TEMPER AND GAGS
I never lost my temper on the set. Why would I? I was thrilled to be there, and I knew there was one person in charge of making sure everyone was happy and productive, and that person was me. But if I had lost my temper, it would have been during pre-production of House of Games (1987).
We were in Seattle, then a poor and decaying, lovely city. I’d had a dream. In this dream a horse was running at the local track, Long-acres, the next day, and it had something to do with the movies.
I woke, and found, in the morning paper, Scriptgirl, running in the fifth, going off at 17-to-1. I gave my assistant, Scott Zigler, a thousand dollars, and told him to put it on the nose, on Scriptgirl.
End of the day, and I heard on the radio that Scriptgirl had won and, from Scott, that he forgot to go to the track.
Bob Rafelson was shooting Black Widow in Seattle. He asked me to play a cop in one scene, and I went over, on my lunch hour, to play the part. Debra Winger was starring, and running a high-stakes blackjack game for herself and the teamsters. Scott and I won several thousand dollars, which lessened the pain. And Scott (with whom I worked often) directed my The Old Neighborhood on Broadway in 1997 and many of my plays in New York and elsewhere. But on House of Games he was new to the Biz, and so the butt of that concomitant of filming: gags. Film motto: Gags first. Filming, time permitting.
I don’t know how (or why) a contemporary crew would get along without gags. For if life on the set is not amusing (in addition to and offset by being exasperating and draining), one’s in the wrong business.
It’s always been the lower-class kids who are the boxers. If you’re not prepared to take a beating in order to succeed, you don’t belong in the ring—the beatings you take inspire you to stop taking them and learn to administer them. One can’t enter boxing horizontally, through “boxing school.”
The folks in my day, in the movies, had to fight their way in. All were proud, the departments, the actors, their pride expressed in an esprit de corps, a large part of which expression was gags.
Scott was in charge of our Establishing Shot. Executives adore the establishing shot. I was doing my TV show The Unit, and the suits demanded an establishing shot of the Capitol to convince the audience that they were actually seeing something in Washington, D.C. They then demanded we super, over the shot, the legend WASHINGTON, D.C. For the benefit of whom?
Why, of their rice bowls, of course. For if they weren’t dreaming up nonsense, what were they doing there? We had Monday morning read-throughs of The Unit, infested with various barnacles from The Studio. I asked one what his particular job was, and he replied, “Facial hair.”
So Orion, the producers of House of Games, demanded an opening, establishing shot of Seattle. I told them, “Why?” Pause. “It’s not important that it’s Seattle,” I said. “Those who wouldn’t recognize Seattle aren’t going to know anything more than that it’s a city. And the residents will no doubt recognize their hometown.” No. They demanded the shot.
So I had Scott arrange it. He put a large mirror faceup on a large table and behind it put a poster of Seattle Harbor, or whatever it’s called. He then bought a child’s tiny, flat-bottomed pull toy of a tugboat, attached a string, and pulled it slowly across the mirror, for the shot. During which, we sprinkled water from a watering can onto the construction, ending the shot with the watering can becoming visible.
We sent the shot with the dailies to Orion and never heard back. The shot wasn’t included in the film, but I count it my finest hour.
Balanced by the below.
House of Games was a hell of a film. Orion wouldn’t promote it—why should they, as they’d already gotten their money (four million) back in Foreign Sales—but Roger Ebert, then the country’s most important film critic, called it “The Year’s Best Film.”
And then I was shooting my next film, Things Change, in Tahoe, and got a call from the head of a Very Important European Film Festival. He told me House of Games was to be awarded the festival’s highest prize and looked forward to seeing me the next week to accept it.
I said, wait, the Judges haven’t even showed up yet.
He repeated the invitation. Golly, I said, I’m in pre-production, and I can’t tear myself away, but thanks for the award. (No Dave, No Prize, he explained, and I stayed in Tahoe.)
The stupidest thing I’ve ever done in the film biz. (And I turned down both Scorsese’s offer of Raging Bull and Sergio Leone’s of Once Upon a Time in America.)
I was kvetching to my wife lately about this self-inflicted wound, and she said, “Nope, had you gone to Venice, we never would have met.”
Advantage, Mamet.
The experience broke me of the habit of ascribing not only justice but legitimacy to any Awards.I
It’s odd being accused—as regularly happened—of theft. The libels were sufficiently outlandish that my wonder, intermittently, dampened my outrage.
Two very successful producers sued me for fraud when I demanded they fulfill their contract; they alleged I’d cheated them, as I didn’t apply scene numbers to my screenplay.II
Harvey Weinstein contracted to pay me on a step-deal—for a first step of an outline. All the work in a screenplay is in the outline. If it’s correct, the script, and most probably then the film, will work.
Further embellishment is just the Christmas ornaments—take ’em or leave ’em. In film they’re dialogue (which film can do without), and the narrative material, of interest only to bored script readers, and home viewers who need to leave the room.
So Harvey asked to see my outline, and I said, fine, let’s see the down payment.
“How would I know,” he said, “that after I paid you, you wouldn’t cheat me?”
“Alright,” I said, “you write the fucking outline.”
Two Masterpieces.
The Burghers of Amsterdam commissioned Rembrandt to commemorate a Company of Civic Guardsmen. The Night Watch (1642) is one of the world’s greatest paintings. The buyers said that Rembrandt cheated them.
The honchos of another town reached out to commission Auguste Rodin. He sculpted The Burghers of Calais. They loathed it and held his payment in escrow.
The Société des Gens de Lettres, of Paris, hired him to honor Balzac. Rodin spent seven years on the statue until he understood the body to his satisfaction. He began with various nudes, and eventually draped the figure in a cloak.
The buyers saw the maquette and withheld his payment, as they said he was “dogging it.” Kenneth Clark called it “the greatest piece of sculpture of the nineteenth century—perhaps, indeed, the greatest since Michelangelo.”
Rodin spent seven years drawing studies of Balzac at various ages; he had clothing made to imitate Balzac’s, and put his models in it. When the suits accused him of theft, he shattered the plaster maquette, revealing the musculature underneath.
