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Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God

Page 20

by Nat Segaloff


  Silliphant had the chance to do just that with Pearl, an alternate view of the events surrounding Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, that drew from the same well as James Jones’s From Here to Eternity, only told with a greater emphasis on the civilians than the military. It was the first project of Silliphant-Konigsberg Productions, a partnership brokered by agent Don Kopaloff between Silliphant and former agent Frank Konigsberg, and set up at Warner Bros. Prepared as a six-hour drama with intertwining plots that come together during the dawn attack, it starred Angie Dickinson, Dennis Weaver, Robert Wagner, Tiana (as Tiana Alexandra), Leslie Ann Warren, and a huge supporting cast; it used stock footage of the dawn attack from Twentieth Century-Fox’s Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970); and it was equal parts dramatic invention and history.

  Its own history is unusual. Produced at Warner Bros. and bought by ABC as an “event,” the studio balked when producers Konigsberg and Silliphant insisted on shooting it on location in Hawaii instead of at Warner’s Burbank facility. The producers also removed the original director, Alexander Singer, early on and replaced him with TV veteran Hy Averback. According to Konigsberg, the network also tried to fire him as producer, but Silliphant fought for him and he prevailed. [262] Aired on November 16, 17 and 19, 1978, Pearl was a significant network success and has remained so in international sales. It has also developed a cult following despite only a limited exposure on home video (at this writing it has become quietly available as a burn-ondemand title from Warner Archive).

  Future Silliphant-Konigsberg projects never took hold. Silliphant wrote, and Konigsberg solo produced, a 1981 pilot for a detective series titled Hard-case, but it didn’t sell. They also considered doing for D-Day what they had done for Pearl Harbor but Twentieth Century-Fox, which had been eager to license footage from Tora! Tora! Tora for Pearl, declined to let The Longest Day out of its vaults, so the idea fizzled. [263] Silliphant’s move to Thailand in 1988 pulled the plug on Silliphant-Konigsberg Productions.

  If the 1960s were Silliphant’s transition from TV to movies, and the 1970s were his heyday of disaster films and mini-series, the 1980s saw the networks’ entrenchment. Cable was starting to sap their dominance, the studios were youthening, and America was Reaganizing — all of these bringing a decaying sensibility that Silliphant saw but could not buck. Once again it was time for him to change.

  14: A Novel Solution

  Speaking in 1994 to an assembly of admiring Vietnamese filmmakers, Silliphant was asked to describe the role of a screenwriter in motion pictures. “When I write, every shot is there,” he began. “I see in my eye the film before I write it. If I don’t see it, I don’t write it.” But then he said, “Last year I made a film and everybody on the crew changed the script. Everybody! The only person who didn’t change the script was the generator operator, the one who runs the machine. I went out and bought him a gift. I took it to him and I said, ‘I’m very grateful. You were the only man who liked my work.’ And he said, ‘I never read it. If I would have read it, I would have made changes too!’” Once the laughter stopped, he added, “To be a writer, because we are treated so badly, the only thing you have is your ego. Now, they take that away from you, and you have nothing, You have no talent. You are just a rug.” [264]

  After thirty years in the business, Silliphant got tired of being walked on, even if he was well paid. Scuff marks came with the territory, but now there were too many heels. He knew the world was round, and he structured his so he could dodge conflict, except when he was in full charge of it on the page. Confident, even domineering, in pitch meetings, he was often the opposite in his personal dealings, preferring to delegate personnel matters to proxies or through missives. He became a specialist in a passive-aggressive Hollywood technique known as “the non-No ‘No,’” in which you refuse work by setting your price so high that the other guy backs down, thereby making it look like the deal fell apart because of him, not you. At other times he could let proposed projects die on the vine by ignoring them. In addition to faxing himself out of an unhappy marriage with Margot, taking swings at ABC in an interview, and berating the Silent Flute writer with angry coverage, he fired his longtime agent, Don Kopaloff, by leaving him a dismissal letter that tried to make it sound as if it was for Kopaloff ’s own good. “I’m writing it so you’ll have time to absorb it without having to look either brave or cheerful or understanding — or what-ever,” he wrote, “and then when you’re ready we can talk about it.” [265]

