An Angle on the World

by Bill Barich

  From the reaction at the premiere, I suspected Luck wouldn’t be a smash hit, at least not out of the gate. The crowd, though respectful, did not bubble over with enthusiasm, nor did the applause bring down the house. In an age of instant gratification, the show took a different tack and unfolded in the leisurely fashion of a many-layered novel. Milch never made it easy for his viewers. Instead, he introduced them to a shadowy, unfamiliar world, inviting them to set aside their preconceptions, tolerate a little discomfort, and trust that their forbearance would be rewarded.

  Most viewers were unwilling to adapt, though, and the show did poorly in the ratings. Big stars or no, it was too challenging, esoteric, cerebral, or slow-moving—maybe all four—to attract the couch potatoes accustomed to a steady diet of predictable fare. Although the pilot scored higher in its Sunday slot than as a sneak preview, the Nielsens were still disappointing. But how could it be otherwise? In three of its first five weeks, Luck ran opposite the Super Bowl, the Golden Globes, and the Emmys, a trifecta of formidable blockbusters that always buried the competition. Surely HBO hadn’t expected our series to buck the trend.

  The lukewarm reception was still tough to swallow. In Milch’s behavior, I recognized a syndrome I’d gone through myself upon publishing a book. After a spate of good reviews, you allow yourself to believe, however tentatively, you might have a hit on your hands—“cautiously optimistic,” as the cliché goes—only to crash to earth when the reviews don’t translate into commercial success. You’re thrown into a tailspin and kick yourself for foolishly lowering your guard.

  At the start of each week, David was anxious, on the phone to HBO to ask if the numbers had come in yet. There were hopeful moments—an uptick, say, that might signify a trend—but the following Sunday Luck would revert to form, and a gloom would descend on us again. Only with the last two episodes did the show hit its stride and begin to build an audience, but it was too late by then.

  Though we’d finished only two of the four scripts HBO had requested, the cast and crew had already shot the first and were prepping for the second when a freak accident shut down the production. A horse from the Luck stable, being led along a path to the barns by a groom, got to feeling frisky, reared up, lost its balance, and landed on its head, injuring itself so severely it had to be put down. The groom was an experienced hand, and the horse hadn’t been “performing,” but the show was held accountable in certain quarters.

  Within hours, TMZ and other blogs were reporting that Luck had “killed” another horse. The group called PETA—People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals—spread the disingenuous story, apparently happy to advance its own agenda at the expense of the facts. The story soon went viral, and even the mainstream media repeated it without bothering to investigate. It didn’t help that the New York Times was about to print a stinging indictment of the racing industry’s soft underbelly, either.

  The sport was under attack, and HBO caught the backlash. Milch gathered his writers and, looking ashen, said flatly, “It’s bad.” He doubted the series could be saved. There was talk of using stock footage for the racing action, and of beefing up the crime angle even more, but those were improbable solutions to an insoluble problem. In spite of the AHA protocols, two horses had broken down, and—freak accident aside—no one could guarantee that a third wouldn’t be injured while simulating a race before the cameras.

  HBO had a valued brand to protect, of course, and the negative publicity hurt. David seemed resigned, but others in our camp were upset. The network had buckled without a fight, they argued. Our wranglers had done nothing wrong. Given the low ratings and the expense of Luck, one theory went, maybe HBO had seized on the accident as an excuse to cancel the show. I took that as sour grapes. The guessing game was academic, anyway. Two days after the horse’s death we were all out of a job.

  Everybody felt a little sick at heart about the cancellation, abused by fate and left with unfinished business. Whenever a film or a series wraps up and the curtain drops, there’s a sense of loss, but it was heightened for us because the end came so abruptly. The greatest irony, and the one that rankled most, was that so many people on the Luck payroll loved horses, and not a few had given over their lives to caring for them.

  Though I had legitimate credentials as a screenwriter now, I couldn’t imagine churning out scripts on spec—the usual gambit for the newly unemployed—nor was I ready to look for another job. I doubted I could land one that suited me so well. As for Milch, I figured he’d be okay. He understood the vagaries of making art, and his devotion to the written word would keep him on an even keel. He was content on the floor of the writing room, and if a dog was close by, along with a couple of friends—for that’s how David treated us—so much the better.

