Black Evening (24 page)

But as I grew older, I discovered movies. In those days, theatres were palaces, and audiences didn't jabber endlessly. To earn the money to see a film, I would set up pins in bowling alleys. Or if I couldn't get the work, I would stand at a crowded bus stop and pretend that I'd lost my bus fare. Someone was always kind enough to give me the fifteen cents, which I immediately spent getting into a movie theater.

And there I sat, hour after hour, in the silvery darkness, watching film after film (they had double features in those days), sometimes staying to see the movies twice. It didn't matter to me what kind of movies they were, although I confess I wasn't crazy about the ones with a lot of kissing. What did matter was that I was distracted from reality.

In retrospect, it seems logical that I would have wanted to become a storyteller, to distract others from
their
reality. But at the time, I was too confused to know what I wanted. I ran with a street gang. I treated grade school as an interruption of my spare time. High school was a little better. Our finances improved. We moved to a small house in the suburbs. The family arguments were less. Still, by the time I entered grade eleven, I was going nowhere.

That fall of 1960, with little interest in anything except pool halls and eight hours of television a day, I found myself (like a minor-league Saul on his way to Damascus) struck by a bolt of light that changed my life. Even now, I can be specific about the time and date — 8:30 p.m., Friday, October 7. The light was from my television and the first episode of a series called
Route 66
.

The show was about two young men who, in Jack Kerouac fashion, drove a Corvette across the United States in search of America and themselves. One of them was Tod, a rich kid from New York whose father had recently died, leaving such massive debts that, when the creditors finished, the only thing left was Tod's sports car. His partner, Buz, was a tough street kid from Hell's Kitchen, who had worked for Tod's father on the New York docks and had become friends with Tod. Because Route 66 was then the principal highway across the United States, its name was perfect as a title for the series. And because the series was as much about America as it was about Tod and Buz, the producers decided to film each episode on the locations that the characters were supposed to be visiting, although many were far from Route 66: Boston, Philadelphia, Biloxi, Santa Fe, Oregon City…

The first episode, "Black November," involved a small Southern town haunted by a grisly secret from years earlier — the ax murder of a German prisoner-of-war and the minister who tried to protect him. I'd never seen a story like it, not merely the mystery, suspense, and action (a scene involving a power saw remains vivid in my mind) but the appeal of the characters and the reality conveyed by the writing. I discovered that I was waiting eagerly for Friday night to come around again — and the next Friday night — and the next. There was something about the way the characters talked, the emotions they expressed, the values they believed in, that affected me deeply and woke my mind.

For the first time in my life, I began to study credits. Who on earth was responsible for this wonderful experience? One episode would be about shrimp boats in the Gulf of Mexico, with a plot that paralleled Shakespeare's
The Taming of the Shrew
. Another would be about street gangs in Los Angeles, with poetical dialogue amid the squalor. Still another would be about cropdusting in Phoenix, with tragic overtones of Greek myth. Back then, I didn't know anything about Sartre or existentialism or the philosophy of the Beat generation. But even if I couldn't put a name to what I was experiencing, it made me feel emotionally and intellectually alive. Martin Milner and George Maharis were the stars. Still, despite their considerable acting talents, I felt uncharacteristically attracted to the minds behind the scenes, to the creative forces that invented the dramatic situations and put the words (sometimes spellbinding speeches that lasted five minutes) in the actors' mouths. Herbert B. Leonard was the producer. Sam Manners was the production chief. Okay. But still… Then I realized that one other name appeared prominently in the credits of almost every episode. Stirling Silliphant. Writer. My, my. A new thought.

