VILLAINS AND SEXUAL ABUSE AT THE GOLDEN GLOBES

As a cute young thing, I danced in the Maurice Chevalier show Toutes Voiles Dehors, at Expo ’67. I am the last person alive to have been onstage with Maurice Chevalier, whom many in postwar France considered a villain. He was indicted as a collaborator, and a bunch of folks wanted to hang him.^I

The only other villains with whom I was associated in Show Business were, of course, the producers and Studio Folk. I worked, however, with some grand on-screen villains. Notably, two great comics.

Steve Martin played the villain in my film The Spanish Prisoner; Tim Allen played the villain in Redbelt. I always loved comics playing straight. There is no better performance than Jackie Gleason’s in The Hustler, and Jerry Lewis redeemed a career as a buffoon in Scorsese’s The King of Comedy.

The grandest villain of all, a testament to genius, was the light bulb, HAL, in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

For two afternoons, Kubrick was my phone pal. I’d written On Directing Film and sent it to him, ostensibly a gesture of respect but actually a begging letter, looking for a quote. He called me from his home in England. We spoke for two afternoons, mostly about guns. He was a competitive pistol shot; I was too. I of course wanted to steer the conversation to film gossip, but firearms, like aviation and sexual dish among their aficionados, trump all. He did tell me that Kirk Douglas was a pain in the ass on Spartacus, and that, on his first meeting re: Dr. Strangelove, Peter Sellers came to the door dressed as Hitler, and kept it up, accent and all, through a long London brunch.

I asked Kubrick about Sue Lyon’s introductory shot in Lolita. I said it was swell that he’d blown the background out, that is, overlit the shot, so she appears in a haze of light. He said I’d just seen a bad print.

His The Killing was my inspiration for the first film I wrote and directed, House of Games. There I was, in Santa Barbara, on location while Bob Rafelson shot Postman. I’d bought a 1969 Karmann Ghia off the street in L.A. and commuted in it, weekends, down the coast, listening to the radio.

And there was Glenn Gould playing Bach, the C-minor Toccata. It is the ultimate elaboration of a simple triad—that is, of three notes. Jerry Kern did something similar in “Ol’ Man River.” I pulled over to the side of Highway 1 to listen to the exquisite intricacies extracted from a simple theme, and one thing led to another, and I wrote a movie.

Beginning with a noir gave me a taste for the thing, which played into a strength: the ability to craft a plot. This was not a natural skill (like writing dialogue, a gift, for which I will take all the undeserved credit on offer) but rather laudable as a test of determination. As Trollope wrote, “It’s dogged as does it.” In a noir one must stay ahead of the audience, the inclusion of the obligatory scene stops it dead, and the audience goes to the concession stand.

The comics inspire, as The Joke is the perfect paradigm for a dramatic plot, which is, formally, just a joke extended. The solution to each must surprise and delight as it is revealed as inevitable.

Steve and Tim, obvious good guys, turn out, in my films, to be baddies, and we may be surprised. If they were obvious malefactors, waxed mustache or its emotional equivalent, there would be no punch line.

We might say that Kubrick’s aperçu was an anticipation of the computer-as-villain; but his filmic villain was NOT EVEN a computer, it was a light bulb which we were informed was a computer. And that is genius.

We all know that our truest opponents are the swine who take advantage of our good nature slash stupidity. We defend ourselves against obvious threats, but aggressors study to attack us through the undefended points. That’s logic.

The Germans came through Belgium in World War I and almost took Paris. The French built the impregnable Maginot Line, extending right up to and just short of the Belgian defenses. The Germans struck again, in 1940, in Belgium, and this time took Paris, full stop.

The baddies in Hollywood, on first meeting, smile—why not?, it costs them nothing and plays to our vanity and greed. Who is immune? (Gandhi himself had thirty-one different loincloths, one for each day of the month.) Sexual titillation, like most passions, is fungible: this can be mistaken or traded for that (see sadomasochism).

The ambitious come to Hollywood, excited by the promise of reward, and, heck, since they’re there anyway, may trade sex for the promise. As with the disappointed flea market vendor at the close of the day, it makes little sense to cart it home.

The old tale has the young thing, fresh from Kansas, invited to a meeting at a producer’s apartment. She arrives at ten a.m., he greets her, clad only in a bathrobe, and the bed unmade. She writes in shock to her mom back home. “Imagine,” she writes, “ten o’clock and the bed unmade.”

I’d have thought the young things criminally doltish (old joke: Ann-Margret is the only girl in Hollywood who still has her hyphen), until came the dawn. There I was, at my biannual visit to the Golden Globes. The gag was that one showed up, sat at various tables full of stringers (reporters paid only on acceptance of submissions) from newspapers with unfamiliar names situated in countries of which no one had heard, and mimed personability.

One of the Head Dogs of the outfit greeted me as an old friend, did we not meet once every two years, when I’d appear and get my picture took and flog another magnificent film which his peripatetic coterie would fail to endorse? This Head Dog was effusive in his thanks for my appearance and became overly so. For as we spoke he, perhaps absent-mindedly, stuck his hand down my pants.

The conversation continued for a beat or two, as I realized, “… hold on, here…” and put some daylight between us.

