The War Zone

by Alexander Stuart

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  Friday April 12, 1996 A great week working with Tim at his house in the hills above the reservoir in Silverlake, east of Hollywood. I meet his wife, Nikki, who’s incredibly nice, and their wonderful eighteen-month-old son, Hunter. Nikki takes a photograph of me with Tim in front of the Mr Orange poster from Reservoir Dogs in his office, a picture I have to this day on the bookshelves in my office.

  I also have a meeting with Katy Coyle at Showtime about Among the Thugs, which is looking good – they want me to go to New York to meet Bill Buford, who wrote the book, and start outlining the script. I think the fact that my novel, Tribes, deals with the same subject, soccer violence, is a plus.

  Tim says he enjoys working with me, that it’s easy. We’ve been talking about how The War Zone should play on looks and gestures as much as dialogue – on the emotions and small moments that run through every family – especially in the early scenes, where we want the audience to like and feel as comfortable as possible with our characters.

  Tim wants me to look at old silent-movie scripts to see how they were written, so I call around and find a very helpful librarian at the Script Library of the University of Southern California.

  This morning I drive to the USC campus in downtown LA – a strange juxtaposition of old, neoclassical elegance and surrounding urban decay.

  The script library is impressive, if not a little daunting: it makes me aware of just how much of this town was built on the movie business. The silent scripts the librarian has found for me are great – he’s even tried to find some dealing with incest, but couldn’t, because the library mostly has collections from what became the major studios, and a script about incest in the 1910s or 1920s would have been made by a smaller, more radical company.

  The scripts themselves are originals, sometimes carbon copies, on ancient, fragile, almost translucent typing paper. I am told to leave my bag behind and sit in a room, with a young graduate student on duty as an observer/guardian.

  The librarian, in addition to providing a selection of early short screenplays, has found a number of books from the 1910s dealing with writing for silent cinema. But it is the quality of writing in the scripts themselves that impresses me – all the emotion had to be on screen, rather than in the dialogue, for which there were only silent title cards

  – so even the action passages were more lyrical than in the screenplays of today, where description is usually kept to a minimum.

  Take these two brief excerpts from a 1921 script titled The Old Nest:

  SCENE I STREET – CARTHAGE

  LONG SHOT of moonlight [sic] street, mysterious and lonely. A cat runs across the street. In the distance a buggy driven with speed comes forward, a lantern hung under is swinging violently.

  SCENE 4 MOTHER’S ROOM CLOSE-UP OF MOTHER (in her youngest period) looking like a Madonna in a soft focus, lighted by the lamp. She cuddles the sleeping baby to her breast and is musing upon it tenderly, as if she had been called from her bed by its cries.

  After a morning’s work at USC, I drive out to Joshua Tree National Park, three hours east of Los Angeles, beyond Palm Springs. I have been here once before and want to return because the Mojave and Colorado deserts are so beautiful and tranquil, and this is my last full day in LA before I fly back to Miami tomorrow.

  I sit in the sun on the hood of my car, staring at the backlit, strangely glowing cholla cacti and reading the blown-up copy of my novel that Tim has given me, using colored markers to highlight elements and lines of dialogue that I might want to use in the script.

  I also write a birthday card to my friend and one of the film’s producers, Dixie Linder, telling her how excited I am and pleased for us all that this film is finally going to happen. (Dixie and Sarah Radclyffe have been involved since Danny Boyle first came on board in 1994.)

  Then I have a wild drive back along the freeways into Los Angeles, to meet Tim in Silverlake at a bar called the Dresden, and catch a bizarre lounge act by the owners – a couple who have been performing (badly) songs such as The Girl from Ipanema for about fifteen years, long before it was fashionable to clutch a Martini and pretend you’re Dean Martin.

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  Wednesday May 15, 1996 Tim calls three times today from the set of Gridlock’d, the movie he’s shooting on the streets of Los Angeles with rapper Tupac Shakur. Charong is amused when I take one of Tim’s calls in the shower – she says, ‘It’s your boyfriend,’ and reminds me that I don’t answer even her calls when I’m showering.

