Evans kind of liked it, was willing to develop it, but of course it all came down to casting. If we could get two leads he approved of, we were under way.
Then we got lucky: Mia Farrow had an obligation to Paramount for a picture, she was right for the part of the beautiful WASP wife, and she agreed to do it.
So all we needed was the man.
James Caan was willing to do the script. We told Evans. "No penis extension," Evans said. (I still don't know what that means.) Caan was gone.
Donen and I met with Alan Aida, who would have been the best of all possible worlds. Alda said yes, he really wanted to play the male lead. Evans said no--again the mysterious penis extension was at work. Goodbye, Alda.
So Donen and I went to England to work on rewrites, with Mia Farrow as our lady, but no man.
Then we lost Mia Farrow. She was preempted by another film and gone. Donen and I continued working in London, the mood not too cheery. We had Donen, but we were back to square one on casting.
Until Ali MacGraw entered the picture.
MacGraw was, at this time, the top female star around, having gone from nowhere to Goodbye Columbus to Love Story. But she hadn't found a part that excited her sufficiently. Evans told Donen that if we could strengthen the female lead, we had a shot at MacGraw.
So we did what we could. Since the story was of a married couple in trouble, we couldn't make it a one-star vehicle. But we added scenes, shifted focus and emphasis where we could, and sent it off.
Alas, the lady was not pleased. That pretty much ended it. Donen went his way, I mine. MacGraw decided to do The Getaway, where she met and married Steve McQueen, left Evans.
Nobody beat the system....
Chapter Seven
The Stepford Wives
"I think Nanette might be rather good for the part of Carol, don't you?"
"She's a wonderful actress; I think she'd be fine."
That innocuous dialog, spoken casually between myself and director Bryan Forbes--he asked the question, I made the reply--was, at least for me, genuinely memorable. It marked the only time that I realized, early on before shooting, that a project I was involved in was more than likely doomed.
What follows will try and make some sense of that. In general, what we are dealing with here is perhaps the most perplexing problem the screenwriter faces: his relationship with the director.
One can, if one wishes, divide the process of making a movie into three parts: prior to shooting, shooting, and postproduction. (There are those that claim the process should be divided in half: making the picture and selling the picture. There's a lot of wisdom in that view, but it has nothing to do with writing scripts, so a mere mention here will have to do.)
The first of the three parts listed above generally takes the longest time. (Always remember that movies are these great elephantine husks that hundreds of people at various times are trying to lug toward the finish line. It's at least two to three years between the first glimmer of doing a movie and its appearance at your friendly neighborhood theatre.)
More often than not, the movie begins with the producer. He reads a book, a treatment, an outline, sees a play, overhears a remark, whatever. Something tells him that a movie is lurking in the vicinity. Once he has acquired the rights to the project, which can take a lot of time and legal hassling, more often than not, again, the producer will then hire a screenwriter.
In my own case, from the first phone call to the first draft being submitted takes six months. I'm not writing all that time. But usually there's research to be done. And then finding a structure. And then all the things we writers are most brilliant at: finding reasons not to get to it. Eventually, though, we do, the producer reads the script, suggests changes, changes are made.
And then it goes to the studio.
The studio executives read, meet, mull, meet some more before deciding thumbs up or down. Most of the time, the answer is in the negative.
Statistically, in my own case, I suppose half of the screenplays I've written have actually seen production. And I am being dead honest when I tell you this: I have absolutely no more idea as to why some of them happened than why some of them didn't.
Of course it's more than possible that my work wasn't much good. But remember, executives are not necessarily in pursuit of quality.
One of the movies I wrote that never happened the studio truly liked--but it was antimilitary and they were preparing at the same time a giant war movie, one in which they needed a great deal of Army cooperation. And they were frightened that an antiwar film would damage that cooperation.
Another never happened because there was only one star who was conceivable for the part in the studio's eyes--and he passed. They never sent it out again.
Another died because the producer and the studio head hated each other and had for a quarter century. The producer's deal--this was his initial project--stated that he could develop a property, but to go into production he needed the head's okay. (I obviously didn't know of their personal conflict when I wrote the screenplay. If I had, I never would have begun, because the picture was dead from the first fade-in.) The producer liked the script, the studio head said it was garbage. The producer, who then left the studio, asked to take the script with him, paying all costs. The executive said he wouldn't hear of it. (If the producer had been able to take the script to another studio and get it made, and it had turned out all right, that would not have rebounded greatly to his enemy's prestige.) Because of their personal loathing, the script lies lost and forlorn on a shelf, along with you wouldn't believe how many others.
Why they occasionally say yes is far beyond my knowledge. But when they do, the producer has a "go" project.
And then, oh then, enters the director.
This also takes a tremendous amount of time--because the directors you want are always busy. A rule of mine is this: There are always three hot directors and one of them is always David Lean. Today it's Lucas, Spielberg, and Lean. A few years back: Coppola, Friedkin, and Lean. A few years before that: Penn, Nichols, and Lean.
