Trials of the Monkey

by Matthew Chapman

  Consenting Adults is the story of a man, Kevin Kline, who gets tempted into a bizarre wife-swap by his persuasive neighbour, Kevin Spacey. Each will cross the street in the night and have sex with the other’s wife while she is sleeping. At first, Kline resists. It’s a ludicrous proposal, they’ll wake up, they’ll know it’s not their husband, it’s disgusting, it’s wrong. But Spacey is relentless and knows how to manipulate his friend. You do these things precisely because they are wrong. You do them because the risk brings you to life. Kline is a coward, he’s pussy-whipped, he’s lost his edge, no wonder he’s depressed. All of which is true.

  And underneath it all is Kline’s passion for the other man’s wife and for fresh sex in the suffocating time of AIDS. Meanwhile, Spacey’s wife almost seems to be complicit in the plan, tempting him with glances and subtle messages of the body. Finally, he does it, creeps in there in the dark, slides into bed, wordlessly has sex with her, and then goes home. In the morning when he wakes up, guilty in his own bed, he hears the sound of sirens. The woman has been bashed to death with a baseball bat. It’s a set-up. DNA proves Kevin Kline had sex with her, Spacey has an alibi out of town …

  It gets more complicated, and in the end, in my version, it turns out it was a life insurance scam set up by Kline’s own wife in collusion with Spacey. Who better than a wife to understand her husband’s weaknesses and how to manipulate them? For reasons I could not understand, Alan hated the idea of the wife being the villain and eventually tacked on a much more conventional happy ending. It wasn’t until long after the movie came out that I realised that in his previous film, the wife had been the villain. He didn’t want to be seen to repeat himself, which was understandable but had nothing to do with what was right for my story.

  Still, it was a big Hollywood movie. When Kevin Kline agreed to play the part, I called my parents. My mother was too drunk to come to the phone, so I spoke to my father. I heard him shouting to her in the next room. ‘It’s Matthew on the phone, he says a man called Calvin Klein has just agreed to be in a film he’s written.’

  This was too much. Even he had to know who Kevin Kline was, but his ‘mistake’ made the point. Had I searched the world for a profession which would impress them less, I could have done no better than what now, with a little success, became ‘show business.’

  Consenting Adults made a profit, not a large one, but enough not to be an embarrassment, and a lot of people had read the script before Pakula changed it. I was in demand. Studios offered me work. My fee went up. The next movie I wrote (actually rewrote, although not a word of the original script survived) was Color of Night, in which Bruce Willis starred.

  The director, Richard Rush, had directed one interesting movie some time ago, The Stunt Man, but things had not gone so well for him in recent years. I knew this when I went up to his house and, looking down into his murky pool, saw a garden-table-plus-attached-sunshade rotting at the bottom.

  Richard was always polite to me and I liked him well enough, but he too had a fatal flaw. He possessed all the external attributes, all the musculature, of a great director. He was relentlessly stubborn and full of conviction. He was as good a technical craftsman as Alan was, perhaps better. Unfortunately, he wasn’t as bright as he thought he was, and that of which he was stubbornly convinced was frequently wrong. When I spoke to Dino De Laurentiis about him, he said, ‘He fink too much. He fink too much.’ In a way, he was right. Had Richard simply listened to the people around him, not just me, but Bruce Willis, David Matalon, the producer; practically anyone, he would have saved himself a lot of energy and made a better movie.

  At a certain point, my frustration became obvious and I was not invited to watch any of the shooting. When I entered the screening room to view the first cut I was already dubious. The first scene of the film showed Bruce Willis, playing a psychiatrist, having what is euphemistically known in the psychiatric profession as ‘a treatment failure.’ He is lying on the couch almost asleep with boredom when his whining patient suddenly tosses herself out the window.

