The Man Who Heard Voices

by Michael Bamberger

  Martin Childs, the production manager Night had imported from England, had already drawn a simple sketch of a modern five-story apartment complex shaped like a squared-off U, with an oblong heart-shaped pool in its center. Beyond the pool, surrounded by woods, he drew an old-looking bungalow, a vestige of another era, where Cleveland Heep would live. It was terribly drab. Night loved it.

  Now Night was going to see if Martin’s building could work on an industrial site in the suburbs.

  It was dusty and hot the afternoon Night first saw the place where Martin’s sketch might come to life. The cement parking lot was all cracked. The office space was musty and institutional. There were enormous dark warehouses the size of airplane hangars, and a huge flat field choking with weeds. Night was shown a large rectangular room with two doors and no windows and told that it could be his office. The whole place was uninspiring, with bad orange carpeting and mushy fake-brick wall coverings. There were signs everywhere, remnants of the industrial age: NO SMOKING BEYOND THIS POINT; HARD HAT AREA; WATCH FOR MOVING VEHICLES. There were calendars keeping track of consecutive days without an accident.

  The place where Martin’s oblong heart-shaped pool could go had been staked off with yellow caution tape. Down the street were a trucker motel and a biker bar. Across the street from the old plant was a small neighborhood, the residents all black, and a white-painted cinder-block church, the kind you see in the Deep South, in the little towns ignored by time.

  The site had been a factory and still felt like a factory. It did nothing for Night. It was sequestered, soulless, dull.

  “Let’s take it,” Night told Sam Mercer. A vision of what it could be was in Night’s head. “Let’s do it here.”

  On his way home, Night noticed black kids bouncing basketballs on the sidewalk, on the other side of Green Lane. The houses, many of them, had sagging porches and gated windows. Night wondered about the lives in those houses, the untold stories they held.

  Affluent white America treated Night as if he were white. He was rich, educated, accomplished, fun to be with. But Night saw himself as a person of color, as an American minority, just as Cindy Cheung saw herself. Indian-Americans, Native Americans, Asian-Americans, African-Americans, Spanish-speaking Americans, these were his people. The residents of the Cove, they were the American mosaic.

  Night took his own fashion cues from the city, from black Philadelphia, not the suburban country-club world that remained a mystery to his golf-addict father who played only public courses. There were no polo shirts in Night’s wardrobe. When his father the internist, accompanied by a Jewish doctor friend and a black doctor friend, went apartment shopping in Philadelphia in the late 1960s, he came back with stories, told with more humor than indignation, about American segregation. (“Dr. Sham, let me show you a neighborhood I’m certain would better suit your needs.”) Night had grown up with his father’s sensitivity to and awareness of class, race, and ethnic prejudice. Outwardly, he had inherited his father’s you-gotta-laugh-at-it sensibilities. But underneath, for Night, there was a checked anger at the injustices of the world.

  Night liked black culture. He liked the ease and candor and humor and anger of black speech in all its varieties. Night’s neighbor in the suburbs, for a while, was Allen Iverson, the star guard of the Philadelphia 76ers, African-American and speckled with tattoos. He wasn’t Night’s favorite player; his defense was too erratic, and he shot too much. Still, Night had an NBA superstar for a neighbor. Iverson wasn’t around much. Sometimes they’d see each other and wave, driveway to driveway. Once, when Night was shooting baskets with one of his little cousins on his driveway basketball court, Iverson was on his driveway court with one of his little cousins, talking trash and playing more defense than he usually did in televised games. Night liked that, how Iverson wasn’t pampering the kid, wasn’t constantly murmuring “good job” the way the suburban Little League dads do when a gifted child hits a weak infield grounder and trots down to first.