  Kopaloff was devastated. “He was one of the few people that I represented without having had them sign management agreements,” he recalled. “I trusted him. Next thing I know, I get a letter on my desk — it wasn’t even mailed — that sounded like he was crying, he felt so bad. We had been together for a lot of years. I must say I was absolutely furious with him.” [266]

  Most surprisingly, especially for someone who was so forward-thinking in terms of racial equality and in opposing the war in Vietnam, he was a Republican. “He was a classic Hollywood liberal who voted Republican,” his son, Stirling Linh, reported. “My father was pretty conservative. One time during the Bush years, Mom said, ‘Oh, your father was outraged by the war in Vietnam and he would have been outraged by what’s happening in Afghanistan today’ and I thought, ‘No he wouldn’t; he would have totally supported it.’ He would have seen this as fighting the good fight just like he supported the first Gulf War. He would have had the same subtext of fighting the forces of religious fundamentalism and fascism.” [267]

  Such conundrums add to Silliphant’s complexity, particularly in his functional use of violence in drama but not in reality. “I’ve never been aggressive by nature,” he told writer John Corcoran, perhaps explaining this trait. “It’s the reason why I could never have been able to compete [in martial arts]. I simply do not enjoy getting out there and beating the shit out of some guy. I don’t feel I have the right to harm another person.” [268] He could be even harder on himself, even reckless. Although he was paid handsomely, he spent profligately, assured that the work would never stop. After all, with his fame, his skill, and the summit of Hollywood at which he thrived, who could conclude otherwise?

  By the early 1980s, however, he was in a financial crunch. The man who had challenged himself to earn $60,000 when he was staring out in 1956 had, by 1984, set a goal of $600,000 to $750,000 [269] and was being politely dunned by the banks. [270] His response was reminding them that screenwriting is an uneven business. Nevertheless, his activities during this period show that he was trying to grab as many assignments as possible to get ahead. His appointment books reveal how determined he was, and begs the question of whether he needed inspiration to write or had developed the skill to just sit down and crank it out. During, for example, April of 1982, in addition to writing the novel Bronze Bell for 1983 publication, he was dubbing the TV pilot Welcome to Paradise; writing the six-part mini-series Mussolini; picking up Krugerrands for bank deposit; finishing Space, Episode 1; going to Bora-Bora while continuing to write Mussolini; and having meals and meetings with Stan Lee, Irwin and Sheila Allen, and Brandon Stoddard; trying to set up Forbidden Diary at Disney with actress/producer Nancy Malone; meeting with Marty Baum on an unspecified Sidney Poitier project; and writing letters to friends and colleagues. And most of it got done (see filmography).

  These same years saw the kind of upheavals that the film industry hadn’t felt since TV shook its financial base in the early 1950s. The tremors begun by the blockbusters Jaws (1975), Star Wars (1977), and Alien (1979) rearranged the Hollywood landscape. Now all anybody wanted to make were youth-oriented action films, a decision that left the people who wrote character-driven scripts, such as Silliphant, striving to reinvent themselves.

  Silliphant chose a novel solution. Literally, a novel. “When I undertook the John Locke series of paperback novels, I announced in advance of publication that none of them would ever be available in terms of its motion picture rights,” he stated unequivocally. “I further buttress
ed that position by writing each of the three novels so far for this series in a style which would make it virtually impossible for any living screenwriter to be able to fashion a script from the work. In short, I determined to be totally out of the reach of studio group-think and to write books I damn well wanted to write for myself.” He offered a more cynical reason for this decision by explaining, during a 1983 promo appearance for Steel Tiger on LA’s The Sunday Show, “It’s the first of a series of twelve books based on the same character. Imagine what would happen if I were to sell it and they were to make a bad film? What happens to the other eleven books? No one would want to read them.” When asked by the host, “What happens if they make a good film,” he replied wearily, “The chances are ninety percent that they wouldn’t.” [271]

