Which Lie Did I Tell?

by William Goldman

  —but they weren’t real.

  And in the novel, that is never a problem, you are guided by the wit of Hiassen, and you care for this lady. But in the movie all you could see was the surgery. And you never thought of the character and her warmth and funny mouth, all you could look at were these marvels of the medical profession, and wonder how much did it hurt to walk around?

  In other words, the reality hurt the movie.

  Well, Forrest Tucker is eighty years old.

  How does that reality look on film? He’s not Clint Eastwood or Sean Connery, he is those guys ten years from now. He is Paul Newman five years down the line. And they won’t look like they do now. (Sorry, guys.) Take a walk outside, check out any octogenarians you see.

  I promise you this: they’re a lot more likely to be pushed in a wheelchair than they are prepping for a marathon. And in our movie, the same kinds of thoughts are going to intrude as they did with Pandora. How many times does he get up to pee at night? Does his dick still work, and under what conditions? How much do his knees ache when he has to do stairs?

  Remember, this guy is our hero. He can’t snooze in a sofa during this story, he has to do stuff. Two questions just to mind.

  Will you believe it when you see him being physical?

  Will you want to see him being physical?

  You must be thinking this question at this point: Well, does he have to be that old? Why couldn’t he be the great Eastwood now, pushing seventy?

  He could be.

  He could be Arnold, fifty.

  He could be Leonardo DiCaprio, all of eleven.

  Except for one small point: those guys destroy the picture.

  A Riff About Age

  I recently doctored a flick from a novel by Stephen Hunter, Point of Impact. It deals with the strange, fascinating world of long distance riflemen, snipers, if you will.

  In the novel, the main character, Swagger, was a legendary figure in the Vietnam War, and when things went badly, and after hospitalization, he has spent his years alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

  The government gets wind of an assassination attempt on the President. To be done by one of these long-distance whizzes. And they need help to try and figure out how to protect him. A sniper can attack from as much as a mile away, the President is out on the open with a bunch of other heads of state, in New Orleans.

  The government comes to Swagger for help, he leaves the mountains for New Orleans, helps them. But things go badly for him, again, he is wounded terribly, again, and for the remainder of the picture, tries, against terrible odds, to clear his name.

  Okay. The Vietnam stuff, which sets up his character, is a short section in the beginning of the book. But that was thirty years ago and Swagger could not have been in swaddling clothes, since he was drafted. Has to be mid-fifties at least.

  I wrote it for Eastwood. He said no. Redford said no. Harrison Ford said no.

  The movie is in development hell, but there is now interest from a star—Keanu Reeves.

  Gasp.

  And you know what—it’s a terrific idea.

  By now you probably want to strangle me for being so stupid as to say that Eastwood, at seventy, will destroy a picture about an eighty-year-old, while Keanu baby is just fine as a fifty-five-year-old Vietnam vet.

  Here’s the deal: in Point of Impact, the age of the sniper has nothing to do with the heart of the flick—a greatly gifted man is hired to do a job dealing with his speciality, gets double-crossed, and seeks revenge. You don’t need the Vietnam sequence. But the core of The Old Guy is Tucker’s age.

  If I had read the identical article about Tucker, only he was seventy, big fucking deal, I’m sixty-seven. But I cannot imagine what it must be like to wake up every morning at eighty and think, “Christ, I hope today’s bank robbery goes okay.”

  Now, obviously, any studio head would fire me instantly if I screwed up his shot at Eastwood or Connery or Redford or Ford. (Or Leo.)

  The movie they made might work, might be a hit. Maybe you’d write a wonderful script and the movie would work. But I don’t care about what you write, this is about me here.

  And I could not write that movie. (End of riff about age.)

  Okay, precious one, you might be thinking, he’s got to be eighty.

  How do you cast it?

  Huge problem. The only famous actor I can come up with is Gregory Peck and Peck is such a gent, I have problems envisioning him as a lifer. So you have to go with an unknown. If you even think about that, this flashes like a “Price Is Right” answer: If he’s a good enough actor to play the vehicle part in a movie, how come he’s been unknown for eighty fucking years, Bill?

  I have no answer for the casting problem. And I think if I go ahead and write this, this is what will bring me down. Either the studio will say, “are you nuts?” or they will replace me when a younger actor is given the role.

  But I cannot think that way now. I may well be fired, have been many times, will be again.

  But if I love Tucker’s story enough, what I must do is this: put a blanket over my head and write it for Old Glory.

  What about time?

  As big a problem, in its way, as casting.

  Movies do not handle the passage of time well. Most old-age makeup sucks. It tries, but what we think is, “What is Meryl doing looking that way?” In Butch Cassidy, I remember talking to George Roy Hill about the fact that the guys were in South America for eight years. Hill replied that he wasn’t going to fuck with makeup, he’d tell them to act old, which he did, and which worked out—for me, anyway—just fine.

  But this is, depending on how we write it, a very long lifetime.

  If we include the bicycle stealing at fifteen, no problem, obviously, different actor. If we deal with Tucker’s bank robberies when he was in his twenties, a different actor again. And probably you could use the same actor from the San Quentin escape at sixty for the car chase at eighty.