  Night’s office was now in Bristol, in the old 3M plant, which was being turned into a modern movie set. In the code language of the movie business, the set was now base camp. In the same vein, Night and the other lead actors had campers, not trailers. The ones for Night and Paul Giamatti and Bryce Howard were luxurious, with leather sofas and kitchenettes and queen-size beds and all the essential electronic gadgetry. Portable restrooms were brought into the base camp, marked DESI and LUCY. A catering trailer arrived, serving outstanding food, eaten under an elegant giant white tent, the kind you might see at a country-estate wedding. On the menu was grilled fish and beef, sushi, chicken alfredo, fajitas, all sorts of good stuff. At breakfast there was so much fresh colorful fruit, you’d have thought you were at a Marriott Sunday brunch. There was a young Hispanic man who made smoothies all morning long, morning being an inexact word in the movie business. Jimmy Mazzola, the prop man, brought in the espresso machine Tom Hanks used in You’ve Got Mail.

  There were days in July and August that were broiling, but Jimmy could always find a relatively cool spot. He’d go under a fire escape and have a cigarette and a double espresso and tell Martin Scorsese stories or Woody Allen stories or John Travolta stories to anybody who might be around. The roar of construction trucks accompanied his voice; the apartment building was going up at a pace that would have flabbergasted anyone who has ever tried to put in, say, a new patio. Every day at lunch, enormous union construction men, and some women, so wet with perspiration you thought their tattoos might drip right off, sat at the catering tables and engulfed huge lunches. Night talked with them, thanked them for the jobs they were doing, asked them how things were going, and treated them to afternoon Popsicles. You could see they liked working for him. They didn’t blame him for the oppressive heat; that’s part of the Philadelphia summer. Anyway, they were running up thousands of hours of double-pay overtime every day. They weren’t complaining.

  Actors were making sporadic visits for physicals and screen tests or just to check things out. When Night told Paul about Lin Lao’s name change to Young-Soon, he said, “Flip-flop chop!” Cindy came to Bristol and she and Night went to wardrobe. Of everybody in the movie, only Young-Soon would have a modern look. Cindy slipped into a pair of jeans reserved for Young-Soon and transformed instantly from conservative math major to trampy pop diva. With her midriff exposed and orange extensions woven into her long black hair and wearing a tan cowboy hat, Cindy pranced around as if this were the real her. Her mother was snapping pictures with wild abandon. When Cindy apologized for the “momarazzi,” Night saw again the real Cindy—the one who needed to act, not just for the pay, but for others to hear her.

  Bryce Dallas Howard showed up, and there was no commotion. There she was one morning, the daughter of an icon and the movie’s leading lady, looking like an undergraduate on summer vacation. She was wearing a skimpy cotton T-shirt, thin cotton pants, flat sandals, and carrying her lunch in a thermos. She wore no makeup, and was warm and friendly. She hadn’t turned twenty-five yet, and she looked younger than that.

  Bryce was about five-eight, with pale, perfect skin and an exquisite face. In high school she had been an athlete; her father had a fantasy about her playing basketball at the University of Connecticut. (Sports ran in the family. Her younger brother was about to enroll at Pepperdine to play golf.) She had the muscular legs of a sprinter, not the matchstick legs you see on Victoria’s Secret models. Viewed that way, that clinically, she represented another odd choice by Night. She wasn’t a hot chick off the Paris Hilton assembly line, the kind seventeen-year-old boys would pay nine dollars to look at for two hours. Night had something else in mind. On The Village, Bryce had been Night’s personal angel, and now he wanted her to play that role for the world.

  She passed her physical, despite her liquid diet that had been giving her terrible headaches. As an eater, she wasn’t sacrificing that much on the liquid diet. Even on her regular diet, she ate nothing but raw food. No meat, no fish, nothing that required the mac
hine-tilling of soil. Her parents were recovering hippies, she said, who gave her a middle name in honor of the city where she was conceived. Every day was Earth Day with Bryce. Night didn’t like the diet when he heard about it. He was afraid she was getting too thin, and told her so. “If you’re too thin, moviegoers lose their connection to you,” he said.

  He also thought that the liquid diet was the act of someone “trying on personalities, the way a lot of young actors do,” he told me. It seemed antisocial to Night, to eat that way. It didn’t seem like a real way to lead a life. But it was real to Bryce.

  She explained the diet to Paul one morning, the benefits of “cleansing the system” with a liquid diet.

