Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade

  I don't know if you'll have so extreme an experience, but if you aren't moved even a little, boy, is there something wrong with you. No question this material is wonderful. But is it a movie we want to write?

  I want you to read the article now and think about it a little. I'm going on to some other stuff, but eventually, we'll all circle back and meet around Taylor Touchstone's campfire.

  Autism No Handicap, Boy Defies Swamp

  By RICK BRAGG

  FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla., Aug. 16 -- Taylor Touchstone, a 10-year-old autistic boy who takes along a stuffed leopard and pink blanket when he goes to visit his grandmother, somehow survived for four days lost and alone in a swamp acrawl with poisonous snakes and alligators.

  He swam, floated, crawled and limped about 14 miles, his feet, legs and stomach covered with cuts from brush and briars that rescuers believed to be impassable, his journey lighted at night by thunderstorms that stabbed the swamp with lightning.

  People in this resort town on the Gulf of Mexico say they believe that Taylor's survival is a miracle, and that may be as good an explanation as they will ever have. The answer, the key to the mystery that baffles rescue workers who have seen this swamp kill grown, tough men, may be forever lost behind the boy's calm blue eyes.

  "I see fish, lots of fish," was ail Taylor told his mother, Suzanne Touchstone, when she gently asked him what he remembered from his ordeal in the remote reservation on Eglin Air Force Base.

  Over years, Taylor may tell her more, but most likely it will come in glints and glimmers of information, a peek into a journey that ended on Sunday when a fisherman found Taylor floating naked in the East Bay River, bloody, hungry but very much alive.

  He may turn loose a few words as he sits in the living room, munching on the junk food that is about the only thing his mother can coax him to eat, or when they go for one of their drives to look at cows. He likes the cows, sometimes. Sometimes he does not see them at all, and they just ride, quiet.

  Taylor's form of autism is considered moderate. The neurological disorder is characterized by speech and learning impairment, and manifests itself in unusual responses to people and surroundings.

  "I've heard stories of autistic people who suddenly just remember, and begin to talk" of something in the far past, Mrs. Touchstone said. "But we may never know" what he lived through, or how he lived through it, she said.

  His father, Ray, added, "I don't know that it matters." Like his wife and their 12-year-old daughter, Jayne, Mr. Touchstone can live with the mystery. It is the ending of the story that matters.

  Still, they have their theories. They say they believe that it is possible that, Taylor survived the horrors of the swamp not in spite of his autism, but because of it.

  "He doesn't know how to panic," Jayne said. "He doesn't know what fear is."

  Her brother is focused, she said. Mrs. Touchstone says Taylor will focus all his attention and energy on a simple thing -- he will fixate on a knot a bathing suit's draw string -- and not be concerned about the broader realm of his life.

  If that focus helped him survive, Mrs. Touchstone said, then "it is a miracle" that it was her son and not some otherwise normal child who went for a four-day swim in the black water of a region in which Army Rangers and sheriff's deputies could not fully penetrate. He may have paddled with the gators, and worried more about losing his trunks.

  "Bullheaded," said Mrs. Touchstone, who is more prone to say what is on her mind than grope for pat answers, instead of coddling and being overly protective of her child, she tried to let him enjoy a life as close to normal as common sense allowed.

  Taylor's scramble and swim through the swamp, apparently without any direction or motive beyond the obvious fact that he wanted to keep in motion, left him with no permanent injuries. On Wednesday, he sat, in his living room, the ugly, healing, cuts crisscrossing his legs, and munched junk food.

  "Cheetos," he said, when asked what, he was eating.

  But when he was asked about the swamp, he carefully put the plastic lid back on the container, and left the room. He did not appear upset, Just uninterested.

  Lifelong Swimmer At Home in Water

  Taylor has been swimming most of his life. In the water, his autism seems to disappear. He swims like a dolphin, untiring.

  His journey began about 4 P.M. on Aug. 7, a Wednesday, while he and his mother and sister were swimming with friends in Turtle Creek on the reservation lands of the Air Force base. Taylor walked into the water and floated downstream, disappearing from sight. He did not answer his mother's calls.

