TED (O.S.)
(pained)
I was watching the birds.
They all look at each other.
MARY’S MOM
Charlie, do something.
MARY’S DAD
All right, kid, that’s it, I’m coming in.
INT. BATHROOM--CONTINUOUS
A whimpering TED huddles in the corner as MARY’S DAD enters.
MARY’S DAD
What seems to be the situation here? You shit yourself or something?
TED
I wish.
TED motions for him to close the door and MARY’S DAD obliges.
TED (CONT’D)
I, uh … I got stuck.
MARY’S DAD
You got what stuck?
TED
It.
MARY’S DAD
It?
(beat)
Oh it. All right, these things happen, let me have a look, it’s not the end of the world.
MARY’S DAD moves closer and puts his reading glasses on.
EXT. BATHROOM DOOR--CONTINUOUS
As MARY, her MOM, and WARREN listen in.
MARY’S DAD (O.S.)
OH FOR THE LOVE OF GOD!
TED (O.S.)
Shhhhhh!
INT. BATHROOM--CONTINUOUS
MARY’S DAD
(calls out)
Shirley, get in here! You gotta see this!
TED
What?! No please, sir--
MARY’S DAD
She’s a dental hygienist. She’ll know what to do.
MARY’S MOM comes in and closes the door behind her.
MARY’S MOM
Teddy, hon, are you okay?
(moving closer, seeing the situation)
OH HEAVENS TO PETE!
TED
Would you shhh! Mary’s going to hear us.
MARY’S MOM
Just relax, dear. Now, um … what exactly are we looking at here?
TED
(dizzy)
What do you mean?
MARY’S MOM
(delicate)
I mean is it … is it …?
MARY’S DAD
(gruff)
Is it the franks or the beans?
TED
I think a little of both.
Suddenly we hear WARREN from outside the door:
WARREN (O.S.)
Franks and beans!
Ted hangs his head.
EXT. BATHROOM DOOR--CONTINUOUS
MARY and WARREN are huddled outside the door.
MARY
(to WARREN)
Shhhh.
MARY’S DAD (O.S.)
What the hell’s that bubble?
MARY reacts to this.
INT. BATHROOM--CONTINUOUS
TED
One guess.
MARY’S DAD
How the hell’d you get the beans all the way up top like that?
TED
I don’t know, it’s not like it was a well thought-out plan.
MARY’S MOM
Oh my, there sure is a lot of skin coming through there.
MARY’S DAD
I’m guessing that’s what the soprano shriek was about, pumpkin.
MARY’S MOM
I’m going to get some Bactine.
TED
No, please!
Suddenly a POLICE OFFICER sticks his head in the bathroom window.
POLICE OFFICER
Ho there.
TED
(humiliated)
Oh God.
POLICE OFFICER
Everything okay here? Neighbors said they heard a lady scream.
MARY’S DAD
You’re looking at him. C’mere and take a look at this beauty.
TED
No. That’s really unneces--
But the OFFICER’s already climbing in the window. Once inside, he turns his flashlight on TED and WHISTLES.
POLICE OFFICER
Now I’ve seen it all. What the hell were you thinking?
TED
(frustrated)
I wasn’t trying--
POLICE OFFICER
Is that bubble what I think it is?
MARY’S PARENTS nod.
POLICE OFFICER (CONT’D)
But … how … how’d you get the zipper all the way to the top?
MARY’S DAD
Let’s just say the kid’s limber.
The POLICE OFFICER makes a face, then rolls up his sleeves.
POLICE OFFICER
Well, there’s only one thing to do.
TED
No, no, no, I’ll be fine. I’ll just hang my shirttail out and work on it in the morning.
POLICE OFFICER
Look, son, this will only hurt for a second.
The OFFICER reaches down and takes hold of the zipper.
TED
No, no, please!
MARY’S MOM
Teddy, be brave.
WARREN (O.S.)
Beans and franks!
MARY (O.S.)
Warren, shhh.
Defeated, TED holds his breath and braces for the worst.
POLICE OFFICER
It’s just like pulling off a Band-Aid. A-one and a-two and…
CUT TO:
PARAMEDIC
We got a bleeder!
EXT.--MARY’S HOUSE--NIGHT
TWO PARAMEDICS rush TED out the front door on a stretcher. MARY runs alongside him, holding a towel on his crotch, while a THIRD PARAMEDIC dabs at his crotch with a towel. MARY’S MOM and DAD are out front along with two FIRE TRUCKS, four POLICE CARS, and a crowd of about thirty NEIGHBORS.
PARAMEDIC
(To MARY)
Keep pressure on it!
MARY does as she’s told.
MARY
(running along)
Ted, I’m so sorry. Are you going to be okay?
TED
(irrational cockiness)
You betcha!
He gives her two thumbs up as they slide him into the ambulance.
INT. AMBULANCE--CONTINUOUS
The doors SLAM shut and as the ambulance pulls away, TED starts to WHIMPER and we can see MARY fade into the night…
A great comedy scene.