  We never conducted a postmortem on Luck, but it scarcely mattered. The show belonged to the world, where its destiny would be decided. Someday an appreciative audience might rediscover it and celebrate its quality, although it might also wind up in the cabinet of curiosities reserved for those TV series too difficult for the medium. It made no difference, really, at least to me, since the pleasure resided in the work and the companionship, but if I were asked to place a bet on the outcome, I knew which horse I’d back.

  Narrative, 2013

  Writers and the Movies: Joseph Mitchell

  Why bother to make a movie about a writer’s life? It’s a fair question to ask. You’d be hard put to find a less dramatic profession, after all, unless you’re talking in psychological terms, and the thrills can be few and far between. There are exceptions to the rule, of course. Lord Byron would light up the silver screen, leading the Greek insurgents while he recites heroic couplets and rattles a saber or two, but most authors are not as swashbuckling. Instead, they tend to be solitary when they’re working and depressed when they aren’t, and this, quite obviously, is not the stuff of Hollywood legend.

  Still, the genre refuses to die, and every couple of years we’re treated to a new literary biopic. The most recent is Stanley Tucci’s Joe Gould’s Secret, based on the work of Joseph Mitchell, one of the best and most self-effacing writers the New Yorker ever produced. Mitchell, in and of himself, would be a non-starter in the cinematic stakes, except that he became embroiled with Joe Gould, an extraordinary Greenwich Village character who considered himself the last of the bohemians and survived on donations from friends and strangers (the “Joe Gould Fund,” to which Mitchell contributed, along with such stalwarts as e.e. cummings), while he purportedly labored on his epic narrative, An Oral History of Our Time. When Mitchell wrote his profile, in 1942, Gould’s manuscript was already 12 times as long as the Bible (or so its author claimed), all of it scribbled in dozens of composition notebooks hidden in secure places around New York.

  The profile, “Professor Sea Gull,” is Mitchell’s first piece on Joe Gould. He viewed his subject as an eccentric night creature, who wandered the city like the Ancient Mariner, asking for spare change, performing Indian dances at parties, and imitating a sea gull. (As a boy, Gould spent summers in Nova Scotia and kept a gull as a pet. He swore he understood the language of gulls and even translated poems into it. Longfellow’s “Hiawatha” was a perfect fit, he insisted.) A chronic complainer, Gould suffered from the three H’s—homelessness, hunger, and hangovers. Toothless, dirty, and exasperating, he lived on pots of cowboy coffee and heaping plates of ketchup (“the only grub I know of that’s free of charge”). His tale is told in witty, beautifully cadenced prose, but when you read it, you feel that an element is missing.

  It could be that Mitchell felt that way, too, because 22 years later he chose to tell the Gould story again. This time, he wasn’t merely an observer; he included himself in the tale. As it happens, Professor Sea Gull proved to be a big hit with readers, and they sent Gould money and letters of support. In turn, Gould began using the New Yorker as his mailing address and frequently dropped in on Mitchell without so much as knocking. In the second version of their relationship, Gould isn’t so c
harming and funny; instead, he’s desperate and at times despicable, but he’s also more human, and his plight is more touching. We learn that he does have real talent and was once praised by Ezra Pound. But his grandiosity and his airs are impossible, and Mitchell explodes and accuses him of being a fake. “There is no Oral History,” Mitchell shouts. The grand project amounts to nothing more than a few notebooks, in which Gould obsessively repeats the same three or four themes.

  “It exists in your mind, I guess,” Mitchell says, “but you’ve always been too lazy to write it down.”

  Gould replies, in a low, indistinct voice, “It’s not a question of laziness,” before he turns his back and leaves.

  The outburst provokes Mitchell’s finest hour. As he calms down, he’s ashamed of himself for pouncing on Gould. He recalls a time when he went around writing a novel in his head, one that never made it to paper, a Joycean saga he believed in so strongly that he could see it as a finished book, bound in green cloth and stamped with gold lettering—every would-be author’s daydream, perhaps. “The recollections filled me with unbearable embarrassment,” he writes, “and I began to feel more and more sympathetic to Gould.” What if Gould had actually written the Oral History? The thought leads Mitchell to a key passage.

