FINDING THE MATERIAL was not the hardest thing for Teddy Brody to do. Staying up all night, speed reading, marking passages, taking notes, was not all that much of a strain either. Breaking his date with Sam, from Anaheim, who was a fitness instructor at Best Bods in the summer and a ski instructor at Steamboat Springs in the winter, didn’t bother Teddy much. While he responded to the body thing—a hot bod is, after all, a hot bod—it was not what he was searching for. After all, in the age of AIDS, genital warts, herpes, condoms, hand jobs, and mutual masturbation, how much better was a bod than a video or a dream?
Teddy had anticipated that cutting the material down to size would be the hardest part of all. One page was astounding brevity for someone who’d graduated college with honors. Let alone a Yalie. It meant more than choosing. It meant shutting up about his choices: simply saying things and letting them hang there, unexplained, unexplicated, neither proving them nor expanding on their implications, trusting the reader to understand them all by himself. That had required a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. But once done, it turned out not to have been difficult at all.
The really hard thing—it froze him for hours, gave him stage fright, touched him as deep as the fear of defecating in his pants in public—was quoting without attribution.77My God! in old academia that was plagiarism! University chancellors were fired for having done it once, twenty years earlier. A presidential candidate—that is to say, someone presumed to be a professional liar—had to quit his campaign for doing it. And yet Teddy knew that Beagle didn’t want footnotes. He didn’t care from whence the thoughts came. In CinéMutt it didn’t matter. It was clutter. Intellectual litter. The quote from Lodge, and the date, being the exception, because that was part of the point; that we’d used the same themes for three or four wars now and it seemed to work every time. When he handed in his thesis—naked, every word taken from someone else with no recognition, ruthlessly, with cynical abandon—he felt a sense of graduation. He didn’t even have to wait for his grade. Beagle had, by the very asking, taught him something important and deep, and made him a better man. Now Brody had the potential for success in Hollywood. At last, he thought, I can steal.
The sense of empowerment was so potent that the minute Teddy handed the propaganda paper in the idea for his screenplay entered his mind. He knew exactly where he was going to steal the plot, the structure, and the characters and exactly how he was going to reinvent them to make his version fresh and original.78The minute he got home he sat down to write a treatment. The first draft was done in a matter of hours. By morning he had revised it, run it through spell check, reread it, retyped the corrections, and printed it out. He brought it with him to work.
Beagle had had the single page—pithy and enigmatic as strategy by Sun Tzu or prophecy by I Ching—overnight. Teddy Brody waited, impatiently, for Beagle’s arrival in the morning, for his blessing or his curse. And when—if—Beagle praised it, that would be the moment. The moment to say, “I have a treatment—would you read it?”
Beagle had sat bolt upright at 5:00 A.M. It was dark outside, not even a predawn gray, but still crisp black, and stars too. He was wide awake. He thought it was inspiration when that happened, but it was his liver. That’s not to say he didn’t have insights and fresh concepts in the early hours, but it was the sluggishness in his liver that woke him.
The new woman—Beagle told himself he’d have to make a point of remembering her name—had made another stupid mistake. The sort of mistake Kitty would never make. In an excess of zeal she’d gone out and bought a present for John Lincoln to give to Dylan, even though she didn’t know what she was doing. She’d bought a little football and a little helmet. Beagle thought it was cute. Kitty would have known better. Jackie climbed the walls when she saw it. She nailed John’s hide to the door. All the sins of the male race apparently had something to do with football. It brought on war, killing, wife beating, beer guzzling, belching, and the national overindulgence in junk food.
What he understood, at last, when he awoke in the dark, was that football was his model, not baseball, not movies. In one sense that should have been obvious because one of the standard adages in the drivel of popular wisdom is that football is the sport most like war. If you had asked Beagle, before this particular morning when an insufficiency of bile aroused him, he would have said: “Football is the sport most like roller derby. It can also be compared to professional wrestling with more clothes. Golf is the sport most like war.” But part of Beagle’s genius was the ability to overcome his intelligence and arrogance and cater, shamelessly, to a lower common denominator. The lowest, if possible.79
If football was what America thought war was, then a Beagle-directed war was going to be the goddamn Super Bowl. Unlike baseball, which used anticipation instead of action in the game, football no longer even needed the game. The players didn’t have to do anything. The fans did it all by themselves. Super Bowl was the most hyperbolic version of this effect: two weeks of hype, hysteria, wagering, turmoil, media blitz, and ado—without a single block, tackle, or penalty, without one ball thrown or kicked or carried.
The game itself—that final, end-of-the-season, ultimate, championship confrontation—was normally a dud. A blowout, decided early, barely worth watching for those few weirdos who watched for the sake of seeing what happened in the actual game segment of the event. Yet it was never a disappointment. No game was bad enough to diminish the hysteria of the subsequent Super Bowl.
That, Beagle now knew, was the pace and the shape of a war that America was going to love.
Heroes and villains. The hero was a given: George Herbert Walker Bush. He would have his costars. They would be . . . hold that for later.
The first thing Beagle did when he got to CinéMutt was run villain footage. Hitler, Joe Stalin, Ho Chi Minh, Kaiser Wilhelm, Jack Palance, Erich Von Stroheim. There was just one word, one definition of “villain”—Hitler. Change the face, change the language, change the rant, but call the character Hitler.
But the really interesting thing was that in the end the importance placed on the character of the villain was illusory. Bush had done a Hitler bit with Noriega and it didn’t play. Maggie Thatcher had done the Falklands without a bad guy and her splendid little war did splendidly.
What did she have? She had Pearl Harbor!