  There was pragmatism in his move to Bangkok five years later in July of 1988. Before Skype, international phone calls cost a bundle, and e-mail didn’t become a factor until the World Wide Web kicked off in 1991. So the cheapest and fastest way to reach people in other countries was fax. The advantage of faxes, Silliphant explained, was that, when producers were forced to put their promises in writing, they were less prone to bullshit. Perhaps because of this, the screen offers dwindled, and Silliphant focused on novels. He extolled them to the L.A. Times’s Charles Champlin in 1985, saying, “If I could find a producer who would do for me in 1989 what Cubby Broccoli did for [James] Bond, well, now.” [272] Published by Ballantine, the first, Steel Tiger, came out in 1983; then Bronze Bell in 1985; and Silver Star in 1986. A fourth, Iron Kiss, was never begun, and the series ended after three titles.

  Silliphant took a hit in his income to start writing them, but he felt it was something he had to do. [273] John Locke is a Vietnam vet, a former San Francisco narcotics and vice officer, the son of a poet, and a sailor-of-fortune who lives aboard a forty-foot ketch, the Steel Tiger, out of San Diego, but can more often be found on the high seas. His voice — which is to say, Silliphant’s — is equal parts narrative and commentary, rich in detail and monologue. Although Locke has left ‘Nam, ‘Nam hasn’t left him, and he is drawn back into the intrigues for which, in an existential sense, he shares moral responsibility. Locke is named after one of the Enlightenment’s most important thinkers, John Locke (1632-1704), whose writings were key in defining the idea of consciousness, much as Descartes postulated, “I think, therefore I am.” For Silliphant’s Locke, it became, “I am, therefore I’d better think fast.” Part of him is Silliphant and part is a Norwegian sailor with whom he formed a disastrous charter boat company called Oceanic Enterprises in St. Croix that magically made money for everyone except him.

  Although he had dabbled in novels at the very beginning of his writing career and novelized occasional scripts, those forays had been more utilitarian than literary and were driven by residuals and the need to control his properties. The Locke books were a way to get out of that trap and write what he wanted to write. They allowed him to ponder two subjects for which he held a vast ocean of emotion: Southeast Asia and sailing.

  The seafaring worm, picked up as a seven-year-old in San Diego, bored deeply into his soul. Over the years he had owned a succession of vessels: racing daysailer, Laser, Montgomery, 470, Sansare, then a Hobie Cat. He sailed out of Marina del Rey in an Islander 36 (the Tiana I) that slept seven and of which he was so proud that he said, “the first night aboard, I slept in every bunk.” Later he admitted that it slept seven only “if the seven have just come from an orgy and don’t mind the close contact.” [274] One of the reasons he eventually sold it was that the five-man crew he hired to staff the boat got to thinking that they owned it; he’d come aboard and find women’s underwear and the residue of parties that neither he nor Tiana had thrown. He got rid of it. [275]

  Now he could focus on writing. For Silver Star, John Locke learns he has a half-Vietnamese son living in Hanoi whom he must rescue from the slave state that has devoured the postwar nation. The title refers to the medal for gallantry that Locke received, and which he entrusted to Doan Thi, the woman he loved, and who, when she died, passed the talisman to their little boy.

  Facing a comparatively forgiving publishing deadline, he could allow ideas to simmer until they were ready to hit paper, and then type furiously as they poured out. Like an athlete unable to explain the ineffable, he allowed his instinct to guide him. But he also stored notes, sometimes as scribbles on the backs of restaurant tabs, sometimes as neatly typed musings on blue, white, or yellow pages — whatever was handy when the spirit struck — or, if he was in one place, in loose-leaf notebooks. One such tan, padded binder is labeled “scenes” and is filled with an inch of disgorged thoughts for Locke novels, chiefly Silver Star. His notes stockpile research from the broad to the narrow. On the mundane side, there are pages of synonyms for words such as danger, dissent, thought, and disregard. A more detailed set of pages lists possible character names by nationality (Arab, French, Thai, and Vietnamese) and by first and last names that he can mix and match. He wrote page upon page of possible scenes:

  One way for Locke to get into Vietnam is aboard a Thai trawler. These trawlers leave from ports along the southeast coast and carry textiles, medicines, and a broad range of consumer goods to Rach Gia and other points in South Vietnam.

