GIFTS

I’d learned, pre–show business, young and usually out of work, to assess new employers by their handshake on first meeting. As the Cake, so is the Wedding.

Later on, as such meetings were, supposedly, the conjunction of Equals, I elaborated on the insight.

I always brought a gift to a first meeting. It was, as in the Asian tradition, not of great monetary value (everyone can spend money if he has it) but a display of thoughtfulness on the part of the donor—that is, of that which actually cost the giver something: his time or his thought.

I was hired by Brian De Palma to write The Untouchables.

I’m a Chicago South Sider. My grandparents’ generation lived in Capone’s South Side, and some of them knew him and told me about him. I wrote a treatment for De Palma prior to meeting him, and went shopping.

I found a contemporary bio of Capone, in a rare edition, signed by the author. I had it wrapped and went to our first meeting.

“Hi, hi,” and “sit down,” he said. As I sat, I handed him the package. “I brought you something,” I said. He put it aside, saying, “I have a problem with your Scene Two.”

And so it went. Up to and including Bob De Niro calling me from Canada to kvetch about a scene. “You read it before you took the part,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “Why’d it get worse just because you have to act it?” I said. And that was it, for ten silent years (during which he did four of the films I wrote, God bless him).^I

After The Untouchables I’d bought a BMW (a German car), and I loved it till I sat at a stoplight and in the adjacent lane was Brian De Palma, in the same car. That was the end of my relationship with BMW.

I was asked to do a five-hour MasterClass on writing, directing, and general theatrical aesthetics. I went kicking and screaming and had the time of my life. It was produced by Erica Kammann and Matthew Rutler and directed by Diane Houslin. They and their team turned what I thought would be three days of drudgery into a joy. They’d gone to my archives at UT Austin and had re-created (forged) actual notebooks of mine; they’d gone to my cabin in Vermont and had re-created it as a set. (NB: the forging is one of the excellences of the Archives folk in Texas; they guard the originals and make duplicates that would deceive the woman at the DMV.)

At the end of the show, I began talking about The Demolished Man. This is a 1953 science fiction book by Alfred Bester. In it, telepaths advertise testing for those who believe they have the power. The applicants line up, waiting for their turn to be examined, but, unseen, the actual telepaths are watching them from above and thinking: “If you can hear me, please go through the door on the left marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.” Once in a long while an applicant shakes his head and hesitantly walks through the prohibited door.

Well, it was at the end of a three-day shoot, I was exhausted and I had the flu—both offered in extenuation of my behavior; for when I finished my story (and thus the shoot), I started to cry. I asked for another take, apologized to the crew, and in this take cried a little less, and they used it.

I believe the last time I cried was at Random Harvest, starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. (Filmed 1942, tears 1970.)

We finished the MasterClass shoot, and a week later there arrived a signed first edition of The Demolished Man.

I. After our reconciliation, I wrote a script intended for him, The Edge. (The part was, in the event, played beautifully by Alec Baldwin.) I sent the script to Bob. He requested a table read. (NB: No script was ever made by anyone requesting a table read, but I granted graciously what I dared not refuse.)
After the read, Bob came to me and said, “I like it, but I don’t love it. It’s very good, but it’s just not a thing I have to do, and I’ve only got so many of them left in me. Are you mad at me?”

Me: “No, of course not.”

Bob: “You’re sure?”

Me: “Yes.”

Bob: “Good, cause, I want to ask a favor. I’ve got this piece of shit I’m supposed to start shooting on Monday. Could you take a look at the script?”