The View from the Bridge (22 page)

“Nick, what do you think you're doing!?”

“Shooting the script you offered me to direct.”

“But we agreed,
you
agreed—” the voice expostulated.

“I agreed to nothing,” I pointed out, having been waiting for this moment, “except to shoot the script you offered me. But rather than have this discussion,” I went on, by way of preempting his next expostulation, “let me make this easy for you. Fire me.”

“What?”

“Fire me. I didn't want to make this depressing movie anyway. Fire me, and I'll have a perfect out.”

“You're kidding.”

“Not me. Look, you're only ten days in, it shouldn't be too hard to reshoot. You just get a new director and some new actors—”

“New actors?”

“Well, if I walk, Jason's gonna walk, maybe JoBeth Williams, too, but that shouldn't be a problem,” I hastened to assure him, warming to my topic. “You just replace Jason, replace JoBeth, replace Gayne Rescher, and before you know it, you'll be—”

“Hang on.”

I could hear voices mumbling and thought I caught the phrase “that son ovabitch” before my correspondent got back on the line.

“Nick, we'll get back to you.”

“Do that.”

The next day the phone rang again, this time in the Kansas farmhouse where we were shooting. This time the voice—the same voice—crooned with patronizing serenity.

“N-i-c-k, it's your movie, you shoot it the way you want, but, as an officer of ABC Circle films, I must tell you that legally none of that stuff can be in the picture.”

“Fine, you've told me.”

And there that particular brouhaha ended. In the event, not one of the items I shot was deleted, including the celebrated diaphragm and the scenes involving the effect of the electromagnetic pulse, which depicted all electricity cutting out in the wake of an airborne nuclear explosion.

Following the shootout with the network, actual shooting, first in Lawrence, Kansas, and later at an abandoned LA hospital, went very well. For all the bad rap Kansas has garnered in recent years, what with trying to turn back the clock on Darwin, the people of Lawrence were as sophisticated as any I've ever met and they came out by the thousands to make the film work and achieve a scale it could otherwise never have afforded. Now, granted, some of these folks were just there because the idea of being in a movie struck them as fun, but I talked to a large number who had come out of political convictions and genuine concern at the prospect of a nuclear war.
The Day After
is dedicated to them. (The night the film aired, they held a candlelight vigil for peace in Lawrence that hundreds attended; twenty-five years later, at an anniversary reunion and screening in Lawrence, the people who showed up were not movie freaks, but peace junkies.)

There were other problems, however. When it came time to edit the film I was confronted with the hour's worth of padding in the script. I had never edited scenes “to length” before and the process as well as the concept I found confounding. Why should a scene play longer than it could justify itself on the screen? I placed a call to X.

“Listen, X,” I said, “I know that you want this film for two nights, but candidly, I think it will be significantly weakened if we keep in all this extra stuff. I believe in putting my best foot forward and making the best possible impression on you guys that I can. Can't I edit the film the way I think it should go and then, if you still want the rest back in, we can restore it?”

“I'll get back to you,” said X. A day later, he called.

“We, too, believe in the doctrine of first impressions,” said X. “Edit the film your way, and we'll look at it.”

I was astonished by this response, which only made sense when I later learned how difficult it had become for ABC to get any sponsors for the film. As I had anticipated, the political landscape was beginning to register seismic tremors, and the withdrawal of sponsors was one of the earliest manifestations of the difficulties we were to have broadcasting
The Day After
. General Motors, General Mills, General Foods—all the generals had headed for the hills. Certainly if ABC couldn't get advertisers, it made no sense to stretch out the movie beyond a single night. In the end my hatred for the commercials that insistently interrupt the action on network television, and my dream that they might be magically dispensed with, was gratified. The only advertisers to hang in were Commodore computers and one of the smaller car rental companies. Tactfully, the network decided to have no commercials after the bomb dropped. (I wonder if their tact would have obtained if they'd been getting prime ad rates.)

I was in the cutting room one day with our little radio turned on, listening to President Reagan speak. He began by describing the dreadful potential of nuclear weapons, and as I listened, I stopped work, convinced by his tone that something momentous and just possibly wonderful was about to be announced. A freeze on nuclear weapons? Was it possible?

No, the president had something else in mind, a nuclear space shield, an umbrella of missiles to shoot down other missiles, by which to protect Americans in the event of a nuclear missile attack. The press soon dubbed it Star Wars (to George Lucas's consternation), and I went back to work, convinced—if I needed any convincing by this point—that this film needed to be made.

Bob and I finished our one-night version of
The Day After
and showed it to the group of ABC execs. It ran about two hours and twenty minutes. When it was over these guys were all sobbing. These were television executives, but they were also human beings—they had families, they had children, they had lives of their own, a stake in the planet like everyone else—and they had been deeply and obviously affected by what they had seen.

Based on their response, I imagined I was home free.

In fact our troubles had just begun, as a six-month-long tug-of-war soon began over the final shape of the film. Some battles I won; others I lost. When my editor, Bill Dornisch, loyally refused to recut the movie per ABC's samurai approach (now that there was no advertising revenue at stake, why not trim it to the bone?) he was summarily sacked. At one point I actually walked off the picture for three months while X went into the editing room himself, accompanied by his own editor (Y?), and went to town on the film.

Talk about being the hatchet man . . .

A lot of times in this business, confronted by your own impotence in the face of corporate and contractual reality, you think you will die. That all these corporate honchos had wept buckets when they saw the first cut of the film only compounded my misery. That I had labored so hard and given so much of myself (not to mention the people who worked on the film both in Hollywood and by the thousands in Lawrence, Kansas, who had all trusted me) to something I thought so terribly important and then to see it ripped to meaningless shreds was enough to make me contemplate suicide.