  “I like that idea—cleansing the system—yes, that’s appealing, very appealing, sounds really good,” Paul said. His voice was so distinctive, an airy bass, like no other voice in the movies. He had a way of repeating information with different words and dropping his voice markedly at the end of a sentence. He could keep conversations going for as long as he liked, and almost never had to ask a question.

  “I can tell you what’s in it: mineral water, maple syrup, lemon juice, cayenne pepper,” Bryce said.

  “Cayenne pepper,” Paul said.

  “Yes. So good. I can write down the recipe for you.”

  “Sure.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I’m interested.”

  She started to write down the ingredients. One would not come to her. She pointed her elegant, interesting nose, with a bump in it courtesy of a high school basketball game, high in the air. She was worried about the spelling of cayenne. She liked to get things right. Her lines in her script were highlighted with a yellow marker. You could imagine her doing all the extra-credit homework problems as a seventh-grader.

  “You know something—do you use e-mail? Can I e-mail it to you?”

  “Fine, sure.” Paul wrote down his e-mail address for his costar. “I might try it. I could lose a few pounds.”

  “Don’t do that. If you get smaller, I have to get smaller.”

  Paul was meeting Bryce for the first time, knowing they would be working intimately together day after day for the next several months. He had made Cinderella Man for Bryce’s father, but he went out of his way not to mention him to her. Paul figured it was tough enough being the daughter of Ron Howard, trying to make it on her own in her father’s profession.

  In the previous year, he had starred in Sideways, a sleeper hit; he’d been nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor; been a guest host on Saturday Night Live. But in manner, in appearance, in his small talk, he remained an all-world regular Joe. Choate, Yale, summers on the Vineyard, son of Bart Giamatti, there was no sign of any of that. It was all in the vault.

  Night loved how Paul paid almost no attention to his clothes. The actor wore the same thing daily: Merrell sandals fastened with Velcro straps, original Levi’s, and a T-shirt or a short-sleeved plaid shirt with the collar curled up by the humidity, like the madras shirt Richard Dreyfuss wore in American Graffiti. Paul was content out of the spotlight, off to the side, where he could listen to Jimmy Mazzola tell his “Marty” Scorsese stories and where he could be one of the boys. A compliment to him was to be mistaken as a member of the crew, a union painter or something like that.

  One day during preproduction, Night called Paul, who was in his apartment in Brooklyn with window-unit air conditioners.

  “I think you’ve put on a few pounds,” Night said. Paul had recently returned from a vacation in Italy.

  “I always look this way,” Paul said. He normally played everything so lightly, but there was no joke in his tone now.

  “I’m just saying, as the director, I wouldn’t want to see you go any higher.”

  “I didn’t know you wanted Brad Pitt,” Paul said. He was angry, and Night noted the tone, in case he needed it in the future. “If you were looking for buff, you should have hired somebody else.”

  “I don’t want Brad Pitt. I’m just trying to say you’re close to the line.” He didn’t want to antagonize his lead, but Night felt he was doing what he had to do. When he needed to, he’d take on Jose Rodriguez, Sam Mercer, Chris Doyle, the Disney people—anybody, really. “You can’t be an everyman if you go too far in one direction.” He was afraid Paul could turn into a John Candy, where size becomes a comic bit. That would not serve Cleveland Heep. Night wanted moviegoers to see Cleveland Heep, to see Paul.

  There was silence and then Paul said, “I hate this shit.”

  It was a painful conversation, all the way around. Night knew how he must have sounded, like another Hollywood schmuck, judging Paul by the wrong thing. But in his mind, he was protecting the character he had invented. He was defending the movie. He had to do it. But it left him feeling all alone.

  Night didn’t really have a management style, he just believed things so deeply (most of the time) and acted accordingly. If Cindy’s agent really thought Cindy was worth $1 million in her first studio acting job, he should have said, “We won’t take less than a million.” That’s what Night did when he was selling The Sixth Sense.