That grade-eleven student, who formerly had no ambition whatsoever, managed to find the address of Screen Gems, the company listed at the end of the credits. Unable to type, I sent a handwritten letter ("scrawled" would be more accurate) to Stirling Silliphant and asked how I could learn to do the wonderful things that he was doing. One week later (I still recall my amazement), I received an answer from him — two densely typed pages that began with an apology for having taken so long to get back to me. He'd have written to me sooner, he explained, but when my letter arrived, he'd been out at sea in a boat. He revealed no secrets and indeed refused to look at anything I might write (partly because of my inexperience and partly for legal reasons), but he did tell me this. The way to be a writer is to write and write and write and…

Millions of words later, I'm still writing. If not for Stirling, I would never have gone on to college. I wouldn't have gotten a B.A., let alone an M.A. and a Ph.D., wouldn't have met Philip Klass, wouldn't have written
First Blood
. One of my greatest thrills came on a summer afternoon in 1972 when Stirling phoned to thank me for having sent him a copy of
First Blood
and to say that he'd liked it, that he was gratified to have been an inspiration. "If I were a cat," he said, "I'd purr."

We stayed in touch but never met until the summer of 1985 when he suggested that I come to Los Angeles and spend the Fourth of July weekend with him. Twenty-five years after I first experienced his work, I finally got to meet him, a stocky, broad-smiled, gentle-featured man with short gray hair and generous good nature. It was like coming face-to-face with the father I'd never known. Finally, in a closing of the circle, he took my novel,
The Brotherhood of the Rose
, to NBC and suggested that they do a miniseries of it. In 1989, when the series was broadcast after the Superbowl, the most coveted spot in television, I was struck by awe when I watched the credits and again saw the magical words:
Executive Producer Stirling Silliphant
.

Shortly afterward, Stirling told me that in one of his former lives he had lived in Thailand and that now he was going home. He had a Beverly Hills garage sale, moved to Bangkok, and had the luxury of writing whatever he wanted with no deadlines except his own. We often talked about my coming to visit him, but our various schedules kept conflicting. My only contact with him was via frequent faxes. Regret is a terrible emotion. At a little after 8 a.m. on the morning of April 26, 1996 (as with the debut of
Route 66
, I can be very specific about this moment), I was eating breakfast, listening to the news on National Public Radio, when the announcer informed me, "Academy-Award-winning screenwriter, Stirling Silliphant, died this morning from prostate cancer. He was 78." My Cheerios stuck in my throat. It was two days after my birthday. The man I thought of as my father was gone.

Stirling was as determined a writer as I ever encountered. He once had two wisdom teeth extracted in the morning and was hitting the typewriter keys by noon. He worked almost every day and was religious about meeting deadlines. Legendary for being prolific and fast, he was hesitant to show a complete list of his credits because he was certain that no one would believe that anyone could write that much. I've never been prolific or fast, but at his best, his action-filled scripts were inventive, compelling, and thoughtful: his Oscar-winning screenplay for
In the Heat of the Night
, for example, not to mention his television work for
Naked City
. I have tried to follow his example.

Thus my first contact with Hollywood was positive. The troubled street kid who became addicted to movies as an antidote to the darkness of his life found that the dreams those movies inspired could, with hard work, be fulfilled. But many who've been exposed to Hollywood have had the opposite experience. Too often, writers are treated with indifference at best and malicious contempt at worst. They're stonewalled, misled, or blatantly lied to. Some producers can't imagine showing courtesy to anyone they don't have to impress. Their inability to relate to others borders on the sociopathic. That never happened to me on any of the projects based on my works, but I certainly came across it in other contexts, enough so that I eventually decided to write about the bottom part of dreams in Hollywood. This is the final story in my trilogy about the paradoxes of ambition and the dark side of success. We began with a paper boy. We moved on to a teenaged football player. We now meet an adult who tells us about the heartbreak of the movie business. I haven't updated the financial figures in this story. After the $200 million price tag of
Titanic
, I'm amazed to look back at how comparatively cheaply a film once could get made. The following story was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award as the best novella of 1985.

 

"You know who he looks like, don't you?"

Watching the scene, I just shrugged.

"Really, the resemblance is amazing," Jill said.

"Mmm."

