Ten Days in the Hills

by Jane Smiley

  Max sighed.

  “Say—” said Stoney. But then Simon and Elena came down the steps, and just by looking at them, Stoney could tell they had been having it out. He picked up his script again and pretended to read it. She came over and sat behind Max on the chaise. She had her sunglasses on, and after smiling politely at Stoney, she turned her head the other direction and laid her cheek on Max’s back. He said, “You okay?” but she didn’t answer. In the meantime, Simon went and sat down on the most distant deck chair, not even in the sun, and acted casual. If Zoe was the most beautiful woman here, and possibly the most beautiful woman now within the limits of Pacific Palisades, then Simon was the most beautiful man, or boy, or combination of the two. Stoney didn’t think the older folks would be able to see it—after all, Simon had no hair, he had two large tattoos, his eyebrow was pierced, and his pants were being held up by friction with his shorts. Stoney himself remembered being twenty perfectly. This is what he wore: 501 jeans with a Members Only jacket and Doc Martens. This is what he listened to: U2. This is what he watched on TV: Moonlighting. This was his favorite movie: F/X. This was his favorite activity: snorting cocaine. This was the book he was reading: Less Than Zero (he was snorting so much cocaine that it took him almost a year to read it). This was how he was wearing his hair: shaggy and clean. This was his college major: oceanography. This was the name of his girlfriend: Amber Kimberley Marzetta, aged fifteen. This is what they did together: drive around. This was her greatest pleasure: being allowed to take the wheel of his Blazer and push it up to eighty-five or so up Highway 1. This was what his father felt about him: disappointment. This was what his father should have felt about him: despair. Probably, Stoney thought, looking at Simon, who now leaned carefully back in his chair and let his facial expression fade out of defiant good nature to resignation, who he had been at twenty was the reason he had no kids now. He heard Max say to Elena, “You want to talk about something?” Then he heard Elena say something that he couldn’t make out, and then Max said, “Okay, it’s up to you.”

  Stoney said, “Say, Max, can we do a bit of business?”

  Max looked over at him and took off his reading glasses. He folded up the paper and set it on the little table between them, and then he said, “Let’s do. A short bit of business that acknowledges that life goes on.” Elena sat up, then leaned back against the chaise and closed her eyes. Max stood up. First he kissed her on the forehead, and then he propelled Stoney past Zoe and the others and down the steps. He said, “It feels a little crowded.”

  Stoney offered, almost reflexively, “I can go back down to my house—”

  “Elena likes it.”

  “Does she?”

  “Let me put it this way. If one young person would go back up north and resume his classes in graphic design, she would like it fine.”

  “Why is he here?”

  Max gave him a speculative look, then shrugged and said, “I don’t know for certain, but probably because he has a stupid idea. You were twenty once. What was the stupidest thing you did?”

  “Overall, I would say teaching my fifteen-year-old girlfriend to drive. How about you?”

  “Well, I was actually twenty, but almost twenty-one. My buddy and I took the company jeep and went to Saigon to do an errand. The stupid thing we did was decide we were going to explore the city because we had a couple of hours to kill. We didn’t have our weapons with us. Anyway, we were driving around and we got into some kind of crowded dead-end street and the jeep ran out of gas. We were sitting there trying to decide what to do, and a crowd started to gather. They weren’t smiling and they didn’t look friendly, and we had no idea where we were. There were certainly no other GIs anywhere around. My buddy kept trying to start the thing, though we knew it was out of gas, and I was looking up and down the street, wondering if we could walk away or run away, when this kid came up to the car on my buddy’s side, and started pulling on his jacket. He didn’t speak English, other than ‘Come on, Joe, come on, Joe,’ but he looked okay, and the guy’s name really was Joe, so we climbed out of the jeep and followed him. We walked for a while, and we turned a couple of corners. At that point, the kid started running, still calling, ‘Come on, Joe, come on, Joe,’ and all of a sudden he ducked into a tiny little house, and gestured us to follow. I held back, but Joe went in. The door closed, and I thought, Well, I am really fucked now, but the door opened, and Joe pulled me inside just as some of the people in the crowd showed up at the corner. Inside was a typical Vietnamese house, and the kid was standing there with his grandmother and a couple of younger kids. They were all smiling, and so was Joe. After a moment, the kid took me over to the family altar, and pointed something out. When I focused on it I saw the strangest thing I’d ever seen in my life up to that point, which was a picture of Joe in a blue tux with a white-and-blue ruffled shirt at his senior prom, and on his arm was a Vietnamese girl. Well, it turned out that Joe was a family saint or god or something, because when the oldest daughter of the family was an exchange student in the U.S., she went to Joe’s high school, somewhere in Texas, and Joe took her to the prom because his steady girlfriend was already away at college. This girl was out in the countryside teaching, so we didn’t see her, but the grandmother kept patting him and the kids were grinning. We stayed there for a little while and had tea, and then, when an uncle came home, he got gas for the jeep and showed us the way out. We finished our errand and went back to the base with no one the wiser.”

  “Well, the most I can say for teaching Amber to drive was that we never actually got into an accident.”

