BACKWASH
What did it all mean, what can it all have meant: that I know the Maltese Falcon statue appears in a second film, Conflict (1945), Bogey here playing a wife-killer. He’s called in by the cops and some hip set decorator has placed The Falcon in the cop’s bookcase, behind Bogey’s head.
His nemesis is proved to be Sydney Greenstreet, playing straight as a crime-solving psychologist. Bogey did five films with Greenstreet. Of them, The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca both featured Peter Lorre, also of their rep company. A retired cop friend told me that Lorre’s daughter, Catharine, was stopped on Mulholland by Angelo Buono and Kenneth Bianchi, the killers then known co-jointly as the Hillside Strangler, terror of L.A. in the seventies. The Stranglers took her purse and were going to off her when one saw her driver’s license. “He’s my father,” she said, and they let her off as a sort of Professional Courtesy.
Lorre was one of my folk, a Jew, who escaped from the Nazis and fetched up in my neighborhood on the Westside, in sight of the Pacific Ocean.
I’ve always found the Pacific Ocean a bore.
I was raised on Lake Michigan and lived most of my life on the Atlantic, two notably various bodies of water. I know the Pacific gets rambunctious just a bit from shore, but I only see it from the shore, and as an ocean it disappoints.
The Jewish actors moved out here to save their lives, leaving behind not only great careers in Europe (Lorre, Conrad Veidt, Hedy Lamarr, Marcel Dalio, Paul Lukas, and on and on) but their world, which is to say their culture. And here one finds oneself now, the film and theatrical culture of the twentieth century dead. As the means of distribution have been superseded.
No one goes to Broadway save tourists, who want tourist fare, and that’s not only comprehensible but inevitable. Nineteenth-century tourists to Italy may have found actual Etruscan artifacts, unappreciated in this or that remote village; later, pilgrims in search of Art were sold bogus masterpieces in Florence and Rome, and the Religious for two thousand years have always brought home guaranteed fragments of the True Cross. Today in Rome the streets are filled with shops hawking plaques of the genitals of Michelangelo’s David, the wise shopper given the choice of various penis colors and lengths.
Universal Studios makes a fortune having transformed its lot, where films were made, into a nostalgia/amusement park, a financially canny use of the land. The fungible backflow: not only millions paying to go “Eek” at Jurassic Park monsters but the creation of a dedicated audience identified as conditioned to buy anything that makes it go “Eek.”
I know of old, from my days in the Boiler Room, selling this or that over the telephone, that the best lead is that which took the sucker time. He or she who actually cut the ad out of a magazine and mailed it in with a return address is demanding to be screwed. And, financially best-of-all, the folks at Universal have the credit card info of attendees, who will no doubt receive all sorts of Special Offers upon their return home.
The Hillside Stranglers let Ms. Lorre off, but Universal will use every part of the pig but the squeal. The success of the amusement park has inevitably affected the remaining movies actually produced. For the folks queue up for the roller coaster to go “Whee” for a few seconds over a ten-minute ride, and the same progression and percentage are found in the tentpole—producers and consumers both understanding that the product is a legitimate number of thrills separated by just-bearable filler.
Nothing wrong with that, unless one happens to be a writer; for the thrills will be created by the blue screen folk, independent of the script, and the fill is all generic, requiring a dramatist not at all. The screenwriter, once a scenarist, is here exactly like his primordial brethren, the writers-of-titles for the silents.
They wrote “Night Fell Swiftly on the Tropics,” a useless explanation of the shot of a sunset; and today’s flacks craft dialogue, commenting on the same shot, “Well, Jim, sun’s up, I guess that means we’d better be ridin’.”
I spent several afternoons with Lauren Bacall (née Perske). Her house had been flooded out or something, and she was living in a cottage at the Bel-Air, then the world’s greatest hotel. The studios put me up there when I was in town working on a film. And there I sat, every afternoon, at the pool, in a lounge chair, writing, and taxed with lifting an eyebrow whenever I needed a pool boy to come by and bring me something to eat or drink. And we chatted, Miss Bacall and I, about this and that.
