Read Trials of the Monkey Online
Authors: Matthew Chapman
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Nonfiction, #Retail
Trials of the Monkey (33 page)
Victoria and I, and our two partners, Blaine Novak, whose original idea this was, and Doug Dilg, who was the physical producer, owned the company which made the film, and it was one
of those incandescent productions of which you dream for the rest of your career. Without pay, everyone worked tirelessly and well to produce something of which they could be proud. Several careers were founded on
Strangers Kiss,
and years after the film came out, Doug would send checks out at Christmas time according to our profits and everyone’s investment. Some people received checks for five dollars, some for five thousand. We were scrupulously honest.
of those incandescent productions of which you dream for the rest of your career. Without pay, everyone worked tirelessly and well to produce something of which they could be proud. Several careers were founded on
Strangers Kiss,
and years after the film came out, Doug would send checks out at Christmas time according to our profits and everyone’s investment. Some people received checks for five dollars, some for five thousand. We were scrupulously honest.
In the film, Victoria played the emotionally muted girlfriend of a Fifties gangster who finances a movie for her to act in, hoping it will bring her to life. But when it does, when she starts to enjoy the process, he becomes jealous and starts to intrude, holding back money and questioning her sadistically when she comes home. He sends someone down to the set to watch her—and finds she is having an affair with the lead actor. To everyone’s surprise, not least hers, the gangster forgives her and offers marriage. She takes pity on him and allows herself to be drawn back into the suffocating relationship.
Amusingly (though only in retrospect), she went on to play the part in real life, forcing me to play the sorry cuckold. She was offered a role in a comedy with Steve Martin. The movie was called
All of Me,
and there was a lot of rushing around with jars of cremated ashes, funny walks, and things like that.
All of Me,
and there was a lot of rushing around with jars of cremated ashes, funny walks, and things like that.
A few weeks into shooting, she came to me in the back room of our apartment where I was labouring on something no one would ever make and said, ‘I’ve fallen in love and I’m leaving you.’
‘Fallen in love with
who
?’ I asked, stunned. We had made love the day before and she had said, ‘That was so good.’
who
?’ I asked, stunned. We had made love the day before and she had said, ‘That was so good.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she replied and smiled involuntarily, as if embarrassed.
‘It matters to me,’ I insisted, and after a while she told me.
‘It’s Steve.’
‘Steve who?’
‘Steve Martin.’
‘You’re fucking kidding me,’ I said. But she wasn’t.
She packed quickly and left to go stay with friends.
That night I went to a wedding party. There were balloons. I wrote a note and tied it to one of them and let it go. The note said, ‘Help!’ and beneath it was my phone number.
No one called. I couldn’t believe what had happened and the irony of it did not escape me. I kept wandering around saying, ‘I can’t believe this,’ and ‘My God, in L.A. all the clichés do come true.’ Now when I drove around town I wore shades no matter how dark it was, so if she saw me she wouldn’t see the pain in my eyes. I did not behave well. Like most abandoned lovers, I could not allow myself to see the logic (logic!) of her choice. How could she leave
me
for Steve Martin?! A joke’s a joke, et cetera. Looking back on it, of course
I
was the joke, albeit a rather sad joke. How could she
not
leave a hard-drinking failure for a charming, clever, genuinely talented multimillionaire comedian? I had worn her out. She had stuck it as long as she could, trouper that she was, and then, with the same decisive swiftness with which she had left her previous husband, she left me. I have rarely seen her since.
me
for Steve Martin?! A joke’s a joke, et cetera. Looking back on it, of course
I
was the joke, albeit a rather sad joke. How could she
not
leave a hard-drinking failure for a charming, clever, genuinely talented multimillionaire comedian? I had worn her out. She had stuck it as long as she could, trouper that she was, and then, with the same decisive swiftness with which she had left her previous husband, she left me. I have rarely seen her since.
She and Steve got married. He wrote a role for her in his next movie. She played a ‘quirky English girl’ and wore hats. For some reason, no more roles were forthcoming from that source. Unless an actor writes his own movies, he or she isn’t working until someone offers them a job. As today’s ‘new talent’ steps off the plane at LAX, yesterday’s ‘new talent’ is suddenly and brutally ignored. The light of admiration dims, praise ceases to rain down. Unseen, the flower wilts.
