In the spring of 2007, when the editors of Script asked me how I felt about writing a script-to-screen article about Evening, I took some time to think it over. On one hand, I had found Michael Cunningham quite engaging when I’d talked to him about The Hours. Furthermore, both Cunningham and Susan Minot, who’d written the book, were produced screenwriters as well as acclaimed novelists. That rarity was enticing all by itself.
My hesitation was for entirely personal reasons. The previous June, my mother had been diagnosed with an aggressive, almost invariably fatal form of cancer. As she was preparing for surgery, I had arranged to spend several weeks at my parents’ home, helping them as best I could.
During my time with them that summer, my mother was taking a cocktail of drugs, some to treat her tumor, some to make her more comfortable, still more to control the side effects of the others. The combined effects of the medication and her illness put her in a nearly impenetrable fog for most of the day. She slept a great deal and communicated very little while awake. When she roused herself to speak, I sometimes understood her, but more often I didn’t. It’s not that her mind was gone; rather, it was elsewhere, flitting through an inner landscape to which I had no map. It would alight now and then with the friends and loved ones who had gathered to be with her, but only briefly. By the time I was approached about Evening, that fog had lifted somewhat, but even then there were moments when only my father, her companion for half a century, could divine her thinking. At times, even he was baffled.
So I was reluctant to dive into Minot’s novel, and I found it no easier after I’d said yes. The story was told from the point of view of a woman around my mother’s age who is dying of cancer. In the final days of her life, at once doped on morphine and in terrible pain, thrice-married nightclub singer Ann Grant Lord finds her mind returning to the loves of her life: her children, including a son who died tragically, and her husbands, two of whom died before her.
Most of all, though, she revisits the great love—and great regret—of her life, a man she had a three-day affair with some fifty years before. Harris Arden was eight years older, a doctor, and though they pledged love to each other, he warned her almost from the start that he had a pregnant fiancée. To make the memory even more painful, their weekend together at a friend’s wedding ended with a tragedy—a tragedy to which Ann and Harris indirectly contributed. As Ann lies dying, that long-ago love occupies her thoughts, and it is Harris she imagines herself speaking to. But her grown children gathered at her bedside have never heard of “Harris.” Is she delirious, they wonder, or does she have secrets they never imagined?
Evening proved that my experience at my mother’s bedside, eager to share her remaining time but not quite able to reach her, is not unique. As it turns out, Cunningham himself had been through something similar not long before he was approached to adapt Evening for the screen.
“One of the reasons I agreed to do this was that my mother had just died of cancer and had been in and out the way Ann was,” Cunningham recalled.
“It was certainly one of the reasons that I spent years of my life on this story. It is one of the biggest things that happens to anybody—the loss of a parent.”
Not surprisingly, then, Cunningham’s screenplay stresses the plight of Ann’s children more than Minot’s novel does. But that is the least of the changes. Cunningham reinvented Minot’s story almost completely, paring the novel down ruthlessly while finding at least one plotline in the story that Minot’s novel barely suggests.
Minot said that Evening began as a short story called Report from Nurse Brown, which told the story of a dying woman’s last new relationship—with her nurse—through the notes kept by that nurse. “That eventually became a couple of pages of the novel,” she said. “I became more and more interested in what was going on in the mind of someone dying, and that’s what the book became.”
The book was first optioned by the Kennedy/Marshall Company, then affiliated with Disney Studios. Minot by that time had a formidable reputation as a novelist, and had written the screenplay Stealing Beauty for director Bernardo Bertolucci. By 1999, however, when Minot met producer Jeff Sharp, then of Hart-Sharp (the partners have since split), at a wedding in Nairobi, Kenya, Evening was in turnaround at Kennedy/Marshall.
“He mentioned that he had liked the novel and asked about the film rights,” says Minot. “I told him that Disney had put the project in turnaround, and some weeks later he contacted me about getting the rights and having me write the screenplay.”