Really.

It was the first of many such contemplations. I crawled into bed and stayed there for days while my long-suffering agent, Gary Lucchesi, labored behind the scenes on my behalf to effect some kind of rapprochement. Agents must take the long view; they don't want their clients blackballed from future projects because they made waves, a reputation with which I was already flirting. The only good news about being so desperately hurt and angry was that I couldn't eat, which, in my case, did have some benefits. I simply couldn't get my head around the fact of my powerlessness against a large corporation; even though I had brought the film into being, given it life, made them weep when they saw it, then fended off all their absurd compromises, I finally couldn't fend off
them
. The film was theirs; it was their idea, they commissioned it, they paid for it; I was merely the hired hand. Any
droit morale
was theirs. Why was I unable to accept this reality? Grow up.

In the end, X's cut of the film was so ridiculous that even his superiors blanched, for he had inadvertently managed to make plain what we had struggled to conceal: Who started the war? In X's version, it was unambiguously the Soviets. ABC was contractually obliged to let me see it, and I was shattered afresh, all the stitches on my wounds popping open and the bleeding recommencing. Of course with my reputation for being “difficult” now firmly in place, it didn't seem to matter much what I did to cement or redeem it. I lay on my bed of pain, stared at the ceiling, and tried to think. It now occurred to me that the last thing ABC wanted for this hot potato was public dissension from the filmmakers' ranks. Accordingly, when Marilyn Reed, a columnist from the
Chicago Sun-Times
, called and asked me about the film, I hinted darkly of pressure to recut the movie from corporate sources. I took care to be oblique and nonspecific, but my message was clear. Next thing I knew, I was brought back in from the cold to repair X's carnage in the cutting room.

In the end, the film
was
censored, and many things weren't the way I intended them. In addition, it was preceded and succeeded by all manner of disclaimers but it still packed enough of a wallop to drive Bill Buckley and Phyllis Schlafly crazy. They ran around the country like Chicken Littles, warning anyone who'd listen that the sky was falling, while on its editorial page the
New York Post
demanded to know why Nicholas Meyer was doing Yuri Andropov's work for him. (Andropov, lest you have forgotten, was the Soviet premier at the time.) I ask you. The press surprised me by taking no interest in the film itself; all they were obsessed by was the issue of who started the nuclear war depicted in it—we or the Russians? I couldn't for the life of me figure out why this was the only issue that commanded their attention but later came to understand what I had earlier intuited, namely that nuclear war and its consequences per se were simply too dreadful to contemplate head-on and probably wouldn't sell newspapers. It was easier and doubtless more reassuring for the press to concentrate on the more familiar terrain of who began it. Never mind the horrendous consequences of nuclear war; safer to concentrate on whom to blame for starting it. X's version probably would have sent Rupert Murdoch into ecstasies, even as it scotched any possible improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations. I went on CNN's
Crossfire
and tried to get in a word edgewise while Pat Buchanan and Michael Kinsley yelled at each other.

The Reagan White House saw the film before it aired and called us with editing “notes”! In retrospect I don't find this surprising. The President, an old Hollywood pro, doubtless had always longed for final cut. (So did the Army, when we asked for their cooperation before shooting. We didn't get their helicopters; they didn't get to rewrite our script.)

In the years to come I would hear all sorts of amazing stories connected with
The Day After
and the effect it had on people. How a general in Havana saw the picture and said the Cuban Missile Crisis had never been real to him before viewing it; how the Joint Chiefs had screened it at the Pentagon, searching for a way to discredit it—and me. How the White House felt the crucial need to put someone on television directly following the picture to say how off-base the thing was. They considered Jeane Kirkpatrick, which would have been fun, but unfortunately wiser heads prevailed and we were all treated to the benign presence of Secretary of State George Shultz, reassuring Ted Koppel that everything was going to be just fine. Then followed an all-star session of
Nightline
(the most highly watched edition of the program ever), featuring Elie Wiesel squaring off with Henry Kissinger and William Buckley, with Kissinger opining that scaring ourselves to death was no way to make nuclear policy.

Seeing as that is just what we had been doing for the previous forty years, I felt his argument had some holes in it.

I tried to watch the film the night it aired but couldn't imagine anyone sitting through it. After all, it wasn't a very good movie; that had been, in a way, the point. If the movie had been “good” in the conventional sense, we could have let ourselves off the hook, talking about how wonderful Jason Robards was, how effective the music was, etc.—anything other than contemplating its stark nuclear message. (As far as music went, there wasn't any, other than some Virgil Thomson over the credits and a few bars to link a couple of scenes, as I hadn't wanted to “goose” anyone's reactions.) As a director, I had made the film as a counterintuitive exercise. I knew if people discussed the movie instead of what the movie was about, we'd have failed. I wanted all the script's banality to work for me, to entice the audience past our subject matter until they were drowning in it. Seeing the film that night on television, however, all I got was the banality.

And thank God there was no CGI technology available to make nuclear destruction spectacular and “fun,” which was how
The New York Times
some thirty years later reviewed an end-of-New York movie called
The Day After Tomorrow
—global warming as a special effects extravaganza.

The morning following our telecast I was stupefied to learn that over a hundred million viewers had stuck with the thing to the end, often watching in hand-holding groups. Ed Hume had known exactly what he was doing. It is my understanding that the hundred-million mark for a TV movie has yet to be surpassed. And with all the channels currently available to fragment the viewing audience, it seems unlikely a single event will ever again capture so large a portion of the population.

The Day After
is probably the most worthwhile thing I ever got to do with my life to date. In the immediate aftermath of the broadcast, though, I wasn't convinced it had done any good. Who wants to admit that his mind was changed by anything as dumb as a TV movie, anyway?