was not a May–November romance, but more May–September. Maybe August.
It lasted a year while we were both stationed in Europe, and her fiancé, a Special Forces major, was stationed in Panama. Military life is tough on relationships of all kinds, and the defense of Western civilization makes people horny.
Cynthia and I had separated a little over a year before this chance encounter, under circumstances that can best be described as messy. Apparently neither she nor I had gotten over it; I was still hurting and she was still pissed off. The betrayed fiancé looked a little annoyed, too, the last time I saw him in Brussels with a pistol in his hand.
The O Club at Hadley is vaguely Spanish in architecture, perhaps Moorish, which may have been why Casablanca popped into my mind, and I quipped out of the side of my mouth, “Of all the gin joints in the world, she walks into mine.”
Either she didn’t get it or she wasn’t in a smiling mood, because she continued to read her newspaper, the Stars and Stripes, which nobody reads, at least not in public. But Cynthia is a bit of a goody-goody, a dedicated, loyal, and enthusiastic soldier with none of the cynicism and world-weariness that most men display after a few years on this job. “Hearts filled with passion, jealousy, and hate,” I prompted.
Cynthia said, “Go away, Paul.”
“I’m sorry I ruined your life,” I said sincerely.
“You couldn’t even ruin my day.”
“You broke my heart,” I said with more sincerity.
“I’d like to break your neck,” she replied with real enthusiasm.
I could see that I was rekindling something in her, but I don’t think it was passion.
I remembered a poem I used to whisper to her in our more intimate moments, and I leaned toward her and said softly, “ ‘There hath none pleased mine eyes but Cynthia, none delighted mine ears but Cynthia, none possessed my heart but Cynthia. I have forsaken all other fortunes to follow Cynthia, and here I stand, ready to die if it pleases Cynthia.’ ”
“Good. Drop dead.” She stood and left.
“Play it again, Sam.” I finished my beer, stood, and walked back to the bar.
I sidled up to the long bar among men who had seen some of life; men with chests full of medals and Combat Infantry Badges, men with campaign ribbons from Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, and the Gulf. The guy to my right, a full colonel with gray hair, said, “War is hell, son, but hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“Amen.”
“Saw the whole thing in the bar mirror,” he informed me.
“Bar mirrors are interesting,” I replied.
“Yup.” In fact, he was studying me in the bar mirror now. Apropos of my civilian attire, he asked, “You retired?”
“Yes.” But in fact, I was not.
He gave me his opinion of women in the military—“They squat to piss. Try doing that with sixty pounds of field gear”—then announced, “Gotta go drain the dragon,” and ambled off to the men’s room, where I presume he stood at the urinal.
I made my way out of the club into the hot August night and got into my Chevy Blazer. I drove through the main post, which is sort of like a downtown without zoning, encompassing everything from a PX and commissary to misplaced barracks and a deserted tank maintenance facility.
Fort Hadley is a small post in south Georgia, founded in 1917 to train infantry troops to be sent into the meat grinder on the Western Front. The area of the military reservation, however, is quite large—over 100,000 acres of mostly wooded terrain, suitable for war games, survival courses, guerrilla warfare training, and so on.
The Infantry School is phasing out now, and much of the post looks forlorn. But there is a Special Operations School here, the purpose of which seems somewhat vague, or perhaps, to be charitable, I could say experimental. As far as I can determine, the school is a mixture of psychological warfare, troop morale studies, isolation and deprivation studies, stress management courses, and other head and mind games. It sounds a bit sinister, but knowing the Army, whatever the original bright idea was, it has since become Drill and Ceremonies, and spit-shined boots.
To the north of Fort Hadley lies the medium-sized town of Midland, a typical Army town in some ways, populated with retired military personnel, civilian employees of the base, people who sell things to soldiers, as well as those who have nothing to do with the military and like it fine that way.
Midland was an English trading post as early as 1710, and before that it was an outpost of the Spanish colony of St. Augustine in Florida. Prior to that, it was an Indian town, the center of the Upatoi Nation. The Spanish burned the Indian town, the English burned the Spanish outpost, the French burned the English trading post, the British army burned and abandoned their fort there during the Revolution, and finally, the Yankees burned it in 1864. Looking at the place today, you wonder what all the fuss was about. Anyway, they’ve got a good volunteer fire department now.
I got on the interstate that skirts Fort Hadley and Midland and drove north, out into the open country toward a deserted trailer park. This was where I was temporarily staying, and I found the isolation convenient in terms of my job.
My job. I am an officer in the United States Army. My rank is unimportant, and in my line of work, it’s also a secret. I am in the Criminal Investigation Division, the CID, and in the Army, which is very rank-conscious, the best rank to have is no rank. But, in fact, like most CID personnel, I am a warrant officer, a specialized rank that exists between noncommissio
ned officers and commissioned officers. This is a pretty good rank because you have most of the privileges of an officer but not much of the command responsibility, or the Mickey Mouse crap that goes along with it. Warrant officers are addressed as “Mister,” and CID investigators often wear civilian clothing as I was that evening. There are times when I even have illusions that I’m a civilian.
There are, however, occasions when I do wear a uniform. On these occasions, the Department of the Army issues me orders with a new name, a rank appropriate to the case, and a uniform to match. I report for duty into a unit where my quarry is working, and I go about my assigned duties while gathering evidence for the judge advocate general.
When you’re undercover, you have to be a jack-of-all-trades. I’ve been everything from a cook to a chemical warfare specialist—though in the Army that’s not such a big difference. It’s sort of difficult to get away with some of these roles, but I get by on my charm. It’s all illusion anyway. So is my charm.
There are four warrant officer grades, and I’m topped out at grade four. All us fours are holding our breaths waiting for Congress to approve a five and six. Some of us have died of asphyxiation waiting.
Anyway, I’m part of a special CID team, a sort of elite unit, though I hesitate to use that word. What makes us special is that we’re all long-time veterans with good arrest and conviction records. What also makes us special is that I have extraordinary powers to cut through Army red tape, which in the military is like having a magic mushroom in a Nintendo game. One of those extraordinary powers is the power to make an arrest of any military person anywhere in the world, regardless of rank. I wouldn’t push this and attempt to arrest one of the Joint Chiefs for speeding, but I always wanted to see how far I could go. I was about to find out.
My permanent duty station is at CID Headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia, but my cases take me all over the world. Travel, adventure, free time, mental and physical challenges, and bosses who leave me alone—what more could a man want? Oh, yes, women. There’s some of that, too. Brussels wasn’t the last time I had a woman, but it was the last time it mattered.