The Seven-Per-Cent Solution stayed on the Times list for forty weeks, making it the third-best-selling novel of the year, behind Jaws and Michener’s Centennial.
All in all 1974 was a banner year for me. Although the rest of the country was in the grip of a depression, with people being thrown out of work, the oil embargo, and lines around the block for gasoline, my second TV movie, a fictionalized account of the notorious 1938 Orson Welles radio adaptation of War of the Worlds and the havoc it caused, was aired around Halloween. I had titled it The Night the Martians Landed but CBS in its infinite wisdom had renamed it The Night That Panicked America. Whatever the title, I was certainly having a run of luck. The film even won a prize at the Monte Carlo Television Festival. (The Monte Carlo Television Festival???)
Tom Pollock told me I must buy a house. There was a need to invest the money.
“What money?” I demanded. I hadn’t yet seen a penny.
“Trust me, Nick, there’s going to be a lot of it.”
And there was, too. I bought a small house, again in Laurel Canyon, and there too I was fortunate. I found myself the proud owner of the best two-person home in LA—complete with obligatory swimming pool—tucked discretely into the hills on a piece of uncharacteristically level ground, not subject to mudslides on or off. (Earthquakes and fires were another matter.)
In early 1975 I was sent to publicize the book in England, where it was serialized in the tabloids (shades of Dickens!) and where it received the Gold Dagger Award from the British Crime Writers’ Association. I was on radio. I was on TV. I was on a roll. My kid agent, Kevin Sellers, sold the film rights to his mother, a producer named Arlene Sellers. Other agents at IFA criticized the deal he made, pointing out all the things wrong with it—chiefly that it should have been for a larger sum of money—but I thought they missed the point. No one else had liked or worked on selling the book at all.
The deal was made with the stipulation that I write the screenplay, which I did, under the aegis of Herb Ross, who was to direct it. Writing the screenplay of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was an interesting experience. Ross largely left me to my own devices. I included too many speeches, as usual (it would be years before I could figure out the screenplay thing), but I made good use of the opportunity to improve on what I considered the novel’s defects, chiefly, the mystery Holmes and Freud are called upon to solve once Freud has cured Holmes of his drug habit. I was quite prepared to be ruthless and even eliminated the tennis scene between Freud and the villain, Baron Von Leinsdorf. At this point Ross dug in his heels. “Eliminate the tennis scene? No way.”
“But it’s not germane,” I countered. “You want the audience to sit still in a movie while two guys play tennis? Unless you got a guy planting an incriminating cigarette lighter on an island”—a reference to Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, which did have a tennis game/cigarette lighter in it—“people will be bored.”
“But it’s a favorite scene from the book,” Ross insisted. “We have to have it.” That struck me as an odd rationale, but I yielded. Herb had great respect for the material, and I was frequently begging him to cut stuff—even in the editing room—while he kept defending my work. “You’re de-balling your own script,” he’d say. He also had the habit of ending sentences with the phrase, “Do you know what I mean?” which, while rhetorically irritating, I admit I found hard to resist, even when I didn’t know what he meant. During one of our exchanges, I conceded something along these lines, saying, in effect, “You’re the expert, I’m just the—” “No, no,” he countered, “you can’t get away with that. You’re in the big leagues now; you can’t go on pretending to be the kid. You have to fight for what your gut tells you.”
Herb Ross’s interest in my views was not limited to my contributions as writer of the novel and screenplay; he sought my opinion on other matters, including casting. I suggested Peter O’Toole as Holmes, a seemingly inevitable role for the tall, lanky Brit, but he and Herb had not had a good working relationship on the musical version of Goodbye, Mr. Chips. When I heard that Robert Duvall was interested in playing Watson, I sparked to the idea. In the novel, I tried hard to emphasize a revisionist doctor, not the bumbler offered by Nigel Bruce. Our aim was to get audiences to look at these people afresh, and what could be fresher than Robert Duvall as Dr. Watson? But can he do an English accent? wondered Herb.