  We now realise Bruce’s office is at the top of a skyscraper. The wide shot that tells us this shows the woman diving out through the glass. This is followed by a shot from inside a lower window as the patient goes wailing by. There’s a high angle of her falling away, and a low angle of her falling closer. Then there’s another wide shot of her falling down the side of the building (she still has a long way to go), and then another from below and another from on top, and then one through an even lower window as she whistles past even quicker and …

  This went on for what seemed close to a minute and was so unintentionally funny that I was unable to suppress my laughter. I knew at once that we were in serious trouble. It was a little thriller and should have cost ten million at the most. It ended up costing forty million and was overblown and melodramatic to a truly fantastic degree.

  When they asked me what I thought, I told them the only solution was to see Bruce fall asleep at the start of the film, have the woman jump out the window, and then let the picture run as it was until the end, when you cut back to Bruce waking up to find the woman still in the room, whining. It’s an old device, of course, but still … a psychiatrist’s nightmare! That’s funny. Done like this, the picture would work brilliantly. What a wheeze. You could have put back all the stuff which had to be cut out as too laughably excessive, including the protracted treatment failure.

  But no one would go for the idea, least of all the director. They were taking it seriously. I was so angry at what Richard had done that I bought a poster from a science magazine, ‘Penises of the Animal Kingdom,’ which consisted of anatomically correct illustrations of animal cocks in order of size, starting with man, then dog (yes, dog), hyena, pig and so on until it reached elephant, and then last but certainly not least, whale. Next to the whale penis, I wrote, ‘But you’re the biggest dick of all’ and was about to send it when he had a heart attack—which he survived—so I didn’t.

  When the film was about to open, I called my mother and told her under no circumstances to go and see the film or to read any reviews—there was probably little danger of her doing either anyway by this time—and then I flew to Brazil and stayed there for three weeks. Many movie critics secretly, and even not so secretly, want to be screenwriters and will often flatter the director, a potential employer, at the expense of the writer, a potential competitor. Thus if a movie is good, the director gets all the credit, while if it’s bad, the writer often takes most of the blame.

  I was vilified, the movie flopped, but I survived and one job followed another for the next seven years, up to now, each one bringing an increase in pay and none, up to now, getting made. It may sound comic to say this, but I am a good screenwriter and worth every cent. The best Hollywood writers, and I consider myself to be among these, are often better than their more critically admired playwright colleagues. The trouble is, their best scripts don’t get made. I know several writers like myself who have work tucked away which is far superior to everything they’ve had produced. As Kubrick once said, ‘Just because a script has been turned down by every studio in town doesn’t mean it’s a work of genius, but it is a good start.’

  When Joe McCarthy decided to go after some artists in his anti-Communist campaign of the early Fifties, he didn’t chase down the painters and the poets. You could say rock and roll has had more influence than cinema in the latter half of the century, but in terms of potential, movies have it all. They are capable of conveying extremely complicated ideas—as complex as the novel if you so wanted—but with far more emotional force. And yet they don’t.

  Even with McCarthy long gone, 95 per cent of Hollywood movies are at best sentimental and at worst violent and sentimental. In the most technologically advanced nation in the world, an extraordinary number of them are also as tritely superstitious as tarot cards. There are hard-bitten, unsentimental film noir imitators, but their cynicism is superficial, apolitical, an exercise in style which challenges nothi
ng. A minuscule percentage of films deal with complex subjects, but almost always reach acceptably sentimental and politically correct conclusions. And then you have films which are genuinely contentious and daring. Maybe there’s one of these every other year.

  If you run around pitching long enough, you notice certain themes abort immediately. Suggest there might be something twisted or brutal in this capitalist haven, and no matter how dramatic and compelling the story is, you can hear the toilet flushing before you even say goodbye, and the most important thing you learn is that a HAPPY ENDING is almost mandatory. The bolder you are in probing the uglier corners of American life, the more important it is to have a HAPPY ENDING or at the bare minimum—excuse me while I puke—a ‘Life Affirming’ one. Tragedy, a form of drama which has worked well for the last two thousand years, is absolutely taboo, and you can’t help wondering why. Why is the richest and most powerful country in the world so insecure that anything even remotely critical of the status quo is as welcome as someone coughing up blood in a cigarette commercial?