  An extensive air, water and ground search followed. It involved Army Rangers, Green Berets, marines, deputies with the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Department and volunteers, who conducted arm-to-arm searches in water that was at times neck-deep, making noise to scare off the alligators and rattlesnakes and water moccasins, and shouting Taylor's name.

  He is only moderately autistic, Mrs. Touchstone said, but it is possible that he may not have responded to the calls of the searchers. At night, when it was nearly useless to search on foot, AC-130 helicopters crisscrossed the swamp, searching for Taylor with heat-seeking, infrared tracking systems.

  In all, the air and ground searchers covered 36 square miles, but Taylor, barefoot, had somehow moved outside their range,

  "The search area encompassed as much area as we could cover," said Rick Hord of the Sheriff's Department. "He went farther,"

  It was not just the distance that surprised the searchers, Taylor somehow went under, around or through brush that the searchers saw as impassable, Yet there is no evidence that anyone else was involved in his journey, or of foul play, investigators said.

  Apparently, Taylor just felt compelled to keep moving. Members of his family say they believe that he spent a good part of his time swimming, which may have kept him away from snakes on land,

  The nights brought pitch blackness to the swamp, and on two nights there were violent thunderstorms. Lightning would have penetrated his shell, Mrs. Touchstone said,

  "I think it may have kept him moving," she said, and that might have been a blessing. Certainly, said his mother and doctors who treated the boy, he was exhausted.

  "Do you really think God would strike him with lightning?" she asked. "Wouldn't that be redundant?"

  Somewhere, somehow, he lost his bathing suit. His parents said he might have torn them, and, concentrating on a single blemish, found them unacceptable, Mrs. Touchstone compared it to a talk she once heard by an autistic woman who had escaped her shell, who told the audience that most people in a forest see the vastness of trees, but she might fixate on a spider web.

  On the third day oi Taylor's journey, Mrs. Touchstone realized that her son might be dead. For reasons she could not fully explain, she did not want to see his body recovered. It would have been too hard to see him that way. Even though Taylor is physically fit and strong, friends and relatives knew that this was the same terrain that in February 1995 claimed the lives of four Rangers who died of hypothermia while training in swampland near here.

  Instead, about 7 A.M. last Sunday, a fisherman named Jimmy Potts spotted what seemed to be a child bobbing in the waters of the East Bay River. Mr. Potts hauled him into his small motorboat,

  Later that day, Taylor told his momma that he really liked the boat ride. In the hospital, he sang, "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."

  Mother Encourages Son's Independence

  Mrs. Touchstone lost Taylor at a Wal-Mart, once. "That was bad," she said,

  He ran out of Cheetos once and hiked a few blocks, alone, to get some. The police found him and brought him home.

  He decided once that the floor in the grocery store needed "dusting" -- he likes to dust -- and he got down on the floor and began dusting the grimy floor with his fingers.

  But he has never lived in a prison of overprotectiveness. Even though his mother says there are limits to how much freedom he can realistically have and how much so-called normal behavior she ca
n expect from him, she decided years ago that the only way he could have anything approaching a normal life -- in some ways, the only way she herself could have one -- was to let him go swimming, visit neighbors, take some normal, childlike risks.

  He is prone, now and then, to just walk into a neighbor's house. Once, he went into the kitchen of a neighbor, opened the refrigerator, took out a carton of milk, slammed it down on the counter and stood there, expectantly. The woman called Mrs. Touchstone.

  "What should I do?" the woman asked.

  "Well," Mrs. Touchstone said, "I'd pour him a glass of milk."

  The fact that Taylor is not completely dependent on his parents, that he is not treated like an overgrown infant, that he is allowed to swim on his own and roam the aisles of the Wal-Mart and raid the neighbors' refrigerators, may have helped him survive when he was all alone in the swamp, his family believes.

  His father offered this explanation: "That's all his mom. I was overly protective."

