The View from the Bridge (35 page)

In the event there was no way I could leave my kids to direct
The Odyssey
or anything else. Eventually the film was taken over by Andrei Konchalovsky (HBO left it when I did). He hired his own screenwriter and over at NBC threw out my script; together they concocted
The Odyssey According to Danielle Steele
. The trashing of Homer seemed of a piece with everything else that had happened.

Then one day I met a beautiful woman named Stephanie, and everything changed. It takes a large heart for someone to come into a family in place of a beloved wife and mother. Stephanie made it look easy and saved the lot of us. I am not a profound person and I've never been able to sort out the metaphysics here, but I certainly know love when I feel it. I know other people in similar circumstances who have not been so lucky as to get a second chance at life.

Many years ago I read an article in the Science section of
The New York Times
that has stayed with me. It had to do with the genetic component of happiness. What side of the bed did you wake up on the morning you were born? The article pointed out that people seem born with an innate level of happiness that appears to exist independently of outward circumstances. You get a raise, win the Oscar, fall in love—and your level of happiness rises in response to good news. But eventually it resettles at its standard level. Similarly, you can get fired, have your house burn down, and so forth. Your happiness declines appropriately—but by and by it tends to slide upward to where it was before. This idea seems very relevant my own experience of life. I've gone through some horrendous stuff. I haven't recovered from Lauren's death; a part of me doesn't want to recover from it. But I have learned to ingest it, to coexist with the fact of it, to incorporate it into a life that includes my love for Stephanie, a love that measures no less. My glass always goes back to looking more than half full.

VENDETTA

And as long
as you're alive, life doesn't stop. More things happen. In 1997 HBO offered me the chance to direct a film called
Vendetta
. By now I was happily married to Stephanie (with a third daughter to show for it), and finally in a position where things were stable enough for me to spend time behind the camera again, and so I was delighted to accept. The script by Timothy Prager was based on a nonfiction account by Professor Richard Gambino of events surrounding the biggest lynching in American history. The victims were not—as I had anticipated—African Americans, but rather Sicilians in New Orleans in 1891. They had been accused and acquitted of having murdered the city's very popular—and very corrupt—chief of police, David Hennessy, who had been gunned down in a heavy fog on his way home from work the previous October by persons unknown. The city's white oligarchy saw in Hennessy's murder an opportunity to throw a monkey wrench into the power of the growing Sicilian population. It was a compelling tale, the more shocking as it was so little known. When the Sicilians were acquitted, the judge nonetheless refused to release them, holding them overnight on a bizarre technicality, “lying in wait” (for a murder of which they'd just been found not guilty!), long enough for a mob of twenty thousand to be rallied by an advertisement in the next morning's newspaper: COME PREPARED FOR ACTION TO ADDRESS THE DEFECTS OF JUSTICE IN THE HENNESSY CASE! The mob stormed the parish prison and shot, stabbed, and used for target practice,
while
hanging, these unfortunate wretches, before going home, satisfied that they had, in one newspaper's editorial, done the jury's work for them.

The script was an ensemble piece, a cutaway view of New Orleans as an anthill with several different strata, including—just above the blacks—the Sicilians, most of whom spoke no English. It seemed crucial to me that their scenes be filmed in Sicilian. John Matoian, then head of HBO Films, agreed, though he did feel that the film needed a star—HBO traditionally hooked their films to stars—even though there wasn't a starring role in the script. In the end Christopher Walken undertook to play the chief white oligarch, who might or might not have been the real culprit behind the chief's murder. (The theory being that it was pinned on the Sicilians to allow the whites to take over their businesses when they were executed—which they did.)

I visited New Orleans (which then existed), only to find that the French Quarter had become a sort of Disneyland and bore little resemblance to the New Orleans of 1891. HBO wanted me to film in Canada, which I thought ridiculous until I visited Kingston, midway between Montreal and Toronto. The city was situated on Lake Ontario, and with its period architecture parts of it could—with a little help—pass for Louisiana and the Mississippi and/ or Lake Pontchartrain. With the help of my ingenious production designer, David Chapman, Kingston soon became the very vanished New Orleans of our story.

I had labored under the common delusion that Sicilian was merely a variant of Italian, only to learn that it had about as much relationship to that tongue as Yiddish does to German. All my Italian actors had to learn their lines in an alien tongue. I might as well have cast Americans; the linguistic chore would have been essentially the same.