  And in that question lies the answer.

  Movies have become commercials. The word ‘art’ has become an expression of contempt. If you send someone a script and they say ‘It’s an art movie,’ it’s tantamount to having someone spit in your eye.

  When the studios began, they were owned by a group of ex-vaudevillians from the East. These were not men of culture but they were men of complex ambition and they were individuals, and part of what drove them was a desire for a kind of respectability which money alone couldn’t buy. Consequently, they felt compelled to make a few good movies every year, some of which were somewhat radical. These days the studios are largely owned by corporations whose only interest is profit and the protection of their image. Consciously or not, every executive is aware of this. The oyster effortlessly finds the grit, but what is then produced is not, unfortunately, a pearl.

  If the very rich in America refuse to make the connection between crime and economic inequality, we, the filmmakers, refuse to find a link between the lies we tell and the way our audience behaves. We are too ashamed to ask ourselves what effect it has on society when the artists, the supposed advocates of truth, become mere propagandists for corporate fantasy. How does my impoverished redneck feel, for example, when he takes his jumbo-sized Coke and his tin of Skoal back to his cabin, turns on the TV, and finds nothing there which reflects, let alone sympathises with, the gravity of his condition; where, in fact, he sees only success and happiness and victory? Add to this neglect the inescapable message in every movie he likes (action movies) that in the end the true hero solves his problems with a gun, and you have all the ingredients (including, you can be sure, the gun) required to send our twisted hillbilly out in search of a cathartic shoot-out.

  And if this line of reasoning appears naive, then one must ask oneself an even more depressing question: if movies can have no influence for bad, how can they possibly have any influence for good?

  The phone rings in my room at the Best Western, startling me. I’ve been staring, eyes out of focus, at the screen of my computer. My villainess and hero drift above New York. She has just attempted to spray the crowd with some awful chemical, but my hero and I have thwarted her. Because I intend to kill her in about ten seconds, I’ve got her hanging at the end of a dangling rope.

  I pick up the phone.

  ‘Hello?’

  Perky, religious little Amy up at the front desk tells me some students have come to visit me from Bryan College. They’re in the lobby. I switch off the computer. My villainess will have to hang on a little longer—there’s Christians to be met.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Stumbling in the Wilderness

  Big moths blunder against the lights as I walk along the humid gangway to the lobby. Two Bryan College students await me. One is the young woman with the ring through her nose, Laurie; the other is her friend, Matt. The boyish Laurie explains she heard me speaking about my book on the lawn at Bryan College. Could she and some of her friends take me out to lunch tomorrow and talk some more? I tell her I don’t know what I’m doing—tomorrow is Sunday and I’m still hoping to extract a tape from Gale Johnson—but why don’t she and Matt come back to my room, I’ll take their number, and we can chat a while? There’s a moment of hesitation—a process of calculation, a rapid measurement against a code?—and then they come with me down the walkway. We enter my room—the one where I work—and sit down. They ask me how I enjoyed the caving and then we talk about Kurt Wise.

  They seem far more authentic and accessible than the other students. They exist outside of their faith. I tell Laurie this, saying I found some of her co-religionists too good to be true. She doesn’t understand and gives me the old ‘everyone’s a sinner’ line, but it’s done with a certain reserve. Matt thinks what I’ve experienced is the social awkwardness of kids who have been raised by Christian parents, home-schooled by Christian parents, and had a social life centred solely around the church. Knowing nothing but this society, they’re made uneasy by the secular world and become self-protective.

  Ten to fifteen minutes pass in pleasant conversation, then there’s a knock at the door and three more students stand outside, a boy and two girls who, it now turns out, Laurie left in her car, expecting to be back soon.

  ‘We’re just chatting,’ I say as I invite them in.

  ‘Yeah, well we wanna chat too,’ says one of the girls, laughing.