Let me ask you something—what’s your favorite moment? Here are three of mine. This for openers:
TED
YEEEOOOOOWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!
And this:
MARY’S MOM
I’m going to get some Bactine.
She’s a dental hygienist, right, of course she’d head for the Bactine. Do you know how much that would hurt?
And:
TED
I don’t know, it’s not like it was a well thought-out plan.
I just love the character for being able to come up with, in that situation, a line of that quality.
I think this is the scene that makes the movie.
Look, there is, as we all know, no “best” anything. Never forget that in the eighteenth century, the leading literary critics felt the greatest writers of all time were Homer, Sophocles, and Richardson.
This movie hits me as hard as it does because I am—as so many of us are—Ben Stiller. Taller, sure, and I never wore braces, but my high school days involved living with a deaf mother who told me I caused her deafness, only releasing the truth, that I had nothing to do with it, when she was dying, and a drunken father who stayed in his second-floor room for four years, only venturing out to pledge sobriety, a ruse for his driving to the liquor store for another long supply. And you get through that fine, you tell yourself you’re lucky, a lot of people have it worse. And, boy, do they. I had a nice house, there was Minnie who worked for my family and cared if I survived, and how many people get to go to Bears games or camp in the summertime? But I couldn’t bring friends home, not with that secret on the second floor, and I didn’t date, because who would go out with me, and my schoolwork went to shit and I stayed home a year faking sickness and as I lay
there what I thought of was how beautiful she was going to be, and how good our life together.
You think I didn’t root for Ben to win Cameron Diaz?
The Farrellys think it’s another scene that makes the movie.
Peter Farrelly says, “It was where Matt Dillon comes back and he says—wow, she’s grown heavy and she’s on welfare and she’s got kids and she’s got all sorts of problems and we show Ben go home that night and he thinks about it and comes back the next day and says, ‘I still want to meet her.’ And he says maybe he can help her out, I can’t let it go.
“Because that’s true love. Anybody could fall in love with Cameron Diaz. Come on, you see Cameron Diaz and you’d want to chase her fifteen years. Why root for that? You know, who wouldn’t? But even when he thought she was a whale and she was on welfare, and had a bunch of kids out of wedlock, he still wanted her because he was in love with her. And so at that point, the audience says—he deserves it. And that, I think, is why it works.”
Understand something—movie scenes, like scenes from plays, are not finally intended for the page. They were written with actors and directors very much in mind. In fiction, the novelist or short story writer is your sole companion and you view his world through his eyes. Same with a poet.
On the printed page, the explosive quality of the Zipper Scene can never totally come across. (The second time I saw it, I thought the man in front of me was literally going to die before it was over.)
But you can tell on even one reading that the quality is there.
Most brilliant movie writing tends to be ignored by the critics.
For many reasons, the writer traditionally has been ignored when it comes to kudos. Very few of us get away with it. Callie Khouri did on Thelma and Louise, Bob Towne with Chinatown, me with Butch. But we are not favored by the media. We do not get sent out to do television talk shows. That you expect. What’s hard is when stars—who for the most part write as well as most six-year-olds—say they make up their parts. (I would love to have Conan or Jay ask to see a star’s screenplay, then read it on the air.) And directors rarely take less than all the credit they can get.
You must deal with that as your career goes on. It ain’t gonna change. But the media must love someone. If Steven Spielberg had directed the Zipper Scene, all the critics you’ve ever heard of would have written something along these lines: “After all these years of thrilling us with dramatic adventures, who would have guessed his genius could move so easily to farce. There is no end to the man’s talents. You can feel his touch behind every line of dialogue. More, Steven, please.”
If James Cameron had been behind the camera, the huzzahs would have been of this order: “Of course he is a master of size, of special effects, but who would have guessed the man was also a comic genius. There were hints of this wit in some earlier work—especially Aliens—but here he just lets it fly. Next, George Bernard Shaw? Please, James.”
The fact is that both these wonderfully gifted directors are as helpless as Jo-Jo the Dog-faced Boy when given anything remotely connected with laughter. But the Mary scene is so good, someone has to get credit for it. Couldn’t have been the writer, could it now?
* * *
Why Do We Write?
I write out of revenge.
I write to balance the teeter-totter of my childhood. Graham Greene once said one of the great things: an unhappy childhood is a writer’s gold mine.
I have no idea if my early years were unhappy or not, since I have childhood amnesia (not as uncommon as you might think). Zero memories of my first six years of life. Oh, I’ve been told things that happened, there are family photos of this or that, but it’s all secondhand.
I once went to see a shrink who specialized in regression. I am, it turns out, surprisingly hypnotizable. But we decided there was no reason to proceed, since my life was going along without more than the usual amount of bad stuff.
But I’ll bet if I had gone visiting, it would have been dark down there.
I was a novelist for a decade before I began this madness known as screenwriting, and someone pointed out to me that the most sympathetic characters in my books always died miserably. I didn’t consciously know I was doing that. I didn’t. I mean, I didn’t wake up each morning and think, today I think I’ll make a really terrific guy so I can kill him. It just worked out that way.
