Which Lie Did I Tell? (9 page)

One of the moments that screenwriters can never obliterate from our memories is when we realize that, now and forever, we have written a flop.

And when I say “flop,” I am not referring, not even remotely, to a “
succès d’estime,
” i.e., a film that maybe doesn’t make back
all
its money but has its passionate admirers. And I don’t mean an effort, however worthwhile, that has perhaps “come a cropper.” Not an effort that “falls short,” that “misses the mark,” that “runs aground.” Not the “ill-judged,” or its cousin, the mighty struggle that went “in vain.”

No, lads. I am talking about the whiff, the stiff, the stinker, the all-out fucking fiasco.

I am talking, alas, of my
original screenplay,
The Year of the Comet.

If you write screenplays for a living, there are really only three choices. The
adaptation of someone else’s writing is one, and I think the easiest, because someone else has done the brute work, made the people, invented the story. The adaptation of your own work is much harder—I’ve done it several times—
Magic, Marathon Man, The Princess Bride
(also
Heat
—no, not the Pacino-DeNiro one, the
Burt Reynolds one; and the reason you will not learn more about this baby in these pages is simple: to my knowledge, lawsuits are still flying). What makes this kind of adaptation complicated is that we have gone through so much failure trying to get the novel to work, we tend to cling to our favorite scenes and sequences when we come to make the movie. “Oh, no, I can’t cut that sequence, it almost
killed
me to write that.”

We have forgotten, in other words, Faulkner’s great dictum: in writing, you must
kill all your darlings.

But I doubt anybody doubts the original is the hardest of all, presents
the greatest problem. Simply because you are, duh, making it up. What saves you in this kind of enterprise is this: your passion. In
Butch,
I needed to try and tell that story of the two guys, moving through decades and countrysides, who become legends a second and glorious time. In
The Ghost and the Darkness,
the lions were my passion. I wanted to write about brute power and horror and fear, and at the heart of it, the existence, even for nine months, and even in Tsavo, of evil moving among us.

What made
The Year of the Comet
possible was this: my passion for red wine.

Now, what kind of tale could I try? Answer:
anything.
There are no rules when you start in. I could have written a heart-wrenching drama—
Ray Milland
deux,
if you will. A Jimmy Cagney gangster flick, set in Prohibition, about who owns Chicago. I could have made it a George Lucas job, set in the future when scientists have discovered that if you substitute blood for Bordeaux, people will stagger around a lot but they’ll also live forever.

One of the things you probably aren’t aware of is that
Easy Rider
cost Hollywood hundreds of millions of dollars. Oh, not the movie itself. That was a tremendous success. I am talking about all the idiots who decided to rip it off and capture the suddenly exposed “youth market.”

Charade
was another money-loser. A great success by itself, it unleashed a stream of other idiots who decided to do their own romantic-comedy-thrillers. Forget that they didn’t have
Peter Stone’s wonderfully stylish script, Stanley Donen’s equally stylish direction. Plus those two ugly clods toiling in the vineyards, Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.

I was one of the leading idiots, and for my sins I decided to write a romantic-adventure-comedy-thriller about a bottle of red wine.

The settings were pretty much preordained by the nature of the material. Sing Sing somehow seemed wrong. Devil’s Island, too. So I wrote it to take place in the most romantic places I knew—London, the Scottish Highlands, and the French Riviera.

Now, those places pretty much dictated that the story be a chase. I had to get from one to the next. With at least some semblance of logic.

My movie would be a chase, then, after a bottle of wine.

But it couldn’t be Hearty Burgundy. Had to be a wine worth the travel. So I invented what surely would have been, had such a thing ever existed, the most valuable wine ever. 1811, known in Europe as “The Year of the Comet,” is generally thought of as being the greatest year for wine, if not ever, certainly of that century.

And if it was great then, and in a sufficiently large bottle, it might be drinkable in 1978, the year I wrote it (or indeed, 1992, the year the movie got released). So I decided on a bottle of the most famous red, Chateau Lafite Rothschild. And I made up a celebratory bottle—Napoleon had been having some good years in that era—that was bigger than any ever made, a bottle equal to two regular cases of wine.

I liked that for a lot of reasons. The bottle would have been worth many millions, so its breaking might be useful. It would still possibly taste as good as anything yet found on Planet Earth. And it would be heavier than shit, helpful if I could figure out how to use that for comedic moments.

For my lovers I thought it might be wonderful to write a role for
Glenda Jackson as my wine lady. (We are a quarter century back when I am fiddling with the idea.) Can’t remember who I thought of for the man, but Cary Grant must have been in my heart.

Remember, this was the second of a three-picture deal I had signed with Mr. Levine, following
A Bridge Too Far
and
Magic.
It was finally released by Castle Rock in 1992—and if you think that time leap is unusual, well, it isn’t. You only need one person who has the wherewithal to make your movie to make your movie.

Nothing had happened to the notion—it was still a romantic comedy about a chase after a legendary bottle of wine. Wine’s still around and there is some evidence that romance has survived too, if you look hard enough. But no one wanted it back in the ’70s. Castle Rock, just starting out, did. If God wanted to punish me and made me take a job as a studio head, the first thing I would do is hire all the bright young film-school students and movie nuts I could find and have them read
every
script my studio owned. I am guessing, but thousands is probably low. And since the studio heads are what they always have been, hardworking and imperfect, I am betting I could find a bunch that slipped through the cracks. All that it takes for the worst screenplay of all time to become the best screenplay of all time is the news that
Tom Cruise wants to do it.

