HIGH & LOW
I was hired to rewrite a rather bad film, We’re No Angels (1989). The original (1955) starred Bogey and was directed by Michael Curtiz (Casablanca). It was mawkish, but presold as A Christmas Film.
In my version, Bob De Niro and Sean Penn are to star as two escaped convicts. So far, so good. And the Irishman Neil Jordan is to direct. He later rose to prominence with The Crying Game, a film that the audience left, satisfied, as it revealed that the Lead Girl had a penis.
I wrote a smashing script. The Producer, someone or other, flew to Cambridge for a meeting between me and Neil Jordan, who flew from Ireland.
We were introduced, “Hi, hi,” and Neil said, “I have some questions about your script.” I riposted, “Then why don’t you go fuck yourself.” And got up and left.
The revenge, if not his, then of the gods, was that the film (in contradistinction to the script) Just Wasn’t Funny. And there I was, paid in full.
Oh Lord, the films I’ve been fired from.
Martin Scorsese, who I’d turned down for Raging Bull, asked me to rewrite Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963).
This is a pretty swell kidnap story. The rich guy, our hero, is Toshiro Mifune. His son was at summer camp with the chauffeur’s kid. Mifune’s son gets kidnapped, and the kidnapper says, “Five million bucks, or I kill the kid.”
This taps out Mifune, but he of course says he’ll pay. The chauffeur offers to contribute his own life savings. Then Mifune’s son walks in, and we find it was the chauffeur’s kid they snatched. All rejoice, as all has ended well. Then the kidnapper calls to say the deal still stands, five mil for the chauffeur’s kid.
“Well,” Toshiro’s wife says, “of course, you don’t have to pay.” But he says, “The chauffeur was going to give me his life savings for my kid…” Drama ensues, and then falls apart in Kurosawa’s last act.
In the last act, the drama turns into a procedural, playing past the essential question.
The film was based on one of Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels. Ed couldn’t figure the end out either. I figured it out.
In my third act, the Hero’s threatened by his wife, by the board of the company he runs, and by everybody and their aunt—“stand down, let the cops try to find the kid, walk away from it, you do not have to pay for another man’s kid”—and here is my contribution: his kid then says the same thing. He tells his father that it is not his responsibility to ransom the other kid, his best friend, a boy he himself has betrayed, by leaving him to the kidnappers.
Our hero escapes from his home, where his wife is trying to restrain him from paying the ransom. He takes his son with him and directs the boy to pay the ransom to the kidnappers, expunging his guilt by an act of courage.
Our hero and his son then return to the house. The son goes to his mother and Mifune sequesters himself with the cops. Later, he asks the maid for his son.
“He’s gone,” she says. “Your wife took him.” Our guy says, “He’ll come back.”
How did I figure it out?
In the denouement, Kurosawa inserts a Technicolor sequence in the black-and-white film. The kidnapper is supposed to make smoke from a chimney, to reveal his location. The film goes to color. Oooh and ahh, certainly, but what does it indicate, save that Akira knew (if only subconsciously) that something was lacking and he’d better take up the slack?
Well, something was lacking; a correct denouement.
Of what? Well, it would have to be of a problem or objective.
What was the Hero’s objective?
He came up from the Assembly Line, he became Head of the Company, he’s about to take the company Public and become very rich, then his kid gets kidnapped.
The third act and the punch line must be an elaboration of the central issue, ending in its resolution through a new understanding of the problem. The new understanding can only come about through the missteps (Acts One and Two) of the Hero. What is at issue? Our most prominent hint is the kidnapping of his son.
In the third act, then, he must be striving to do something for his son. But. His son is already home.
What is the solution—it baffled Ed McBain and Kurosawa. No shame in that, I’ve been stymied myself. But I was being paid to figure it out and so, I, like the Hero (now my doppelgänger), had to find the solution.
Act One. He rises from the Assembly Line. How in the world would that have to do with his son?
Ah. He marries poor and WANTS TO GIVE HIS SON A BETTER LIFE.
How did I come to this conclusion?
I began with the assumption that, as the signal event is the kid’s kidnapping, the story must be about the Hero and his kid.
Act Two, then, he is about to Go Public, and become vastly wealthy, thus fulfilling his responsibilities to his family, now almost on Easy Street. His kid gets kidnapped, returns, and all the household counsels the Hero that he need not ransom the other kid. He is unsure, and considers their arguments, UNTIL HIS OWN KID PUTS THEM FORTH. (“Dad, you aren’t under an obligation to the chauffeur’s kid.”)
