And I know this: that is going to be some fucking bowling match. I don't know if either Goodman or Turturro is going to survive the thing, but I cannot wait.
Guess what? Not only is there no bowling contest, the Coens never even thought of having one. For them, it was just background for character. Well guess what?--they're wrong, because I want to see Goodman kick Turturro's ass.
The Coens, whatever their billing says, both do everything--write, produce, direct. They show up pretty much every day at their office on the West Side, do a kind of nine-to-five thing, but most of the time they wouldn't glorify what they do by saying it's writing.
They often set scripts aside, as they did Fargo, after about sixty pages were done. They wrote a stage direction--"Interior. Shep's apartment. Carl is banging an escort." There it stood for a year and a half. They may have as many as half a dozen scripts stashed away around their office. I don't know about you, but if they're close to being Fargo, I wish they'd get cracking.
Fargo is the story of a complicated crime that goes very wrong.
An automobile dealer needs money. What he decides to do is have his wife kidnapped and split the ransom money--courtesy of his father-in-law--with the kidnapers. (His wife is wealthy, he is not, and his father-in-law openly despises him.)
The kidnappers do not know each other well, and when they spend time together, it turns out they despise each other, too.
The dealer gives the kidnappers a car as the first installment of what they will eventually receive. In the meantime, he is harassed at work by people trying to buy cars from him, and at home, where he is trying to put together a deal with his father-in-law that will render the kidnapping unnecessary. He strikes out.
The kidnappers abduct his wife. They are driving through the area of Brainerd, Minnesota, with the wife in the backseat. They are in their new car. A cop stops them--the chattier of the two has forgotten to put tags on the car. The cop leaves his motor running, his lights on, and comes over to the car where the wife is lying on the floor in the rear. The chatty one tells the silent one that he will handle things. He tries to bribe the cop, who will have none of it, and when the officer asks the chatty kidnapper to please step out of the car, the silent one shoots him dead.
The chatty one is stunned at this, but he gets out of the car in the snow and starts to drag the dead cop off the road.
At this moment, another car drives by, slows, sees the chatty one dragging the cop away, and then takes off.
The silent kidnapper pursues them, and after the car chase has gone on a while, realizes they have pulled off the road. He does the same, finds them, kills two more.
Blackout.
We hear a phone ringing, a couple are in bed, it's the middle of the night. The woman answers, says she'll be right there. The man, her husband, says he will fix her some eggs, she needs her strength.
We see, as she gets out of bed, that whoever she is, she is pregnant.
Now, in a quick breakfast scene, we see she is also a police officer. And it's clear she is going to the crime scene. Where she has zero chance of ever solving the madness we have just seen unfold.
The Barfing in the Snow Scene
HIGHWAY
Two police cars and an ambulance sit idling at the side of the road, a pair of men inside each car.
The first car's driver door opens and a figure in a parka emerges, holding two Styrofoam cups. His partner leans across the seat to close the door after him.
The reverse shows Marge approaching from her own squad car.
MARGE
Hiya, Lou.
LOU
Margie. Thought you might need a little warm-up.
He hands her one of the cups of coffee.
MARGE
Yah, thanks a bunch. So what's the deal, now. Gary says triple homicide?
LOU
Yah, looks pretty bad. Two of'm're over here.
Marge looks around as they start walking.
MARGE
Where is everybody?
LOU
Well--it's cold, Margie.
BY THE WRECK
Laid out in the early morning light is the wrecked car, a pair of footprints leading out to the man in a bright orange parka face down in the bloodstained snow, and one pair of footsteps leading back to the road.
Marge is peering into the car.
MARGE
Ah, geez. So ... Aw, geez. Here's the second one ... It's in the head and the ... hand there, I guess that's a defensive wound. Okay.
Marge looks up from the car.
...Where's the state trooper?
Lou, up on the shoulder, jerks his thumb.
LOU
Back there a good piece. In the ditch next to his prowler.
Marge looks around at the road.
MARGE
Okay, so we got a trooper pulls someone over, we got a shooting, and these folks drive by, and we got a high-speed pursuit, ends here, and this execution-type deal.
LOU
Yah.
MARGE
I'd be very surprised if our suspect was from Brainerd.
LOU
Yah.
Marge is studying the ground.
MARGE
Yah. And I'll tell you what, from his footprint he looks like a big fella--
Marge suddenly doubles over, putting her head between her knees down near the snow.
LOU
Ya see something down there, Chief?
MARGE
Uh--I just, I think I'm gonna barf.
LOU
Geez, you okay, Margie?
MARGE
I'm fine--it's just morning sickness.
She gets up, sweeping the snow from her knees.
...Well, that passed.
LOU
Yah?
MARGE
Yah. Now I'm hungry again.
LOU
You had breakfast yet, Margie?
MARGE
Oh, yah. Norm made some eggs.
LOU
Yah? Well, what now, d'ya think?
MARGE
Let's go take a look at that trooper.
BY THE STATE TROOPER'S CAR
Marge's prowler is parked nearby.
Marge is on her hands and knees by a body down in the ditch, again looking at footprints in the snow. She calls up the road:
MARGE
There's two of 'em, Lou!