Like
The Day After
,
Vendetta
depended on the goodwill of an entire town to provide size and scope to the story. What Lawrence had done for nuclear war, Kingston did for lynching. Folks came out by the thousand to go through makeup and wear period clothes (and mustaches for the men) in order to get paid a pittance and a sandwich for their infinite pains. They were wonderful.

In my admittedly subjective opinion, I think
Vendetta
is my best work. I had mysteriously improved as the result of my hiatus from the camera. My coverage was more efficient and more imaginative than before, my work with actors, shaping performances, increasingly subtle.

My only explanation for my improvement has to do with watching my oldest daughter learn to ride a bicycle, a process that took five days. On the first day, wearing helmet and knee and shoulder pads in an empty parking lot before a closed restaurant in Provincetown, she lasted about ten minutes before crying that she'd had enough. On the second day she went about fifteen minutes before giving up—but there had been some improvement. By day three, fifteen minutes had become twenty, and Rachel was actually pedaling.
Something had happened in the night
. Simply put, she hadn't woken up where she'd left off the day before. Her brain and then her muscles had processed something she had experienced or learned. By day four she was almost there, and by day five, she was riding a bike—but the major part of the work had somehow occurred when she wasn't on the parking lot. So it was with my other two daughters, and so it was with me when I resumed directing after the time following Lauren's death.

It was harder, after so much time had passed, to return to features. I tried the independent route, spending a couple of years attempting to put together a film Ronnie and I had cowritten entitled
Spoils
, a film noirish piece, set during the waning days of World War II and involving two officers of the German occupation—male and female—who discover the German crown jewels in the basement of the castle where they've been billeted and decide to steal them. Bruce Greenwood and Linda Fiorentino were to have been our leads. A wild, true story, our script came heartbreakingly close to filming (we were ten days out) when the money disappeared, and I was obliged to fly home from Germany on air miles. The world of independent cinema is rough. Ismail may have been tardy with his checks but enough of them went through to make his movies.

THE HUMAN STAIN

When I was
in Belgium, trying to hold together my production of
Spoils
, I got a phone call from Gary Lucchesi, asking if I'd read Philip Roth's novel
The Human Stain
. Gary, having done the executive shuffle from Tri-Star to Paramount, was now heading production at a company called Lakeshore Entertainment. I had not read Roth's novel but determining by this point that I would shortly be home (and unemployed), I agreed to have a look at the book and meet with Gary and his boss, Tom Rosenberg.

Tom, who hailed from Chicago, had attended Berkeley and gone on to work as a civil rights lawyer in Kentucky before becoming an Illinois real estate mogul. He ran Lakeshore as a mini-major studio, making the films that pleased him. Like a salmon swimming upstream, Tom was still interested in movies about people. By 1999 this was already becoming a rarity, but under Tom and Gary's stewardship, plucky Lakeshore was doing okay.

I devoured Roth's novel and was deeply affected by what I read. Roth's in-your-face hyperarticulateness sometimes works and sometimes doesn't, but it matters not to Philip Roth. He just keeps writing. To use a baseball analogy, some of Roth's books are singles, others strikeouts, still others home runs, while some are out and out grand slams. What you learn about art (and possibly life) from Philip Roth (and maybe also from Woody Allen) is that the name of the game is showing up and swinging for the fences.

In the case of
The Human Stain
, there was no question that Roth had written a grand slam. The story of a black man passing as white and succeeding wildly in his deception, only to lose tenure at the college he has created for an allegedly racist remark, was provoking and disturbing, let alone ironic. Coleman Silk's subsequent love affair with an illiterate custodial worker, leading to their tragic destruction, was, I felt, the work of a genius operating at the height of his powers. Roth's snapshot of America during the Clinton impeachment proceedings was dead on, as savagely accurate as it was heartbreaking.

I had no idea how to make a movie out of the novel, but I had six weeks in which to figure it out. Six weeks became five and before I knew it, three. I was back in Los Angeles, recuperating from the
Spoils
debacle but no closer to cracking
The Human Stain
. Finally, with three days to go, Stephanie advised me to give it up. I was just making myself—and everyone else—crazy. Tell them the truth, she urged. No point bullshitting.