Minot relished the prospect of finding new angles on her story. “There were things I knew about these characters which perhaps never made it into the book. I liked reexploring their story. I liked being forced to think in only visual and audio terms.” Her biggest challenge was simply “boiling it down”—a hurdle Cunningham would also find daunting.
When a few years passed without a production in sight, Jeff Sharp approached Cunningham to consider working on the project. The Hours had brought some fame to the novelist, and by now he had completed a screenplay for the film adaptation of his own novel A Home at the End of the World. It was his first screenplay.
“I wrote fiction for twenty-five years before I even thought about writing screenplays. I only started writing screenplays when I was asked to; I never just sat down and wrote a screenplay of my own volition,” he says. But that doesn’t mean he found it a chore. “My early sense was one of almost ecstatic relief [to be going] from what I had been doing most of my life to something I didn’t have to be especially good at, because I was new. You’ve been doing something for a long time, and you begin to have some reputation, and the pressure starts to mount, and then you get a gig doing something different—you’re a beginner again. You have a kind of beginner’s license, a beginner’s recklessness. That was a fantastic feeling for me.”
A House at the End of the World was in post-production, he remembers, when Sharp called him to ask if he’d be interested in adapting Evening. Cunningham had read the book some years earlier. His own mother’s death was fresh in his mind when Sharp contacted him, and that drew him to the project. As he recalls, though, “I knew immediately that I would have to make very dramatic changes. There are, like, a hundred characters [in Minot’s novel]—[and] just enough events for a novel, but half again too much for a movie. Pregnant girlfriends and all that.
“I asked Jeff to tell Susan I’d love to do this, but if I were to do it, it would involve significant changes, and if she had a problem with that, I would just pass on the job. My first loyalty is always to my beleaguered fellow novelist, and the last thing I wanted was to be somebody who messed up someone else’s book. Susan, to her enormous credit, got back to me via Jeff and said, ‘No, I assumed you would make enormous changes. Please go ahead.’”
Cunningham didn’t find out until later that Minot had written a draft of the screenplay. “I think it really helps if you’re not the [author of the work being adapted],” he says. “I couldn’t have adapted The Hours. You’re too immersed in the story as you told it in the book, and I think it can be really helpful to have somebody come in who sees the story from a different angle and can be objective about it.”
Cunningham chose not to reread the novel while working on the script. But he remembered the book well enough to say that “the two versions are quite different—not just in terms of characters omitted, but in terms of some fundamental emotions and implications about what happens. I think I have a somewhat different take on Ann Lord than Susan did.”
One major difference had to do with that old bugaboo, likability. “The Ann Lord I remember from Susan’s novel is a less sympathetic character than the dying woman I wanted to write about. Sympathetic is a tricky term, often used to mean ‘nice.’ Who wants to know about a nice character? ‘Sympathetic’ to me has more to do with [demonstrating] how this character explains herself to herself.
“What I was really interested in was the whole notion that at the end of one’s life, one could be confronted with the big motherfucking version of all those little nagging regrets that have plagued us throughout our lives. ‘If only I’d said yes that night—if only I’d taken that job—things would have turned out differently.’ For Ann, in both the novel and the movie, it’s this brief affair with a guy who was able to remain untarnished in her mind because she didn’t have time to get to the little domestic arguments and the hemorrhoids and the hair in the sink.
“It was my impression from Susan’s book that to a certain extent Ann is right: She fucked it up, she failed to rise to the occasion of true love, and it never came again. Which isn’t my feeling about love or life.
“I wanted to write a story about somebody who at the end of her life is fortunate enough to understand, before the lights go out, that there is nothing to regret, there is no missed chance—that’s just an illusion. It’s your life, [and] it’s been a great gift, no matter how it went.”
In the book, Harris simply wasn’t available to Ann. She made no choices that led to their parting; he simply refused to leave his fiancée. Ann had no choice. So what, at bottom, was there for her to regret?
“I suspect that’s part of the point,” says Cunningham. “‘Oh, little humans! Go ahead, die regretting something you couldn’t have done anything about anyway.’ That it’s one of those jokes that God plays on us.”
