The View from the Bridge

by Nicholas Meyer

  I am not sure why my father fell in with this plan. It is certainly true that he was an artist manqué himself, who would later publish two splendid full-length biographies (one of Joseph Conrad, the other of Houdini), and something of my scheme must have stirred promptings he had long ignored. Ultimately, the film took five years to make. It was shot on weekends and over Christmas, Easter, and summer vacations and involved my father driving a host of hyperkinetic kids in costume to various locations—Central Park, Cape Cod, Cowboy City, New Jersey—and somehow pulling the thing together. He told me he would lie awake at night devising shots and silly bits of business, clearly enjoying himself. We shot out of sequence, of course, like a real film, compelled by necessity, so that the cast aged and shrank as we assembled the scenes. I edited the film with my cousin Bob on our kitchen table. The result was an eighty-minute masterpiece that seemed to charm everyone who saw it. Now matter how hard I fought with my father throughout my fraught adolescence, work on the film went on, and I think it held us together as well as setting my feet on the path they would follow for the rest of my life.

  My movie schooling was completed when my father remarried. Leonore brought few material possessions with her when she moved into our house, but one of them was choice, and I got custody of it: a large Zenith (black and white, of course) TV found its way into my room. Any chance of academic advancement went right out the window with this part of my stepmother’s “dowry.” In those far-off times, television stations ran endless late-night movies from all eras, and I sat and watched every one of them, staying up till all hours and learning about . . . what? Damned if I know. Having a good time. Escaping. Memorizing the names of the actors, the cameramen, the composers and directors, whoever they were. With my memory and capacity to absorb what interested me, I shortly became an autodidact of this arcane world. Who cared? Nobody except me.

  I could probably write a(nother) book entitled Everything I Know I Learned from the Movies. (Or Everything I Know I Learned from the Backs of Record Jackets.) Unlikely as it may seem, I was one of those people who actually derived knowledge from the content of movies. I did the same thing with comic books. There used to be something called Classics Illustrated, a series that was more or less what its name implied, comic book versions of every great book you ever heard of. The optimistic idea of whoever was behind the project was self-evident: if you liked the comic, try going on to read the book, which was exactly what I did every time. To this day—for better or worse—many of the original illustrations in those comics still inform my visualization of Moby-Dick or A Tale of Two Cities.

  IOWA

  In the summer of 1964, following my surprising graduation from high school, I sailed to Europe on the Queen Mary and backpacked all over the place, alone, as usual. In the fall, I entered the University of Iowa, which may seem a strange choice for a Jew(ish) New Yorker, but with my academic record the possibilities were not limitless. Harvard was not holding its breath and Iowa did boast the Writers’ Workshop, the foremost place in the world to study guess what. I did meet New Yorkers in Iowa who didn’t care for the place, thought it too remote, too provincial, were put off by the food, etc., but I was not among them.

  Iowa was my chance to start over, and I did well there, almost from the beginning. I wasn’t always or particularly a great student, but I did find a niche for myself, friends, and a measure of success. In the theater and film departments I met other people who were like me, and, as no one knew of my previous existence, I was approached with no particular prejudice. Since I had few preconceived ideas of my own, I was a blank slate on which there was room to write a great deal.

  I don’t think I’d been in Iowa City a month when a vacancy for a film reviewer occurred at the Daily Iowan, the school paper, and I landed the job. The paper didn’t care about such things as film criticism, being preoccupied with sports, student politics, and the war in Vietnam (wherever that was), but I viewed the position as nothing less than a heaven-sent opportunity. I seized hold of that post in an iron grip and never let it go—for the next four years. Before my arrival, reviewers covered one or two movies before irate letters to the editor drove them figuratively out of town. With a thicker skin and a surprising instinct for the long-term possibilities of the post, I stuck it out and gradually the hostility dissipated. In four years I wrote four hundred reviews—averaging three a week—and had what was said to be the most popular column in the Big Ten newspapers. I remained in Iowa City even during the summers for fear of forfeiting the position. It was the beginning of the making of me. I got to air my opinions about film or anything else that was suggested to me by what I was watching. I experimented with my own aesthetic theories and enunciated my philosophical musings as they seemed relevant to whatever Paramount was releasing that week. I had a bully pulpit, and for once there was an audience ready to listen to what I had to say. They didn’t always agree, but they got used to the idea of me.