Her advice came as a great relief to me, and I was instantly reconciled to it. Unknowingly this served to do what was really needed, namely to take my conscious mind off the problem. As I have indicated earlier, my best creative work takes place when I am able to let go. In the present instance I remember I was sitting in the bath, staring at my toes and wondering—not for the first time—why long immersion in water causes the skin to wrinkle like prunes.

Suddenly, unbidden, like safe tumblers falling into place—
click, click, click
—came acts one, two, and three of
The Human Stain
.

I sat completely motionless, letting the water get cold around me, afraid that if I moved, my elegant solution to the film would vanish like a dream following a morning cup of coffee.

But it remained, and I became convinced it was the right way to adapt Roth's novel. Adapting novels or short stories or plays is a tricky process, and one that varies with the piece being adapted. Let's confine ourselves for the moment to novels. The better a work of art, i.e., the more successful it is in the medium for which it was originally created, the more difficult its successful translation into another form is likely to prove. Something—much?—will likely be lost in translation to another venue. Novels are a flexible form—they can be long, they can be short, they can be written in the third person, the first person, etc. But films—or plays, or operas for that matter—must obey certain dramatic conventions. They must, for instance, be digestible at a sitting, two hours, three if you must and five if you're Wagner, but that's pushing it. Descriptions, interior monologues (think Molly Bloom's forty-page soliloquy), multiple narrators or points of view—these present problems for the filmmaker that the novelist need not think twice about.

I was determined to preserve as much of Roth as possible and found a structure that seemingly allowed me to do this gracefully, faithfully, and economically. Once those tumblers had fallen into place and Tom had given me the go-ahead, the script was not that hard to write. Both Tom and Gary were delighted with the result, and Anthony Hopkins and Nicole Kidman agreed to make the film before a director was in place, another flattering testament to the script's success. That director was not, I realized, going to be me. I had simply been away too long, and there was not enough heat under my name. Pity, as I felt I knew how to do it. The director search proved unexpectedly tough. Here was another way in which movies had changed since the early '90s when I had last directed a commercial feature: While I was agreeably surprised to get calls from agents all over town congratulating me on the script and saying how moved they were by it (these were
agents
, mind you), directors were reluctant to sign on for anything so serious and “uncommercial.”

I heard Robert Benton was interested and I eagerly supported this idea, as I had always regarded him as enormously gifted. He was the right age to appreciate the dilemmas of Coleman Silk's era and he was wonderful with actors, including Miss Kidman, with whom he had worked before. I argued vociferously on his behalf and met with him in New York, thumbing through the script, page by page, explaining why I had done this or that.

Tom hired him, and I flew again to New York to a script meeting with Benton, Tom, and Gary, which took place September 9th of 2001. Before leaving for the city I got a call from a friend telling me startling and distressing news that was apparently unknown to his friends: Herb Ross was dying in New York.

As soon as I reached Manhattan I went to visit Herb, who was in an attractive room at the Lennox Hill Hospital. He was dying and he was alone. I was amazed to find him in this condition. Herb Ross, a man who had moved so glamorously in the public eye for so long, who had directed Barbra Strei sand, had been friends with so many glitterati and married to the extraordinary ballerina Nora Kaye (at whose funeral I had spoken some years earlier), was now inexplicably facing death without a soul to gaze comfortingly into his eyes. For whatever reason, he had not wanted anyone to know about his condition. What
was
going on? When I tried to ask him, he looked at me and merely shrugged. His eyes were clear; he understood my question. Perhaps he simply didn't know the answer, but he didn't seem reconciled to his isolated hospital room. Or perhaps he was entirely reconciled, concentrating on his imminent journey to the undiscovered country. I held his hand. I kissed his unresisting cheek. Only at the last minute did other people realize where he was and what was going down. On my way out of his hospital room, I met Dick Benjamin and Paula Prentiss arriving to see him. I couldn't—and still cannot—understand a life that ends on such a bizarre note. Granted, we are born alone and die in the same way, but surely this last, heroic rite of passage might have been eased by the comfort of friends or family. Alas, Herb seemed to want neither. He had seemingly chosen to go through this final transit without witnesses or companions. On
his
deathbed, Leonard Bernstein's last words had been, “What is this?” When I utter those syllables, I'm sure I want to be holding someone's hand.