  No business school would teach that, Night’s habit of laying all your cards on the table. On Lady, he had done it first with Paul Giamatti and then with Alan Horn and then with Cindy Cheung, kept saying, You’re the one. And where was the reciprocity? He couldn’t get Paul to read the script right away. He couldn’t get Horn to open the meeting at his house with his verdict on the script. He couldn’t get Cindy to climb aboard at the SAG minimum. Maybe they had seen that Night was crazy, off his game, riddled with doubt. He sounded like a man trying to re-create his first love. Any sane person knows it can’t be done.

  We’re gonna do something magical together here, I can feel it. Are you feeling it?

  Yeah. Listen, what time you gonna start on that Tuesday after Labor Day?

  The rest of the world could not afford to be so unguarded. Not Cindy, not Horn, not Paul, not Sarita. Maybe Chris Doyle—maybe. He was crazy, too.

  Shortly after Night’s watch-the-weight talk, Paul was in Bristol for a day of rehearsals with Bryce. Paul came into Night’s office, and Night rose from his big leather swivel chair. Night said, “Whaddup, bitch?” They hugged.

  “What’s going on?” Paul said through a laugh. “Look at all this!” he said with actorly wonder. He waved his hand at the walls of Night’s office, which were covered with white copy paper, 231 carefully ordered sheets, each with three or four screen-shaped rectangular drawings. Paul didn’t intend to give heightened meaning to everything he said. It just came out that way. Paul started to examine Brick Mason’s storyboarding, his depiction of the movie’s scenes in sketch form.

  Night knew he had to have Paul with him for the movie to work. The voices were telling Night that Paul was losing faith in him, and Night had to turn that around.

  When Paula had delivered the sale script to Disney that Sunday in February, and even when Night had brought Sale Script II to Warner Bros., he was never certain he had the ending correct. He played with it in his head at night. Paul was meandering among the storyboards like an art student at the Met. He was an illustrator himself. Paul looked at the final page of the storyboards, where Brick had drawn Cleveland Heep taping a handwritten note on his bungalow door for his tenants. Night said, “I’m thinking about a new ending,” and told Paul about it. Paul was the first to know. Night needed Paul to know that he was his most important collaborator on the movie, more so than even Chris Doyle.

  “A very bold stroke, my friend,” Paul said with a heavy emphasis on the k in stroke. And in the response, Night heard Paul saying that he got it, not just the new ending, which was significant, but what Paul meant to him, and what Night was trying to do.

  As Night and Paul talked about the new ending, people in other offices were working on the original one. One floor down, Jimmy Mazzola, the prop man, was preparing a portfolio for Night with different choices for the final scene: stationery in different sizes an
d different textures, handwriting samples written with different writing implements. Jimmy knew that someday Night would ask, “Would Cleveland use a pen or a marker?” Jimmy would be ready.

  There were so many things like that, what Night called “tonal choices.” What kind of cigarettes should the smokers smoke? Which of eighteen shades of beige was the right one for the apartment building’s exterior? What books should be in the apartment belonging to Mr. Leeds, the character who did nothing but watch TV?

  One day Night spent a full minute staring silently at his youngest actor, Noah Gray-Cabey, who was playing a boy genius named Joey. Night was wondering whether Joey would wear a plain short-sleeved T-shirt, a long-sleeved striped one, or something else. “Long is more complex,” he finally told Betsy Heimann. The wardrobe queen nodded gravely.

  Then there was Night going through his own wardrobe questions for his role as Vick Ran. Betsy wasn’t outfitting him with the frazzled-writer look. The movie was filled with writers: Vick, who can’t get his pen in gear; old Mrs. Bell, animal lover and failed writer; Mr. Farber, the movie critic; Cleveland Heep, often writing in his journals.

  “What are you, a thirty-one-inch waist?” Betsy asked. Chicago was all over her R’s.

  “Yeah, but when we’re shooting I’ll probably lose an inch.” It was impressive, with his massive meals. His nervous energy burned them right off.

  She had a half-dozen different styles of designer jeans for Night to try on. Night put on a pair and looked at himself in a full-length mirror, dropping his chin, moving his shoulders forward, squinting, tousling his hair like Ben Stiller playing the airhead model in Zoolander. Betsy had Night in flimsy leather sandals and a T-shirt underneath a ripped T-shirt. Jesus as a fashion model.