Well, you can't get them. Many producers don't even want them--the more powerful the director, the less so the producer. But all movies are soft until principal photography--there is no such thing as an absolutely firm "go" before that time--so a giant director makes the producer's likelihood of getting the project off the ground that much easier.
Once a director is hired, he enters permanent and meaningful combat with the producer. They smile at each other a lot but maybe mongooses smile at cobras on occasion.
Anyway, they meet, pledge loyalty, and next the scriptwriter is brought in for additional meetings. Changes are made in the screenplay. Finally, casting begins. Just as you never get the director you want, you also don't get the star. Reynolds is committed for the next two years, Redford is hiding out in Utah, Eastwood runs his own show, De Niro usually works with Scorsese, on and on.
Somehow, miraculously, casting gets done, and then there are more meetings, more changes. And two crucial men are hired: the cinematographer and the production designer. What the movie looks like on the screen, these two are the gentlemen responsible.
At this point, every day more and more people sign on. The caterer, the script girl, a hundred and then some. And a start date is given for principal photography. And on that day, the first part ends.
Shooting can take from eight to forty weeks. And during this second part of the filmmaking process, the director is at his most evident. (And because this is also the time when the press comes in to do publicity pieces, it helps account for the omnipotence of the director. Cosmopolitan does not send reporters to meet with the producer when he's there alone at the outset. People doesn't spend a lot of time in the editing room after the shooting is done.)
The period after completion of shooting--the postproduction work--is the most technical of all. It takes months to cut and dub and loop and score and whatever else they do. I don't know what they do, but whatever it is,
it's brutally hard and totally important.
The writer, then, usually only deals with the director on the second half of the first part of a film. Sometimes you have a voice in the selection of the director--"Shit, not him!"--sometimes you don't. Most of the time when you finally do meet, it is two total strangers shaking hands.
I feel the screenwriter must be just as supportive of the director as possible. But it's often hard to know just where you can be most helpful. I try to have seen everything the director's done before we begin. Because no director can do everything. Francis Coppola, for example, if you look at the two Godfathers and Apocalypse Now, has a fabulous sense for the epic. But it should be equally clear, if you look at Finian's Rainbow and One from the Heart, that he's no wizard when it comes to musicals or light comedy. So if I were working with Coppola on preparing a script--and I should only be so lucky--and I got an idea for something dealing with size, I would quickly tell him. But if the idea pertained to a musical moment or something lightly comic, I would never mention it.
Because if I did, and he hated it, terrific. But if he liked it, you're down the tubes. He'll shoot it badly or, worse, incorrectly; the moment won't work; and it will damage whatever's come just before it and, more than likely, everything that will follow.
The greatest enemy of every movie is this: There is never enough time. So when you meet with a director, you try and shorthand things, get to know each other in a way you wouldn't dream of if you were cruising the Caribbean together. Did you like this movie? Did you like that moment in another movie? You didn't? Why? Have you read this book? Bergman's my favorite, which of his stuff do you like best? (If he doesn't like any Bergman, you may as well get off the trolley then and there.) What do you like to eat? Which hotels are your favorites? Which restaurants? How old are your kids? (If he's gay, you tend to know that already, so you don't ask that question.) What did you major in? Are you a sports nut? Etc. Mutual friends? Etc., etc.
Now, all the while you're circling him, he's moving too. (I hate the script, can he fix it? I like the middle but the opening stinks, will he change that without a fight? Shall I fire him now or wait awhile? Etc., etc.)
This is all cordial, and it seems like time wasting, but it isn't. I'm trying to find out where he's coming from, he's feeling me out as quickly as he can.
And neither of us wants to get down to the business at hand: improving the goddam screenplay. I don't trust him--where the hell was he when I was alone for six months in my pit?--does he have the least conception how many times I wrote and rewrote the opening, trying to bring it to life?--is he trying to ruin my baby? (Sometimes yes, sometimes no, I can't tell at this stage. But I don't trust him, not a little. And I shouldn't.)
And he shouldn't trust me either. (People keep secrets from each other.) It's an accepted fact that all writers are crazy; even the normal ones are weird.
The writer-director relationship is an adversary one, at least when you're starting out with someone you know only from his work on screen. It can be pleasant, it can be hateful, but it never can be easy. But even at its worst, I feel it's my job to be supportive, to give him anything I can that will help the movie or, at the very least, won't screw it up.
And even after almost ten years, I still wonder if I was too supportive on The Stepford Wives.
Ira Levin's novella, on which the film was based, came out in the early seventies, when the Women's Liberation Movement was the hot topic on all the tv talk shows. Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique had opened the floodgates, Gloria Steinem was a magazine cover girl, and all across the country people were echoing Freud's great unanswered question: "What do women want?"
The story takes place in the lovely Connecticut suburb of Stepford. A postcard town. Quiet, safe, not much to do at night. Many of the husbands in Stepford belong to the Men's Association, which meets in a large, protected building. They do a lot of good works to keep Stepford as fine a place to live as you could ask for. They meet quite frequently, these husbands do--bright, successful men, many of them in scientific fields, computers, plastics, etc.