For writers, it’s different. Writers can always work. The organism blooms in the dark.
Strangers Kiss
took me to numerous film festivals where I exploited my recent heartbreaking bachelorhood to the full, and then I started writing again. I wrote constantly, stopping only to drink, screw around, and exercise. There were car crashes, weird sexual encounters and even weirder love affairs, miscarriages, cocaine binges, fights, and many blackouts.
Strangers Kiss
took me to numerous film festivals where I exploited my recent heartbreaking bachelorhood to the full, and then I started writing again. I wrote constantly, stopping only to drink, screw around, and exercise. There were car crashes, weird sexual encounters and even weirder love affairs, miscarriages, cocaine binges, fights, and many blackouts.
After a year of this I was offered a movie to write and direct for Showtime, the cable company.
Slow Burn
was a novel based
on a true story about a kidnapping in Palm Springs. The producer was Joel Schumacher, who is now a big director. I spent two months in Palm Springs and could never find the beach. I was convinced there had to be one because why else would anyone endure that heat, but in the end I was persuaded there was no beach, just a bunch of senile golfers in search of the next hole. The movie starred Beverly D’Angelo, Eric Roberts, and a very young Johnny Depp. It was okay and did well. The writer of the book on which it was based hated what I had done so much that in his next book, he wrote in an English scriptwriter with short hair called Matthew. Matthew got killed in a manner so excruciating it made even the unsuperstitious me wince as I read it.
Slow Burn
was a novel based
on a true story about a kidnapping in Palm Springs. The producer was Joel Schumacher, who is now a big director. I spent two months in Palm Springs and could never find the beach. I was convinced there had to be one because why else would anyone endure that heat, but in the end I was persuaded there was no beach, just a bunch of senile golfers in search of the next hole. The movie starred Beverly D’Angelo, Eric Roberts, and a very young Johnny Depp. It was okay and did well. The writer of the book on which it was based hated what I had done so much that in his next book, he wrote in an English scriptwriter with short hair called Matthew. Matthew got killed in a manner so excruciating it made even the unsuperstitious me wince as I read it.
Next I wrote and directed
Heart of Midnight,
an independent movie for an eccentric Hungarian/Australian producer named Andrew Gaty. Andrew had distributed
Strangers Kiss
in Australia, where he had made a lot of money. Now he was in America to make a dangerous career switch. He was a stocky, powerfully built man with thinning hair, crazy eyes, and a broad smile. He was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel in possession of a terrible script which he flapped at me as we sat beside the pool in a cabana, I feeling rather self-conscious. After I’d read it and rejected it, he told me I could do what I liked with it so long as the location and the basic premise remained the same. I didn’t really want to do it, but Andrew was irresistible. The more I said no, the more insistent he became. His visions of our future together, founded on this single film, became increasingly optimistic and outlandish, as did his charm and humour. Rejection was the stone he honed himself on, and pretty soon, sharp as a razor now, he cut me loose from my good taste and reason. Aside from Andrew’s relentless and persuasive charm, Denise was pregnant with Anna Bella and I needed the money. I started to rewrite the script as we entered pre-production.
Heart of Midnight,
an independent movie for an eccentric Hungarian/Australian producer named Andrew Gaty. Andrew had distributed
Strangers Kiss
in Australia, where he had made a lot of money. Now he was in America to make a dangerous career switch. He was a stocky, powerfully built man with thinning hair, crazy eyes, and a broad smile. He was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel in possession of a terrible script which he flapped at me as we sat beside the pool in a cabana, I feeling rather self-conscious. After I’d read it and rejected it, he told me I could do what I liked with it so long as the location and the basic premise remained the same. I didn’t really want to do it, but Andrew was irresistible. The more I said no, the more insistent he became. His visions of our future together, founded on this single film, became increasingly optimistic and outlandish, as did his charm and humour. Rejection was the stone he honed himself on, and pretty soon, sharp as a razor now, he cut me loose from my good taste and reason. Aside from Andrew’s relentless and persuasive charm, Denise was pregnant with Anna Bella and I needed the money. I started to rewrite the script as we entered pre-production.
