by Berger, Glen
We were off to just a fantastic start.
A couple of decades ago, when I worked as a temp, I was sent to work the register at a florist’s shop for the day and, within an hour, I had somehow wound up with my arms around a voluptuous young Brazilian woman. I was giving her dancing lessons, in fact, when suddenly her fiery, jealous lover burst through the door. As I desperately tried to defuse the situation, a snickering camera crew came out from the back room and informed me I had just been filmed for the New Candid Camera.
That was the memory that came to me as I sat with Roberto in that coffeehouse. Because I was feeling more and more like the unwitting subject of a never-ending Candid Camera episode produced by Franz Kafka. Somehow I convinced Roberto that I hadn’t been canned. And Roberto insisted he had no ego invested in the project—he didn’t even anticipate his name showing up in the program. I said I would send him the latest structure, and we’d all have a chat about it. And as we left the coffeehouse I said, “And listen, man. Any problems—just call me. Communication on this show has been sucky, and it would be great if that started improving.” Roberto said he heard me.
An hour later, Michael was yelling at me on the phone. “I told you to talk with him! To find a way to collaborate!”
“What? WhadIdo?!”
Michael said he just received an angry call from Roberto’s agent.
“You told Roberto he’d be your errand boy?!”
“What?! I didn’t say that!”
“You said someone needed to be the runner. Go out on coffee runs.”
“Coffee runs?!” I’m losing my mind. Wait—“I did say ‘show-runner,’ but—”
“So you did say it!”
“Michael! That’s completely different! A showrunner is like the head writer, it’s—”
“Glen—”
None of this boded well.
“Michael, now that we’re on the subject of ‘head writer,’ who is the head writer now?”
“There’s no head writer. You’re collaborators. Work together.”
“Well yeah, but . . . even if we agree practically all the time, there still has to be one person who—”
“Phil. Everyone answers to Phil.”
But Phil McKinley isn’t a writer. Seriously, none of this boded well.
Two years before getting the Spider-Man gig, I wrote a musical that was based on The Tempest. Only, in my version, it was revealed that the “treacherous” Antonio character was actually the one wronged by the imperious Prospero character.
So Julie made a Tempest making the male Prospero a sympathetic female. I made a Tempest sympathetic to the betrayer. And Roberto? He too wrote a play based on The Tempest. It’s called Rough Magic, and Prospero is the villain. And the hero of the play? Melanie Porter. She’s a dramaturge. A script doctor. And she has magical powers.
“The work in process becomes the poet’s fate.” The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad put an arachnid spin on the same idea: “We are like the spider—we weave our life and then move along in it.”
The hero was a magical script doctor—I didn’t even want to contemplate how that boded for my collaboration with Roberto. But Michael’s sudden silence regarding Jim Millan meant he didn’t want to recommit to the Canadian (who would have been a valuable ally). I informed my agent.
She wrote back a three-word e-mail: “Gather your troops.”
This was getting ridiculous. These weren’t the Napoleonic Wars. I made a vow to Michael Cohl, and told him that if everyone made the same vow, we were going to be all right. I promised him that until opening night I would remain:
Sane.
Collaborative.
And competent.
Though, frankly, I wasn’t sure I was capable of sticking to such a promise.
17
* * *
Mutate or Die
So what shall we call the fight between Arachne and Peter? “Last Dance of the Spiders”?
Oh—no—it has to be a tarantella!
A tarantella?
A tarantella! Like Captain Hook in Peter Pan!
I woke up vomiting. It was March 13, 2011. And I had all the symptoms of tarantism except one. In 1370, near the town of Taranto, the first case was recorded. Believed to be caused by the bite of the tarantula, tarantism’s symptoms include vomiting, exhaustion, palpitations, involuntary erections, shameless exhibitionism, acute melancholia, and delirium. I was now experiencing all of these symptoms. Except shameless exhibitionism, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had suddenly gotten the urge to strum on a guitar in my underpants next to that Times Square cowboy. Perhaps having one’s name in ten-foot-tall letters on a billboard in Times Square would count as shameless exhibitionism. But on March 13, I felt so much shame seeing my name up there, I was probably in the clear.
I had been away from my wife and children for seven months. Friends and colleagues had either stormed away from the production, been ditched by the producers, or were in a confused torpor. It was said of tarantism that even the intoxication from alcohol couldn’t bring relief. The only cure (it was said) was music and dancing, which had to be “prolonged and strenuous.” And this was the origin of the tarantella, a galloping dance in 6/8 time—the dance Julie wanted for the end of the show. Arachnologists have now concluded that it wasn’t, in fact, the tarantula that was responsible for the symptoms of tarantism. Rather, it was the malmignatte—a Mediterranean black widow—one of several spider species featuring a female that devours any mates not nimble enough to get away from her after collaborating on a creative endeavor.
Julie Taymor—as Riedel reported—“is said to be hellbent on vengeance.” And in another article he wrote that Julie was “now threatening that if she is forced to go, she’ll take her script with her.” This, of course, would bring down the production.
“Can she do that, Joyce?” I asked my agent.
“Well . . . possibly.”