  “It probably wouldn’t have been the great book he had gone up and down the highways and byways prophesying it would be at all—great books, even halfway great books, even good books, even halfway good books being so exceedingly rare. When I thought of the cataract of books, the Niagaras of books, the rushing rivers of books, the oceans of books, the tons and truckloads and trainloads of books that were pouring off the presses of the world at that moment, only a very few of which would be worth picking up and looking at, let alone reading, I began to feel that it was admirable that he hadn’t written it. One less book to clutter up the world, one less book to take up space and go unread.”

  So Gould, in the end, acquires a certain nobility for not having written a bad book. It’s his secret that the Oral History doesn’t amount to a hill of beans, but many of his cohorts and contributors still cling to the myth, as Mitchell once did; and when Gould died in a Long Island mental hospital, in 1957, they launched a search for the buried treasure. The search continued until Mitchell set the record straight in 1964, with Joe Gould’s Secret. It would be among his last pieces of published writing and a fitting cap to his career, rich in metaphors about both the creative process and the human comedy.

  Hollywood first approached Mitchell in the person of Michael Lieber, an L.A. producer, who caught a mention of the profile in the New Yorker and tracked down a copy. He tried to acquire the film rights in the late 1980s, but Mitchell politely declined to sell. Lieber pursued him for six years until Mitchell consented. Howard Rodman, a screenwriter, adapted the story, and Lieber shopped the script to directors. In his opinion, Stanley Tucci was an ideal candidate. Tucci’s movie Big Night had the warmth, comedy, and intelligence of a Mitchell piece, plus he’d demonstrated his affinity for literary properties as an actor, too, with roles in Billy Bathgate, Slaves of New York, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, and Winchell. If anybody could be trusted to faithfully convey Mitchell’s vision, the production team thought, it might well be Tucci.

  There are conventions to the genre, I soon discovered. The writer usually smokes, mostly cigarettes but sometimes a pipe if the part involves superior intelligence. It goes without saying that writers drink in movies, frequently to the point of total daffiness. They prefer hard liquor and knock it back straight from the bottle or flask when they’re under stress. In addition, they have someone special in their corner, who makes their intolerable burden tolerable—a spouse, lover, friend or editor whose wisdom and sacrifice keep the furies at bay. And for some unfathomable reason, many writers in movies live or spend time by the ocean. Inspiration? Heavy doses of oxygen? Your guess is as good as mine.

  I decided to watch a number of these movies in chronological order, beginning with Beloved Infidel (1959). The film is based on Shelia Graham’s memoir of her affair with F. Scott Fitzgerald (the infidel, I assume, although he never utters a blasphemous word) while he was writing scripts in L.A. and hoping to get started on a novel about Hollywood. As played by Deborah Kerr, Sheila is a peppy, ambitious, pushy Brit devoted to celebrity gossip. (In the remake, you’d cast Tina Brown.) She meets Scott at a dinner party, and the sparks fly when they hit the dance floor to the tune of “Blue Moon.” For all his boozing, Scott (in the person of Gregory Peck) still looks flawless. Even when he falls off the wagon later on, his only messiness involves a wayward lock of hair that slips down his forehead. “Stop, you’re making me blush!” Sheila cries.

  Scott may be flawless, but he’s in trouble. He’s been having a rough stay in Tinseltown, with four failed screenplays behind him and the studio chiefs trashing his elegant prose style. “We can’t film adjectives,” they tell him. But the saintly Sheila (it’s her memoir, after all) is there to help, and she steps in as his lover/muse and sets herself the task of nursing him back to literary health. It won’t be easy, because Scott is fragile and has his black moods. His books are out of favor, and he believes he’s a forgotten man. In an early scene, he and Sheila, traveling incognito, drop in at a bookstore and ask the owner if there’s any Fitzgerald in stock.

  The owner, though kindly, is not encouraging. “Who reads good novels today?” he asks, unafraid to go after the big philosophical questions. “Now it’s politics, yoga, cookbooks. Why, I’ve got a beautiful set of Balzac out back that the mice are enjoying!”

