Dying for a Cigarette

by Lee Child

The producer’s notes came in. The screenwriter saw the e-mail on his phone. The subject line said Notes. The phone was set to preview the first several words of the message, which were Thanks again for making time for lunch today. The screenwriter looked away. He didn’t open the e-mail. Didn’t read more. Instead he backed up and sat down on the sofa, stiff and upright, straight like a poker, palms cupped on the cushions either side of his knees.

His wife sat down on his lap. She was an hour back from the beauty parlor, still in her afternoon attire, which was a cream silk blouse tucked into a navy linen skirt, which when standing fell just above the knee, and when sitting, especially on a lap, crept a little higher. She was wearing nothing underneath either item. She wondered if he could tell. Probably not, she thought. Not yet. He was preoccupied. She lit a cigarette and placed it between his lips.

He said, “Thank you.”

She said, “Tell me about lunch.”

“It was him and three of his execs. I think at least one of them was financial.”

“How did it go?”

“Exactly like I was afraid it would.”

“Exactly?”

“More or less,” he said. “Possibly even worse.”

She said, “Did you make the speech?”

“What speech?”

“About dying.”

“It’s only a line. In the first paragraph. Not really a speech.”

“Did you say it?”

He nodded tightly, still a little defiant. “I told him for years I had been a good little hack, and I had always done what he wanted, as fast as he needed it, overnight sometimes, even sometimes on the fly while the camera was rolling. I told him I had never let him down, and I had made him millions of dollars. So I told him overall I figured I had earned the right to be left alone on this one. Because finally I had the one great idea a guy might ever get in his life. I told him I would rather die than see it compromised.”

“That’s the speech I was talking about.”

“It’s only a word.”

“With a lot of preamble.”

“It’s a strong first paragraph, I agree.”

“How did he take it?”

“I don’t really know. I went out for a cigarette. He was okay when I got back. He said at first he thought I was nuts for not seeing his point, but now I had gotten him thinking maybe I was right and he was wrong.”

“What was his issue?”

“This has always been about the British Army in World War I. Am I right? Hasn’t it? Since the very first moment I got the idea. You were the very first person I ever talked to about it.”

“Actually, I think that must have been a previous wife. Or several ago. The idea was already well established when I came on the scene.”

“Was it ever anything but the British Army in World War I?”

“Don’t they like that?”

“He said the studio asked if it was an English-country-house movie.”

“What was his answer?”

“He said maybe English-country-house people, but not in the house. Obviously. In the trenches, in France or Belgium, or wherever else they had trenches.”

“So is it a problem?”

“He said the studio thinks the audience would relate better if it was the Civil War. With actual Americans involved.”

“I see.”

“I reminded him there was an essential story strand involving an airplane pilot. The infancy of the technology. A huge metaphor. It could not be dropped or altered in any way. I reminded him that airplanes weren’t invented yet, during the Civil War.”

“I think they had hot-air balloons.”

“Not the same thing at all. A hot-air balloon is automatically a slow-motion scene. We need speed, and fury, and noise, and anger. We need to feel we’re on the cusp of something new and dangerous.”

“What did he say to all that?”

“He agreed with me that the studio’s idea was bullshit. He said he only passed it on because it came from the top. He said he never took it seriously. Not for one minute. He was on my side totally. Not just because of the airplanes. Because of the ideas. They’re too modern. This is all fifty years after the Civil War. The characters know things people didn’t know fifty years before.”

“He’s right, you know. The ideas are modern. You got it through, even to him. That’s great writing, babe.”

“He said the same thing. Not babe. He said it was my best writing ever. He said I could say things in four words other writers would need a paragraph for. He said I could get things through, even to a cynical old moneybags like him, about how the thoughts my characters were having were building the postwar world right in front of our eyes.”

“Flattering.”

“Very.”

“He’s right, you know,” she said again. “It stands to reason. Obviously the postwar world was built from new ideas, and inevitably they were forged during the war itself. But to see history happen in front of our eyes is fantastic. It’s going to be a classic. It’s a shoo-in for Best Picture.”