  Tim seems really happy with the way the script is developing – I’ve been faxing him pages as I write, and sounding out some of our ideas via email with a friend of his, Margaret Hussey, whose opinion he trusts. Tim says I’m on a roll, which makes me feel fantastic.

  I’ve been trying to remain true to our early meetings, the energy and direction we found then. Writing a dark tale of Devon in Miami Beach requires a degree of imagination, so to get in the mood I watch scenes from videos of My Life as a Dog and The Spirit of the Beehive before I work.

  For maximum intensity, I slide in a tape of Tim’s first performance, in Made in Britain. A few minutes of Tim as a sly, intelligent, yet dangerously emotionally damaged neo-Nazi skinhead thug is enough to banish the palm trees, heat and humidity of Miami from my brain.

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  Friday June 7, 1996 After two months of working on the script in Miami Beach, I’ve flown to England, to do publicity in London for my Miami book, Life On Mars, some research for my next novel, Chinatown Nights, and to visit Bideford in North Devon, a town where Tim used to spend his summer holidays and where we will most likely shoot the film – although the novel was set in South Devon, in a small village (unnamed in the book) called Branscombe.

  I decide it would be nice to take my parents there, since living in Miami means that I don’t see enough of them. We drive the six hours from their house in Bexhill, and it feels very strange – I realize I have not been on holiday with them, which is what this feels like, since I was at school!

  We find a hotel on the outskirts of Bideford, then drive around the town in the late afternoon, and to Clovelly, a beautiful village Tim has told me about, built alongside steps down a steep hill to the sea. Even twenty years later, Tim’s memory of Devon is vivid – he has even described to me a pub, the Red Lion, at the end of the old quay in Clovelly. But his memories are not fond, and I can sense in Bideford some of the bleakness he remembers from his childhood.

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  Saturday June 8, 1996 Today, I photograph my parents laughing and dancing together on the sand dunes at Instow, a few miles along the coast from Bideford, where we may shoot the scene in which Jessie and Tom stay out on the beach all night with Jessie’s local boyfriend, Nick.

  These moments, and this trip, will come to have a special meaning for me, as my father is to die nearly a year later, in April 1997, from smoking-induced lung cancer.

  In a perverse way, The War Zone – which was always a difficult book for my parents to deal with, although absolutely not based on them – will give us some of our happiest final memories together.

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  Sunday July 14, 1996 I finish the first draft of the script for Tim. Great excitement. He is in Chicago filming Hoodlums, and says we’ll get together in LA to go through it when he’s finished in early September.

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  Friday September 6, 1996 Up at 5:00 a.m. today to fly from Miami to LA to work through revisions of the screenplay with Tim, who seems very happy with how it has developed.

  He comes over to my hotel this afternoon, directly from a screening of Woody Allen’s new musical, Everybody Says I Love You, in which he plays a convict who gets involved with the daughter of a wealthy family, played by Drew Barrymore.

  I am thrilled that he is responding so positively to the work I’ve done on the script. I have tried to stay true to our first intentions, and to Tim’s encouragement not to shy away from even our two most challenging scenes – in the shelter, where Tom actu
ally sees Dad abusing Jessie; and in London, where Jessie tries to persuade her older, single-parent friend, Carol (Sonny in the book), to sleep with Tom.

  Following our early discussions, I’ve kept dialogue to a minimum, trying to play as much as possible off the looks, gestures and pain that the characters feel. But it’s great to work with someone who is only concerned with the honesty and power of the material. Tim doesn’t care if it’s difficult, controversial or uncommercial – he says he will find a way to bring it to the screen, and I don’t doubt him.

  This evening, after working all afternoon, we go to the Good Luck Bar in Silverlake for a drink. It’s a great spot, a former Chinese restaurant that’s dark and full of atmosphere.