Herb Ross, formerly a choreographer, was married to Nora Kaye, the greatest dramatic ballerina this country had ever produced, and he never made a move without her. Kaye had been a devastatingly powerful and dynamic dancer, and when she opened her mouth, Lower East Side New Yawk came out, and with it a shrewd intelligence. On the day Duvall came to meet with us (stars do not audition, they “meet”), Herb and Nora had been feuding on the phone, hanging up on each other all morning. Duvall was also up for the role of Woody Guthrie in the forthcoming Bound for Glory and to our consternation he arrived in character—as Woody Guthrie. Herb and I glanced at each other, bewildered, as Duvall conversed in his Oakie twang. After fifteen or twenty minutes, he rose to leave and then, as a seeming afterthought, produced an audiocassette. “I brung you this so’s you kin hear me talk like Dr. Watson,” he explained before departing.
Wouldn’t you know, there was no cassette player around for love or money, except one in someone’s BMW, parked outside Herb’s office. The next thing, eight of us had crammed into that car like clowns in a circus and listened to Duvall’s impeccable Oxbridge. “He can do it!” I exclaimed, vindicated.
Not so fast. Herb had to play the tape for Nora. In due course a cassette player was found and he held it to the office phone and prefaced playing it by saying, “Nora, listen to this. Can you tell this man isn’t English?”
In light of their recent spat that was all the opening she needed. On the extension, I could hear her: “Hoibert—is dat Mel Brooks? You wanna trow de pichure in the terlit, just youse dat poison, whatever. Don’t take my woid for it,” she went on. “Ask an English poison. Ask Sam.”
Herb hung up the phone, devastated. Me, too. I could see my actor getting away. . . . “Sam” turned out to be the Rosses’ friend, actress Samantha Eggar (who would later play Mrs. Watson in the movie). Herb followed Nora’s instructions and, with the same preface, played the tape for Eggar, who hesitated as I held my breath on the extension again. “Well, it’s awfully good,” she acknowledged carefully, “but he’s trying too hard, isn’t he?”
Damn. Now Herb was really spooked. “Can we call one other English person?” I begged. “And this time, can I ask the question?”
We found a British secretary in the office of a studio executive—having a British secretary is considered el swell out here—and I said to her, “We’re having a debate over whether this person is Australian or South African. Can you tell us?” My knuckles were white on the receiver as Herb played the damn cassette again.
“Oh,” she corrected, “neither. That’s BBC English. That’s an Englishman.” Which is how Duvall became Dr. Watson.
Later, Herb asked me what I thought of getting Laurence Olivier to play Professor Moriarty. It took all my self-control to pretend this was a regular question. Laurence Olivier, my childhood idol, he who had introduced me to Shakespeare, whose movies Hamlet, Richard III, Henry V, Wuthering Heights, and The Beggar’s Opera I had sat through a million times. Olivier, whom I had seen in Becket on Broadway—the English Brando.
“Sounds good to me,” I managed.
In the months that followed, I couldn’t imagine this ever coming to fruition. We wouldn’t be able to make a deal. He wouldn’t live to play the part. I wouldn’t live to see him play the part. He’d live and I’d live but we’d never meet. . . . But we made the deal and Olivier lived. I lived . . . and we met.
I had experienced life’s casual cruelties. My mother’s excruciating and pointless early death, my isolated and unsuccessful high school years—but just as randomly, life can be kind. At the Pinewood Studios in 1975, I was introduced to the Great Man
.
“Did he really take cocaine?” Olivier asked, regarding Holmes. When I assured him this was the case, he smiled. “I don’t think my father let me read that one.”
Taking a breath, I told him of a letter I’d written him after seeing his filmed production of Three Sisters, in which, after thanking him for having brought so much happiness into my life, I’d explained I was trying to be a writer and offered, by way of small recompense, to send him a copy of the book I’d written when it came out, the book he was now filming.
He had no recollection and yet he’d sent me a very kind (now framed) letter of acknowledgment. He was on the film for three days, during which I lunched with him and watched his acting very carefully. When it came time for his close-up as the evil professor during one of Holmes’s cocaine-induced hallucinations, he said, “I shall do my Richard the Third face . . .” and he did, too. I might as well have been in heaven.