“Except that the postwar world he was talking about was post–World War II. The 1950s, in fact. He thinks the story should be set during the Korean War. With actual Americans. And foxholes, not trenches. He thinks foxholes are better. Necessarily more intimate. An automatic reason to shoot a scene with just one or two actors. No extras. No background hoo-ha. Saves a fortune. He said one or two guys alone in a trench would look weird. As in, who are they? Are they malingerers? Did they pull the lucky straw and get to stay behind on sentry duty? Or what? Either way, he figures we would need to burn lines explaining. At the very least we would need to have them say, no, we’re not malingerers. It would be an uphill task to get anyone to like them. But guys in a foxhole don’t need explaining. They’re taking refuge. Maybe there are two of them. They tumbled in together. Maybe it’s a shell hole. Maybe it’s a little small, so they’re resentful of each other right from the start. They have to figure out how to get along. He said the modernity and the futurism in the ideas made no sense in World War I. It had to be the 1950s. He said we could still keep the airplanes. Jet-fighter technology was in its infancy. There were the same kinds of stresses. All we would need to do was give the guy a more modern kind of helmet. The actual lines could stay the same. He said some things never change. Some truths are eternal.”

“How did you react?”

“I let him know I was very angry, and then I went out for another cigarette.”

“How long were you gone?”

“I don’t know. Ten minutes? Maybe more. It’s a big restaurant. It’s a long walk from his table even to the lobby.”

“You shouldn’t do that. Obviously they talk about you, at the table, while you’re gone. Him and his people.”

“Actually, I think they mostly make calls on their phones. Like multitasking. Probably trashing other writers’ dreams. I saw them finishing up when I came back in, every time. They were looking kind of guilty about it.”

“You should watch your back.”

“It doesn’t matter if they talk about me anyway. They can’t make me agree. This is my project. I could take it somewhere else.”

“Where?”

The screenwriter didn’t answer.

His wife snuggled tighter. She pressed her chest against his. No bra. She wondered if he could tell yet. She felt like he should. Certainly she could. Just a thin layer of silk.

She said, “He might be right about the foxholes.”

“The point is the whole structure of English society was reproduced in the trenches. The officers had servants and separate quarters. It was a microcosm. We need it as a baseline assumption. Like a framework for the story.”

“But a foxhole could reproduce American society just the same. Kind of quick and dirty, kind of temporary. Two recent arrivals, required to somehow get along with each other. Like a metaphor of its own. Maybe one of them could have been drafted out of Harvard or Princeton or somewhere, and the other is a street kid from Boston or the Bronx. At first they have nothing in common.”

“Cliché.”

“So is a country-house drama with mud. You were a good enough writer to make that work. You could make anything work.”

He said, “That’s not the worst of it.”

“What more?”

“He said the hero can’t be a loner. He said there has to be a buddy, from the first scene onward.”

“Really?”

“He said he realized all along in the back of his mind he had been seeing it as a buddy movie set in Korea. He said my draft was the right heart in the wrong body. He said it wasn’t a story about one Englishman. It was a story about two Americans. He said sometimes writers don’t truly understand what they’ve written.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. I was speechless. I went out for another cigarette.”

“How long this time?”

“The same. Ten minutes. Maybe more. But don’t worry. What was there to talk about? Suddenly I realized I had gotten it ass-backward. I thought I was owed one particular thing, because I had been a good worker. They thought I was owed a different thing. Which was not to laugh in my face and turn the picture down flat. They were looking for a polite exit strategy. Ideally they wanted me to withdraw the proposal. That would save everyone’s face. Artistic differences. So they were nibbling it to death. Trying to make me break.”

“Did you?”

“Turned out I was wrong. They were serious. I got back in and started to say something about how we had all agreed at the get-go that the artistic vision would not be compromised, ever, in any way, and now here we were with two best buds in Korea. But he cut me off early and said, sure, don’t worry, he understood. He said I had to remember every single idea in the history of the motion picture industry had gotten a little scuffed up when it came out of the writer’s head and collided with reality. Even the famous screenplays that get studied in film school. The lady who brought the coffee added some of the lines. It was about what worked on the day.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.”

“You didn’t go out again, did you?”

