A Lotus Grows in the Mud (26 page)

It’s six months later and the night of the studio screening of the first cut of our movie,
Swing Shift
. As usual, we are all a little anxious as we file into the Warner Brothers screening room. As actors and crew, we have all given our best, but—as with every movie—they are ultimately assembled and made in the editing room, leaving us completely helpless.

I arrive with Kurt, and wave at a beaming Christine Lahti and Ed
Harris. I return Holly Hunter’s wink. I raise a hand in greeting to a nervous-looking Jonathan. Kurt takes my hand, and we sit side by side as the lights dim and the film begins to flicker at us from the projector.

The movie that I was so passionate about, that I first sold to Warner Brothers, unfolds before our eyes. I take Kurt’s hands. We watch our faces up on the screen, our mouths opening and closing over our lines. There is the airplane factory, the pretty little garden houses and the buzzing, jumping jitterbug bars where I first felt the pangs of love for Kurt. Our costumes look great. My wig doesn’t look too bad after all. But something is wrong. Very wrong.

When the final scene rolls and the screen flickers blank, you could hear a pin drop in that screening room. I sit staring up at the screen in silence.

“What happened?” I finally say to Kurt, a lump in my throat. “What happened to the honor of the women in this movie? My character has no conscience. I look like I’m almost enjoying it when I swan off with my husband and leave Lucky just standing there. There is no struggle there at all! And that masturbation scene should never have made the first cut. It didn’t feel right when I did it. Oh my God, I had no idea! I should have said something sooner.”

I had such high expectations for this movie, for how it was going to look and feel, but now all I feel is a mass of butterflies in the pit of my stomach. I say to Kurt, “Even if I hadn’t been playing the role of Kay, I still would have hated her. She had a very complex character, and the editing of her scenes needed to be handled with great compassion, wisdom and experience. It was all a matter of someone else’s perspective, I guess—it always is—but I just wish I had known the vision of our director. Maybe I never asked in the first place.”

Everyone else looked good; their characters were rounded and believable and true. Christine Lahti, as my best friend, was outstanding (and later won the New York Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress—and deserved it, I might add), but my character doesn’t look like the character I thought I was playing.

Holding myself together, I stand as the lights come up, and cling to Kurt’s arm.

The audience seems to be unusually quiet. Half smiles are being thrown at one another as we all head toward the exit.

Heads of studios file past, faces somber, their eyes cast down. One of them, catching my eye, throws over his shoulder, “We’ve got some work to do.”

We! I thought I wasn’t producing this movie!

T
he following morning the studio calls me.

“We’d like you to come in for a meeting this afternoon, Goldie. We’re all going to sit down and talk about what needs to be done to fix this movie.”

Despite my sadness at how things turned out, I feel intense relief. It’s the studio heads who will now help us do whatever we can to get this movie back on track.

Jonathan arrives silently and takes his place at the conference table. He can barely look me in the eye. He hates me already, I can tell. My heart sinks to the pit of my stomach, and I wish I could somehow get us back to the place we were when we first met and fell a little bit in love. But there is no getting around this feeling of sadness.

One of the studio heads opens the meeting. “I guess you both know why we’re here. We’d like to talk about some changes we want to make, because, to be honest, this isn’t really working for us, guys. We have some notes; we’d like to hear your thoughts; and then, between us, we can decide what needs to be done. We know this is the first cut, but we think that some of the characters need more defining, and the timeline is a bit confusing.”

I feel horrible. I keep hearing my pitch to them almost a year ago. It will be fresh, new. We can merge the forties into the eighties. It should feel like a musical. It’s going to be great. I cringed at how much I sounded like a producer with all the shuck and jive and all the radda radda. I know in my heart that I have dramatically let them down.

“Goldie, we know that you’ve got some things that you want to say, so why don’t you go ahead.”

“Okay,” I begin, clearing my throat. “Well, clearly, I’m not happy with the way this movie turned out. It isn’t just that I’m unhappy with my character—that’s a small part of that—it’s that this is not the movie I sold to this company.”

Turning to Jonathan, I tell him, “I never wanted to stand in your way or be the squeaky wheel, Jonathan, and I deliberately tried not to do that. But I guess that I’m just going to have to say at this point that because I promised a certain movie to Warner Brothers, and even though I relinquished my producer’s role, I am now going to have to take off my blond wig and put on my producer’s hat.”

Jonathan hardly says a word as the discussions continue and I vent my frustrations about the film. I become a lot more vocal and much more heated than I ever intended to be. My emotions undoubtedly get the better of me. Jonathan sits there expressionless, but I can see in his eyes how offended he is. In fighting for the integrity of my promise to the studio, I know in my heart that I have lost a dear friend. Worse than that, I have become his worst nightmare. The idea of being that person in his mind upsets me greatly.

A small part of me, however, can’t help but wonder how he would have reacted or if things would have been different if I had been a man. Would he have sat and listened if I had spoken my mind frankly and expressed my opinions forcefully? This isn’t about Jonathan; this is a Hollywood problem.

But it is too late. I cannot change my gender, and I cannot take back what I have said. I have been tiptoeing around for so long, afraid of standing tall and giving credence to the things that I know. In fearing that the suggestions I might make would be offensive, I didn’t make them, even though they were based on my own experiences and point of view of character development, my understanding of the story lines and the film’s overall social commentary.

The next few months become
my
worst nightmare. The studio expects me to help fix this movie, so I become the go-between. They ask me to approach a new writer and work with him on script changes. Despite still not having the producer title or credit, I spend the next few
weeks running back and forth in the middle of the night with new pages. When we finally come up with rewrites that the studio is happy with, they commission one full week of reshoots, a very expensive proposition that involves bringing back all the actors and starting from scratch. Nobody is happy at the prospect, least of all me.