Anyway, the wine picture disappeared for over a decade. And then, suddenly, it was a movie. What I want to talk about now was our first public screening.

I don’t think even a phenomenon like Mr. Spielberg knows for sure what he has until he sees it in front of strangers. Oh, sure, he has the most amazing commercial track record of all time. And sure again,
Jurassic II
probably was not much of an angst-maker. But for the rest, he is like the rest of us, at
your
mercy.

There is an amaaaazing amount of bullshit that you read in the print media or hear on the tube about why movies are hits or flops.
Titanic
was this, that’s why it turned out the way it did.
The Postman
was that, that’s why it turned out the way it did. Everybody wanted to see the young lovers on the big ship. Nobody wanted to see
Kevin Costner in a movie about an apocalyptic mailman.

Well, that’s only true
after
it opens.

I was with one of the top executives at one of the studios that was involved with
Titanic
and this person said to me, with fingers very much crossed—this is the week it opened, remember—
“If it just does a hundred million at the box office, we’ll be okay.”
Now this is a very bright fellow. And had seen the screenings and pored over the results. He had heard and seen the audience reaction—

—and he had no idea what it would do.

I felt pretty good about
The Year of the Comet.
I mean, I felt pretty good
for me.
I mean, I wasn’t slashing my wrists. Any number of reasons, but chief, I think, is that I had been around the shoot.
Peter Yates, the fine English director, is a friend, has been for many years, and he runs a very pleasant set.

I knew we were not Bergman, but I also knew we had delivered what we set out to do, a romantic-adventure-comedy-thriller, this one about a legendary bottle of wine. How big a hit we might be, of course I had zero idea. We could fail, too.

But no way we could be a disaster.

I remember the evening of the sneak very well, still, almost a decade later. I sat where I like to sit, all the way back, rear corner, left or right. I watched the audience come in. They were young Californians, and kind of excited to be there in the
test audience. Usually, people at these test screenings are excited. It’s something most of them have never done before, never will again.

And they can be, at least I think they can be, wonderfully helpful. Especially when they are confused about something. Very often those of us involved with the effort think we have made something clear, when in fact, we have not. I love test screenings for that kind of help.

By far the best screening I ever saw or will see—not a test, but the first time the movie was shown in New York—was
Jaws.
A lot of people do
not remember what a disaster it was in the making, but it was comparable to
Godfather I
and
Tootsie.
No one remembers what disasters those two were, either, before they were released. But they were. Nightmares the media glommed on to, ridiculed constantly, only to shut up when the final product was shown.

Jaws
went wildly over budget, had a director in diapers who was clearly helpless, unable to deal with those pesky little problems that cropped up, like disastrous weather and a monster that didn’t work. Then it went into the silence all movies enter—
postproduction. (Not a lot of famous funny editing-room stories.) Anyway, there we are in the theater, a thousand people maybe, some famous, most not, all curious.

Lights down, time to fish or cut bait.

I never remember any music hitting an audience like those first guttural notes of
John Williams’s great score. There were gasps two seconds in. And nobody spoke for two hours. Laughed a little. Screamed a lot. And 124 minutes later, when the lights came up, we all knew something remarkable was about to go out into the world.

I was there because
Richard Zanuck and
David Brown, the producers, had been heads of Fox when
Butch Cassidy
was purchased and made. And if
Jaws
was the best,
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
was the worst.

I had never seen it all put together. Director George Roy Hill had been in despair after the first sneak, because, as I said earlier, the audience had laughed too much, which made the ending a problem. So he set about taking out laughs.

Example: the movie opened with these words:

Got a laugh, so he cut the first words, “Not that it matters, but.” Laugh gone.

Unlike
Jaws, Butch
had been a splendid shoot. But there was controversy because my very late great agent,
Evarts Ziegler, had secured $400,000 for the screenplay. A lot of money today. Back then, record-shattering. It made all the papers, not just
Variety.
And a lot of people wondered what the world was coming to, a western selling for that.

It’s my belief that the reason the reviews were so shitty is because of the money I got. A lot of people were pissed, a lot of those people were critics. For them the title of the movie really turned out to be this:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid $400,000.

All the New York and national magazine reviews were mixed to terrible. You could not have reprinted one in its entirety. The reviews in the rest of the country were terrific, and in the rest of the world we soared. But I had no idea of any of that as I sat in another large theater in New York for the first major screening. A similar audience to the
Jaws
gathering.

And
Butch
just
died.

No one left, but no one laughed either. Or was moved. Just a bunch of opinion makers sitting on their hands, and as I fled up the aisle all I heard were remarks about why would anybody open a western in late September, and would Redford be a star, and would the movie make money, and why would anybody pay that much for a screenplay in the first place.

I didn’t see the movie for years after that. I went during one of its reissues—they did that in those days—and by that time the movie had become sort of the
Forrest Gump
of its day, in terms of audience reaction, anyway, and I sat happily munching my popcorn as the audience muttered, “Who
are
those guys?” along with Redford and Newman.

Way better time was had by all.

Going from glorious to crushing to sheer horror, the worst I ever saw was when I was a judge at Cannes and I saw this movie at night when you had to get all dressed up in your tuxedo and it started late, I want to say after ten, and it turned out to be an opera—in Portuguese, yet—and all the creative people were there, hopeful, nervous, and the lights went down in that grea
test of all movie palaces, and once the audience ascertained they were going to be sung to and it was dinnertime, well, they fled. A thousand fled.

We didn’t have that many people at our sneak for
Comet
in Sherman Oaks. It was at a mall, and the theater held a flat five hundred.