We were in the studio's screening room, watching yesterday's dailies. The director — and I use the term loosely — had been having troubles with the leading actor, if acting's what you could say that good-looking bozo does. Hell, he used to be a male model. He doesn't act. He poses. It wasn't enough that he wanted eight million bucks and fifteen upfront points to do the picture. It wasn't enough that he changed my scene so the dialogue sounded as if a moron had written it. No, he had to keep dashing to his trailer, snorting more coke (for "creative inspiration," he said), then sniffling after every sentence in the big speech of the picture. If this scene didn't work, the audience wouldn't understand his motivation for leaving his girlfriend after she became a famous singer, and believe me, nothing's more unforgiving than an audience when it gets confused. The word-of-mouth would kill us.

"Come on, you big dumb sonofabitch," I muttered. "You make me want to blow my nose just listening to you."

The director had wasted three days doing retakes, and the dailies from yesterday were worse than the ones from the two days before. Sliding down in my seat, I groaned. The director's idea of fixing the scene was to have a team of editors work all night patching in reaction shots from the girl and the guys in the country-western band she sang with. Every time Mr. Wonderful sniffled… cut, we saw somebody staring at him as if he was Jesus.

"Jesus," I moaned to Jill. "Those cuts distract from the speech. It's supposed to be one continuous shot."

"Of course, this is rough, you understand," the director told everyone from where he sat in the back row of seats. Near the door. To make a quick getaway, if he had any sense. "We haven't worked on the dubbing yet. That sniffling won't be on the release print."

"I hope to God not," I muttered.

"Really. Just like him," Jill said next to me.

"Huh? Who?" I turned to her. "What are you talking about?"

"The guitar player. The kid behind the girl. Haven't you been listening?" She kept her voice low enough that no one else could have heard her.

That's why I blinked when the studio VP asked from somewhere in the dark to my left, "Who's the kid behind the girl?"

Jill whispered, "Watch the way he holds that beer can."

"There. The one with the beer can," the VP said.

Except for the lummox sniffling on the screen, the room was silent.

The VP spoke louder. "I said who's the — "

"I don't know." Behind us, the director cleared his throat.

"He must have told you his name."

"I never met him."

"How the hell, if you…"

"All the concert scenes were shot by the second-unit director."

"What about these reaction shots?"

"Same thing. The kid had only a few lines. He did his bit and went home. Hey, I had my hands full making Mr. Nose Candy feel like the genius he thinks he is."

"There's the kid again," Jill said.

I was beginning to see what she meant now. The kid looked a lot like —

"James Deacon," the VP said. "Yeah, that's who he reminds me of."

Mr. Muscle Bound had managed to struggle through the speech. I'd recognized only half of it — partly because the lines he'd added made no sense, mostly because he mumbled. At the end, we had a closeup of his girlfriend, the singer, crying. She'd been so heartless clawing her way to the top that she'd lost the one thing that mattered — the man who'd loved her. In theory, the audience was supposed to feel so sorry for her that they were crying along with her. If you ask me, they'd be in tears all right, from rolling around in the aisles with laughter. On the screen, Mr. Beefcake turned and trudged from the rehearsal hall, as if his underwear was too tight. He had his eyes narrowed manfully, ready to pick up his Oscar.

The screen went dark. The director cleared his throat again. He sounded nervous. "Well?"

The room was silent.

The director sounded more nervous. "Uh… So what do you think?"

The lights came on, but they weren't the reason I suddenly had a headache.

Everybody turned toward the VP, waiting for the word of God.

"What I think," the VP said. He nodded wisely. "Is we need a rewrite."

"This fucking town." I gobbled Dy-Gel as Jill drove us home. The Santa Monica freeway was jammed as usual. We had the top down on the Porsche so we got a really good dose of car exhaust.

"They won't blame the star. After all, he charged eight million bucks, and next time he'll charge more if the studio pisses him off." I winced from heartburn. "They'd never think to blame the director. He's a God-damned artist as he keeps telling everybody. So who does that leave? The underpaid schmuck who wrote what everybody changed."