She’d been the childhood friend, in New York, of my friend Andy Potok. His family was friendly with the Perskes; Andy and their Betty were pals. I never got the courage to call Miss Bacall “Betty.”
Andy, a friend in Vermont for fifty years, was a painter. He went blind, in his thirties, from retinitis pigmentosa, and he began to write. His memoir Ordinary Daylight is a masterpiece. He asked me to adapt it for a film. I wrote the screenplay, and some producer gave it to Penny Marshall. Penny said she’d make it (joy all around), but she had a few notes on the script. She gave it to some slave and asked her to highlight those parts of the book that didn’t make it into the screenplay. I went to a meeting and Penny handed me the book, with everything highlighted save the prepositions. I bet the producer five grand that she wouldn’t make the film within six months, he took the bet, and at the conclusion of the stated period, he replied, to my request for the cash, “I was just fooling.” Andy can be seen as one of the poker players in my film House of Games. Others include Bob and Al, other members of my Vermont Poker Game, and Ricky Jay.
Ricky and I mapped out a screenplay based upon an Oscar scam. Lord, how I miss Ricky. What didn’t he know?
As all aerobatic maneuvers are only different arrangements of the loop and the roll, all con games are essentially the inculcation of greed, coupled with misdirection—the pigeon drop (“Oh, look, is this your wallet?”) essentially identical to the Great Housing Bubble (“Would you like this house for nothing?”). And so, we looked at the Oscars, saddened that House of Games, written by me, inspired by him, had not been named best picture of the decade.
He grew up doing the Bally in a carnival,I and I on the South Side and on the edge of various questionable endeavors. Well, then, we reasoned of the Oscars, as we have certainly suffered not only loss but treachery (were that year’s judges suborned or only blind?), why not spin the flax to gold and do a film about stealing the Oscars?
One, two, six, as they said, and the answer, as in Magic and Aerobatics, presented itself as the inevitable combination of one or two basics.
There has existed since the days of the world’s second horse a surefire method to profit from a horse race that depended not at all on the animal’s performance. The racetrack tout (one who sells tips) merely had to circulate in the crowd and sell his knowledge of the Sure Winner. Easy to do. With nine horses running, he only required nine suckers. He sold each one on a different horse, and one of the suckers of course won. And here is the beauty part, he then came back. For more.
Q. How do you inflame the greed of the horseplayers?
A. You sell them a sure thing.
Now: Why should they believe you had the ability to pick a winner?
A. As you just did so. (He was the one sure winner of the nine—he is now hooked.)
The tout at first must answer the sucker’s eternal and essential question: Why me? The tout’s explanation: As it costs you little. Or, indeed, nothing. He can even say, “I’ll give you the first winner for nothing, and you split the winnings with me when you find I’m right.” The sucker is set up. He comes back and says, “Tell me the winner in the next race,” and now the con man shakes him down. (“Pay me.”)
In our film, the con men (Rix and Bex) sell a producer with a nominated film this story: when the Oscar envelope is passed to the Presenter, no one knows the winner’s name save the Accountancy Firm and the presenter who opens the envelope. If the wrong name is read, the accountants would be unlikely to blow the whistle on their flawed security; all one has to do is to bribe the guy who opens the envelope. The con men find out who that particular presenter will be, and do a bit of legwork. They are looking for his particular exploitable troubles: sexual, financial, familiar. Here they employ the same ancient technique of the stickup artist. In the days before everyone wore a mask, the stickup guy pasted some adhesive tape over one temple, painted as if seeping blood or pus (you see, you are already turning away). That is what the bank teller remembered. So in our case, we told this tale: the Star to be suborned was paying off a blackmailer (that’s why he needs the money), and the sucker’s attention was distracted from the tale’s implausability, and drawn to the salacious.
How did our heroes impress the mark with their proximity to the Star? They confessed that they were the blackmailers. Pretty good.