Cunningham started with a version that hewed closely to that of the book. But “part of the process of writing and rewriting and re-rewriting,” he explained, involved “discovering, through trial and error, how much or how little the movie could bear.” One thing Cunningham realized early was that he had to keep things moving briskly. “You can’t make [all] this stuff happen in a script that’s a hundred and twelve pages long.” The Ann of the book had three husbands, two daughters, and two sons. Cunningham would cut one husband and both sons—including the tragic death of one—from his version.
“At a certain point, I almost felt as if I were hovering over this crowd of characters looking for somebody to focus on. All writers, especially writers who adapt from one medium to another, have to be at least a little bit heartless. Too many sisters; too many people in Ann’s bedroom. You’re gone, you’re gone.” There were other cuts: Harris’s fiancée is absent from the screenplay, and Ann and Harris’s circle of friends in 1954 Newport was trimmed back to a manageable lot.
“As you go through it and look at it, you have these eureka moments when you realize ‘Okay, the lifeboat is foundering. There are too many people in it, people have brought too much stuff on board. What can we leave out? What if Harris’s girlfriend isn’t pregnant?’ You try it that way and the boat is still taking on water. Then at some point it’s, ‘What if Harris doesn’t have a girlfriend at all? What if they can’t have a life together—not because he is betrothed to another, but for reasons that have more to do with both character and the workings of fate?’”
On the other hand, some characters, notably the new bride Lila Wittenborn and her brother Buddy, were expanded and reconceived for the screenplay. Buddy even became a pivotal character. In the novel, he’s a womanizing charmer, but just one of a plethora of characters in the wedding party. In the script, Buddy becomes the third leg of a love triangle with Ann and Harris—in love, it seems, with both of them. “Buddy seemed very compelling to me, the alcoholic wastrel son of a repressive family. He just felt interesting and promising.”
In the film, in fact, Buddy is as central to the mystery as Harris: In the first few minutes of the film, Ann tells her daughters that she had loved not only Harris, but “Buddy too. Harris and I killed Buddy.” Buddy’s unrequited love for Ann becomes a mirror of Ann’s longing for Harris, but Buddy meets a rather pathetic end in the book. When the young revelers go out to the shore at night, he falls asleep behind their pickup truck in a field. As they depart, they inadvertently back up over him, and he is fatally injured.
Solving the Movie Puzzle
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM ON NOVEL WRITING VERSUS SCREENWRITING
A novel can include a sort of panorama of characters, a little like the Brueghel painting with Icarus going down in the lower right-hand corner of the canvas. That’s one of the reasons there are novels. That’s one of the reasons we need novels and we need movies. A novel can account for randomness and can include a wide range of people whose fates just barely impinge on one another. I can’t think of a way to tell a story like that in a movie that I would want to see.
I think movies are more closely related to short stories than to novels. A short story actually involves the compression you need for a movie, whereas a novel is another category of thing entirely. Was it Henry James who called a novel a big, baggy monster? That’s what it is. That’s why we love them. I think a short story, very much like a movie, has no room in it for extra baggage. It needs to move, it doesn’t need to move directly, but it needs to move swiftly. It needs to be lithe and light and nimble, and though that forty-page digression to the Crimean War and how it resembles what’s happening at the family dinner may be interesting, there’s no room in a short story for it. Nor is there room in a screenplay for it.
In adapting a novel, [what I do is] first to try to reimagine it as a short story. Reduce it to its fundamental elements, and then adapt that.
There’s something a little bit mathematical about writing a screenplay. You have a certain number of elements. You probably have about two hours to tell the story; no one’s going to make a five-hour movie, or a forty-five-minute movie, for that matter. And it’s a little like solving a puzzle: Okay, these people, these events, this outcome. Tell it in two hours. Go.
That clock ticks relentlessly throughout every page and line of dialogue. There’s no slack, there’s no surcease, there’s no room to stop and take a breath and provide a little background. It’s tremendously structured. It’s like doing sprints, as opposed to a marathon.