  You could keep using different actors, and that might work, but I worry that what it would do is take away from what I think makes the story memorable: accumulation. A lifetime of misbegotten events, all of them heading toward the capture in the playground.

  Clearly, time and casting and all these things mitigate against my writing this story. And the truth is this: I would not write this story. But the reason is not included above and is personal with me. Here it is:

  Because the people are alive.

  Twenty-five years ago I was in Holland, where we were shooting A Bridge Too Far. I was leaving that day for America, ticket in my hot little hand, when a message came, suddenly: it was from General Frost and it wondered, could I stop off in London before I went home?

  Only a yes answer was possible.

  The Brits are so different from us, there are no words; but nowhere is the difference clearer than when it comes to war: we venerate victories, they adore disasters. So the greatest battle for them in World War II was Dunkirk.

  Followed closely by the awful Battle of Arnhem, where so many died so unfairly. A Bridge Too Far was about that battle. It began with a mistake of the Allied high command—Germany was falling, and clearly our General Patton was the man to finish the job, roar straight into Berlin with his unstoppable tank corps and kill those motherfuckers. The Nazis were getting braced for Patton and they were terrified of him.

  But the plan to end the war went to the insecure Brit, Montgomery. He and Patton detested each other but Montgomery won out here, and planned the greatest parachute drop in history.

  It was a cavalry-to-the-rescue deal. Thirty-five thousand troops were to be dropped behind Nazi lines in Holland, where they were to take a series of bridges. At the same time, a huge tank corps was to roar into Holland and solidify the bridges as they came to them.

  The last bridge was at Arnhem. Once it fell, the tanks were to wheel across it into the industrial heart of the enemy. And bring the boys home by Christmas.

  That was the theory.

  The realit
y was worse than any Keystone Kops two-reeler. Fuck-up followed fuck-up. I won’t detail them here, but the paratroopers who landed to take Arnhem Bridge—a huge thing, think the George Washington or the Golden Gate—were eight miles from the bridge. (One mile for these troops with their light weapons would have been unacceptable.)

  The Battle of Arnhem was a bloodbath for the Allies. But the man who kept it in at least some kind of order, the hero of the effort, was Captain (later General) John Frost, thirty-one at the time and played wonderfully in the movie by Tony Hopkins.

  When I went to work on the story, I expected to find all this great stuff that Frost did. We’ve all seen phony Hollywood war stuff, we know a heroic act when we see one. (I still almost have to vomit when I think of the last hour of Saving Private Ryan.)

  Well, Frost didn’t do much of that. In a totally different way, he was like Butch Cassidy, who people just, well, took to. Frost was a guy who people just, well, believed in. If Johnny Frost said it’s going to be okay, you knew this: you weren’t going to die. What he was was this quiet figure who in real life might have been unnoticed. But put him in a situation where a hero was needed, he was your guy.

  Okay. In the middle of this massacre, a decent German general—they were allowed two—drove onto Arnhem Bridge, white flag flying, and said to the waiting British officers, “Surrender.”

  Pause. Then one of the British officers answered this: “You wish to surrender to us?” Then another pause. Followed by: “We don’t have sufficient supplies to take you all prisoner. Sorry.”

  The next morning the slaughter began again.

  I loved that moment. It happened, it was so insanely British, so nuttily brave. I had Frost say the line, though in real life it was another officer.

  We are back now to me in Holland, with this strange urgent request. I changed my plane, flew to London, met the general at a civilized restaurant, chatted briefly, very briefly, about how the movie was going.

  And during this time I was aware of only this: General John Frost, a man I revered, a brave man by any definition, a legend in his home country, was pale and he was frightened.

  Finally he said this: “Your script will destroy me.”

  Not the kind of thing I hear a lot. I had no idea what I had done. I don’t think I even answered. But I still remember the awful feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “That line,” he went on. “That line.”

  I must have asked which.

  “When you have me saying we couldn’t take them prisoner. To accept their surrender.”

  I still hadn’t caught on. “I didn’t make it up.”

  “Yes, of course. But I didn’t say it.” Finally I understood as he went quietly on. “Don’t you see? People will think I was trying to make too much of myself. Everywhere I go they will know I didn’t say it, that a brave man did say it, and I was trying to take from him, trying to make too much of myself, make more of myself than I am. And they won’t forgive me.”

  I tell you this: being there, hearing his fear, knowing I had caused it with my words, is something I will never stop remembering. He was quiet for a while and we ate a little. “Would this be all right?” I asked him. “I love the moment and it’s true, so could we keep the moment but not have you say anything. Would it be all right if you were there, but silent?”

  He thought about that. “I would have no problem,” he said. Which was how it was shot.

  I will never do another movie when the people are alive.

  I tried a couple of times after Bridge, never will again. Lots of reasons. People panic when they are going to be up there on screen. (I would. You would, too.) People also get greedy when they are going to be up there on screen. The writer cannot make the crucial changes required, the compressions that are essential to screenplays.

