(He doesn’t look at his wallet this time either, just hands over another bill.)
CAB DRIVER
This is another single. That’s two.
MEL
Must be jet lag.
(Hands over another bill, still without looking at his wallet)
CAB DRIVER
Three singles don’t cut it, Mister.
(beat)
Why don’t you ever look at your wallet?
MEL
Look, I’m in a hurry--
CAB DRIVER
--does this scam work where you come from, you Australian asshole?--
(calling out)
Officer?
CUT TO
ONE OF NEW YORK’S FINEST, moving to the DRIVER.
POLICEMAN
Problem?
CAB DRIVER
This guy owes me from JFK and all he does is hand over three singles--
(big)
—and he never looks at his wallet.
POLICEMAN
Don’t get you.
CAB DRIVER
Watch.
(to MEL in the back)
I’d like my money, mister.
MEL
Here, take it.
(he hands over another bill without looking at his wallet)
POLICEMAN
Damndest thing I ever saw. What’d he give you?
CAB DRIVER
Progress--a five.
POLICEMAN
(to MEL)
Mister? You owe the man. Now, why don’t you just look in your wallet, take out the money, and hand it over.
CUT TO
MEL sitting there, the wallet in his hands. He tries to raise it up to eye level so he can see it. His arms won’t move. He tries to drop his head to chin level so he can see it down there. His head won’t move.
MEL
(soft)
I don’t … seem to be … able to do … that.
POLICEMAN
This is not funny--you don’t pay the man, you go to jail. You want to go to jail?
Let’s leave Mel pondering that question. And pardon my riff about Mel’s not being able to look at his wallet—I was in a Last Action Hero mode, and this scene would have worked there. Because that movie was about an action hero in a movie who didn’t know he was in a movie, he thought he existed in our world.
All the ten clichés in the list are about trying to save time. Because the alternatives are too gruesome for the moviegoer: sitting there with nothing happening that relates to the story.
Get on with it—that is what the camera demands, and when we write movies, we have no choice but to obey.
Here’s a shot that’s a favorite of mine—it’s when I can tell a movie is in trouble. When a car drives up to a house and you see the whole long drive, you just know the movie is going to suck. Because there is only one reason to show the drive.
There better be a monster in the house …
* * *
Chinatown
by Robert Towne and
Fargo
by Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
* * *
I’m not sure, really, why I linked these two great Oscar-winning screenplays. I could fake you out with a lot of reasons. They both form the basis for among the best detective movies ever made, both are funny and savage and filled with shocks and surprises, both are literate and surprisingly witty.
Both have wondrous detectives at their core. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), armed with his juvenile cynicism, thinks he know everything but is totally unprepared when he meets a man (Noah Cross, played by John Huston) who is really willing to do anything.
Marge (Frances McDormand), the pregnant police chief, is a lot smarter than Gittes but amazingly unprepared for the strange and terrible things people do to one another.
Both movies are dazzlingly complicated until you know their truths, and then they are clear and inevitable, as all wonderful storytelling must eventually be.
I think what links them in my mind is the placement of their two great scenes. The Fargo detecting scene starts half an hour in, the Chinatown confrontation begins twenty-five minutes before the end. (I have gone to Bergman for an example of a beginning, and, modestly, said he, I am going to use Butch Cassidy as an example of an ending.)
These two scenes both have the same effect on their respective movies. When you read them you know this: the work is done. A magician’s phrase for that part of a trick—it can come close to the start or near to the end—when the magician’s crucial work is finished. All that remains is the unfolding of the inevitable.
In both movies, after these two scenes, the remainder, for me, is inevitable. The writers have us in their power, at their mercy; they can do with us what they will.
The Coens drive me nuts a lot of the time.
Example: I cannot explain too often how crucial it is for you to know your story before you start. For me, if I don’t know how a story is going to end, I don’t know how to enter each individual scene preceding. I am not saying you must know each cut, obviously, but it is essential that you know the story you are trying to tell. I asked them how they know they are ready to start a screenplay.
JOEL
To start it? Well, since we started writing we don’t do an exhaustive outline--
ETHAN
--or any outline. The rule is, we type scene A without knowing what scene B is going to be-- or for that matter, we type scene R without knowing what scene S is going to be.
JOEL
What happens with us is mostly that we tend to write fast at the beginning, then get very slow, then speed up once we really have to confront the structure.
ETHAN
And also, because we’re doing our own thing, we can get stuck and literally grind to a halt and put it aside for a year even.
In other words, everything I feel you must do, they don’t. Obviously, there is no correct way to work. I think the one thing writers are all interested in is how others do it. (Maybe looking for, at last, the right way—who knows?)
I have a theory as to why it works for the Coens. Peter and Bobby Farrelly have equally bizarre ways of getting things done. Listen to this madness:
PETER
Bill, you said once you were in a spot where you didn’t know what was going to happen next.