[Whatever you write], what you’re doing is asking people to pause in the middle of their very busy lives and look at [your story]. Wait a minute, stop what you’re doing and look at this! Don’t have sex, don’t have lunch, don’t learn French, get someone else to pick up your kids at school and do this instead.
You’d better give them something that’s tense and taut and deep and meaningful. Otherwise, the fact that you wanted to do it, [or that] it expresses some untapped beauty of your own soul, isn’t enough. You’re doing it for yourself and you’re doing it for other people. If you don’t understand that both elements are equally important, narrative in any form is not really the job for you.
“Buddy’s death resonates, very subtly, with the drunken, privileged recklessness of these people,” Cunningham says. “I think one of the unspoken themes of the novel, and the movie as well, is money. What does it do to people who have a little more than they need? Part of the way Buddy’s death functions in the novel is to help create this air of excess and waste.”
Cunningham sees the “tininess” of Buddy’s end in the book as part of Minot’s intention, but gave him a more dignified death in the script, making him the victim of a hit-and-run accident while trying to catch up to Harris and Ann, who are on their way to a tryst. “As a character who got a significant promotion, I wanted him to get a better finish,” says Cunningham. “I wanted him to die chasing after an impossible love.”
As it all sorts out in the screenplay, it sometimes seems that everyone’s in love with Harris. (Late in the film, when the older Lila shows up, she says as much.) Ann falls for him in hours, Lila secretly pines for him, and Buddy, long smitten with Ann, turns out to be pining for Harris, in some way, as much as his big sister is.
“This gets down to some of the differences in the laws of storytelling physics in writing a novel and writing a screenplay,” says Cunningham. “A novel has time for loose ends and vast numbers of characters whose relationships can be little more than that they’re part of the same novel. I don’t see how you could do that in this movie. [With] two stories [past and present-day], you have roughly an hour for each one. Buddy and Harris and Lila need to have a story together. Each one needs to be an integral part of the story of the other.”
Evening was in development for more than six years, and had several directors attached. Both Minot and Cunningham credit producer Jeff Sharp for his work during those years. “Jeff never let the project die,” Minot says. “It is due to his perseverance that the movie got made.” Director Tony Goldwyn also worked on the script with Cunningham for a long time, a period Cunningham remembers as an “ongoing friendly argument.” When Goldwyn got another gig, though, Jonathan Caouette, who’d made a splash with his autobiographical documentary Tarnation, came on board.
Working with Caouette, Cunningham says, “I felt differently encouraged to make it more magical and strange…. It was like somebody came down in a bubble, like Glinda in The Wizard of Oz. He had made this amazing documentary, but he wasn’t a Hollywood guy, he wasn’t a screenwriting guy. He would say things like, ‘What if Ann could fly in one scene? What if she wandered into the woods and came back all dressed in leaves and branches?’ Which was great fun. And, like any sensible person, I would say, ‘That’s a great idea, that’s an interesting idea, but I can’t do it.’”
Eventually Caouette left the project for another commitment, and the job went to Lajos Koltai, who showed little desire to change the script. “My relationship with Lajos over the last year has involved my saying about certain lines: ‘No, I can see now this one sucks.’ ‘No, no, no, it’s beautiful!’ [Koltai would respond.] ‘No, Lajos, it’s melodramatic, let’s take it out.’”
“One of the things about writing a script as opposed to writing a novel [is that] you’re with it long enough to develop a certain objectivity about it. You begin to see that certain lines that seemed like a good idea at the time are not playing. That actually, when spoken by living actors, they feel stilted and melodramatic and should be cut.”
The script attracted something of a dream cast: Claire Danes as young Ann; Vanessa Redgrave as the dying Ann Lord; Redgrave’s daughter Natasha Richardson as Ann’s daughter Constance; Toni Collette as her other daughter, Nina; Meryl Streep as old Lila; and Streep’s daughter Mamie Gummer as her younger self. Patrick Wilson, fresh off his turn as one New England dream hunk in Little Children, played yet another: Harris. Hugh Dancy played Buddy.