  ‘We were supposed to just ask you for lunch,’ Laurie tells me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say to the new group, ‘I didn’t know you were out there.’

  ‘That’s okay,’ says one of the new girls, ‘our friends don’t know manners, they’re from the United States.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m from Dayton, but that’s different, I come from a little town and we know how to be proper.’

  Everyone laughs. The new kids have the same qualities as Laurie and Matt. They’re funny, responsive, at ease, smart. They tease each other and make fun of themselves. There’s nothing prissy about them, they’re forthright and not defencive.

  ‘So, are you allowed to be out this late?’ I ask.

  They all laugh. ‘Occasionally we stay up past eleven,’ says a girl.

  ‘Eleven? I’m shocked!’ I say. They laugh again.

  They ask what the book is about, how I got the job, where I came from originally. I don’t tell them I’m a descendant of Darwin, but recount some of my school life, ending with, ‘I was a bad kid, but then … I reformed.’

  I give them a look which they can take any way they want. They laugh again, particularly the girls. ‘What made you reform?’ asks Laurie. ‘If you have reformed.’

  I explain how I got interested in writing, about the psychiatrist who gave me hope. They listen attentively, ask intelligent questions, and make interesting comments. They’re good company. It’s a real pleasure to have them here.

  The phone rings. It’s Denise. Without telling her why, I ask if I can call back in half an hour and hang up.

  ‘My wife,’ I explain, ‘I couldn’t tell her I was in a roomful of Christians.’

  This gets a huge laugh. Emboldened, I ask:

  ‘So, did you all come down here to convert me?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I hate that word!’

  ‘We’re not that way. There are some people,’ Laurie says, ‘who’ll do that, get in your face, “If you don’t do this, don’t do that …” We believe in living Christian lives, if people see that maybe it’ll have an effect. That’s all.’

  But they are more interested in finding out what I’m doing than they are in talking about their faith, which I alternately tease them about and probe them on until eventually Laurie gets irritated.

  ‘You seem to have more of a problem with us being Christian than we do,’ she says, and makes a gesture almost of frustration: Look, here we are in your motel room, curious about you, interested in what you do, we
’re not just Christians, we’re people.

  And she’s right. I feel mawkish and ashamed and change the subject.

  Erica’s name comes up. One of the boys says that within a day or two of being in camp, she had memorised the names of all the other students and the camp counsellors. It was something she’d learned from a book.

  I ask about misbehaviour at the college.

  ‘So, you want to dwell on that now?’ asks Laurie, smiling.

  ‘We all behave impeccably,’ states another, laughing.

  ‘We all have our struggles with the rules,’ says the third girl. ‘Which ones to follow, which ones not to follow …’

  On the dress code, they point out that it’s partly a cultural thing. Americans in general are more ‘modest’ than Europeans.

  ‘That’s true,’ I say, ‘in Europe there are nude beaches all over the place. I don’t suppose you get much nudity down at the boat dock here …’

  One of the girls says she and some friends do occasionally go skinny-dipping up in the mountains at night. I’m surprised they’d venture into the mountains when it was dark. Aren’t they afraid? But they’re not. They love the countryside and talk about it enthusiastically. They go hiking through it, play in it, sleep in it. We talk about the Pocket Wilderness, a nature reserve which used to be part of the Dayton Coal and Iron mining operation. One of the girls, Christie, tells me if you know where to look you can still see the mine’s ventilation shafts. When they leave a few minutes later, she offers to show them to me if I’m around tomorrow. I accept.

  I go to bed and have a strange dream about sweet-natured Christian girls spelunking on their hands and knees.

  Sunday is as intolerably damp and hot as every other day, but in the small church where Gale Johnson’s husband preaches, it’s almost cool. I’m in my Sunday best (jeans and a shirt) and have the place of honour beside the pastor’s wife. Two boys stir restlessly on the other side of her as their father, Carter Johnson, preaches. He is not a bad preacher, seemingly reasonable and not at all excitable. Maybe this is the problem, the house is less than a quarter full.