  The phenomenon of his journey has prompted teachers at his school to consider changes in the study plan for autistic or handicapped students. One teacher told Mrs. Touchstone that they would stress more self-reliance.

  Mrs. Touchstone, who jokingly calls herself "Treasurer for Life" for the Fort Walton chapter of the Autism Society of America, said her son's journey should clarify, in some people's minds, what autism is.

  "I want every inch of that swamp he crossed to count for something," she said.

  For now, life is back to normal. He screamed when he was forced to take his medicine, which is not so unusual for a 10-year-old. "We've got a little autism in all of us," Mrs. Touchstone said.

  Taylor has always been something of a celebrity in his neighborhood, so his mother does not expect much to change after his ordeal. There was a sign outside his school that just said, "Welcome Home," and many people have called or written to tell her how relieved they are. One elderly neighbor wrote to tell Mrs. Touchstone how relieved she was that "our child" was home safe.

  Mrs. Touchstone will not waste time wondering, at least not too much, about her son's strange trip. She can live with the notion of a miracle.

  "I guess God was looking for something to do," she said. "I guess he looked down and said, 'Let's fix things up a little bit.' "

  Why did it move me so?

  First of all, I have kids. And they were little once. And you remember things you did to please them, dopey family stuff that maybe alone on earth you remember and I remember when the eldest was pushing three and we were driving along and up ahead was a traffic sign. She pointed to it and said, "P-o-t-s ... stop," and for hours afterward, thoughts and talk of dyslexia, which she did not have, were very much in the air, and what my wife and I didn't realize was this: Jenny was just bored going "s-t-o-p."

  Personally, I would open The Dolphin with the cow scene. Maybe as a credit sequence.

  FADE IN ON

  A country road, somewhere South, farmland whizzing by. Now a curve in the road and when we come out of it

  CUT TO

  Cows.

  Dozens of them munching away, no big deal, we're just looking at cows. Most ordinary thing in the world. But this is what we hear--

  Joyous laughter.

  Coming obviously from the throat of a little kid. It's exultant almost. Just the happiest sound there is.

  CUT TO

  Inside the car and TAYLOR'S MOTHER driving along, looking across toward the passenger, whom we can't see yet. She smiles, echoing the happiness she hears and

  CUT TO

  THE COWS. And they are doing nothing to provoke such a reaction. Still just a bunch of munchers. But the laughter is still there. Then we hear TAYLOR's voice. Very young.

  TAYLOR (OVER)

  Cows.

  CUT TO

  HIS MOM, nodding to herself.

  MRS. TOUCHSTONE

  That's right, Taylor.

  Now as she drives along--

  CUT TO

  Another curve in the road. Mrs. Touchstone takes it slowly, hugging the right-hand side of the two-lane highway.

  CUT TO

  MRS. TOUCHSTONE, concentrating on her driving. But there is, for some reason, for just a moment, a look of sadness.

  CUT TO

  THE FARMLAND. The cows are gone now, behind us.

  TAYLOR (OVER)

  Don't see cows.

  CUT TO

  MRS. TOUCHSTONE. Driving along.

  MRS. TOUCHSTONE

  We'll come again.

  (and now on that)

  CUT TO

  TAYLOR TOUCHSTONE himself. He is big, and not thin, and he holds a stuffed leopard in one hand, a pink blanket in the other. He is autistic, and he is ten years old.

  And very much the hero of this piece.

  TAYLOR

  (to his mother)

  Don't see cows.

  (MRS. TOUCHSTONE says nothing, concentrates on the road.)

  CUT TO

  TAYLOR. CLOSE UP.

  TAYLOR

  (to the leopard)

  Don't see cows...

  (The leopard shakes its head as we)

  CUT TO ANOTHER

  THE CAR, driving on through the farmland...

  There's a lot of other stuff I'd use, too. I love it when there he is in a neighbor's kitchen, banging away with the milk carton. And the disappearance, searching for Chee*tos, I'd sure put that in. (Foreshadowing, as they say.) Plus maybe a family outing where you see what a dolphin he is, how happy and tireless he is in the water (Foreshadowing II).

