by Parnell Hall
Hey, now don’t blame me. The premise was Sidney’s. My job was to make it as plausible as possible. Which wasn’t easy, having to throw in four hot babes.
Blaire was one of them. A girlfriend of one of the men involved in the frame. Rick goes to her to try to convince her of his innocence, and to persuade her to help him. The theory in operation here—and I fought this out with Sidney, to no avail—was that women like Blaire are essentially good, and only go along with their boyfriends because it hasn’t occurred to them that they are evil, but turn against them as soon as someone clues them in.
I pointed out to Sidney that this made women look like mindless sex objects incapable of independent thought. His response, “Who gives a flying fuck?” was uttered with a warm smile and grand good will, as was Sidney’s habit when doing something utterly ruthless, obnoxious, or mean in his role of producer, sort of like winking and saying, Aren’t we movie people wicked?
Anyway, that was the scene I was lumbered with—to have Rick Dalton talk Blaire Gangster-Girlfriend into helping him, without either of them coming across as total nitwits. Kind of like Mission Impossible.
Only I’d done a good job with it. I really had. In fact, some of my best work in the movie had gone into that scene. Even Sidney, who was quick to find fault with everything, was impressed. So I was eager to find out how it played.
Only I didn’t get to for nearly an hour. First there was more farbling around than one could have imagined.
For one thing, Sidney was buffeted by an endless string of department heads and crew members. Of which there were many more, now that we were into our final week of preproduction. In addition to the set crew, laboring industriously and noisily upstairs, there were also two more electricians, the best boy and first electric, brought in to assist the gaffer in running power to the set.
In addition to the director of photography, there was now the first assistant cameraman, who was serving as the camera operator during rehearsals, a concession Jake Decker had negotiated from the union. For our movie, there was no camera operator—when we actually began filming, the DP would shoot, a second assistant would come on to load film, and the first assistant would pull focus.
We had also picked up a key grip and his best boy, who were responsible for moving things on the set. While there was nothing much to move on this set, there was still the camera, and on our skeleton crew, even the key grip would work the camera dolly.
Another new arrival was the script supervisor, a young woman by the name of Clarity Gray. Poor as I am with names, I caught hers, because Clarity struck me as such as appropriate one for a script supervisor, and also because she was the one person on the crew in whom I took a keen interest. The script she would be keeping track of happened to be mine.
In addition to all these, there were two more young gofer types, one tall and awkward, one short and nerdy, who apparently were all Jake Decker was able to get for what he was willing to pay, i.e., nothing. But even for unpaid college kids doing it for the experience, they looked bad. So much so it occurred to me to wonder if Dan had dug them up somewhere just to make him look good.
Anyway, all these people were constantly pestering Sidney, which I guess was an occupational hazard on a movie if you happened to. be both producer and director. And what made this take much longer than it should have was the fact that Sidney wasn’t paying any attention to them.
That was because the poor man was preoccupied with our other new arrival, a willowy blonde with a disproportionately enormous bosom, whom I assumed was the actress playing the part of Blaire. I had to assume this, because Sidney wasn’t taking time off from drooling over her long enough to introduce me.
Did I say drooling? I beg your pardon. I wouldn’t wish to impugn the man. To be perfectly honest, I cannot specifically recall saliva dripping from his mouth. I think it would be safe to say his eyes were bugging slightly out of his head.
I think it would also be safe to say that this was not just my opinion, but was also shared by the attractive assistant director. I should say the previously attractive assistant director, because she might have been a wet dishrag for all Sidney Garfellow seemed to care now.
Anyway, you know what it’s like to have tremendously selfish motives? To have a stake in something and be so personally involved in it you can’t really focus on anything else? Well, that’s how I felt that morning. My script was about to be read. For the first time. A major breakthrough in my life. Yeah, I’d had a few magazine articles published before. But nothing like this. My lines were going to come to life. My wit was going to be displayed. If there was a laugh from the cast or crew, it would be my writing that got it.
If you’re not in the arts, I can’t begin to explain what that meant to me. All I can say is it crowded everything else out of my mind. Which is why I didn’t really realize what was happening for a while. All I knew was that we weren’t rehearsing and I wanted to be. So it was a while before I realized the reason we weren’t rehearsing was because our young star wasn’t there.
When I finally did realize it, it pissed me off. We had only one week of rehearsal scheduled, which was tight, very tight. And here was this arrogant kid, fresh from his Hollywood success, too big to show up on time and rehearse with us. It occurred to me he’d probably come sailing in around noon, either hung over or stoned, with a pair of voluptuous teenage groupies on his arm. So even before I met him, I really resented him. Son of a bitch. Where the hell does he get off taking drugs and banging young girls all morning when he should be doing my script?
Anyway, somewhere in all this Jake Decker wandered in, noticed that we weren’t rehearsing and that Sidney Garfellow had been rendered almost catatonic by a silicone overdose. Jake took him by the arm and said something in his ear.
I must say, Jake certainly had a way about him, because Sidney immediately sprang into action. He stepped out, clapped his hands, and said, “All right. Listen up, everyone. Rehearsal time. Let’s clear the set and get ready to roll.” He turned to the script supervisor, snapped his fingers imperiously, and said, “Clarity. What’s the first scene up?”