Thereafter, the project was developed much like a stage play. Cunningham attended some rehearsals, and even spent time on the set, tweaking the script during production. The actors gave their input, but he calls the changes they prompted “smallish.”
Cunningham admits he’s still learning the lesson Don Roos summed up as “Actors bring eyes.” “On film, gifted actors like Claire and Vanessa can bring so much innuendo and resonance to a character through the way they perform a particular scene that a lot of the exposition and history that feels satisfying and necessary on the page just feels extraneous on film.” Specifically, several scenes showing Ann with her two husbands began to feel extraneous during the rehearsal period. “On the movie you don’t really want pause and see all that stuff happening to Ann, when on paper it feels perfectly natural.”
The ending also changed. The script ended with a flashback to Ann onstage, and a tourist popping a photo of her, the image freezing on her smile. “It seemed fine on paper. God knows a movie script is read by ten thousand people before the cameras start to roll.” Cunningham even played the tourist, in what would have been his first-ever speaking role. “We watched the movie from beginning to end and said, ‘It seems to come out of nowhere. It doesn’t resonate.’”
“If any narrative, any putative work of art, is going to be effective, you have to be alert to the ways in which your plans, though understandable, have simply not worked out the way you thought they would,” he says. “If you insist on the way you wrote it in the face of what’s not quite happening on the screen, you’re a fool. You’re going to sabotage your own movie.”
So the ending changed to a series of shots of day turning to night over the water at the house overlooking the bay. “And I’m no longer in the movie, which makes me so sad,” says Cunningham.
Cunningham admits that there’s one scene he wishes had not been cut down: a confrontation between Ann’s two daughters over the direction of one of their lives. “I know it was a long scene, but I would have voted to keep it in its entirety,” says Cunningham.
Another scene was added after Natasha Richardson was cast as Ann’s daughter. “We realized [that], since we have Vanessa’s actual daughter, she should have some kind of scene with Vanessa. I wondered what it [should] be, and I remembered the last couple months of my mother’s life, when she was pretty continually tuned out.
“I remember wishing so hard that she could tune back in and be herself for ten minutes because there were things I still needed to tell her. I wanted her to acknowledge that I was taking good care of her, that I was being a good son. And then I realized, ‘Oh, that’s not going to happen.’ Without understanding it, I’d had my last conversation with her quite a while ago.” That feeling would become the inspiration for a monologue from Richardson.
In the film, that led to a small irony. Constance, the daughter played by Richardson, never gets that lucid moment from her mother. But Ann does have such a moment with Nina. That encounter gives Ann the chance to tell Nina exactly what she needs to move into the next phase of her life.
Cunningham says that the set of Evening was an unusually happy one. And with that too-good-to-be-true cast and the story’s extraordinary literary pedigree, Evening seemed like a sure bet to be released in the fall, when it would be fresh for awards season and the Oscars. But its distributor, Focus Features, had several prestige releases for the fall and scheduled the film for June. “We debated with Focus about that and finally deferred to their experience and conviction about June,” says Cunningham. “It’s always a gamble, you never know, but I think it’s pretty safe to say that all of us who made the movie were thinking, yeah, it’ll come out in the fall.”
The June date may have been the first tipoff that this wasn’t going to be the powerful film experience one might expect. As a film with a summer setting, at least in the 1950s scenes, the studio may well have opting to market the film to the youth market as kind of summer romance. Its ad campaign, with its upbeat music, seemed to pitch it as a “chick flick.” On the other hand, the release date may well have reflected Focus’s recognition that the film, despite its assets, simply hadn’t come out good enough to be a serious awards contender.
Many of the reviews remarked that Evening should have stayed a book, not become a movie. Such comments should be taken with a grain of salt: Presumably they come from critics who’ve read the book and liked it, and people who’ve read any book and liked it tend to be dissatisfied with the adaptation. Some of the critics who disliked Evening’s screenplay made a point of tweaking Minot for it, sometimes without mentioning Cunningham at all.