  I don’t know if this is true for anyone else, but I can dissect my life in terms of conscious and unconscious goals. I seem to have had one of each. My conscious goal was to be an actor, an occupation that made a kind of inevitable sense, given my fragmented identity, lack of self-esteem, and other random personality disorders. If I can’t be the King, let me play the King. Writing, on the other hand, was just something I always did; it never occurred to me to become a writer or that a writer was what I wished to become. Without actually denigrating my gifts in that direction (this would come later), I never gave them much thought.

  Writing must therefore have been my unconscious goal; later, directing proved to be a bit of both. For starters, until I became an actor, I don’t think I actually knew what a director did. It wasn’t until I heard one shouting at me while he was comfortably nursing a cup of coffee in one of the orchestra seats that it occurred to me I was in the wrong line of work. Directors got to watch and criticize. And they were brought the coffee. More seriously, I think I had trouble acting because I thought I knew—more than the director—how scenes should be played.

  I had a new career goal.

  I wrote my first full-length screenplay at Iowa. I had read and been knocked out by a Jack Finney novel called Assault on a Queen. It was about a scheme to hijack the Queen Mary, of all things, and I was riveted from first page to last. What an amazing film this would make! I didn’t have the rights, of course, but this never troubled me, as I knew my script would never be bought or filmed—it was simply the experience, the exercise, and the challenge of adapting the book, which, to my way of thinking, was absurdly simple. I didn’t know anything about the format of screenplays (far fewer were published then than now), but I started with page l of Finney’s novel, boiled it down into what I thought it should read like as a screenplay, and then went on to page 2, and so forth through the entire book. The result, I decided, was not bad. I telescoped here and there, tightened the dialogue a lot, and dispensed with a character or two, but I faithfully followed Finney’s ingenious plot and preserved, it seemed to me, the narrative excitement of the book, albeit my Smith Corona had a lot of Wite-Out clinging to the keys by the time it was finished.

  Two years later I found myself reviewing Hollywood’s version of Assault on a Queen, which starred Frank Sinatra and Virna Lisi and had a screenplay credited to Rod Serling.

  Everyone agreed it was about the worst film of the year. I sat in the theater, stunned by what seemed to me to be the arbitrary and utterly perverse departures from the novel that the film had made. I was unable to account for why the filmmakers (I had never heard of the director) had taken a perfectly serviceable, not to say ingenious plot and made it all-over dumb. I never did find out for sure but I feel fairly certain that Mr. Sinatra had a lot of ideas that wouldn’t go away—unless he did. The six-hundred-pound gorilla sleeps where he wants.

  The last thing worth mentioning in this brief account of my Iowa years was my first, glancing encounter with Star Trek. I had made friends with two New Yorkers from the Bronx, a husb
and and wife, both in graduate school. She was in the workshop and he was getting a PhD in American Indian studies. He was, among other things, a terrific pianist and also addicted to the Star Trek television series, then being broadcast daily in Iowa City. My friend watched Star Trek daily, for fifty-four days, at the end of which time his wife left him. A couple of times I tried to watch along with him. For whatever reason, Star Trek flew by me at Warp Speed. I think there is something “earthbound” in my temperament, a kind of flat-footed literalness that made me concentrate on the cheesy sets and silly costumes—to say nothing of the pointy ears—a lack of sympathetic imagination, if you will, the absence of which might have allowed me to dispense with all that literalness and open myself to what was going on underneath all that cardboard.

