The View from the Bridge (36 page)

Herb's melancholy final days preyed on me as I attended my script meeting on
The Human Stain
. New York was beautiful in those early September days. None of us had a clue everything was about to change.

I had gone into the meeting expecting it to be three against one—with me being the lone defender of what I had written. The balance turned out to be quite different, with Tom, Gary, and me shooting down suggestions for changes from Benton. I was pleased and moved to find myself among allies.

Later, after Herb's death and the calamity of 9/11,
The Human Stain
was shot—where else?—in Canada, and I was mysteriously frozen out of the shooting. I was allowed up for a very circumscribed visit. (Although the Writers Guild negotiates such privileges, the writer, that necessary evil, is typically eagerly dispensed with by filmmakers at the earliest possible opportunity.) I was treated with every courtesy, introduced to all and sundry by the director as the author of this “brilliant” screenplay, but after watching one scene, I called Stephanie and said I was coming home. It wasn't my script and, more to the point, it didn't seem to have much to do with Roth's novel.

Later, sharing drinks at the Old King Cole bar at the St. Regis, I asked Benton, “Bob, why'd you shut me out of the movie?” and he answered, “Because you wanted to make a different film, Nick, and I couldn't fight you and do my job at the same time. I made the only film I knew how to make.”

This, I have to admit, was an honest answer from a decent man. I just couldn't for the life of me figure out why he'd wanted my script to begin with if he couldn't come to terms with Roth.

ELEGY

My relations with
Lakeshore, however, remained cordial, and a good thing, too, as they were still interested in films about people. I wrote an adaptation of Richard Russo's novel
Straight Man
for them and adapted another Roth work, a novella called
The Dying Animal
. It usually takes forever to get movies made, so I was pleasantly astonished five years after writing it to learn that my second Roth script was going to be filmed. In the interim, Al Pacino had toyed with it and us. We'd spent years trying to land him for the role of New York intellectual David Kepesh. We'd argued with the Italian director Pacino had envisioned directing the film—I felt he wanted to domesticate or sentimentalize Roth—before getting lucky with Spanish director Isabel Coixet, and a cast that included Penélope Cruz, Ben Kingsley, Patricia Clarkson, and Dennis Hopper.

I've noted elsewhere my skepticism about the importance of movie titles, but I concede that some are more off-putting than others.
Forrest Gump
may not sound terribly inviting, but
The Human Stain
or
The Dying Animal
, while plausible book monikers, are not, in my view, enticing names for movies. I try to picture a couple planning their Saturday night—
Hey, honey, how about taking in
The Dying Animal
tonight?

When I wrote
The Human Stain
, I suggested that we change the title. I wanted to call the movie
American Skin
, which I thought fit like a glove, given the subject of the book. Lakeshore demurred, counting, I imagine, on the novel's readership to constitute its core audience. When it came time to turn in
The Dying Animal
, I chose to take matters into my own hands and simply wrote
Elegy
on the title page. Lakeshore, however, wasn't 100 percent sure about that, and while they agreed that Roth's title would probably not sell tickets they worried that no one would know what “elegy” meant. I argued that the audience for this film probably would but offered to change the title if we could come up with something better.

In the end no one could and the movie was released to lovely reviews and enough business to justify Lakeshore's herculean efforts in getting it made.

I've since written another film for Lakeshore, this one something I brought to them, based on William Doyle's riveting minute-by-minute account of James Meredith's enrolling at the University of Mississippi in the fall of 1962,
American Insurrection
, a title, I suspect, we'll keep.

I've also spent five years trying to get my screenplay of
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
, based on Edmund Morris's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, before the cameras. More recently, I've adapted the nonfiction book
Patient Number One
for HBO and written a biographical movie about Bangladeshi 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, known as
Banker to the Poor
.

Will any of them get filmed?

If I live long enough. Meantime, like Eliza, I hop from ice floe to ice floe. . . .

EPILOGUE

I always dreamed
of writing and directing movies and have been lucky enough to realize that dream. Nonetheless, I remain a transplanted Easterner, still a stranger to the world of Hollywood and filmmaking. I used to be amazed at parties at the response I got when I said I loved such and such a film.

“What do you
mean,
you loved it—it didn't do a dime.” If I've heard this logic once I've heard it a million times. And the converse: “You hated it? It did two hundred million, how could you hate it?”

How can I complain or cavil with this standard of measurement? It is called “show
business.
” Am I maintaining that films are art? And if I am, how can they not also be business, any less than Shakespeare's Globe Theatre was a moneymaking operation? If a play didn't please, it didn't make money, and if it didn't make money, you can bet it wasn't revived.

Well, not until years later. The world of art is full of posthumous success stories. For every Mozart, buried anonymously in a pauper's grave, Hollywood can point to films that flopped—
It's a Wonderful Life
,
Citizen Kane
,
Bringing Up Baby
—but are today revered as classics of the medium.

Such ruminations are part of my attempt to figure out just what I feel about the
Star Trek
series, which I once dismissed as the one about the man with pointy ears. While its scientific trappings and much of its premise may be absurd, is that absurdity any greater than, say, the Greek myths with their half-man, half-bull monsters, flying horses, and all-too-human Gods? Are Spock's ears any more improbable than wings on the ankles of Hermes? For that matter, is the content of
Star Trek
any more improbable than Moses parting the Red Sea or Christ rising from the dead? Are Homer's bickering gods and goddesses more plausible than Mickey and Minnie? Are the only valid legends
old
legends? Do the
Star Trek
tales perform no useful purpose other than as a reassuring gloss on an America-first, gunboat diplomacy view of America's place in the world/universe?

I know the answers to none of these questions, and certainly, having contributed to some of these “legends,” I am too close to be in any way objective regarding their value.