Eventually, I cast Jennifer Jason Leigh as the lead and she was everything I’d hoped for. I also had a production designer named Gene Rudolf who was exceptional. But I had written the script too fast and it walked an uncomfortable line between art and
exploitation. Andrew was so optimistic and determined he listened to no one and so miscalculated the budget that we were in the red before we began pre-production.
exploitation. Andrew was so optimistic and determined he listened to no one and so miscalculated the budget that we were in the red before we began pre-production.
We built the main set (a defunct sex club) in an abandoned town hall in Charleston, South Carolina. I went down a couple of weeks ahead of Andrew, who flew back and forth between New York, where he owned an apartment on Park Avenue, and L.A., where he was now engaged in all kinds of complex financial negotiations to do with foreign sales and distribution pickups, none of which I understood when he’d call me in the evenings. A couple of days before he was to join us permanently in the South, the line producer, the man who actually deals with the nuts and bolts of production, took me aside and said, ‘We’re several hundred thousand dollars over budget, but if you speak to Andrew, don’t tell him. I don’t want to undermine his confidence while he’s out there in L.A. trying to sell this thing.’
I had so much to think about myself, I merely shrugged. This couldn’t be true. How could a movie that was supposed to cost less than a million be ‘several hundred thousand’ over budget? Half an hour after Andrew arrived, I came out of my office and found him leaning against a wall, face buried in his arms, sobbing.
‘For God’s sake, Andrew,’ I said, ‘pull yourself together, people are watching.’
‘I’m ruined,’ he told me. And he was.
We managed to complete the movie, but, even beyond the fact that it was flawed, it was cursed. Companies went bankrupt around it. What little money it made never reached Andrew and he was forced to sell his Park Avenue apartment in New York and rent a smaller one in Los Angeles, where he remains.
Never use the word ‘heart’ in a movie title. It is a word begging for affection. Never use the word ‘midnight’ either because it begs to be found exotic when in fact it’s merely tired and sleazy. The combination of the two words was the kiss of death. I’m not saying this was our only problem, but I’m convinced it compounded all the others that
Heart of Midnight
had. I wanted to call it simply X, which would have been much better. The film,
which dealt with sexual perversity and violence, was gang-raped by the critics. As the father of the movie, I suffered more than I acknowledged at the time, partly because I knew they were right, it was not a good film. However, just because you have an ugly kid and
know
it doesn’t make it any easier to hear about it thirty times in a single week.
Heart of Midnight
had. I wanted to call it simply X, which would have been much better. The film,
which dealt with sexual perversity and violence, was gang-raped by the critics. As the father of the movie, I suffered more than I acknowledged at the time, partly because I knew they were right, it was not a good film. However, just because you have an ugly kid and
know
it doesn’t make it any easier to hear about it thirty times in a single week.
By the time the film came out, Anna Bella had been born and I wanted to stay home and watch her grow, at least for the first year. I decided to write a mainstream Hollywood movie and make some money.
I went out and pitched
Consenting Adults.
Consenting Adults.
Pitching is when you go out and tell a story to anyone who’ll listen and has money—studios, producers, actors with their own companies—and hope they’re sufficiently interested to pay you to write it. All writers do it differently. I’m told there are writers who go in and say, ‘A man and a woman! She’s got claustrophobia, he’s afraid of open space! They have to get from L.A. to Chicago!’ And get the deal. I’ve never been able to do this. My pitches last at least thirty minutes and are really an outline for a script.
I used not to be very good at this. One morning soon after I arrived in L.A., I found myself in one of those typically deceptive Hollywood offices—pine tables, fat white sofas and armchairs—pitching to a producer and his D-girl (the person who administers the development of material). I was about halfway through and explaining a particularly interesting point in the story when I saw the producer’s head start tilting toward the back of the sofa. He rested it there a moment and then his eyes began to glaze over and he fell asleep. I turned toward the D-girl and continued pitching. No deal.