But I was also in school. While working film sets are normally boring to visitors after the first half hour—it seems that nothing is being accomplished—for me, an aspiring director, it was endlessly instructive to watch the filming of my script. What might appear to the casual observer as long periods of wasteful inactivity, more closely scrutinized, revealed a pattern of industrious efficiency. I got to watch the masterful sets of the great Ken Adam (designer of the James Bond films and the extraordinary Barry Lyndon), lit by the equally celebrated cinematographer Oswald Morris (a favorite of John Huston, Morris photographed the pioneering color advances of the original Moulin Rouge, mimicking the palette of its subject, Toulouse-Lautrec, as well such crowd pleasers as Oliver! and The Man Who Would Be King).
I got to watch Herb Ross work with his actors and tried to learn from their interaction. Ross was patient but most of all—crucial for a film director—he was observant. And he was good with actors, not always the case with film directors, who, increasingly, have devolved into technicians. Ross knew how to give actors their time and space. He knew when to speak and when to stay silent, letting them make their own discoveries.
And I got to watch dailies, or rushes, those snippets of the previous day’s work. Dailies have been described as sentences in a book that hasn’t been written yet. (Editing is the process of stringing together those sentences.) In the dailies of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, one could evaluate the work of Morris and Adam, but also glimpse the performances of such celebrated actors as Nicol Williamson and Alan Arkin (Holmes and Freud, respectively). I say “glimpse” because what you are witnessing in dailies is slivers of performances, not the totality such as you’d see on a live stage.
While Alan Arkin took more takes to figure out how to play the role, it was evident that both actors were at the top of their game. More problematic was Robert Duvall, whom I had hectored Herb Ross into hiring, despite his misgivings on the fateful day of our meeting him. Watching Duvall’s work, piecemeal, I despaired. The actor was doing nothing, merely standing there, saying his lines.
“Can’t you ootz ootz him?” I implored Ross. “He’s not doing a thing.” Herb acknowledged the problem and tried to approach Duvall, who scoffed testily, “What do you want me to do?” and made a serious of exaggerated grimaces. We were going to have to live with what we’d got.
In the end, Duvall almost steals the movie. What we took to be his static performance, once stitched together, revealed itself to be the most sophisticated film acting. Duvall understood, better than most, how his performance would come together in the cutting room, how gestures so tiny they could not be perceived with the naked eye or indeed in the dailies, once combined, would deliver the cumulative punch. The closer the camera came, the less he knew he needed to do.
Looking at dailies turns out to be an art in itself.
At this time, I was being importuned by my publisher, E. P. Dutton, for a second Holmes novel, a request that threw me into some confusion. I well understood their reasoning while at the same time I worried that I would, by repeating myself, do the one thing that as a writer—and filmmaker—I had always vowed to avoid. Two conversations served to change my mind. The first occurred in San Francisco at the home of Francis Ford Coppola, where I found myself having dinner one night with the director and his large family. I had the opportunity to ask Coppola why he had chosen to make the second Godfather movie, which he had filmed the year before.
“Three reasons,” Coppola told me, serving up pasta he had cooked for about twenty people on a Saturday night. “In no special order, I was offered a great deal of money; secondly, I was curious to see if I could mine the same vein for more material, and lastly, there were elements of the first movie—chiefly a pervasive amorality—which troubled me and I saw in the chance to make another film over which I would arguably have more control, an opportunity to address what I considered this serious defect.”
Two days later, in Los Angeles, Godfather II won a boatload of Oscars, including Best Picture of the Year and Best Director.
The second conversation took place with another director, Ulu Grosbard, in Los Angeles. We were on a soundstage, standing in a buffet line at a wrap party for some film I’ve forgotten, when I posed the question of a sequel to my book to Grosbard.
“Do it,” he told me. “It gives you ‘fuck you’ money.”
“Meaning?”
“It buys you the right to fail. Our business is very problematic,” he elaborated. “You can have hits, you can have flops, you can be hot, you can be cold. It’s good to make money when you can; it’s something for a rainy day and it buys you the opportunity to take chances on material whose commercial prospects might otherwise scare you off.”
Coppola’s and Grosbard’s arguments carried the day and I went back to the Holmes well.