BOBBY
Well, that’s what we do. We write ourselves into a corner purposely--
PETER
Because we think if we can go into a corner where there’s no way out, and then we take a week or a few days or a month even, and find a reasonable way out without making it absurd, then nobody in the audience is going to sit there and get it within a minute and get ahead of us.
And what do they do in that “week or a few days or a month even”?
PETER
We just drive. You know, it frees everything up. We just get in the car and drive. I drove across country fifteen times but together we’ve only done it five times.
Okay, my theory as to why it works for them is simplicity itself: numbers. Not because they are brother writing teams, although that doesn’t hurt. They certainly know each other so well, and can deal with each other’s idiosyncracies. But it’s because there are two of them. I can’t do it that way—if I get into a dark place, I can’t say to my writing partner, “Here, fix the fucker.” There’s only me, trapped helpless in my pit, no way out.
Another example of why the Coens drive me nuts: The Big Lebowski. This nutball mélange of a flick takes place a lot of the time in a bowling alley, where John Goodman, who is nuts, is taunted by another bowler named Jesus (John Turturro). A tournament is mentioned several times.
And I know this: that is going to be some fucking bowling match. I don’t know if either Goodman or Turturro is going to survive the thing, but I cannot wait.
Guess what? Not only is there no bowling contest, the Coens never even thought of having one. For them, it was just background for character. Well guess what?—they’re wrong, because I
want to see Goodman kick Turturro’s ass.
The Coens, whatever their billing says, both do everything—write, produce, direct. They show up pretty much every day at their office on the West Side, do a kind of nine-to-five thing, but most of the time they wouldn’t glorify what they do by saying it’s writing.
They often set scripts aside, as they did Fargo, after about sixty pages were done. They wrote a stage direction—“Interior. Shep’s apartment. Carl is banging an escort.” There it stood for a year and a half. They may have as many as half a dozen scripts stashed away around their office. I don’t know about you, but if they’re close to being Fargo, I wish they’d get cracking.
Fargo is the story of a complicated crime that goes very wrong.
An automobile dealer needs money. What he decides to do is have his wife kidnapped and split the ransom money—courtesy of his father-in-law—with the kidnapers. (His wife is wealthy, he is not, and his father-in-law openly despises him.)
The kidnappers do not know each other well, and when they spend time together, it turns out they despise each other, too.
The dealer gives the kidnappers a car as the first installment of what they will eventually receive. In the meantime, he is harassed at work by people trying to buy cars from him, and at home, where he is trying to put together a deal with his father-in-law that will render the kidnapping unnecessary. He strikes out.
The kidnappers abduct his wife. They are driving through the area of Brainerd, Minnesota, with the wife in the backseat. They are in their new car. A cop stops them—the chattier of the two has forgotten to put tags on the car. The cop leaves his motor running, his lights on, and comes over to the car where the wife is lying on the floor in the rear. The chatty one tells the silent one that he will handle things. He tries to bribe the cop, who will have none of it, and when the officer asks the chatty kidnapper to please step out of the car, the silent one shoots him dead.
The chatty one is stunned at this, but he gets out of the car in the snow and starts to drag the dead cop off the road.
At this moment, another car drives by, slows, sees the chatty one dragging the cop away, and then takes off.
The silent kidnapper pursues them, and after the car chase has gone on a while, realizes they have pulled off the road. He does the same, finds them, kills two more.
Blackout.
We hear a phone ringing, a couple are in bed, it’s the middle of the night. The woman answers, says she’ll be right there. The man, her husband, says he will fix her some eggs, she needs her strength.
We see, as she gets out of bed, that whoever she is, she is pregnant.
Now, in a quick breakfast scene, we see she is also a police officer. And it’s clear she is going to the crime scene. Where she has zero chance of ever solving the madness we have just seen unfold.
The Barfing in the Snow Scene
HIGHWAY
Two police cars and an ambulance sit idling at the side of the road, a pair of men inside each car.
The first car’s driver door opens and a figure in a parka emerges, holding two Styrofoam cups. His partner leans across the seat to close the door after him.
The reverse shows Marge approaching from her own squad car.
MARGE
Hiya, Lou.
LOU
Margie. Thought you might need a little warm-up.
He hands her one of the cups of coffee.
MARGE
Yah, thanks a bunch. So what’s the deal, now. Gary says triple homicide?
LOU
Yah, looks pretty bad. Two of’m’re over here.
Marge looks around as they start walking.
MARGE
Where is everybody?
LOU
Well--it’s cold, Margie.
BY THE WRECK
Laid out in the early morning light is the wrecked car, a pair of footprints leading out to the man in a bright orange parka face down in the bloodstained snow, and one pair of footsteps leading back to the road.
Marge is peering into the car.
MARGE
Ah, geez. So … Aw, geez. Here’s the second one … It’s in the head and the … hand there, I guess that’s a defensive wound. Okay.
Marge looks up from the car.