But the Stepford wives don't mind their husbands' absence. They are a bunch of genuinely adoring women. They cook for their men, they raise well-mannered, happy children, they are passionate about housekeeping.
They are also passionate about their mates. No migraines in Stepford when a man needs bedding down. And if the sex is good for the husbands, from the husbands' point of view it ought to be pretty all right too--
--because the Stepford wives are gorgeous. I mean, you never saw such bodies. Not a Twiggy in the town. Raquel Welch would have been average-looking. These girls are Playmates come to life. And they don't dress to hide their virtues. In their summer shorts and T-shirts, in their tennis whites, you could have an orgasm just standing by the checkout counter at the A&P (shopping being something else they love to do).
Into this atmosphere moves a young couple, Joanna and Walter. Joanna is a bright, determined, reasonably aggressive girl who wants to be a photographer. Housekeeping she can endure; child-raising, too--but what she really wants, please God, is a career all her own.
Joanna isn't too ecstatic moving to Male Chauvinist Pig heaven. But she does the best she can, makes a friend--and then she realizes that something very strange is happening in Stepford.
The women change.
They become obedient, their bodies blossom, they live only to make their husbands happy. Joanna thinks maybe it's the water or something else crazy.
What it is, of course, is murder.
All those scientist-wizard husbands murder their wives and replace them with perfect plastic substitutes they create in the Men's Association. By the time Joanna realizes the truth, it's too late, and the movie ends with Walter married to another suddenly voluptuous, totally subservient Stepford wife.
The role of Carol was one of the three female leads. She is the robot who lives next to Joanna.
Nanette Newman is an English actress in her mid-forties. A good actress too. An attractive brunette. But a sex bomb she isn't.
Okay, now we get back to the crucial dialog in the car. Bryan Forbes was set to direct the film. We are still in the getting-to know-each-other circling stage. If anything, I am a little more tense than usual, which, as my wife will tell you, is pretty tense, for a very good reason: Bryan Forbes is what is called Out There a "hyphenate." He is a writer-director. Since he got his first directing job, he has written every movie he's been involved with. (I didn't know it then, but he would totally rewrite Stepford too. Almost totally. The last quarter of the movie is mine. I think he would have changed that, too, but he ran out of time.)
Okay again, we're driving in the car, talking about casting. Names are tossed this way and that. And then the fatal (for me) words were spoken.
"I think Nanette might be rather good in the part of Carol, don't you?"
Instant death. Why? Well, forget the fact that she was English; that might be a little jarring but there are lots of English women living in Connecticut.
The main thing was this: She destroyed the reality of a story that was only precariously real to begin with.
Look, this is a movie about insane men. Insane and so frightened of women, so panicked that their wives may begin to assert themselves, that they resort to murder. And if you are so insanely desperate, so obsessed with women being nothing but subordinate sex objects, if you are willing to spend the rest of your days humping a piece of plastic--well, shit, that plastic better goddam well be in the form of Bo Derek.
You don't commit murder and make a new creation to have it look like Nanette Newman.
Not only that, by having Nanette Newman in the part, the whole look of the film had to alter. Forget the tennis costumes. Forget the parade of Bunnies walking through the A&P in shorts on their perfect tanned legs. She can't wear the clothes. Which is why if you ever see the movie you will understand why all these women in the summertime in Stepford, Connecticut, walk around in long dresses to the fl
oor and big brimmed hats on their heads.
What could I have answered when Bryan's question was put to me? Well, I could have said, "Bryan, she's English. And this is a very American piece."
I could have said that, but it would have been dicey. In the first place, she was a more than fine enough performer to act the role. And, as noted, there is no law barring the British from New York suburbia. But most important, Bryan knew it was an Americana piece and he was English, so he already felt, perhaps, somewhat uncomfortable as director. Throwing his background up at him would have done nothing--you can't say the actress is wrong because she's English when you're working with a director who is also English.
What I could not say was the truth: that she wasn't sexy enough, that casting her would possibly kill the picture right there. Why couldn't I say that?--
--because Nanette Newman was his wife.
What else could I have done? I might have run to the producer, Edgar Scherick, and told him everything. But Stepford was a troubled production--we'd had difficulty finding a director. Preliminary casting had turned out to be a bitch. And since everything is soft till principal photography (never forget that), the last thing Edgar needed was a hysterical writer predicting Doomsday because a good actress was suggested to appear in the movie. Besides, being his wife meant security for Bryan, his family would be around, he wouldn't be as much a stranger in a very strange land.
And even if I was right, even if Nanette meant a change in the look and the reality, that didn't mean the movie wouldn't work. Nobody knows what movie will work (Never, never forget that.)
So I said what I said. I like to think I at least took a long pause before answering.
She's a wonderful actress; I think she'd be fine.
I'm still not sure....
Chapter Eight
The Great Waldo Pepper
Adventures in the Screen Trade Page 22