They figured, they said, that they could actually get more money through bribing the Star and fixing the Oscars than by shaking him down. Now the sucker is distracted by the proximity to a scandal in which he must believe, for the blackmailers have confessed themselves criminals. They have given him their confidence. The two basic principles of Magic are here, 1) anticipation—the trick is accomplished before the mark knows it is in operation; 2) misdirection—as the scam progresses, the mark is distracted by difficulties in the Star’s itinerary: he was supposed to receive the bribe in Pasadena, but he changed his plans; he has drunk himself sick from fear of exposure, and so on.
The sucker’s attention now is not on the confidence folk but on the Star. At the racetrack the anticipation is the selling of the First Tip; by the time the sucker comes back to plead for another go, the trick is already accomplished. The misdirection will come after the score; while the mark is waiting for his Final Winner to romp home, the touts are far, far away. The punch line to our script was that Bex and Rix, having taken the mark for five mil to fix the Oscars, wonder how to expand their operations, and decide to “fix” a Presidential Election.
Someone is stealing my material.
Our Oscar film was going apace, as part of the usual trans-Siberian railway journey of Idea to Screen; and then the rumor spread that someone had stolen the gag FOR REAL. You may have heard that some woman was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress award; and the Presenter was Her Best Friend, who opened the envelope and spoke a name that may, in fact, not have been written on the card. A superb bit of film lore, and we all, of course, hope it was true. As, film producers’ understanding to the contrary, we all love a good story.
How, Rix and I wondered, could The World be so cruel as to ruin our grand idea? Here is the answer: we say that such and such is unthinkable only of those things that have just been thought of—fantasized by ourselves or accomplished by others.II
There’s a lot of world out there; and there are a lot of people, you and I included, scheming on its more gainful exploitation. The grand perception of psychoanalysis, for the dramatist, is that all actions are performed FOR A REASON, and that one may reason backward from the action, however absurd or self-destructive, to a cause. The determination may be arbitrary, or indeed wrong, but it may be made. Further, that, for the dramatist, the process may be reversed, the cause postulated first, and its development to a conclusion graphed—at which point (in the tragedy only; and in the drama previously) the cause of the progression is clear.
The dramatist as analyst, unfortunately, cannot punch out and go home. The psychoanalyst can leave his work at the office (the old saw being that if you were introduced at the cocktail party as an analyst, you had to put up with being told, “Oh, now I suppose you can read my thoughts… so I must be careful…”). No, the Doctor can happily walk away from his bread-and-butter tales of woe. But the dramatist has no off button. All human behavior, to him, is either a revelation or a confirmation. Of what? Of human variations on the themes of sin and folly.
Which I introduce in reference to the Oscars, and the reality of their potential for subversion. What could have brought this to mind (my own and Ricky’s, or the nominee’s Best Friend’s)? I suggest it was the ritual insistence, every year, upon their absolute security.
The French between the wars built the impregnable Maginot Line to defend against the Germans. The Germans looked at a map, saw where the Maginot Line ended, and attacked there.
How do we know the Oscars can be fixed? Everything can be fixed. This is the lesson we can take from the magicians: the more intelligent one is, the easier he is to fool. Magic invites the observer to let his intelligence lead him to its overthrow. Just like Dramatists. When we are doing our job. When we are not, we’re merely writing propaganda; not even Francis the Talking Mule but “Francis the Talking Mule Rids Himself of Prejudice.”
- I. “They’re on the inside, folks, they’re on the inside…”
- II. My first play in New York was Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Some producers bought the rights, fucked up the script (an act of vandalism), and then CHANGED THE TITLE (an act of insanity).
Three years after it came out, as About Last Night, Steven Soderbergh brought out Sex, Lies, and Videotape. I don’t recall the film, but I do recall the title, the salacious power of which would have/should have been mine.
Years later Soderbergh commissioned me to write a Dillinger script. I wrote a lulu, and he shitcanned it and made another film, a piece of crap. An odd choice.