With
Consenting Adults,
it looked as if no one would go for it, so I went home and started writing. Then a bright and aggressive man named Chip Diggins, who had heard the pitch, pushed it through at Hollywood Pictures (a now defunct division of Disney) and I got paid to finish it. I was lucky—at first. Everyone connected with the development of the script was smart and
creative and we had fun, which, of course, is often the key to good work.
Consenting Adults,
it looked as if no one would go for it, so I went home and started writing. Then a bright and aggressive man named Chip Diggins, who had heard the pitch, pushed it through at Hollywood Pictures (a now defunct division of Disney) and I got paid to finish it. I was lucky—at first. Everyone connected with the development of the script was smart and
creative and we had fun, which, of course, is often the key to good work.
The film got made with Kevin Kline and Kevin Spacey. The director was Alan Pakula, who was notorious for torturing writers, but I was happy to be tortured; the thing was getting made.
I liked Alan. He was a tall, grey-haired man, deliberately professorial and fundamentally a gentleman. I hoped, secretly, that he would become my mentor, something I had never had. This didn’t happen for various reasons, but I learned a few things from him nonetheless. ‘Everything is possible if you don’t panic,’ he would say, shutting the door on his line producer only days before shooting, ‘and nothing is possible if you do,’ he’d add, sitting down with me to start going over the ending for the fiftieth time.
He had started as a producer, producing among other things,
To Kill a Mockingbird
. As a director he had made such films as
All the President’s Men, Klute, and Sophie’s Choice.
He was married to a handsome society woman and author of popular historical books. The two of them knew everyone in New York from Arthur Miller to the Mayor. He could charm anyone into just about anything. He was a good craftsman and, usually, a great actors’ director. He was urbane and capable.
To Kill a Mockingbird
. As a director he had made such films as
All the President’s Men, Klute, and Sophie’s Choice.
He was married to a handsome society woman and author of popular historical books. The two of them knew everyone in New York from Arthur Miller to the Mayor. He could charm anyone into just about anything. He was a good craftsman and, usually, a great actors’ director. He was urbane and capable.
There was one thing he was lousy at, and it drove him insane: he could not write. Whenever he tried, it ended in disaster, and I think this is what caused him constantly to chew over scripts—including scripts by such writers as William Goldman—until he’d chewed out much of what was good in them.
In the case of this movie, the process unquestionably made the script worse, and it got worse still when he finally laid hands on it himself. Something that was witty and clever became slow and turgid.
Consenting Adults
is the story of a man, Kevin Kline, who gets tempted into a bizarre wife-swap by his persuasive neighbour, Kevin Spacey. Each will cross the street in the night and have sex with the other’s wife while she is sleeping. At first, Kline resists. It’s a ludicrous proposal, they’ll wake up, they’ll know it’s
not their husband, it’s disgusting, it’s
wrong
. But Spacey is relentless and knows how to manipulate his friend. You do these things precisely because they
are
wrong. You do them because the risk
brings you to life.
Kline is a coward, he’s pussy-whipped, he’s lost his edge, no wonder he’s depressed. All of which is true.
is the story of a man, Kevin Kline, who gets tempted into a bizarre wife-swap by his persuasive neighbour, Kevin Spacey. Each will cross the street in the night and have sex with the other’s wife while she is sleeping. At first, Kline resists. It’s a ludicrous proposal, they’ll wake up, they’ll know it’s
not their husband, it’s disgusting, it’s
wrong
. But Spacey is relentless and knows how to manipulate his friend. You do these things precisely because they
are
wrong. You do them because the risk
brings you to life.
Kline is a coward, he’s pussy-whipped, he’s lost his edge, no wonder he’s depressed. All of which is true.
And underneath it all is Kline’s passion for the other man’s wife and for fresh sex in the suffocating time of AIDS. Meanwhile, Spacey’s wife almost seems to be complicit in the plan, tempting him with glances and subtle messages of the body. Finally, he does it, creeps in there in the dark, slides into bed, wordlessly has sex with her, and then goes home. In the morning when he wakes up, guilty in his own bed, he hears the sound of sirens. The woman has been bashed to death with a baseball bat. It’s a set-up. DNA proves Kevin Kline had sex with her, Spacey has an alibi out of town …
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