  You can see what Scott’s up against. His only ally is Sheila, and she urges him to ignore the studio and work on The Last Tycoon. She salts him away in her Malibu pad, where he smokes cigarettes by the ocean and writes in longhand on a sunny terrace. When he has four chapters done, he sends them to his agent back east to submit to magazines, but he’s rejected everywhere, and it launches him on an epic bender. He pals around with some drunken swabbies, slaps Sheila, pulls a pistol on her and, in general, burns all his bridges. After some major apologies, Sheila agrees to forgive the old infidel, and Scott redoubles his efforts, but he dies of a heart attack before the novel’s done. The End, as they say.

  There isn’t much in the film that’s terribly unreliable, except perhaps the flattering portrait of Sheila Graham, but for a supposed tragedy, Beloved Infidel is remarkably untragic. Fitzgerald’s soul-destroying despair is glossed over with a light touch. The movie shows an exceptional distance from its ostensible subject, and that’s too bad since Henry King, the director, made some decent pictures. (In fact, his Jesse James offers a seminal moment in American cinema, in a scene where the James brothers are being pursued on horseback after robbing a bank. They escape by throwing stolen dollars at the posse behind them until the riders dismount and pick up the loot.) But King was probably tired by the time he took on Fitzgerald, since he started as a director in 1915. It was his next-to-last film; his last was Tender is the Night.

  Julia (1977) is drawn from an autobiographical essay in Lillian Hellman’s Pentimento, and it traces her development as a playwright, among other things. Hellman (Jane Fonda) is in a house on the beach as the movie opens, wearing a ratty bathrobe, typing, smoking and drinking whiskey neat. (Indeed, she sets a record for the most cigarettes inhaled in a single picture, managing to puff away even as she eats a sandwich.) Clearly, she’s struggling, so when her lover/muse Dashiell Hammett (Jason Robards) returns home with a bucket of clams, she rushes out to meet him. But Dash is no Sheila Graham. He’s tough and crusty. He’s written novels himself, and he’s not about to go easy on Lily just because she’s young, pretty and worships the ground he walks on.

  Her first words? “It’s not working again, Dash. Falling apart again.”

  Guys love to hear that after a day of digging clams. “Put on your sweater,” Hammett says wearily. “Drink some whiskey. I’ll build a fire, and we’ll start dinner. Don’t forget the smokes.”

  “I’m not here to ta
ke orders. I want advice,” Hellman shouts, but there’s no response. “You’re not a general habit, and I ain’t the troops!”

  Cut to a bonfire on the beach. They’re both drinking whiskey now, and they should be nice and mellow, but Lily can’t leave it alone. She’s like a broken record. “I’m in trouble with my goddamned play,” she says again, “and you don’t care.”

  Dash is smashed, but he’s a silly sort of drunk. No Scott-type violence here. “If you really can’t write, maybe you can get a job,” he tells her. “Be a waitress or a fireman. You could be a chief. It’s not a bad idea, you know?”

  Hammett belongs to the Joseph Mitchell school of lit crit—i.e., we don’t need another crummy book—but his teasing only goads Lily to persevere. She smokes, strolls by the ocean and drinks more whiskey until she completes a first draft. Dash reads it right away. “You wanted to be a serious writer,” he says, sober now and looking very Land’s End. “That’s what I like, that’s what we work for. I don’t know what happened, but you better tear this up.” Long, solemn pause. “Not that it’s bad, it’s just not good enough.” Long, solemn pause. “Not for you.”

  Tough love! But his criticism only goads Hellman, and so on. Of her second draft, Dash says, “It’s the best play anyone’s written in a long time.”

  “But are you sure?” Lily asks. She’s sitting in the sand by the ocean.

  “I’m positive.”

  And that’s it. Enter fame and fortune from stage left. Soon Lillian Hellman is rich and a celebrity. Her play is on Broadway, and she brags about her skills as a fisherperson. Julia is a celebration of hard work, pluck and solid mentoring, with a tip of the hat to Dash Hammett, the Vince Lombardi of literary coaches, but at least it offers some action when Lily goes abroad and helps out in the battle against fascism.