But I suspect that in the long run it is the long run itself that counts.
Star Trek
's importance—or lack of same—will not be determined by how much money the films have made; it will not be determined by critical appraisals in varying venues. No, Time is the ultimate arbiter of Art. When Nixon visited China he banqueted with that wily courtier, Zhou Enlai, and asked him during the meal what he thought of the French Revolution.

“It's too early to tell,” was Zhou's answer.

So I think it is with all manner of art. There is a kind of aesthetic Darwinism at work in art: The fittest survive but oftentimes works initially celebrated pass quickly into oblivion while those dismissed at the time stubbornly defy internment. There seems to be no logic or formula by which survival or extinction can be predicted. Sometimes art intended as highbrow (what Hollywood refers to as “prestige pictures”—made to win awards) disappears without a trace while “programmers” (also known as B pictures) turn out to be the real thing. It is certainly not without meaning that George Lucas's
Star Wars
films, as well as his Indiana Jones series, were made as homages to Saturday morning serials, quickie productions that didn't “count.” Films on which Hollywood lavished extraordinary care and ambition, such as Darryl Zanuck's
Wilson,
don't seem to wear as well. Is
Ben-Hur
a film worth watching aside from its justly celebrated chariot race? I'm only asking. Were the folks turning out what we celebrate today as film noir really believing that what they were doing was art? Was
The Curse of the Cat People
supposed to be art?

And yet it is often these films, relegated to the bottom half of the double bill, that seem to endure. (One could go a step further and wonder whether movies themselves were ever thought of by their creators as art, or was art conferred upon them, and their makers, with the passage of time?)

On the other hand, one can always point to ambitious enterprises that have indeed fulfilled the lofty ambitions of their creators.
Citizen Kane
and the original Broadway production of
West Side Story
were both self-consciously conceived as Art and (so far) have been embraced as masterpieces. Artists do tend to be ahead of the curve, and what is dismissed at the time often goes on to conquer. Stravinsky's
Rite of Spring
, booed at its premiere (a woman stood up in the balcony and shrieked, “I've never been so insulted in my life!”) was only twenty-five years later adopted by Disney (Disney!) as the soundtrack to fighting dinosaurs, and no one bats an eye. Au contraire: audiences have belatedly caught up with Stravinsky.

So far.
Star Wars
may have entered the pantheon, but will its residence be permanent? Check it out in another fifty years. There is an ebb and flow to art, as well. Films, music, and painters drift in and out of fashion. Remember the words of Zhou Enlai.

And so with
Star Trek
. I cannot gauge its value or understand its meaning except subjectively. While the films are not ones I would have deliberately chosen as a vehicle for self-expression (I did begin this book by acknowledging the happenstance paths of life and their unlooked-for consequences), I cannot deny that my life has been changed—enriched—as a result of my association with the series, and perhaps the lives of others have been affected as well. Who's to say if I had got to make my film version of Robertson Davies's novel
Fifth Business
that as many people would've been affected by the result? How many scientists and astronauts at NASA were first inspired by the silliness that was
Star Trek
to reach for the stars? Answer? A lot.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle lavished a great deal of time, effort, and research on his historical novels, among them
Micah Clarke
and
The White Company
, but it is for the “programmer” Sherlock Holmes stories that he is best remembered. Does it mean Holmes is “better” than
The White Company
? Arguably not, but Holmes's popularity cannot be without meaning, for either Doyle himself or the rest of us. Interestingly Doyle remained willfully obtuse on the subject of Holmes: He could do it but he didn't “get it.”

In some ways, as this memoir has shown, I have had similar feelings about
Star Trek
. I could evidently “do it” while at the same time I told myself for long periods that I simply didn't get it.

That can no longer be said to be entirely true. And by this point it would also seem graceless of me to insist that it is. Enough time has passed so that, though I may not be able to assess the lasting merit of
Star Trek
, I can certainly give some consideration to how
Star Trek
has changed me.

Or for that matter, movies generally. It has long been traditional to knock Hollywood as a place where talented people lose their souls, prostitute themselves for—what else?—money and fame, and generally forfeit their integrity. There are books and indeed movies that reinforce the stereotype of the sellout, the Faustian bargain, etc. The self-pitying writer has become his own stock character, marinating in lacerating self-hatred, wallowing in capitulation to the seamy forces of darkness and commerce.

I don't believe I fall into this category. I love movies and try to make good ones; I recognize that show business (like America itself) has its tawdry and vulgar side. But it also has its splendid aspects, and if I continue to be seduced by those, I plead guilty. I think storytelling is a worthwhile profession, and you try to tell the best stories you can in the best way you know how and you try to steer clear of the crap. I suppose I am not a mainstream Hollywood creation but merely a peripheral character, working in a narrowing artery that I hope is not my own. Granted, most movies are worthless, but the ones that aren't are as meaningful—to me, anyway—as any other form of art.

Someone once said that work is doing something you don't like in order to earn a living. I am fortunate that that has not been the case for my own career. I have been blessed to struggle with what I love,
for
what I love. And whatever heartaches, disappointments, flops, setbacks, occasional betrayals, and bad behavior (including, on occasion, I fear, my own) I've had to face, I am still of Walter Mirisch's opinion. I don't think I would have lasted this long had I not found this strange place and strange occupation to be as full of the most wonderful, loyal, creative people and friends as I could hope to find anywhere. While telling stories may not be rocket science, it's arguably less lethal. And given that it's the world's second oldest profession, I'd like to keep doing it for as long as people are willing to listen.

This book began
with an anecdote in which Walter Mirisch declared he would not have lasted in this business had it not been for the support, encouragement, and love of the many splendid people in it.