Jonathan is invited to come back and direct these new scenes, but when he arrives on set I can feel nothing but loathing from him. All I can think of when I look at his face is the joy we once shared, the laughter and the kisses and the hugs. I remember the hilarious casting sessions, the late-night sandwiches, choosing Kurt as Lucky, the fun we had during the jitterbug scenes, the way he was so darling with my mother. I so admired his energy and his passion and his vision. There is now so much misunderstanding between us, and I don’t know what I can do to repair it.

Equally distressing for me, I can feel huge resentment from some of my fellow actors too. I am sure many of them think this is just a huge ego trip for me, to make my character look better, but they are really missing the point. To try to defend myself and what I’m trying to do for the movie would only fuel the flames, so I say nothing and just try to get the work done.

I have never felt quite so disenfranchised. Jonathan, whose help I would have loved, sits in a corner watching us work our way through this whole ghastly experience, completely rudderless. At one point, when Kurt and I finish a scene, I turn to Jonathan and say, “How was that, Jonathan?”

He looks at me with a passive expression and says, “Well, I don’t know, Goldie, how was that?”

It is all I can do to stop myself from running off the set. I feel so completely isolated. I started out with such good intentions for this movie, and I can’t believe that this is how it has ended. I’m not doing this to spite you! I want to scream. I’m not doing this for myself. I’m doing this because Warner Brothers might ditch our movie.

The revised script trickles in. The final pages are delivered on the last day. We shoot them mechanically, trying to make them work. In the end, some of them do and some of them don’t, but there is no more time and no more money. I drive off the lot that night, wondering how I allowed
all this to happen. After all, we create our own realities. And my fear created this one.

When the movie finally comes out later that year, 1984, Jonathan stays away. His publicity people issue a disclaimer saying that he had nothing to do with the final cut.

I’m hurt. I go away for a while, to get away from Hollywood and all the hype. I fly to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to visit the eight Indian children I sponsor on a reservation, to get back to what really matters to me.

Sitting in a street café in the most beautiful surroundings one morning, sipping coffee and reading the newspaper, I feel much better. The scenery is breathtaking, the air is so clear, and the waitress comes to my table and pours me another cup. Just as I am about to take a sip, I spot a headline on the Entertainment pages:
GOLDIE FIGHTS FOR CONTROL
.

It takes me so off guard, I stop breathing. I read through the text about how I snatched control of
Swing Shift
because I didn’t like the way I looked. Over the next few days and weeks, the stories start to repeat themselves, appearing all over. Some claim that I thought Christine Lahti outshone me in the first cut, so I insisted that her performance be reduced. In each case, when approached for a quote Warner Brothers replies, “No comment.” This is what really pierces my heart.

No comment? Is no one going to defend me? I realize then that the studio’s relationship with the director is sacrosanct. It is the one relationship that they protect above all. My blood freezing in its veins, I also fear that this could be the end of any chance I ever had of working with another great director.

Needing to run, to escape to somewhere pure and clean and clear, I jump in my car and drive out into the arid desert. I need to remind myself of the world outside my industry, of the ancient rituals and customs that ground me to this life. Collecting one of my adopted children from the reservation, I take him to a Hopi Indian village to watch the ritual corn dance. Snuggled next to this beautiful seven-year-old boy, sitting with our legs dangling over the roof of an adobe building as the sun sets warm and golden over the purple mountains, I watch the men dancing beneath us to a hypnotic drumbeat, celebrating the fruits of their harvest, which this year have been pitifully meager.

They work hard for a living, I think.

It was a great leveler. That no matter who we are, sometimes things don’t always work out the way we want.

R
ight or wrong, I acquired a reputation after
Swing Shift
that to this day I’m not sure I don’t still have. One director who was approached to do a movie with me a short time later actually called the studio and said, “I’ve heard she is difficult to work with. Is this something I want to get into?”

When I heard what he’d said, I thought I was going to die.

It is not just a question of mudslinging, but a little bit of who I am too, I suppose. I guess in my wish for things to be the best they can be, I don’t play that game so well.

The question is how do we as women become realized, how do we deal with our own power? Whether it is in our relationships or in the workplace, it seems we are always negotiating for our own voice and always afraid of speaking what we feel. As a little girl, I was shy. I wasn’t comfortable with my own ideas, never believing they were worthy of being heard. As I grew older, I was afraid of my own strength and worried that if I showed too much power it would make me less attractive to men, or a threat to women.

But now, after all this time, I throw down the gauntlet. The only path to happiness is to really be all that you can be. To be secure and unafraid of speaking your own mind. If your intentions are not just to win the game, then you can feel good that you have spoken your mind without malice or anger but just from the depths of your truth.

The more we can feel emotionally liberated, the more whole we can feel as people. We might say to ourselves afterward, Gee, I shouldn’t have said that, or maybe I should have said it differently. Well, okay, maybe you need to work on your presentation—it is important to be conscious and compassionate and act with great civility—but don’t forsake your own wisdom because you fear you will lose something.

What is more important? Losing your face, or losing your integrity?

I’ve seen Jonathan Demme many times in the years since
Swing
Shift.
I think we have come to understand that we were both placed in an impossible situation and that neither of us handled it quite as well as we might have. We were both young; we were both growing. We were both fighting for our positions. We both had strong beliefs as well as our own insecurities. To be less seasoned is to be less tolerant and more afraid. The more seasoned you are, the more willing you are to let others shine.