LOU
Yah?
MARGE
Yah, this guy's smaller than his buddy.
LOU
Oh, yah?
DOWN IN THE DITCH
In the foreground is the head of the state trooper, facing us. Peering at it from behind, still on her hands and knees, is Marge.
MARGE
For Pete's sake.
She gets up, clapping the snow off her hands, and climbs out of the ditch.
LOU
How's it look, Marge?
MARGE
Well, he's got his gun on his hip there, and he looks like a nice enough guy. It's a real shame.
LOU
Yah.
MARGE
You haven't monkeyed with his car there, have ya?
LOU
No way.
She is looking at the prowler, which still idles on the shoulder.
MARGE
Somebody shut his lights. I guess the little guy sat in there, waitin' for his buddy t'come back.
LOU
Yah, woulda been cold out here.
MARGE
Heck, yah. Ya think, is Dave open yet?
LOU
You don't think he's mixed up in--
MARGE
No, no, I just wanna get Norm some night crawlers.
INT. PROWLER
Marge is driving; Lou sits next to her.
MARGE
You look in his citation book?
LOU
Yah...
He looks at his notebook.
...Last vehicle he wrote in was a tan
Ciera at 2:18 A.M. Under the plate number he put DLR--I figure they stopped him or shot him before he could finish fillin' out the tag number.
MARGE
Uh-huh.
LOU
So I got the state lookin' for a Ciera with a tag startin' DLR. They don't got no match yet.
MARGE
I'm not sure I agree with you a hunnert percent on your policework there, Lou.
LOU
Yah?
MARGE
Yah, I think that vehicle there probly had dealer plates. DLR?
LOU
Oh...
Lou gazes out the window, thinking.
...Geez.
MARGE
Yah. Say, Lou, ya hear the one 'bout the guy who couldn't afford personalized plates, so he went and changed his name to J2L 4685?
LOU
Yah, that's a good one.
MARGE
Yah.
THE ROAD
The police car enters with a whoosh and hums down a straight-ruled empty highway, cutting a landscape of flat and perfect white.
Why did I say that the work is done in this movie about one-third of the way through?
No logical reason, but I remember that when I saw Fargo the first time, after that scene I felt a sense of peace. I have seen everything the Coens have done, and I know they are perverse. But I could not conceive that even the Coens could kill Marge. (My God, Frances McDormand is married to Joel. No way he offs his wife.) Which means I have faith I can give her my heart.
And that whole insane opening? I thought the whole movie was going to be about unraveling that baby. So when she nails it right out of the chute, you bet I relaxed. How could I not? I was going to spend another hour with one of the major movie characters of the decade. And I didn't care if at times she was less dazzling than here. I just wanted to be along on the ride.
So, yes, for me, here, even this early, the work is done.
Decades past, Bob Towne and I had the same agent, the late and very great Evarts Ziegler--we are in the '60s now--and Towne was already the script doctor. He was this mysterious figure and he seemed to have fixed everything, but his cover was blown at the Oscars in '72 when Francis Ford Coppola thanked him from the microphone for his help with The Godfather.
The odd thing about his writing--I can still hear Ziegler trying to make sense of this--was that when he doctored, he was fast, met deadlines, etc., but on his own stuff, death. Paint dried more quickly.
Chinatown took a while.
Towne had the two rapes from the start--the rape of the land and the rape of the woman. His problem was which to lead with, how to knot them together, and that was hard.
The scene that follows, the confessional if you will--one of the most famous in modern films--amazingly enough did not work. It was in a couple of different places in the script. And one day Towne was meeting with the director, Roman Polanski, and they both knew there was something wrong, it was no fucking good, and suddenly they both realized that a confession of this depth is not casually spoken, it is bled, battered out of someone, and the force of revelation struck Towne: Nicholson would have to beat the truth out of Dunaway. The moment he knew that, the scene was written in half an hour.
Remember that no film, before it comes out, is a classic. We fantasize, sure. But usually only in the privacy of our own rooms. I remember when George Roy Hill and I were working on Butch; during a break we started talking about our hopes for the film. One of us, could have been me, said, "I just want it to be remembered as being as good as The Gunfighter." (Check it out at your video store.)
And when you luck into a classic, as Chinatown turned out to be, certain moments and actors take your memory. Here, obviously, you think of Nicholson with his cut nose, Dunaway trying to control her crumbling world. But the great performance in the movie, for me anyway, and the greatest role, is neither of those.
TOWNE
Noah Cross is the center of the story. Without Noah Cross the story goes to shit. I mean, his character is absolutely the center of it all, and I've often reflected that it's Huston's performance, which is so uncompromising. He doesn't blink or hesitate in the fact that he is an evil man. Most people won't have to face the fact that at a certain time and a certain place, they're capable of evil. And his rationale was that he faced the fact that everybody has it in them, and that he just did it.
Take a look at the ending Chinatown scene, where Huston is taking his younger daughter from the car. Ecstasy on his face. Evil triumphant. And even though he is not present in the earlier confession scene, boy is he there.
Before our interview, I had only talked to Towne once. It was right after I first saw Chinatown, was bowled over by the story he told, the way he told it, got his number from our agent, called and raved.