“Page forty-six, scene one-oh-nine. Interior, Blaire’s Apartment. Day. Rick and Blaire.”
“Fine,” Sidney said. “Places, please.”
He took the young starlet by the shoulders and piloted her toward the set.
I was right in their path, so I realized he was going to introduce me, and I made a mental note not to stare. It was prudent, considering the extent of the cleavage and the bounty it revealed.
However, this personal admonition turned out to be unnecessary. Sidney steered the young lady around me as if I weren’t there. As I watched him usher her onto the set, two thoughts occurred to me. One was that Sidney Garfellow really was an unpleasant, arrogant, fucking son of a bitch.
The other was, how the hell was he going to rehearse without Jason Clairemont?
I’d just had that thought when the two new young dorky gofers walked out on stage.
I blinked. Good Lord, it couldn’t be. I’d seen To Shoot the Tiger myself. Even with a stunt double covering up the awkwardness, this tall, goofy dork couldn’t be him.
He wasn’t.
The short nerd was.
10.
I STARED AT THE ASSISTANT director in disbelief—she was the one who’d just told me that. “Come on,” I said. “It couldn’t be.”
The AD, obviously still very hassled by Sidney Garfellow, said, “Why should I kid about a thing like that?”
“Of course not,” I said. “But I saw To Shoot the Tiger. The guy’s almost as tall as Eastwood.”
She gave me a look. “That’s movies.”
“Huh?”
“Movie magic. It’s a camera angle, or they stand him on a chair. I heard Al Pacino once played with some tall actress, they dug a ditch for her to walk in.”
“Yeah, but ...”
“But what?”
“I can see why they’d do that, him bein’ Al Pacino.
I mean, you want him in the movie, so you do something like that. But the Eastwood film. The kid’s a nobody. Why don’t you get a kid who’s right for the part?”
She smiled at me, a superior, condescending smile. “That film made a hundred and seventy-five million dollars,” she said.
That was a conversation killer. And lowered my opinion of the assistant director a notch. Right. In hindsight, we know it did. But there was not one studio executive, one Hollywood producer who knew it was going to make a hundred and seventy-five million dollars. No one knows that on any project, no matter what director, no matter what star. It’s all a crap shoot.
And gambling on this kid? What a long shot that was. Particularly considering how nerdy he looked. So finding out he was Jason Clairemont was quite a shock.
But nothing compared to the shock I got when rehearsal began.
Let me set the stage. This is, as you’ll recall, the scene where our hero, having escaped from prison, attempts to elicit the help of the girlfriend of one of the men who framed him. The way I wrote it was, if I must say so myself, rather neat. See, when he goes to jail, our hero is young and naive, the type of guy who’d let himself get framed. When he comes out of jail, aside from having learned karate, he’s street smart, and knows all these underworld tricks he picked up from other prisoners.
So here’s how I wrote the scene of him calling on this gangster’s girlfriend. We see a shot of her, returning to her apartment with a bag of groceries from the supermarket. At the apartment door, she balances it on one hip and fumbles with her keys, unlocking one huge police lock and then the regular double-locked door. She opens the door, walks in, and stops short. We cut to her point of view, and see a shot of our hero, sitting calmly on the living-room couch.
Which is a nice payoff, after the setup of her police lock—all the security in the world couldn’t keep this guy out.
But as I watched the opening scene, it wasn’t her pantomiming unlocking the apartment. No, instead, it’s him, pantomiming picking the lock.
I went over, tugged Sidney Garfellow by the sleeve. “Sidney,” I whispered. “What the hell’s he doing?”
“Improvising.”
“But what for? This isn’t in the script.”
“In the script he got in by picking the lock.”
“Right. We discover him there.”
“Right. But to get there, he must have picked the lock. So he’d like to try picking the lock.”
“If we see that, there’s no surprise.”
“What do you mean?”
“When she comes home and finds him there.”
Sidney gave me his condescending smile. “Stanley,” he said. “Just ’cause we shoot it don’t mean we use it. It doesn’t work, we lose it in the edit. What’s the harm?”
I took a breath. “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry. I know you got other things on your mind.”
I went over, poured myself a cup of coffee. I drank it while Jason Clairemont improvised several scenes of picking the front-door lock. Since there was no door and no lock to pick, and he was pantomiming the whole thing anyway, and since the scene wasn’t in the script and was destined for the cutting-room floor, this had to be one of the most useless, futile, and boring endeavors one could have imagined.
Finally, when Jason Clairemont was through screwing around, we were able to get on with the scene. Hot Babe Number One pantomimed opening the front door with her bag of groceries. As she did, I realized Sidney was right. If we just cut the scene of Jason breaking in, the rest of the scene could play exactly as written.
Or so I thought.
Here’s how the scene I wrote works. As I said, the bimbo opens the door, turns around and stops, shocked, and from her point of view we see our hero sitting on the couch. She looks at him in utter terror. She has no idea who this is or why he’s here. He could be a rapist, a murderer, what have you. After all, this is New York City. Her first line is, “Who are you?”