A month earlier, Joyce explained to me how the typical Dramatists Guild–approved contract worked regarding “approvals” in a musical: In a dispute, all of the “authors” of the musical have a vote—not just the bookwriters, but the lyricists and the composers as well. So if Bono, Edge, and I were all in agreement, we, in theory, could overrule Julie. This seemed like handy information as a last resort, and with my ancient deal memo buried in a file cabinet upstate, I never bothered to confirm that the Spider-Man contract was essentially the same as a standard Guild contract.
It wasn’t.
Julie actually had exclusive approvals over everything in the script—both as the director, and also as the co-bookwriter. Plus—being an author meant she got to approve the selection of the director—which was suddenly no longer a redundant clause. For the first time, I understood why Michael had written a month before about Plan X leading to “lawyers and painful settlements.”
“But—Joyce—what does that mean? What happens if I keep working on a script that she doesn’t approve of?”
The answer was that it would get messy, because my contract also stipulated that I was compelled to fulfill any bookwriting duties as requested by the producers. So no matter what I did and whose stipulations I followed, I was breaking my contract.
But it got even messier. Because neither Julie nor I had actually signed our contracts. We signed “deal memos” years and years before, but the complicated final contracts were still in Lawyerland when rehearsals started, and then everyone got distracted, and then everything got weird, so final versions were never generated for signature. Which now gave Michael Cohl a few more ergs of leverage over both of the original bookwriters. Michael could put the fear in me anytime he wanted (and he did) simply by “innocently” asking, “Have you signed your contract yet?”
Never play poker with this guy.
I was sitting with Michael now—along with Jere and Phil McKinley—in a booth in the back of the Lambs Club. They invited me to this booth-meeting to make a few things clear. Firstly, my back-channel days were over. It was ti
me to get in line. Everything on my mind needed to be directed to Phil and only Phil, and Phil would disperse the information as he saw fit. This included all correspondence with Bono and Edge. No side talks with them.
They assured me that I shouldn’t feel like I was being singled out—new protocols were being put in place across the board. Every department was going to have one representative, and only that representative would present that department’s perspective to Phil. Talk between departments without Phil’s presence was going to be discouraged. There was going to be a tidy chain of command, rigorously enforced, and this would cut down on all the breakdowns of communication that occurred in the ancien régime.
I nodded into my glass of ice water. The wooziness, the clamminess, it was all coming back. They’ve just described a lovely recipe for dysfunction.
Secondly, “Glen, we want you to be open to new ideas.”
“Of course.”
Phil said that—just as an example—he may want to open the second act with the Chrysler Building and Goblin, with Spider-Man swinging in, and—
“But, Phil, the Tech for that would be—”
“Well that’s another thing, Glen,” interrupted Jere. They all wanted me to stick to my job description and stop worrying my pretty little head about Tech issues. They already had experts who would tell Phil what would or wouldn’t work, based on—
I had stopped listening.
Just before this meeting, my wife had called me, updating me on how life was going back home. It was all good. Except the basement had flooded, and our water heater was dead.
“It’s a shotgun wedding,” said Phil, “but I’m sure you and Roberto will find a—”
Yeah yeah, a “rhythm.” More words about Roberto needing his space to write; Roberto being owed the chance to get a feel for the material; Roberto having some good ideas—
My family has no water. I need to find a plumber.
“. . . and so once Roberto is finished with his pass of Act One, you’ll of course have plenty of opportunity for notes—”
Wait. Wha—
“Roberto’s going to take this week to write his Act One.”
“Oh—so should I start writing my Act One too? Because according to the schedule, the Act One is due at the end of the week, so maybe if we both wrote versions and then—”
Phil repeated what he just said, with a bit of testy emphasis.
“Roberto’s taking this week to write Act One.”
I wouldn’t find out for weeks that Roberto and Phil had already attended the show together. And that Phil, subsequently, made some decisions about what to do with the vestigial writer. But I could already tell where this was going, and if Phil went down that road, I was going to make everyone very miserable. I would pull at these pillars and bring this temple down on all of us. Already I could tell “Sane, collaborative, and competent” was going to be a heavy lift.
I dashed off an e-mail of concern and conciliation to Phil and he responded, “If I gave you the impression that you were not to write scenes then I’ve been misunderstood. I simply wanted to give Roberto an opportunity to catch up to the show.”
I was being played. But I’d deal with it. At least now I had it in writing from Phil that I’d be penning scenes. Phil also offered his opinion of Bono and Edge’s original music demos for the show that I sent him earlier in the day. Before hearing the demos, Phil had been expressing just how underwhelmed he was by our composers’ output. But he heard Edge’s GarageBand demos and got religion:
“I have to say, I feel like I’m hearing the music for this show for the very first time. It’s a beautiful score and the fact is we are not hearing it in any way, shape, or form based on these demos.”
There we go. If Phil can find a way to show off these songs to better effect, we’ll be golden.
An as-long-as-it-takes meeting to beat out the plot with Phil and his two bookwriters was scheduled for the next day. The script would change more in the next forty-eight hours than in the last four months. The last four years. Roberto wrote to his collaborators late that night, “As Stan Lee says, ‘Face front, true believers!’ ”
If Stan Lee was being quoted in e-mails, this really was a new team.