Focus may also have wanted Evening as summer counterprogramming to Spider-Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Shrek the Third, and Fantastic Four 2: The Rise of the Silver Surfer. If so, they miscalculated. Many of the summer’s blockbusters held their audiences well, and the popularity of Knocked Up and some of the other hits of the summer left Evening with little room to find an audience. It grossed under $13 million in the United States.
It’s hard to say exactly what went wrong with Evening. Everything is in place for a terrific film. In fact, everything may be too precisely in place. The prestige cast, the gorgeous vistas, the literary tone, even the wistful piano in the score: It’s all exactly what you’d expect, which has the downside of being, well, exactly what you’d expect. Even viewers who hadn’t read the book or the script, as I had, seemed to find something predictable about Evening—not in terms of the plot, but in terms of the emotions it evokes. For whatever reason, something about Evening didn’t click.
Even as I spoke to Cunningham, he may have had some intuition that such trouble was coming.
“Everybody had an amazingly great time making this movie. Nobody was in any way difficult. So much so that we worried we were having too good a time making it, which meant we were putting some sort of curse on it once it was out in the world. Apparently there’s some old Hollywood superstition that successful movies are always hell to make, and if you had a good time making the movie the way we did the movie is doomed to failure. I can only hope that’s untrue.
“But as Ann Lord learned, you can only have the experience you’ve had, you can only do the best you can do, and you just can’t know what the world is going to make of anything you do. I still haven’t gotten over the fact that The Hours, the arty little book that was supposed to sell three thousand copies and then vanish to the remainders table, has changed my life the way it has. Nobody thought that was going to happen. It really confirmed something I always suspected: It’s always a gamble. Good work succeeds sometimes; good work fails sometimes. All you can do is what you’re able to do, and then wait and see how the world responds.”
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
CREDITS
DIRECTED BY Shane Black
SCREENPLAY BY Shane Black
NOVEL (BODIES ARE WHERE YOU FIND THEM) BY Brett Halliday
PRODUCER: Joel Silver
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Susan Levin and Steve Richards
PRODUCTION COMPANIES: Warner Bros. and Silver Pictures
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY John Ottman
CINEMATOGRAPHY BY Michael Barrett
FILM EDITING BY Jim Page
CASTING BY Mary Gail Artz and Barbara Cohen
PRODUCTION DESIGN BY Aaron Osborne
ART DIRECTION BY Erin Cochran
SET DECORATION BY Jeannie Gunn
COSTUME DESIGN BY Christopher J. Kristoff
MAJOR AWARDS
None
CAST
Robert Downey Jr….HARRY LOCKHART
Val Kilmer…GAY PERRY
Michelle Monaghan…HARMONY FAITH LANE
Corbin Bernsen…HARLAN DEXTER
Dash Mihok…MR. FRYING PAN
Larry Miller…DABNEY SHAW
Rockmond Dunbar…MR. FIRE
Shannyn Sossamon…PINK HAIR GIRL
Angela Lindvall…FLICKA
Teresa Herrera…NEWSWOMAN
Daniel Browning Smith…RUBBER BOY
Jake Eberle…PATROL COP
Bobby Tuttle…HOTEL CONCIERGE
Stephanie Pearson…TEEN HARMONY
BUSINESS DATA
ESTIMATED BUDGET:$15 million
RELEASE DATE: September 14, 2005
U.S. GROSS: $4.3 million
FOREIGN GROSS: $11 million
REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
“Deliriously enjoyable…. The duo make a whole greater than the sum of their parts, a couple of highly flammable actors as famous for their volatile offscreen reputations as for their redoubtable acting chops.”
—LISA SCHWARZBAUM, ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY
“Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang mocks, celebrates, wallows in and ultimately exemplifies the allure of the traditional Hollywood formula.”
—MICK LASALLE, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
“Essentially a pumped-up screwball comedy with a big body count and a soupçon of gross-out, Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang clinches its status as a resurrection story…”
—J. HOBERMAN, VILLAGE VOICE