…Where’s the state trooper?
Lou, up on the shoulder, jerks his thumb.
LOU
Back there a good piece. In the ditch next to his prowler.
Marge looks around at the road.
MARGE
Okay, so we got a trooper pulls someone over, we got a shooting, and these folks drive by, and we got a high-speed pursuit, ends here, and this execution-type deal.
LOU
Yah.
MARGE
I’d be very surprised if our suspect was from Brainerd.
LOU
Yah.
Marge is studying the ground.
MARGE
Yah. And I’ll tell you what, from his footprint he looks like a big fella--
Marge suddenly doubles over, putting her head between her knees down near the snow.
LOU
Ya see something down there, Chief?
MARGE
Uh--I just, I think I’m gonna barf.
LOU
Geez, you okay, Margie?
MARGE
I’m fine--it’s just morning sickness.
She gets up, sweeping the snow from her knees.
…Well, that passed.
LOU
Yah?
MARGE
Yah. Now I’m hungry again.
LOU
You had breakfast yet, Margie?
MARGE
Oh, yah. Norm made some eggs.
LOU
Yah? Well, what now, d’ya think?
MARGE
Let’s go take a look at that trooper.
BY THE STATE TROOPER’S CAR
Marge’s prowler is parked nearby.
Marge is on her hands and knees by a body down in the ditch, again looking at footprints in the snow. She calls up the road:
MARGE
There’s two of ’em, Lou!
LOU
Yah?
MARGE
Yah, this guy’s smaller than his buddy.
LOU
Oh, yah?
DOWN IN THE DITCH
In the foreground is the head of the state trooper, facing us. Peering at it from behind, still on her hands and knees, is Marge.
MARGE
For Pete’s sake.
She gets up, clapping the snow off her hands, and climbs out of the ditch.
LOU
How’s it look, Marge?
MARGE
Well, he’s got his gun on his hip there, and he looks like a nice enough guy. It’s a real shame.
LOU
Yah.
MARGE
You haven’t monkeyed with his car there, have ya?
LOU
No way.
She is looking at the prowler, which still idles on the shoulder.
MARGE
Somebody shut his lights. I guess the little guy sat in there, waitin’ for his buddy t’come back.
LOU
Yah, woulda been cold out here.
MARGE
Heck, yah. Ya think, is Dave open yet?
LOU
You don’t think he’s mixed up in--
MARGE
No, no, I just wanna get Norm some night crawlers.
INT. PROWLER
Marge is driving; Lou sits next to her.
MARGE
You look in his citation book?
LOU
Yah…
He looks at his notebook.
…Last vehicle he wrote in was a tan Ciera at 2:18 A.M. Under the plate number he put DLR--I figure they stopped him or shot him before he could finish fillin’ out the tag number.
MARGE
Uh-huh.
LOU
So I got the state lookin’ for a Ciera with a tag
startin’ DLR. They don’t got no match yet.
MARGE
I’m not sure I agree with you a hunnert percent on your policework there, Lou.
LOU
Yah?
MARGE
Yah, I think that vehicle there probly had dealer plates. DLR?
LOU
Oh…
Lou gazes out the window, thinking.
…Geez.
MARGE
Yah. Say, Lou, ya hear the one ’bout the guy who couldn’t afford personalized plates, so he went and changed his name to J2L 4685?
LOU
Yah, that’s a good one.
MARGE
Yah.
THE ROAD
The police car enters with a whoosh and hums down a straight-ruled empty highway, cutting a landscape of flat and perfect white.
Why did I say that the work is done in this movie about one-third of the way through?
No logical reason, but I remember that when I saw Fargo the first time, after that scene I felt a sense of peace. I have seen everything the Coens have done, and I know they are perverse. But I could not conceive that even the Coens could kill Marge. (My God, Frances McDormand is married to Joel. No way he offs his wife.) Which means I have faith I can give her my heart.
And that whole insane opening? I thought the whole movie was going to be about unraveling that baby. So when she nails it right out of the chute, you bet I relaxed. How could I not? I was going to spend another hour with one of the major movie characters of the decade. And I didn’t care if at times she was less dazzling than here. I just wanted to be along on the ride.
So, yes, for me, here, even this early, the work is done.
Decades past, Bob Towne and I had the same agent, the late and very great Evarts Ziegler—we are in the ’60s now—and Towne was already the script doctor. He was this mysterious figure and he seemed to have fixed everything, but his cover was blown at the Oscars in ’72 when Francis Ford Coppola thanked him from the microphone for his help with The Godfather.
The odd thing about his writing—I can still hear Ziegler trying to make sense of this—was that when he doctored, he was fast, met deadlines, etc., but on his own stuff, death. Paint dried more quickly.
Chinatown took a while.
Towne had the two rapes from the start—the rape of the land and the rape of the woman. His problem was which to lead with, how to knot them together, and that was hard.
Which Lie Did I Tell? Page 21