What had I done to “lead him on”? Was I “inviting”? No. Was I that cute? No. What had he found attractive? Ah, I reflected that night, he must have been turned on by the excellence of my film!

In which I was close-to-at-one with generations of the (self-) seduced-and-abandoned dead blondes, rough trade, and regular old aspirants.

Sadie and Abie have been married fifty-five years. She’s dying in the hospital, he goes to visit, she asks him to “throw a little schtup into her,” he does so. The next day, she rises from her deathbed, cured. He begins to weep. “I could have saved Eleanor Roosevelt.”

I love Eleanor Roosevelt.

I wrote a smashing police script (fired from), in which an old cop tells a rookie, “You may be broke and tired and wet, but you’re going to get more pussy than Eleanor Roosevelt.”

Speaking of which, I wrote a television pilot about two con men flogging a counterfeit letter proving beyond a doubt that Abraham Lincoln was gay.

Yes, the business changed (died), and as I aged out of it and got sidelined because of my politics (respect for the Constitution, etc.), my work began to resemble that of the postwar Trobriand Islanders. They’d become fat and sassy during the war, from the air bases built on their islands. Japan surrendered, the Allies and their planes went home, and the islanders constructed large plane-shaped structures out of bamboo, to lure the fellows back.

My equivalent can be seen in the various unproduced works of worth holding my bookends apart.

When I realized that the Globes folk weren’t going to give me no stinking statuettes without I forked over something, the light bulb went on. I fantasized that, on my next film release, I would go back to their photo-fest and threaten that if they didn’t give me a prize I’d have them all deported.

And would they have even responded to my threat? And now that threat exceeds its shelf life, in this day of vanished borders.^II

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What was I smoking when I wrote Wag the Dog?

We know the main gag is the Prez stages a fake war to distract the voters. Even hipper, though, is that the Albanian attack is going to be staged from Canada.

A song from the film:

I guard the Canadian border

I guard the American dream.

Can you imagine my surprise—let alone my lack of delight—on being informed that the Writers Guild had been awarded another author credit for my script?

The phone rang at my place in Vermont, and Jane Rosenthal, Wag’s producer (along with Bob De Niro), told me, outraged, that a panel of the Guild had given first-position credit to someone else.

“Huh,” I said. “What someone else…?”

“It seems,” Jane said, “that there’d been a previous script.”

Nobody had mentioned it to me, and it would have made no difference to my work if they had, as I wouldn’t have read it. I wrote the thing based on Barry Levinson’s “The President is caught in a bind, and decides to stage a fake war.”

The Guild had awarded first-position credit to a first-submitted script of which I had no knowledge. I called them, proud of my ability to contain my amazement, and explained the situation. Well, they (I can’t remember who, in this case, bore that dread title) said, “Why didn’t you submit a précis of your position vis-à-vis the other script?”

“I didn’t know there was another script,” I said.

No help for it, I was told, but to appeal to the Review Committee.

The Review Committee, three writers, ruled me the loser.

Then I got a call from one of the three, who said the other two had not even read the scripts but simply looked at the dates of submission.

I didn’t rat this person out but did call the Guild, and asked how many times a credit ruling had been overturned on appeal. They told me they were not permitted to give out that information.

Me: “Why not?”

Writers Guild: (Pause.)

Bad bad Writers Guild. And yet I’m still paying dues. To an uncaring idiot bureaucracy that is supposed to exist solely to defend my interests. Perhaps you’ve had a similar experience.

It was, however, as you might imagine, pleasing to have the title embraced as part of our language.

And I received one medal in my life.

The French government named me a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. It comes with a green medal on a green ribbon, and is known as le Pruneau (the prune). Later, their Consul upbraided me for an episode of my TV show The Unit. Here, the Foreign Legion conspires to deprive our military guys, The Unit (Dennis Haysbert, Scott Foley, Max Martini, Demore Barnes, and Michael Irby), of a win. The Guys refer to the Legion lads as Frogs, and Michael Irby announces the appearance of the French to the Team Leader, Dennis, saying, “Hey, Boss: Ribbit.”

The Consul wrote I’d impugned the honor of France. Which calls to mind my script Joan of Bark. This is a comedy. A young father goes to France to claim some prize or treasure—I believe it is a tapestry of Joan of Arc’s dog, Woofy.

Will Ferrell said he’d do it, and it sat around fermenting at Sony for several years. It’s still there. I mourn not only the dead script but my unexecuted directorial notions, for the location to which the Hero travels is “downtown Arc,” and all the men there wear berets, and the women carry string bags, out of which stick a French Loaf, and are followed by poodles. What a loss.

Old Joke: 1947, upper-class Brit goes to pick up his cleaning and finds the old Jew proprietor weeping.

Brit: What’s the matter?

Jew: Ve lost India.

1. I. Cf. the great Arletty, whose boyfriend was head of the Paris Gestapo. Arraigned for treason after the war, she testified, “My heart is French, my pussy is International.” They let her off. This is why I love the French.
2. II. A beloved joke of my youth:

   Q. What do you call a buccaneer?

   A. A high price to pay for corn.

   Inflation has destroyed that joke (and yet we speak of “progress”…).