  While we are standing at the bar, talking about the script, a young woman of about twenty-two comes over, introduces herself and tells Tim that her friends have dared her that she wouldn’t come and talk to him. Tim is very nice and we chat for a while. The young woman is from Minnesota and is a big fan of his work.

  After about five minutes, we tell her that we must get back to our discussion of the script, at which point she becomes quite hostile. We ask her politely to leave, but she won’t. I ask how she would feel if she were in a restaurant with her family in Minnesota and a complete stranger came up and wanted to talk? How would it be, I say, if after a few minutes of conversation, the stranger just wouldn’t leave?

  But she simply becomes angry with Tim, turning on him and telling him that all actors are the same, arrogant and not interested in other people. She finally goes back to her friends. Tim always handles these situations well, but I’m glad it’s not a problem many writers have to face.

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  Sunday September 8, 1996 I wake early this morning to finish the revisions Tim and I have been discussing, then go to Kinko’s on Sunset Boulevard to print it out and make two bound copies.

  Then it’s straight to Tim’s house for the afternoon, where we read it through aloud in the garden and make some final changes. Nikki is looking great – she’s pregnant with their second baby, due in December.

  In the evening, just as we are finishing up, and without analyzing it too much at first, we make a really significant change to the script

  – we suddenly think: what if the baby, which has always been a boy, suddenly became a girl?

  Once we’ve had the idea, it seems to make perfect sense. I had originally written a male baby into the novel because I had a son, and I liked the idea of Tom feeling slightly threatened by a new, younger brother. But once Tim and I start talking about a girl, it connects with everything else in the script. I have also reached the point, after so many years of working on different drafts, where anything fresh brings it alive for me again.

  Above all, in this case, the risk of Dad continuing the abuse with a new daughter raises all kinds of new horrors, both for Jessie and the audience.

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  Monday September 9, 1996 Up early again to go through the script one more time and replace all references to the male baby with a girl. Thank god for the ‘find and replace’ command on the computer – although it doesn’t necessarily locate references to the baby’s gender in dialogue.

  I meet Tim at Kinko’s on Sunset at noon, to print out the revised script once more. Kinko’s is busy – it seems that everyone in Hollywood who isn’t an actor, is a screenwriter – but for some reason, when you’re with Tim, you don’t have to wait in line. We go off to lunch while the bound copies are made.

  In the afternoon, we relax at his house. Tim seems really happy and excited – Nikki tells me that when he’s not, when he’s thinking about The War Zone and what he wants to do with it, he paces around the garden, smoking.

  Instead, this afternoon, we open a couple of beers and I play with Hunter, dragging him down the small hill on their lawn, with him riding a plastic cooler as if it were a sled. After that, Tim and I go off for a Boys’ Night Out at the Chateau Marmont Bar, before my flight back to Miami and Charong – and work on the Among the Thugs script

  – tomorrow.

  A strange postscript to the day is that Tupac Shakur, with whom Tim filmed Gridlock’d earlier this summer, has just been shot in Las Vegas.

  Tim had told me that he’d had a meeting with Tupac before making the film, to establish clearly that there would be no guns on the set – Tupac was already afraid of being shot, as part of the East Coast-West Coast rap ‘gang war’.

  Tim said that, for him, it was just a movie, he had a wife and young child and did not want to die making a film. Now Tupac has been gunned down in what is oddly described as a ‘car-to-car attack’ on the Strip in Vegas.

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  Wednesday September 11, 1996

  The scripts Tim and I FedExed to London on Monday have now been read. Sarah Radclyffe calls me in Miami today, knocked out by the first material she has seen since Tim got involved with the film. Happily, her immediate response is that she wants to increase the budget – the words you most want to hear from a producer. Dixie’s reaction to the script is simply, ‘Oh, my God.’ Tim calls me several times, too, thrilled by their response.

  This evening, in the graduate-level screenwriting class I currently teach at the University of Miami, I show my students Tim’s work in Made in Britain.