  PARAMOUNT PICTURES

  Following Iowa, I faced the the choice of heading east or west to continue my life, and I chose to go back to New York. I had never heard anything good about Los Angeles and knew no one there, so my hometown seemed a more sensible possibility.

  I landed a job in the publicity department of Paramount Pictures, then located in picturesque Times Square, i.e., before its Disneyfication, when you had to run the gantlet of unhappy-looking ladies on your way to work. (They were already at work.) I didn’t actually know what a publicist did but that seemed beside the point; it was a job and it was vaguely connected with the movie business. I had joined the circus at last. Sort of.

  The old Paramount Pictures building was a massive stone affair with gorgeous elevators whose gold-paneled doors were crafted in some eerie echo of Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise in Florence. There’s plenty of irony in Hollywood, but no one ever gets it—which is also ironic, I guess. The older I become, the more I decide that irony is generally a cheap shot, anyway.

  In any event, those gorgeous doors didn’t open onto Paradise, or anything like it, not if you hit the eleventh-floor button. They opened onto something called the Snake Pit, a huge area with a two-story ceiling subdivided at the floor level by translucent cubicle walls with little desks within each cubicle. There were no windows anywhere and the lighting was atrocious. Why this dismal arrangement should have gained the name Snake Pit I am at a loss to explain, but somehow it fit.

  It was here that the publicity department toiled away, doing—what? With my limited powers of observation and even more limited gifts of analysis, it was almost impossible for me to figure out. I knew what my job was (sort of), and I knew my boss.

  His name was Bill Schwartz and he kept a pencil over one ear, the tip jutting past his right eye as though it was a permanent feature of his physiog nomy. He was cynical but not bitter, or perhaps it was the other way around, but this certainly was not the life he’d planned as a graduate of CCNY. He was a decent man, highly intelligent, and he wrote novels that didn’t get published.

  On the other hand, he did know how to write a simple declarative sentence, a skill that I had apparently failed to master during four years at the University of Iowa.

  My job was a curious one. It was to write “press kits” for each Paramount film, these “kits” to contain a synopsis of the film’s plot (in case the viewer couldn’t follow it?—actually I discovered this failure was far from uncommon), production “notes,” assorted biographies of the stars, writer, director, producer, etc., plus various “human interest” articles, anecdotal items regarding alleged incidents that took place during the production that newspapers might use for column fillers. (These fillers were always lies and were interchangeable: simply substitute the title of the film you wished to promote and keep the anecdote as is. The one that sticks in my mind dealt with a pesky tourist, who insisted on photographing the actors on the set of movie “X”—change title here, ad lib—until an assistant director explained that his color shots would be useless, as this was a black and white picture. Great, huh?)

  Actually, writing “press kits” was not my job. In fact, these “kits” had already been written in Hollywood (a place somewhere to the left of me as I faced the Harlem River), but they had been composed in “Hollywoodese,” a separate argot, untranslatable to the layman. If you don’t believe me, try reading Variety sometime and see if you can understand what they are talking about.

  My job was essentially that of translator, taking the Hollywoodese version of the press kit and rendering it into normal English. I would take phrases like “The Walter Matthau-Jack Lemmon starrer” and reconfigure it as “The film, which stars Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon . . .” and so on. There was little room for improvisation, either. Billing was always in contractual order and repeated ad nauseam. When the film’s title changed, every piece of paper in the kit had to be retyped and rephotocopied. This was before the days of computers, and we chopped down an awful lot of trees for no good reason. One film—a picture that actually interested me—started out being called Fräulein Doktor. Then someone somewhere decided it should be called Betrayal. Then they decided to call it The Betrayal. Then they called it something else and then they went back to Fräulein Doktor. It did no business under any of these titles but we had to change the press kits no one was interested in every time.

  One would have thought I could do this stuff with my eyes closed. Hadn’t I written those four hundred film reviews, hadn’t my column been judged (where I can’t remember) the most popular in the Big Ten newspapers? Wasn’t I then and therefore about to be a Big Asset to Paramount Pictures?