• • •
Phil had a lot of little-people stories. If the years Julie Taymor spent immersed in Indonesian culture were her lodestar for approaching art and life, Phil’s were the years he spent in the circus. To illustrate to Roberto and me the importance of staying flexible as we began the script process, he brought up the time he devised a procession for Ringling Bros. that was led by a little person followed by an elephant with a tiger balancing on the elephant’s back. Phil recounted that before he could implement this scenario, one of the trainers told Phil that the procession was a bad idea.
“But why?” asked Phil. “It’s a great image. You’ve got the contrast—the short midget, the big elephant—”
“Yeah,” said the trainer. “Except the tiger will see the midget as food.”
So Phil, being artistically flexible, decided not to do the little-person-elephant-tiger combo after all.
Nice parable. Point taken.
However, Phil’s story about the incident at a European circus in which a little person was accidentally swallowed by a hippopotamus was the most harrowing thing I had ever heard, with no apparent lesson to be gleaned other than you shouldn’t devise trampoline acts involving both trotting hippopotami and little people.
“He got a standing ovation, though,” Phil recounted. “The crowd didn’t realize that getting eaten wasn’t part of the act.”
Set pieces catching fire, husband-mauling bears—I found all these stories assuaging, as they seemed to suggest perhaps Michael and Jere had found the right creative consultant for Turn Off the Dark. What was needed most was someone who wasn’t easily daunted.
So Phil, Roberto, and I began the script meetings in a small room in the PRG offices, where Tony Adams once ran Hello, and where David Garfinkle still labored away on . . . stuff, at a desk hidden from view. Later in the day, we moved the discussions to Phil’s newly rented apartment. (Phil had temporarily relocated from Iowa for this job. He wore his Midwestern cred proudly.) After nine hours, we had dismantled and rebuilt all of Act One. It was all work I did just the week before with the Canadian, but with differences.
For one, the Geeks got the axe. Almost no aspect of the show had garnered quite as much scorn from the professional and amateur critics as the Geeks, and Roberto and Phil were positive they wouldn’t be missed. And now there was a chance to replace their scenes with character-deepening dialogue with, say, Uncle Ben or Mary Jane. Almost as importantly, cutting the Geeks would signal to the critics that we were serious about this overhaul. And the last strike against the Geeks: They were “principal performers,” so cutting them would save the production over a half-million dollars a year in salaries.
So four actors (including Alice Lee, who was hired to play Miss Arrow when T. V. Carpio became Arachne) were about to lose their jobs. After performing their roles over a hundred times, they were going to be sitting in the audience instead of taking a bow on opening night. (And actually, three of the four would end up deciding they had better things to do that night.) The stage-left area where they hung out during the show would become inaccessible—used as space for a large speaker instead. Peter Parker was going to sing “Bouncing Off the Walls” alone, instead of being accompanied by four spastic backup singers. And the actors’ dressing rooms—with their mood lighting, computer games, and shelves of comic books—would be converted into soulless prop-repair rooms.
The rest of the day in Phil’s apartment was spent using sentences like “I’m bumping on that plot point,” and “Yeah, I’m bumping on it too,” to express that an idea didn’t make sense yet. Television-writer-room speak.
Our mandate from Marvel and the producers was, yes, to “turn off the dark.” If the show was going to sell volumes of tickets, it needed to be family-friendly,
and that meant it needed to be accessible. Sunny. Phil took this mandate to heart, often literally. “Picture This” got its title and refrain temporarily changed to “Sunny Days.” And he wanted different makeup for Arachne—less kabuki, more . . . pretty. Peter Parker was going to lose his suspenders and start looking normal. Mary Jane’s father would no longer be an abusive drunk, just a muddled one.
And Phil wanted the violence in “Bullying by Numbers” toned down. “Frankly,” he reiterated later, “the more we can make this a number about kids having ‘fun’ bullying Peter, we’ll have a better launch to the show as opposed to beginning a show with a suicide, a beating, and two dysfunctional family arguments.” Lyrics like “We’ll burst your nose” got changed to “We’ll punch your nose.” Less graphic, I guess.
And lines like “Peter Peter beats his peter” were right out. It was a lyric currently sung in counterpoint by the high school girls. For teen cred, it couldn’t compete with Spring Awakening’s “Totally Fucked,” but at least it was something for the adolescents in the audience. But Phil wasn’t having it. He knew the Midwestern family of four was going to be our bread and butter, and he wanted them to feel safe.
“And the choreography where it looks like the bullies are jerking off? Come on. There’s no place for that in a family show like this.”
He had a point, and I wasn’t about to get on a pro-masturbation soapbox.
“And these lyrics by the bullies in ‘D.I.Y. World’?—‘Do yourself, yeah, do it to yourself ’? They’re out too.”
Geez—how much masturbation did we have in this show?
And most of all, to brighten the show, they wanted it clear from the top that MJ and Peter were into each other. Our leads should be kissing before the end of the first act. I rolled up my sleeves—the Canadian and I had already come to the opposite conclusion.