So. The bimbo opens-the door, turns around, sees him, and says, “Rick! What are you doing here?” And our hero says, so help me god, “Just couldn’t stay away from your charms.”
I blinked.
What the fuck?
I threw my half-full coffee in the garbage, went over and grabbed Sidney by the arm.
“Sidney,” I said. “What the hell is that?”
“What?” he said. “They’re doing the scene.”
“No, they’re not,” I said. “Those aren’t the lines.”
“Stanley,” Sidney said. “I told you. He can’t say the lines. We gotta change ’em to fit him.”
“I did change ’em.”
“Obviously not enough. If he can’t say the lines, he’s gonna say something else.”
And he was saying something else, even as we were talking. He was saying something juvenile and idiotic, having to do with their past relationship, which she has besmirched by her allegiance to this gangster.
“Sidney,” I said. “He’s killing the scene.”
“Oh, come on,” Sidney said. “Such a fuss over a few words.”
“It’s not just words,” I said. “It’s the whole damn concept. She doesn’t know him. That’s the whole premise. That’s why the scene works. Take that away, and you got nothing. If they have a previous relationship, it’s clichéd and predictable. What I wrote was subtle.”
That’s when Sidney turned on me. I’ll never forget the look he gave me then. It was as if I were some loathsome bug.
“Subtle?” he said. “Subtle? We are making an action film, not The Brothers Karamazov. The shark in Jaws isn’t subtle. It bites.”
The thing is, I’m not quick on my feet. In terms of arguments, I mean. I’d be worthless on a debate team. By the time I think of a comeback, the moment has passed. I’m the type of guy who goes home grumbling to himself, and then thinks of what he should have said.
Which is what happened to me then. When Sidney Garfellow told me the shark in Jaws bites. I was dumbfounded. First by the fact he’d turned on me, and second by the statement itself. The shark bites? What could I say to that? Particularly when the line that ran through my head was, “When the shark bites with his teeth, dear.” Which is of course from Threepenny Opera, a play I acted in back in college, the song from which also became a number-one Bobby Darin hit.
See the problem? None of that was particularly relevant to the current situation, was a suitable comeback to what Sidney Garfellow had just said. It was not until Sidney had moved off, and I stood there seething in helpless fury, that I was able to frame a response.
Right, Sidney. The shark in Jaws bites. And that same shark was in all the Jaws sequels and they bite. The sequels, I mean .Jaws was a great movie, and the sequels suck. Why? They all have the shark. The one that bites. So I guess that wasn’t it. Maybe there was something about the quality of the movie. Maybe Steven Spielberg had something other than just the special effect of the mechanical shark going for him. Maybe who the characters are matters too. And what they say. And whether we give a flying fuck about them.
Naturally, I said none of this. I just stood and watched in impotent frustration as the nerdy twerp and the busty bimbo improvised the scene. Even with no stake in the matter, it would have been enough to make me throw up. Since I saw it as the end of my career, I can’t tell you how excruciating it was.
And what made it worse—which was funny, because how could it possibly be worse?—was that of all the cast and crew members looking on, none of them knew it was bad. Or why it was bad. Because none of them were as familiar with the script as I was. Had worked with it for the past six months and knew every detail, every nuance. And realized, as I did, that what this schmuck was doing was not only ruining the scene they were working on, but was fucking up half-a-dozen scenes later on. The ripple effect—you change one thing, it effects everything else. If these two had a prior relationship, the scenes of them getting to know each other won’t play. So some pretty neat dialogue plus a couple of comic bits go out the
window.
Am I rambling? I bet I am. Am I saying something self-centered and defensive? Probably. Did I feel totally victimized? You’d better believe it. After all, I was doing this for the screen credit. Not for the money. I was, as I’ve said, working for the bare minimum, the least Sidney could possibly pay. That and a deferred payment—which it occurred to me right then, if the movie was this bad, I would never see. I was doing it for the screen credit on the theory that once other producers and directors saw my work, I could get work. Because most movies of this type were absolute shit. So if one came out with characters who were witty and likeable, and a plot that had a few surprises and at least made sense, people would sit up and take notice.
But this?
No one in his right mind was going to hire me because of this. This was exactly the type of mindless trash I had expected my movie to stand out from.
Oh boy.
I tell you, from that moment on things did not improve-if anything, they got worse. Sidney did not apologize for what I felt was a gutless betrayal. Instead, he passed it off just the way I should have imagined he would. With a shit-eating grin and his boy-aren’t-we-movie-producers-ruthless bit.
Meanwhile, Jason the Wonder Nerd continued ignoring the script and saying any damn thing he felt like, and not only the dialogue but also the plot of the movie went right out the window.
And as for me, I just watched. I was still nominally the writer of the piece, though any resemblance between me and a screenwriter was coincidental and not to be inferred. Clarity, wielding script, pad, and notebook, would pencil in whatever lines Jason Clairemont and the various hot babes and gangster types would come up with, and deliver it to me to render into script form. So not only was I forced to hear this garbage, I had to type it too. And, I realized with a shudder, ultimately put my name on it.