  And I think you have to have a scene, maybe in the family, maybe at school, where you talk about Taylor and what his limitations are and why his mother is raising him this way, with as much freedom as he can handle. And I'd probably want something in school, to show that he wasn't the most popular kid on the block.

  Note: this story cannot be cute like Rainman. You betray the heart of the material if you phony it up. Look, I liked Rainman too, was glad it won the Oscar that terrible year--but I was always aware that I was watching Hollywood Horseshit. I knew nothing was going to happen to poor little Dusty. And that he and Cruise--who for me gave the performance that made the movie work--were going to tug at my heartstrings and leave me with a warm fuzzy feeling.

  I want more from The Dolphin. I don't mean more in terms of accolades or box-office glory--I want you to be rocked by the fucking glory of Taylor's survival and at the same time be aware that this kid is not going to turn into Cary Grant and have Katharine Hepburn chasing after him. And his family is always going to suffer pain. End of note.

  Back to Taylor. I think you throw in as much as you can of what everyday life was like for him before he went floating away. But I also think this: that is not going to take very long. I would guess that at the latest, by the twentieth minute, Taylor has begun his journey. This is a hundred-minute flick.

  Now here is what you must know: I cannot write this picture. I do not know remotely how and I'll go further and say this: I don't know that it can be done.

  There is a legal phrase that is used in music-plagiarism suits, the kind of thing that always seems to swirl around Andrew Lloyd Webber. You know, someone appears from somewhere and claims they wrote "Memory," or something along those lines.

  The money part.

  That's the phrase, "the money part," and it means this: the heart of the song. That part of the song that makes it what it is. Well, movies have money parts, too--not all of them, maybe, but a lot. And in this case it is clearly not the looking after cows or the milk carton.

  It's the trip.

  That amazing four-day, fourteen-mile trip.

  By a ten-year-old.

  An autistic one, please.

  Through an area where four Rangers died.

  Through thunderstorms.

  And snakes and alligators.

  That is the money part. And a fabulous one it is. With but one problem--

  --how do you write that in a screenplay?

  Remem
ber, earlier, when I talked of the limitations of the form? Well, I think we have run smack into one. I don't want to make this mechanical, but listen--for me, the climax is when he is found. From there until the end cannot take more than a couple of minutes, five at the most. We have to fill eighty minutes of screen time, remember. Eliminate the end, and we're down to seventy-five.

  We need and will want some family scenes. There's the "Have you seen Taylor?" scene. And the calling-the-police scene. And the planes-leaving-their-airstrips-and-going-looking scenes. And the search-on-foot scenes. And a couple of family scenes.

  But they all must be short. Because our heart is not here, we want to be with Taylor and what happens to him.

  Give all these scenes together fifteen minutes. Want to make it twenty? You've got twenty.

  We still have an hour to fill with Taylor.

  And all he does is dolphin along.

  Sure, sometimes there is the thunder. But how many nights of that can you have? And sure, a couple of snake scenes. And the same number of alligator scenes. But nothing happens to the kid. He gets scratched, period. He can't get bitten by the poisonous snakes or he would die and if they are nonpoisonous, who gives a shit? The gators can't catch him or they would munch him. And how often can he just barely get away?

  How do we fill the time?

  There is a similar true event that has a similar problem, the single most famous act of courage of the twentieth century--Charles Lindbergh's solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927.

  It was made into a movie thirty years later, The Spirit of St. Louis. Written mostly and directed by one of the all-timers, Billy Wilder. Wilder miscast his picture fatally--the almost fifty-year-old Jimmy Stewart as the twenty-five-year-old Lindbergh. (For The Dolphin we are not going to get Matt Damon.) He also gave the Lindbergh character flashbacks.

  But we can't give Taylor flashbacks. In the first place, he probably can't remember much, and if he could, how much suspense can we build into a memory of him blowing out his candles when he was, say, six?