  By now they were in the garden, which was just beginning to get sun. What Stoney liked best in this garden was the bamboo, but water lilies in the pond were nice, too, the way they led your eye to the willows, and behind them the cypresses. Max stopped walking, and put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. He said, “I want to make a movie. I can put a shooting script together in a week. I’ve got it completely in my head. If I had the equipment, I could start shooting right now. It’s a cheap movie. Indie type.”

  “Oh,” said Stoney. He felt a little disoriented, because for a moment he’d thought Max was reading his mind. Only when he heard that word “cheap” did he realize that they were thinking not at all the same thing. He said, “How about making a big-budget movie? You want to do that?”

  “Who for?”

  Stoney knew that Max was especially suspicious of several producers. He said, “Nobody you know.”

  “Then how did they get the money?”

  “It’s not Hollywood money. It’s not even a Hollywood movie, really, but they want it to look and feel like a Hollywood movie.”

  “European?” That notion livened him up.

  “In a way. Partially. It’s a lot of money, and you have the final cut. It’s a good deal, Max.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it sounds like someone is giving something away.”

  “Well, they want to film on location, and the location is far, far away.”

  “Where?”

  “You aren’t going to like it, but they have so much money, you can essentially do anything you want. You could make a masterpiece, you really could. I read the source material over the weekend. It’s fabulous.”

  “Where’s the location?”

  “They thought of you because of Grace. They all saw Grace. And Bull Run, too. You could see this movie as a kind of combination of Grace and Bull Run, set in the sixteenth century.”

  “Where’s the location? You know I don’t even like to leave my bedroom and go across the 405.”

  “I know that, but I said I would approach you.”

  “Where’s the location, Stoney?”

  “Ukraine.”

  “Ukraine! What is this movie?”

  “A remake of Taras Bulba.”

  “A remake of Taras Bulba! That old Yul Brynner movie? No one wants to see that movie, Stoney.
”

  “These guys do.”

  “Have you ever seen it?”

  “I screened the DVD last week. It wasn’t bad. But it isn’t like the book. They want it to be more faithful to the book—no romance. I mean, yes, romance, but I guess in the book when the son takes up with the Polish princess the father kills him for being an unworthy Cossack. And then the other son is captured and tortured to death while the father watches. They want all of that stuff to stay in. They want you to be true to your sources. I thought you might like that. My guess is that they think this is going to fly more with the world market than with the American market.”

  Max was looking at him in disbelief.

  Stoney said, “It really is a lot of money. I guess you would have a free hand. They have someone in mind for the music, but they aren’t firm on that. Actually, that sounded like a good idea to me. Apparently this person knows all about Cossack music and church music from that period, and has found a few haunting melodies—”

  “How much have you talked to them? How did they find you?”

  “Did you ever meet Avram Cohen Ben Avram?”

  “That Israeli guy who was a friend of your father? The one who owns that house on the top of the hill above Bel-Air that they’ve been building for twenty years?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I met him, of course. But I never figured him out. Isn’t he a big deal in Mossad or something like that?”

  “I wish I knew. But anyway, he knows these guys, and through him they got to me. Your name came up right away. I mean, I said that it was unlikely that you would ever do this, but they got me to look at the movie and read the book—the book is really short. I liked it. It’s good material. I said I would ask you.”

  By this time, they had gotten to the far end of the garden and walked around the cypresses. From there you could see up the 405 through a cleft in the mountains. The highway was bright and busy. You could hear the sound of the breeze rustling the cypresses, and the trickle of the water in the Japanese pond. They sat down on the bench. Max stretched out his legs. He said, “Well, I never saw that movie, but I saw ads for it when it came out, because Brynner was such a big star, and someone else was in it, too, who was that—”

  “Tony Curtis played the misguided son.”

  “Yeah, they were pushing him as a heart-throb in those days. Anyway, in the ads, as I remember, lots of horseback battles and raids in native costume and that sort of thing.”

  “From that point of view, Max, it could be an important movie. I mean, here it is in the Middle East, Ukraine and Russia on one side, Muslims on the other, lots of religion, but, you know, removed by five centuries. Jews in traditional costume. Everyone in traditional costume. The time is ripe for something authentic like this that kind of comments on what is going on nowadays but doesn’t actually make a statement. This could be big for you. And the Cossacks had certain fighting techniques. I don’t know what they were, but I was thinking of Crouching Tiger when I was reading the book. Crouching Tiger on horseback. I guess they were great horsemen.”

  “That’s another thing. Who’s going to wrangle the horses? When they made that movie before, there were guys all over Hollywood who did horses for a living because of all the cowboy movies and TV shows, but those guys are gone now. I don’t know who can train a horse to go over the tripwire anymore. Did you hear that they’re making a movie about Alexander the Great? Oliver Stone is directing. Anyway, someone was talking about the pre-production—who was that?—oh, Norman Ballantine. He’s advising them about horses. I guess they went with some kind of black horse called a Friesian that has a big head and lots of hair on its legs and a thick mane and tail. An unusual-looking horse, but too unusual-looking, if you ask me, because it’s going to pop off the screen and look not like a regular horse. And it wouldn’t even matter if that horse were the spit and image of the original Bucephalus. If the audience is gawking at that horse, then there goes every other authentic detail that you were working toward weaving into a seamless film. I hate making movies with horses in them. Even when they behave, they don’t work. The more horses, the more problems. So we’ve got Cossacks, and therefore we’ve got horses.”