  But most of all, I won’t because you’re going to hurt somebody, cause pain or embarrassment. And God does that well enough without our help …

  Story Two: The Good Guy

  * * *

  Before we get started, does it strike anyone else as odd that the beautiful and ruddy-cheeked state of Colorado has been host to two of the most horrific crimes of the decade? The Littleton school massacre and the JonBenet Ramsey murder. California, sure, logic dictates that place, and New York, too. But not Colorado.

  That riff having accomplished nothing, let’s go to this story, it’s one of those out-of-the-blue notions. Here’s what it is.

  As I write this, Littleton is still very much in people’s consciousness. The usual shit, oh oh oh, violent movies did it—no, rap music—no, TV—no, the Internet—no, blank did it (fill in your own medium). My take, by the by? If those amazingly crazed young men had gone into that school, with the same murderous intent, but armed with knives and clubs, the incident would have been death-free.

  Now understand, when I say Littleton, in a movie we would give it a different name, put it in a different place, etc. etc. What you keep is the massacre. And this: the media assault on the mistakes of the lawmen.

  Here’s the story—our guy, the good guy of the title, is the head lawman where the incident happens. Only it’s a much smaller town, smaller school, smaller police department.

  It would be nice if our guy was pretty much it. And he is terrific—honest, upright, and true, the kind of young man you’d want your own son to grow up to be. (Kevin Costner, say, just after Dances with Wolves, when the whole world was in love with him).

  My story would be that he gets wind of the madness before it happens, tries like hell to stop it, is lied to by the parents of the loonies, breaks past their bullshit, realizes just exactly what is going to happen—

  —and gets there just too late to stop it.

  He rushes to the school, almost gets killed, but the kids are a step ahead of him. They blast their schoolmates, set off their bombs, and just as he finally corners them, they kill each other, leaving our guy shaken and alone to face the consequences.

  Meaning, in this story: the media.

  They descend on the town, take it over, cover the funerals as if it were Di all over again, do endless tear-jerking interviews, ask “Why?—Why? —Why?—How could this happen in our America?”

  And make a villain out of our good guy.

  Other law experts are brought in, they criticize him, why didn’t he do this, that, the other thing.

  They do their best to destroy his life.

  And what is our good guy doing?

  Trying to hold together, sure. Trying to hang in, of course. But he is also desperately trying to stop an even bigger slaughter from happening —because he has stumbled onto this fact: there were three crazy kids in Littleton, and the two who made the first invasion, they were nothing compared to the third kid, their leader and mastermind, who is way nuttier than the other two put together. And whose plan just might include this: blowing up the entire school.

  Does our good guy get there in time this time?

  You decide what you want, but let me throw in a curve.

  Remember at the start I casually mentioned there had been two crimes in Colorado? Well, I was misdirecting you—I want to use them both.

  Like this. In the middle of his desperate search for the third crazed kid, who has disappeared from his home but you know is somewhere nearby, waiting, in the middle of our good guy killing himself trying to find him, in the middle of the media calling for his resignation, he gets a phone call—

  JonBenet Ramsey—who lives in Littleton—has been found strangled in the basement of the biggest house in town.

  Our good guy pulls himself together, goes to the mansion to investigate. He is met by the man who called him, the child’s shattered father. The mother is almost incoherent with grief and cannot be interrogated.

  And what our guy does, brains fried, past exhaustion, is go through the house, checking the body, possible entrances by a stranger, all kinds of stuff—and here’s the kicker—

  He does it terribly—from lack of sleep. God knows,
as we watch, he moves things, shifts stuff around—

  Our good guy is destroying evidence. And we see him do it.

  Now it’s the next day, and the media shifts from Littleton High to the strangled beauty-contest winner. And snippets of her contest dances fill the channels—

  Who could throttle a perfect child such as this!

  As the media realizes that evidence has been damaged, they go into overdrive—our good guy should be hung.

  But he tries not to pay attention because he knows that with all the attention on JonBenet, it’s a perfect time for the third nut to attack the school—kill them all—

  And he tries, but guess what—our good guy gets there, not a second too late but before the third nut blows up the entire school.

  And he stops the possible carnage.

  Yessss. This is the guy we have rooted for from the beginning, the guy who has killed himself for justice.

  Even the media have to admit he pulled off a great thing, saving all those high school kids from death.

  A press conference is called where he handles himself well, with modesty. Which he has to leave because JonBenet’s parents are now in shape to be interviewed.

  He goes back to the mansion. He talks to the wife. The wife is better. She has an alibi. She was with her husband at the time of the murder.

  He talks to the husband now. “Will you find the killer?” the husband asks. Our Good Guy shakes his head. “Don’t see how,” he answers.

  And then the two men quickly glance at each other, and it’s one of those looks that tells everything. We now know why our hero destroyed the evidence—so the father will never be caught—

  He and JonBenet’s father are lovers.

  Final fade-out.

  Catch you by surprise? Hope so.

  What do you think?

  I guess more important is this: What do I think? Even though I’ve had the idea of the father and the lawman being lovers for a long time, I never put the two together till the morning I’ve written this.