  But my inflated sense of brain got the better of me, as did my stash of cinematic lore and my sense of mission, the certainty that I was about to change forever this mundane job into something that every newspaper editor from here to Omaha would cherish when our press kits crossed his desk.

  After I had finished a piece I’d turn it into Bill for his okay. I can still remember the blank astonishment with which I viewed my copy when he first returned it to me. The text, so erudite and witty, so knowledgeable and insightful, was scored all over with heavy black pencil. Where had all my scintillation gone? All the adjectives, adverbs, fun or arcane phrases had bit the dust. There was virtually nothing left.

  When I had the temerity to protest this butchery, I was told bluntly, “Look, this isn’t film school. Just write a simple declarative sentence, why can’t you, and stick to The New York Times copy style book.”

  It was months before I learned how to do this. I am not a fast learner, but I do learn thoroughly, if anyone is still speaking to me by the time the process is concluded.

  During this period, Paramount made a number of terrific films, all of them for about two million dollars each. Lindsay Anderson’s If. . . . , Franco Zeffirelli’s version of Romeo and Juliet, Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool, Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War, and Larry Peerce’s Goodbye, Columbus were among them. They were good films or interesting or intelligent and it was fun to work on them. It is hard to imagine a studio making such a varied and ambitious slate of films today when each movie has the budget of a small country.

  In my spare time I continued trying to write screenplays and using the Paramount photocopying facilities to assist me.

  “Remember,” Schwartz would intone, solemnly tapping me on the shoulder when he passed my desk and caught me at it. “Everything you do here belongs to Paramount.” I never caught him working on any of his novels, although he had a door to his office, whereas I didn’t even have a cubicle but sat in the center of the Snake Pit, my life exposed for all to see.

  The Paramount staff were an interesting crew and included old Adolph Zukor himself, the founder of Paramount Pictures, who, at one hundred years of age, was still shuffling along the corridors of the eleventh floor in short white shirtsleeves, carrying bundles of paper that no one but he knew anything about. One intuited the old man must have been a tiger, but now his comings and goings were ignored, or at best viewed with a patronizing tolerance by the young wheeler-dealers who rushed past him in the halls.

  “Good morning, Mr. Zukor,” Charlie Bluhdorn would say, without p
ausing for an answer, which was just as well because Zukor turned to me, who happened to be walking next to him at the time and asked who that man was. I told him I didn’t know.

  One of the folks in our department creatively suggested in a meeting that we have Otto Preminger slugged at Kennedy Airport when he got off the plane by way of promoting his latest turkey, something called Skidoo.

  That was one of his better ideas, but it made my eyes pop.

  Another trick we had was getting books Paramount owned onto the bestseller lists. In those good old days all the people who worked in the building were presented with fifty dollars cash to take with them to various bookstores on their lunch hour. We were to purchase ten copies each of The Godfather, or whatever else we were pushing that week, at these emporia. As to what we did with the books themselves, that was our business. Chuck ’em in the garbage, if we wanted. (Paramount was not unique in this activity; later, working at Warner Brothers, I can recall everyone being sent out to purchase copies of Summer of ’42, with similar results.)

  Nowadays, of course, such a dreadful piece of manipulation could never occur.

  We had our own Sammy Glick too, a kid from Fordham with insane blue eyes that looked at you but saw something else. He had spent some time in a monastery, and I knew for a certainty he was off his chump. In the Snake Pit it was passed off as Ambition and therefore regarded as harmless.

  There was also Winifred Gibbons, the office beauty, an English girl a year or three older than myself with a delicious Oxbridge accent and a lot of jewelry that jangled teasingly whenever she moved. She specialized in organizing our society and charity benefits and was, as you might expect, hotly pursued by a lot of high-powered executives, none of whom ever entered the Snake Pit, but one of them sent her a dozen roses every day. I was crazy about her.