  Even though the subject and context – a British neo-Nazi skinhead thug – are foreign to them, they are stunned by the madefor-television film’s power. And even though Tim’s character is almost uncompromisingly aggressive and unpleasant, they definitely feel his pain: one of my women students says she can’t understand how the characters around him don’t see how much he is hurting.

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  Friday September 13, 1996 Tupac Shakur died today, as a result of the gunshot wounds he received last weekend while driving with Death Row Records boss, Marion ‘Suge’ Knight.

  I call Tim to say that I am sorry to hear the news – I don’t know that he and Tupac were especially close, but the death of anyone affects me powerfully since the loss of my child, especially when the circumstances seem so futile.

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  Sunday December 1, 1996 I come home from the University of Miami with Charong to an excited message from Tim on our answering machine: ‘We did it! Channel Four will fully finance the film – or finance it with a French partner.’

  He has talked to David Aukin in London, who has become a staunch supporter of Tim and the film – and a wonderful email correspondent with me. There is just some minor tweaking of the script to be done, Tim says, then we’ll shoot it next autumn.

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  Sunday January 5, 1997 Tim and Nikki’s new baby, a boy, is born today around 1:40 a.m., Pacific Standard Time. Tim calls me at 8:31 a.m., Miami time, sounding over the moon. They’re naming their new son Michael Cormac, after one of their favorite writers, Cormac McCarthy.

  Everyone should name their babies after writers, I think. In a celebratory mood, Charong and I go boating on Biscayne Bay.

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  Thursday May 1, 1997

  Tim calls from London with the fantastic news that Channel Four is now absolutely committed to financing The War Zone. He has had a really good meeting with David Aukin: the script has been approved and the production is greenlit. The plan now is to shoot next spring. Tim and Nikki will move their family to Europe this summer, while Tim acts in Giuseppe Tornatore’s The Legend of the Pianist on the Ocean in Italy; then they will find a house in London and Tim will start pre-production on The War Zone. We’re already starting to think seriously about casting ideas.

  There is a general election in Britain today, which I have been following closely from Miami via the BBC’s excellent websites – streaming audio and video of political coverage that really does erode the barrier the Atlantic Ocean presents.

  The British Labour Party, which I have always supported, may finally win from the Conservatives and end the grim era that began when the dread Margaret Thatcher was elected in 1979 (although she was ousted by her own party in 1990, just a
s I was moving from Britain to Miami Beach). When I ask Tim what the mood is like in London, he says that it’s exciting, there is a sense of real change in the air.

  Later, as Charong and I walk along Collins Avenue, after we have had dinner on Miami Beach, I receive excited calls on my cell phone from friends in Britain, saying that there has been a massive swing to Labour.

  We get home to an ecstatic answering-machine message from our best friend in London, Spike Denton, loudly proclaiming, ‘It’s a landslide!’

  After years of Thatcherism and then the appalling John Major, there finally is a new beginning. It augurs well for the film, I think: the sense that the repressive, male-dominated (Thatcher never did much for her own gender) power structure may be changing.

  It has been strange living in America under Bill Clinton when, on many levels, the US has seemed a good deal more liberal than Britain.

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  Wednesday June 4, 1997 Tim calls from the Chateau Marmont to tell me that he likes my recent Guardian Questionnaire (a regular feature in the newspaper), and particularly my answer to the question, ‘How often do you have sex?’ My response: ‘Why would anyone want to know?’

  Tim’s comment about my comment: ‘It’s a little bit sweet, a little bit, “Fuck you.”’

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  Tuesday January 27, 1998

  (Charong and I are now living in Los Angeles, having moved here from Miami in August 1997.) My birthday today. A videotape of The War Zone screen tests arrives, together with a birthday card from Tim, Dixie, Sarah and everyone in the production office – a great birthday gift. I play the tape, a little nervously but mostly feeling confident that Tim has chosen well.