With this moment, the film’s throughline reveals itself. In his struggle to provide, first, sustenance and, then, luxury for his son, he has ruined him, to the point where the son now prefers money to the life of his best friend. Our hero, thus, goes to ransom the other kid, primarily to save his own son. How? He takes his son to the kidnappers and sends him in to ransom the other kid. And so the story is solved.
As you can see, I was pleased with this solution. This, as always with a correct solution, leads one to observe, “It was there all along.”I (This is actually the definition of a correct solution.)
Great script. Scott Rudin was producing, and Mike Nichols was going to direct. I was called to the (inevitable) conference about, as usual, the “piece of shit” I’d written. We conferred at Mike’s Fifth Avenue penthouse.
Out on the terrace, across from the Metropolitan Museum, we were served a superb lunch by a perfect, uniformed staff. Mike and Scott hated my script.
Me: “Why?”
They: “It has to be about greed. He needs to be punished because of his greed.”
There we are, surrounded by Picassos, two ungeschtupped (very wealthy) showfolk—Jews, like me, risen from The Gutter to perfectly deserved comfort and acclaim.
“Fellas,” I said, “it has nothing to do with greed.”
“No, no,” they said, slurping their blinis with caviar (I swear), “he has to be punished for his greed.”
I finished my white wine and left. I regret that I did not say: “Are you two kikes out of your fucking minds…” as the introduction to a brilliant speech. You, reader, may imagine it, and I assure you the actual diatribe would have been even better.
But I knew that such a speech would have availed me little save my own self-amusement. Why? Scott is, and Mike was, very far from stupid. Both loved the movies and knew them from Méliès to the present day. But, but, both were of Old Hollywood, and nobody in Hollywood ever changed his mind.II
Why not?
Because they don’t know why it works. (It being the script.)III
There is, certainly, a magic about performances. Some actors illumine the screen, and one will watch them forever, doing whatever they’re doing. Some (actually) seem to have no life behind the eyes. We can’t say why. But a script can be analyzed. The question is not “Why doesn’t the movie work?” but “Why doesn’t the script?” If it does not work, it can, and must, be fixed. Most script doctoring is addressed piecemeal, that is, a car chase, a snappy line, a love scene here might recapture the audience’s attention.
This is the understanding of an amateur. The Professional (myself) addresses the script as a problem in construction—just as the magician plots an effect. Everything leading to the effect must be clear to the audience—so that they will lead themselves to that place where they can be delighted or awed by the disruption of their mental processes, the Revelation, “It was there all the time.”
The failed magician may say, “Yes, but, I worked so hard on it” all day long, but the audience will be the judge of that, and if he wants to advance from Birthday Parties he will study to put himself in their place.
Mike and Scott, delightful companions, enjoyed their adventure in screenwriting; the film never got made, but they congratulated themselves on their superiority to greed. “Lads,” I thought, “you worked for it, you deserve it, you have nothing to be ashamed of, and should enjoy yourselves and be proud.” But apparently they didn’t think so. Or, at least, had some ambivalence. I miss Mike. Everyone does. And I always enjoy being with Scott, who loves movies. But when the big winner knows it’s too early to leave the table with his winnings and decides to hoard them till he can, reasonably, go home, he will start losing, as he’s no longer playing poker.
- I. Zanuck and Brown fired me off of The Verdict and hired Jay Allen to write a new script. Sidney Lumet read both and told them he was doing mine. We all were nominated and went to the Oscars, and Dick Zanuck threw his arm around me and said, “We had it all along…” This is the same Dick Zanuck who later fired me off Lolita, saying of my script, “You made him seem like a pedophile.”
- II. In Ted Morgan’s Maugham, he tells the story of the casting of The Razor’s Edge. This, you may remember, was Maugham’s grand novel about a young WWI flyer who cannot return to his prewar life but goes off to discover himself. The film starred Tyrone Power as the flyer, Gene Tierney as the Rich Girl who abandons him when he won’t return to society, and Anne Baxter as the Nice Girl. She marries a rich fella who loses all in the crash; and she turns to drink and becomes a whore.
Darryl Zanuck was producing. Anne Baxter was put up for the film, but, according to Maugham’s story, Zanuck didn’t find her sexy. He was at his pool one afternoon with Gregory Ratoff, who said she was a great lay, and Zanuck changed his mind.
In any case, that’s the story. She’s great in the film. Anne Baxter was Frank Lloyd Wright’s granddaughter. They were taken on a tour of Disney in the ’30s. Walt walked them through the labs and showed them the early “storyboard,” stick figure animation of the whale scene from Pinocchio. Then they watched the finished product, and Frank said, show the other one.
- III. Hollywood is hierarchical and savage. Those dealing with their inferiors may express an opinion, and the opinion may be disputed. But they are simultaneously proclaiming a position, criticism of which by an inferior is cause for dismissal.