In 1976, I published my second Sherlock Holmes pastiche, The West End Horror, in which Holmes solves a grisly case in London’s theater district, crossing paths with the likes of Oscar Wilde, Gilbert and Sullivan, George Bernard Shaw, and Bram Stoker. Though it lacked the surprise engendered by its predecessor, and though it was not a story about Sherlock Holmes (rather, a Sherlock Holmes story), it gave me considerable pleasure, especially as I found the actual mystery superior to the one in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, and creating good mysteries is not normally one of my strengths. I also thought my characterizations of Wilde et al. were pretty good and I was proud of the fact that all the real people Holmes encounters were doing what they were actually doing in the first week of March 1895. Like Seven, The West End Horror became a bestseller, remaining on the Times list for three months. I had definitely arrived.
To top off my heady year, I found myself nominated for an Academy Award for the screenplay of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. I don’t much hold with prizes for art, and Oscars seem especially spurious. If you want to know who the best actor is, let them all play Hamlet. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense.
Unless you get the nomination, of course. Then it’s dead serious. I lost to William Goldman for All The President’s Men and griped (to anyone who’d listen) that at least I’d generated my own source material and hadn’t had to rely on Dick Nixon!
This was all fun. I was making a living making movies, my childhood dream. I was vaguely respectable. . . .
It was all too simple. All I needed to do was keep writing Holmes stories. Ulu Grosbard’s advice had one, hidden pitfall. You could always rationalize repeating yourself with the idea that you were putting money away for yet another rainy day. Do it often enough and you’d get out of the habit of taking chances. I didn’t know if I was an artist but I knew for sure what a hack was: someone who finds something they’re good at and keeps doing it over and over. My ambitions may have exceeded my abilities, but I wasn’t prepared to keep writing Holmes stories.
PART 2
TREK
TIME AFTER TIME
My directing debut came in 1979 with a film I wrote called Time After Time. The film was based on a then-incomplete novel by an acquaintance of mine, Karl Alexander, whom I ha
d known from the playwrights’ workshop at the University of Iowa. His time travel idea of H. G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper to present-day San Francisco greatly appealed to me. I wished I’d had the idea myself but knew perfectly well that I wouldn’t have dreamt it up—or anything like it—in a million years. I’m also a slow thinker so it was a couple of months after reading Karl’s sixty-five pages that I woke up with my brainstorm: If you like the thing so much, how come you don’t option the rights and write the screenplay yourself ? Among other things, a film based on Karl’s conceit would involve merely two men pursuing one another through an alien landscape—alien to them, not the audience, meaning our production would be cheap. I would need only two Victorian costumes, and most of the special effects would be in the minds of the viewers, now forced to view our own society from the perspective of Martians, albeit Victorian ones.
I felt this was the sort of project a studio might permit me to direct. I had been biding my time for this moment, slowly building up my credibility around town with produced television movies and my (entirely fortuitous) Oscar nomination. The iron was hot; it was time to strike. I optioned Karl’s story with my own money and wrote the screenplay in a week. This figure, however, is deceptive. When folks ask how long it takes to write something, they never—I never—include how much mental work precedes the physical act of writing. Most of my writing takes place before I actually put pen to paper. In the case of Time After Time, I had lain awake for months contemplating Karl’s clever conceit and how I’d make it into a movie if only I’d thought of it, before the penny dropped and I came up with the notion of optioning the thing. I thought a lot about Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphavillle, a sci-fi movie I had reviewed in college, where all the props are ordinary items with extraordinary names. A book, for example, might be termed “an information container” and so forth. I didn’t remember much of the Godard film except for this ingenious and provocative gimmick. When my script was finished I showed it to a producer friend of mine, Herb Jaffe, with whom I had always wanted to work. Jaffe was known throughout the business as a gent, which doesn’t begin to do him justice. He was among the legion of people I’d met as a stranger in town who had befriended me—just as Walter Mirisch later reminded me in the aftermath of Verna Fields’s funeral. Herb loved the script and was undaunted by the condition of my directing it, and slowly evolved into one of those father figures who seem to play such important roles in my life. In addition, his younger son, Steven-Charles, who coproduced the film, became my close friend and ultimately my producing partner. With Herb as my very reputable producer, another part of my “plausibility campaign” with the studios to direct was in place.
The View from the Bridge Page 6