Towne was not, at that moment, a happy camper.
TOWNE
Looking back at it now, I'm somewhat chagrined at my anger at Polanski. There were a lot of things. There has been a lot of talk about his ending, which is what's in the movie now, and what I wanted, which was virtually as dark and maybe, I think, a little more literary. Evelyn Mulwray killed her father. And had to go to jail. And Gittes was going to talk about it. She was going to be fried, because the identity of her daughter had to be protected. So it made a mess of it anyway. But, in retrospect, Roman was right. The movie needed a stark ending after such a complex story.
I wondered if Towne had any idea, at the first showing, what the movie would become. I figured on a "yes"--having seen the movie so many times, I could not see where the trouble might come from.
TOWNE
The first sneak? It did not go well. We had a horrendous score on the picture. By some guy that Roman knew. It was dissonant, weird, scratchy. Roman was momentarily enamored of it. He said the score was perfect. He was going off to direct an operetta at Spoletto, when mercifully, he ran into a grand old gentleman named Bronislau Kaper, who won an Oscar for his score of Lili, and he said, "Roman, that score is killing your picture." Roman had great respect for him and he said, "Okay, we better get the score changed." Jerry Goldsmith came in then, and did that great score. I was on the set when Jerry spotted it, and it was at that time when you could see the movie come to life. It was like you couldn't see the movie with the other score, and now you could, and I thought, "Omigod, we may have a chance ..."
I love movie stories like that. They let us know so much the media doesn't. The media really is interested in cute stars and hits and occasionally (The Postman) disasters. But most movies come so close to disaster. Remember two things:
1. It is so hard to get a movie made.
2. It is so much harder to make a movie of quality.
In the great studio era, when MGM was churning out a movie a week, not such a problem. I'm thirty-five years into it and maybe I average one movie made per year. That's counting everything--stuff I've written and stuff I've doctored and stuff I've consulted on--and I've been lucky.
And of all those, I love only two. Butch and The Princess Bride. For the rest, some good parts, but all I see are where I should have been better. Got a phone call from Rob Reiner three years after Princess Bride came out. In despair. He had just that night figured out where he should have placed the camera in a scene to make it better. Nuts? Sure. But a lot of phone calls like that get made.
The "She's My Daughter, She's My Sister" Scene
EXT. BUNGALOW-HOUSE, ADELAIDE DRIVE
Gittes pulls up in Mulwray's Buick. He hurries to the front door, pounds on it.
The Chinese servant answers the door.
CHINESE SERVANT
You wait.
GITTES
(short sentence in Chinese)
You wait.
Gittes pushes past him. Evelyn, looking a little worn but glad to see him, hurries to the door. She takes Gittes' arm.
EVELYN
How are you? I was calling you.
She looks at him, searching his face.
GITTES
--Yeah?
They move into the living room. Gittes is looking around it.
EVELYN
Did you get some sleep?
GITTES
Sure.
EVELYN
Did you have lunch? Kyo will fix you something--
GITTES
(abruptly)
--where's the girl?
EVELYN
Upstairs. Why?
GITTES
I want to see her.
EVELYN
...she's having a bath now ... why do you want to see her?
Gittes continues to looks around. He sees clothes laid out for packing in a bedroom off the living room.
GITTES
Going somewhere?
EVELYN
Yes, we've got a 4:30 train to catch. Why?
Gittes doesn't answer. He goes to the phone and dials.
GITTES
--J.J. Gittes for Lieutenant Escobar...
EVELYN
What are you doing? What's wrong? I told you we've got a 4:30--
GITTES
(cutting her off)
You're going to miss your train!
(then, into the phone)
...Lou, meet me at 1412 Adelaide Drive--it's above Santa Monica Canyon ... yeah, soon as you can.
EVELYN
What did you do that for?
GITTES
(a moment, then)
You know any good criminal lawyers?
EVELYN
(puzzled)
--no...
GITTES
Don't worry--I can recommend a couple. They're expensive, but you can afford it.
EVELYN
(evenly but with great anger)
What the hell is this all about?
Gittes looks at her, then takes the handkerchief out of his breast pocket, unfolds it on a coffee table, revealing the bifocal glasses, one lens still intact. Evelyn stares dumbly at them.
GITTES
I found these in your backyard--in your fish pond. They belonged to your husband, didn't they?...didn't they?
EVELYN
I don't know. I mean, yes, probably.
GITTES
--yes positively. That's where he was drowned...
EVELYN
What are you saying?
GITTES
There's no time for you to be shocked by the truth, Mrs. Mulwray. The coroner's report proves he was killed in salt water. I want to know how it happened and why. I want to know before Escobar gets here. I want to hang on to my license.
EVELYN
I don't know what you're talking about. This is the most insane ... the craziest thing I ever...
Gittes has been in a state of near frenzy himself. He gets up, shakes her.
GITTES
Stop it!--I'll make it easy--You were jealous, you fought, he fell, hit his head--it was an accident--but his girl is a witness. You've had to pay her off. You don't have the stomach to harm her, but you've got the money to shut her up. Yes or no?