  A worker’s basic wage hovers around $1 a month at the black market exchange rate; about $25 at the inflated official rate.

  To protect themselves from the enemy arrows and bullets, the Vietnamese made bed-sized shields of water-soaked straw mats, each carried by 20 strong men. These shields served as armor in modern war.

  You could still get a good bowl of Pho soup from the mobile vendors’ carts.

  The Armson O.E.G. [gunsight] is a single-point type scope, made for use with both eyes open.

  The war in Vietnam was a signal that national governments could no longer get away with such things.

  The [Silver Star] medal is hidden within the frame of a photograph of Doan Thi — along with a note in English — which his father will read to him if he ever finds him — and translate to him. THIS HAS TO BE A BIG, BIG SCENE IN THE STORY.

  For scene with prisoner: truth-inducing drugs.

  Scenes: [Locke] has to choose between Thanh Hoa and Dasima. He chooses Thanh Hoa — but she is killed. When Doan Thi dies — and he realizes he would have taken her to America with his son, then to France to meet his mother — he knows that his love for Dasima is not conclusive enough. He will call her from somewhere and tell her not to wait.

  When Clotaire II, King of France (615 A.D.), was at Sens in Burgundy he heard a bell in the church of St. Stephen, which pleased him so much that he ordered it to be taken to Paris. The bell was so distressed at being carried away from home that it turned dumb on the road and lost all its sound. When the king heard of this, he was much concerned. A few years before, the French army had been frightened away by the ringing of the bells in St. Stephen’s church, and now the king was perhaps no less frightened by the silence of this one. He commanded that the bell should be carried back to Sens. No sooner did the bell approach the town than it recovered its voice, and rang so loudly that it was heard at Sens while it was yet seven miles away. [276]

  15: Sunset In the East

  The longing for Southeast Asia started in 1971. Asked to adapt The Khaki Mafia, the explosive Robin Moore/June Collins expose of graft in the U.S. Army in Vietnam under General William Westmoreland, Silliphant visited Saigon with director Jules Dassin and producer Hannah Weinstein to research the project. “Understandably,” he reported, “we were not warmly received at MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam). [277] The financing was supposed to come from [Edgar] Bronfman and all his booze money, but the final important money never came our way. The production funding stayed locked up in Toronto, Jules went back to Athens, Hanna to her apartment in New York, and my twenty-two-year love affair with Southeast Asia kicked in, ultimately causing me to write and write and write about Vietnam, but without much success (The Fall of Saigon, Fly Away
Home, are two primary examples). Ultimately, as you know, I moved to Southeast Asia in July of 1988, but that 1971 trip solidified my knowing that I belonged over here, not in Hollywood.” It also reminded him of his roots as a novelist. “It took me 17 years after The Khaki Mafia to make the move I should have made when I was still in my twenties and wanting to write only novels and poetry,” he said. “Ah, Graham Greene, Andre Malraux, Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham — how I envy those guys.” [278]

  The moving process began at the beginning of 1988, in January, when he had finally had enough of Hollywood. Holding what he sarcastically called “a Beverly Hills garage sale,” at the Camden Drive house, he and Tiana sold (directly or metaphorically) two houses, six cars, and a yacht, and put the rest in storage. For the next six months, with little Stirling in tow and Melissa in a relationship in Montana, Silliphant settled in Thailand while Tiana took off for Vietnam to begin work on her autobiographical 1992 documentary, From Hollywood to Hanoi. When they needed to return to Los Angeles to wrap up business, they accepted the largesse of Abe and Muriel Lipsey, who lent them one of their spare Beverly Hills homes. By July they had made the final break.

  “I think I was born on the wrong continent and into the wrong race,” he would come to say of this move. “I cannot explain it. I have always been fascinated with Asia, with its history. I know far more about Asian history, including the history of Indonesia, the history of Burma, than I do about the history of Germany or France. I have never been that interested in Europe, but have always been fascinated by Asia. I am happier in Asia aesthetically and emotionally. I feel somehow safer.” [279]

 

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