I haven’t written a novel in over a decade—although I hope to have a hand in Buttercup’s Baby soon—and someone very wise suggested that I might have stopped writing novels because my rage was gone. It’s possible.
All this doesn’t mean a helluva lot, except probably there is a reason I was the guy who gave Babe over to Szell in the “Is is safe?” scene and that I was the guy who put Westley into The Machine.
I think I have a way with pain. When I come to that kind of sequence I have a certain confidence that I can make it play. Because I come from such a dark corner. I wonder if there is any connection between why you write and what you write well.
Anyway, you know my m.o., think about yours.
* * *
When Harry Met Sally
by Nora Ephron
I have known Nora Ephron a quarter century, but it was not love at first sight. She was dating Carl Bernstein when I first met her, in Washington in ’74, and I was trying to figure out the story for the movie of Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s Watergate book, All the President’s Men.
What Nora and Carl did was write their version of my screenplay and present it to Robert Redford, the producer, without my knowledge. It was the worst experience of my movie career (see Adventures in the Screen Trade for the gorier details). We both live in New York, didn’t cross paths often, but once, a few years after her betrayal, we happened to be at the same dinner party, one with placecards yet, and I still remember my feeling of triumph when I caught her shifting cards so she and I would not be near each other.
Then, I don’t remember really, a decade back, maybe a few years more, we were again at a gathering and she came over and said, “I’m really sorry,” and I hugged her and that was forever that.
She is very famous now, perhaps the most successful woman director in the world (Sleepless in Seattle, Michael, You’ve Got Mail, among others). But she has always been famous, odd for a writer. Before movies, her novel Heartburn headed all the lists. She was well known when she first came to town, as a journalist. Wallflower at the Orgy, her first book of essays, established her, thirty years back.
Her folks were in the business, too, Phoebe and Henry Ephron, a top screenwriting team—Carousel, The Desk Set, among many others. They also wrote plays about her infancy—Three’s a Family and Take Her, She’s Mine—based on her letters from college.
Her first screenwriting credit—with Alice Arlen—was for Silkwood, a marvelous movie. Probably her most famous work, now and maybe forever, is going to be When Harry Met Sally.
It was a total sleeper, the first movie made by Castle Rock films. Rob Reiner had never had a commercial hit. Meg Ryan—and how did she miss getting an Oscar nomination for this work?—had never costarred in a hit. Billy Crystal had costarred in a couple of films, but a romantic lead?
And everyone fell in love with it. Good as it was then, it’s much better now, because the quality of movies—not counting special-effects flicks—has dropped so low.
Ephron’s screenplay does the heavy lifting, so all the others can twinkle. A bubble of a film, stylish as hell, filled with short witty scenes about the impossibility of love, gorgeous montages of New York as we all want it to be, and little vignettes of older couples talking to the camera of their love experiences—try getting that past a studio executive today.
Crystal’s character fucks everything that moves. Ryan’s, though she claims sexual knowledge, is mocked by him. He is the stud, she the professional virgin. Then, forty-four minutes in, they go to the Carnegie Deli for a snack. And this happens.
The Orgasm Scene
INT.--CARNEGIE DELICATESSE
N--DAY
HARRY and SALLY are seated at a table, waiting for their sandwiches.
SALLY
What do you do with these women? Do you just get up out of bed and leave?
HARRY
Sure.
SALLY
Well, explain to me how you do it. What do you say?
A waiter brings their order.
HARRY
I say I have an early meeting, an early haircut, an early squash game.
SALLY
You don’t play squash.
HARRY
They don’t know that. They just met me.
SALLY
(rearranging the meat on her sandwich)
That’s disgusting.
HARRY
I know. I feel terrible.
(takes a bite of sandwich)
SALLY
You know, I am so glad I never got involved with you. I just would have ended up being some woman you had to get out of bed and leave at three o’clock in the morning and go clean your andirons. And you don’t even have a fireplace.
(quite irritated now, slapping the meat over quickly)
Not that I would know this.
HARRY
Why are you getting so upset? This is not about you.
SALLY
Yes it is. You’re a human affront to all women. And I’m a woman.
(bites into sandwich)
HARRY
Hey, I don’t feel great about this, but I don’t hear anyone complaining.
SALLY
Of course not. You’re out the door too fast.
HARRY
I think they have an okay time.
SALLY
How do you know?
HARRY
How do you mean, how do I know. I know.
SALLY
Because they …?
(she makes a gesture with her hands)
HARRY
Yes, because they…
(he makes the same gesture back)
SALLY
How do you know they’re really…
(she makes the same gesture)
HARRY
What are you saying? They fake orgasm?
SALLY
It’s possible.
HARRY
Get outta here.
SALLY
Why? Most women, at one time or another, have faked it.
HARRY
Well, they haven’t faked it with me.
SALLY
How do you know?
HARRY
Which Lie Did I Tell? Page 16