It wasn’t the villain, it was the villainous act, which found its most perfect expression in the sneak attack. Which was also the centerpiece of America’s mythology of itself: Mr. Nice Guy gets sucker-punched. Mr. Nice Guy gets up off the floor, squares up man to man with Mr. Sneak Attack. Mr. Nice Guy turns out to have been John Wayne, Clark Kent, a Superpower—Mr. Sneak Attack wishes he’d never been born.
What America needed—or Bush needed—or Beagle needed—was someone to invade America.
That was a problem. Big-time. Who was going to invade the U.S.? Mexico? Canada? Laughable. The remnants of the USSR? They’d use nukes, we’d use nukes, that would be the end of Hollywood as we know it. Japan? Would Japan be willing to invade us again? Could the economic thing be made to look like an invasion? No. The job didn’t call for economic war. Too sophisticated for TV and, frankly, the images were nonexistent.
He went back to the Vietnam scenario. He did not yet understand why he felt The Return was wrong and he needed to do so before he could find his way to a war whose aesthetic would succeed. He started running Nam clips. It was clear in less than a minute: jungle. That was a big one. Americans don’t like jungle wars. Too wet. Too hot. Hot and wet was disease and sex. Americans liked fighting the Nazis. Americans liked Germanic warfare. Mechanized. Civilized. Clean and dry.
Yet, America had fought the Japs in the jungle. And that had been good. A lot of good films had come out of it. John Wayne had been mostly in the Pacific. There he was again, on Screen 8, in the only pro-Vietnam War movie ever made, The Green Berets, an old, fat John Wayne strutting around like it was still WWII.
And that was the final insight.
The real fundamental problem, the structural problem, was that Vietnam wasn’t Vietnam. It was never intended to be its own thing. To go back to Vietnam was to miss the point. The point was to be what Vietnam was supposed to be in the first place—a remake—not for theaters, for television—of 1942-45: World War II Two—The Video.
He heard the words underlined in his head. That was it. That was the essence.
He remembered an anthology film—Going Hollywood: The War Years. It said something pertinent. He searched it out and punched it up: “A war where there was no doubt about who started it or what we were fighting for or who were the good guys or who were the bad guys. In other words, it was a war that could’ve been written by Hollywood.” That was good, right on target, but still not the statement that he was looking for—there: “Gone were the movies of the thirties with their screwball rich people, their fast-talking heroines, their wisecracks about banks, government, unemployment. The war canceled all criticism. A new and total wholesomeness pervaded Hollywood’s America. It was decided that the true character of the nation was just—nice. There were no demonstrations, no complaints, in nice America.” That’s what it was really about. That’s what the client wanted. The war was just a means to an end. World War II was the war that delivered the proper end. That was the America Bush wanted—where rich people were respected, banks were good guys, nobody criticized, even the darkies turned out to be nice, and women kept their goddamn mouths shut.
John Lincoln Beagle had chosen the film that America would make next: WWII-2-V.
77 Earlier versions—all but the final one, actually—do contain footnotes or other forms of reference. The first line is attributed to Professor Campbell Stuart in Sidney Rogerson, Propaganda in the Next War (Garland Library, 1938). This is a fascinating series, edited by Captain Liddell Hart, of predictions about World War II. Titles in the series included Sea Power in the Next War, Air Power in . . ., Tanks in . . ., Gas in. . . . The information in the chart, slightly altered, and the three statements following, came from Sam Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination, The Psychology of Enmity (Harper & Row, 1986), a book about war, war images, and war propaganda, which seemed to Teddy to describe the way his family related, especially his relationship to his father and his father’s to his mother. The next line, the quote from Mr. Lodge, and the last two lines, all come from Bruce Winton Knight, How to Run a War (Knopf, 1936; reprint, Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972). The underlined passage is a paraphrase of Terence H. Quaker, Opinion Control in Democracies (St. Martin’s Press, 1985).
78 Jeanine Basinger, in The World War II Combat Film, points out that “Hollywood was, contrary to popular opinion, a frugal place. Plots and characters and events were saved like old pieces of string, and taken out of the drawer and re-used. . . . Useful things were—tough sergeants, raw recruits, old veterans, diary-keeping writers, colorful immigrant types; mail calls, Christmas celebrations, barroom brawls; wounded men crying out to be brought in, and, when rescued, dying anyway; brave men going up in planes to sacrifice themselves. . . .”
This was exactly what Beagle did. He took bits and pieces “saved like old pieces of string,” and we can notice their appearance in the final production. Teddy’s brainstorm was to take the classic combat film—the same twelve or fourteen people: Pop, the guy from Brooklyn, the kid with a puppy, the guy who was gonna write novels someday, etc.—and make all the characters gay. In the Pacific War, a homophobic colonel takes all the gays—men and women—in his battalion and puts them on a tiny atoll. He knows that it will be attacked by an overwhelming force of Japanese. He tells them they must hold out at all costs. And so on.
79 He was fond of a quote from H. L. Mencken, changing they/their to we/ our: “We have built our business on a foundation of morons,” and said as much in a interview in Cinema magazine. “Who do you think buys movie tickets? Who goes to see the same movie fourteen times—morons and aspiring film directors. Who watches TV? If it’s not dumb enough that the morons love it, it will lose money and I haven’t done my job. Catering to the morons is Job One! Somebody said that: Lee Iaccoca? Ford? Reagan? Before you go to make a film, spend a couple of days watching a lot of television. Get down with the morons. If you can make a movie that does that and is brilliant too, then you’re a genius. You’re John Huston, you’re John Ford, you’re Alfred Hitchcock.”
This is actually the last real interview Beagle ever gave. David Hartman saw to it that Beagle never again spoke for publication without a handler present and without previewing the questions.