  Stoney gave Max a moment to recover from his rant, then said, “Will you meet with them?”

  “Will I meet with whom?”

  “The guys who have this money and this idea. They’re afraid someone is going to steal the idea, because the book is in the public domain, so they would like to get a script written.”

  “They’re afraid that more than one person is going to want to remake Taras Bulba?”

  “Look at Dangerous Liaisons. Who ever heard of that? And then there were two movies in production.”

  Max was not laughing, but he was definitely grinning, as if he hadn’t heard such a preposterous idea in a long time and he was really enjoying this one.

  Stoney had to admit that he was a little disappointed in Max’s reaction—surprisingly so, since he had been telling Ben Avram for at least a week now that it was never going to fly. As usual, talking about a project made it live, at least a little. He tried one last thing. “Max. Think about being the boss. Think about doing it your way and not having some twenty-five-year-old studio guy on the phone to you every day, second-guessing everything you do and worrying about money. Wouldn’t that be fun for a change? You should just read the book, anyway. You like to read.”

  Max turned suddenly and leaned toward him. He said, “I’d rather do my movie.”

  “What’s that one?”

  “My Lovemaking with Elena.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Did you ever see My Dinner with Andre?”

  “Set in a restaurant in New York or something like that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I saw a bit of the beginning. I think I fell asleep after that. This is a joke, right? You’re getting back at me for Taras Bulba, but you should read—”

  “No. I think I could do it. It’s interesting. A man and a woman are alone in their room for ninety minutes, and they make love and have a conversation.”

  Stoney said, “Max, that’s called pornography.”

  “Not if they have a conversation.”

  “What would they talk about?”

  “That would depend on what day it was. If the movie were made today, they would talk a lot about the Iraq war. Obviously they would talk about their children. They could talk about anything. That’s what conversation is, associating ideas.”

  “Are these two married?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Early- to mid-fifties.”

  “You want to make a Hollywood movie about an unmarried couple with grown children talking about the Iraq war and making love, with graphic sex? You know better, so this must be a joke. It has every single thing that Hollywood producers hate and despise, and that American audiences hate and despise—fornication, old people, current events, and conversation. You might be able to do it with Clint Eastwood, but unless the girl was forty years younger than he is—” But Stoney couldn’t go on with that. Even thinking about Eastwood made him too nervous. He shook his head and said, “How did you get this idea?”

  “Oh, I’ve had it for years in a general way. I think I first got it when I was watching an old Anthony Hopkins movie, what was it? Brad Pitt was in it.”

  “Meet Joe Black?”

  “That was it. I don’t remember a single thing about it except that when the two kids started making love the camera angles were very tight. Just his head and torso and her head and torso, and a lot of moaning and eye closing, and I thought, first of all, how boring that was, and, second of all, how trapped I felt by those camera angles. They made me want to get up and leave the theater and get a breath of air. And the lovemaking was not actually a relationship. I mean, that isn’t the only example. That’s just the one that started me thinking. I like My Dinner with Andre. It was about a real connection that these two
guys had. Why not make a film about a real connection that a man and a woman have?”

  Stoney eyed Max, who was gazing out over the 405. On the one hand, it was unimaginable that a man who had been in Hollywood for such a long time and knew how the town worked would have seriously come up with this idea. On the other hand, at a certain point in everyone’s career, especially if that career had been successful and critically acclaimed, as Max’s had been, everyone in Hollywood came up with a pet project that was so off the wall that no one they knew could believe what they were saying. It was a pattern, especially for directors. He said, “You know, Max, I guess I can see it, but it’s a French-type movie, not a Hollywood-type movie. I don’t think—”

  “Yes! Good idea! Did you ever see The Magnificent Seven?”

  “Yes.”

  “That was a Japanese movie made in the Old West. Did you ever see Ran? That was an English play made in Japan. Did you ever see The Birdcage? That was a French movie made in Hollywood. We can do this. We just have to find some property, some old French movie, to show them. Like A Man and a Woman, something like that. Then we rewrite it and do what we want.”

  “I think you’re serious. I think you want me to actually take this project around.”

  Max leaned back and looked at him. “I see exactly how it could be. Exactly. It’s running in my head. I can hear the music and the conversation. I can see them making love. It’s like when I was writing Grace. The images in my mind were so thick and alive I never had to think once. Writing the screenplay was like dealing cards off a deck. Each scene, each bit of dialogue was just there. All I had to do was place it on the page. And then, when they did the filming, every time I was on the set it was like looking at something I remembered, even though of course all I ever knew about what really happened with my grandfather and his mother was how the stories were told. Why do you think that movie was so good? Why do you think the screenplay got the Oscar? I’ll tell you. It was because it pre-existed me. It pre-existed Apted. It was a room we walked into. Even when it felt like work, it was the work of reconstruction, not construction.”