“I wanted to. I wanted to register some kind of protest. But I didn’t need to go out. Not even me. So I stayed at the table. He took it as an invitation to keep on talking. He said I could reclaim the movie by writing a great death scene.”

“Reclaim it?”

“He said I could own it again.”

“Whose death?”

“The buddy’s. Obviously the hero has to be alone for the final stage of his journey. So the buddy has to go, page ninety or thereabouts. He said he was sure I would knock it out of the park. Not just the final flutter. But the reasons for it. What was driving that guy to his doom?”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. My head was spinning. First a completely unnecessary secondary character was being forced into my movie, thereby making it actually no longer my movie, but then I’m being told it can be my movie again if I yank the intruder out again. Seemed staggeringly Freudian to me. He had such faith I could do it. He said it will be my finest work. Which would be ironic. Maybe the Writers’ Guild would give me a special award. Best Death of a Producer-Imposed Trope.”

“What happened next?”

“I left. I skipped dessert. I came home.”

“I’m glad,” she said.

She snuggled closer.

She said, “But I’m sorry the world will never see that scene. He was right about that, at least. You would have knocked it out of the park. Some kind of noble sacrifice. One for the ages.”

“No,” he said. “Not noble. I think I would make it small. The big things have already been done. The friendship has been forged. I suppose the final scene has to be in a foxhole. The two of them. They’ve gotten that far by being strong. Now the buddy is about to exit the picture by being weak. That’s the dynamic. I think that’s the way battle movies have got to work. Personality is revealed by the big things first and the little things last.”

“Weak how?”

“This is the 1950s, don’t forget. Even the studio doesn’t want to drag it into the present day. So people smoked. Including the buddy. Now he’s in the foxhole and he’s out of cigarettes. He’s getting antsy. People smoking means it’s already an R-rated movie anyway, so twenty yards away we can have the mangled corpse of one of their squad mates, who the buddy knows is an occasional smoker, which almost certainly means he’s got a nearly full pack in his pocket.”

“Twenty yards beyond the rim of the foxhole?”

“And there’s an enemy sniper in the area.”

“Does he stay, or does he go?”

“He goes,” the screenwriter said. “Twenty yards there, twenty yards back. The sniper gets him. It’s both tiny and monumental. He wanted a cigarette. That was all. A small human weakness. But it was also a determination to live the way he wanted to, or not live at all. Which then explains and informs his earlier actions. We know him fully only at the moment of his death.”

His wife said, “That’s lovely.”

She snuggled even tighter, and scooched her butt even closer.

She said, “So really it’s a fairly small decision. Isn’t it? It’s English accents in 1916, or American accents in 1952. Does it matter?”

He didn’t answer. He had noticed.

* * *

Two years and seven months later the movie came out. It was not about the British Army in World War I. It was compromised in every possible way. The screenwriter did not throw himself under a train. Instead he moved house, higher up the canyon. Then eight months later the buddy won the Oscar. Best Actor in a Supporting Role. The guy’s speech was all about how fabulous the writing was. Then an hour later the screenwriter won an Oscar of his own. Best Original Screenplay. His speech thanked his wife and his producer, the rocks in his life. Coming off the stage he pumped the statuette like a heavy dumbbell and figured some compromises were easy to live with. They got easier and easier through the after-parties and the interviews and the calls from his agent, which for the first time in his life gave him a choice of what to do and when and how much for. The years passed and he became a name, then a senior figure, then a guru. He and his wife stayed married. They lived a great life. He was honestly happy.

He never twigged exactly how his ancient compromises had been engineered. What had killed his artistic vision had been his cigarette breaks. They were ten-minute voids, ripe for exploitation. It was the producer’s idea. He had done it before with difficult writers. As soon as the guy stalked out, he would call the guy’s wife, to report the latest impasse, to get advice on what to say in the short term, to talk him down off the ledge, and then to build an agenda for the wife to discuss with the guy that night, strictly in his own best interests, of course, for his own good, because there was a lot of money and prestige on the line here, and in the producer’s experience a little grumpiness would be quickly forgotten when there was a gold statuette to polish. In this case the wife thought, He’s right, you know, and he was.