THE UNSEASONABLY COLD weather didn’t last long. It was replaced by unseasonably warm weather, and the first week of the new year, 1990, and the last decade of the twentieth century began on the note of unseasonableness.
My friend Guido (my very last friend) and I were pausing before parting outside the Russian Tea Room, where we had had lunch. Both of us took turns commenting on the un-Januarylike January we were having.
“It’s like spring.”
“It’s like Indian summer.”
“I had to turn on my air conditioner.”
“Me too.”
Glancing at the enormous wristwatch on his big wrist, Guido sighed.
“I better get going,” he said. “Damn nuisance, this Maria mess.”
“You’ll find somebody,” I reassured him.
I waved. He waved. We parted, he heading east and I west.
The Maria mess had to do with Guido’s cleaning woman. His former maid, Maria, had suddenly quit to return to her country of origin and he needed to find another maid to clean his apartment.
Almost every cleaning woman of the people I knew in Manhattan was named Maria. Dianah and I had a Maria when we lived together. She stayed with Dianah when I moved out, and I got an apartment and a Maria of my own. The McNabs, George and Pat, had a Maria. The name Maria was no longer a name to me, it was a job description. I never saw my Maria after I hired her. She came to clean on Fridays, and even when I had absolutely nothing to do at my office I made sure not to be home when she came.
Something is called for when you have another human being in your apartment. Some minimal human transaction is required, which I prefer to avoid when it’s just me and one other human being. This evasion of privacy extended even to somebody like my Maria.
I paid her in cash, leaving the money on the dining room table under a heavy glass ashtray. When I returned in the evening, the apartment was clean and the money was gone.
My memory of this woman, who worked for me for almost two years though I never saw her again after hiring her, was of a woman between thirty and fifty. She was dressed in black for our interview, as if she were in mourning. Short arms. Short legs. A sturdy-looking body with no discernible waist. Indian features. Her neck was tucked in the whole time we talked, as if her people had been taught by history, by the Spanish conquistadors and the Catholic church, always to keep their necks tucked in.
My phone was ringing when I entered my office, but it stopped before I could get to it.
The telephone rings.
I light a cigarette and pick up.
“Hello.”
“Mr. Karoo?”
It’s a woman’s voice, and although I haven’t heard it in a long time, I know who it is.
Some people specialize in remembering faces, others remember names, with me it’s the sound of the voice. Once I’ve heard somebody’s voice, I never forget it.
“Hello, Bobbie,” I say.
Her name is Roberta but everyone calls her Bobbie, and not just Bobbie but, for reasons unknown to me, “that Bobbie woman.”
She works for Jay Cromwell, though her little cubicle of an office in Burbank (which I saw once) isn’t even attached to Cromwell’s office. It’s off by itself down the corridor.
I have never actually seen her. I only know her voice, and her little throwaway laughter which brings to mind the sound of a cigarette lighter being struck.
“It’s that time of year again,” Bobbie tells me. “I just want to make sure my Rolodex is up-to-date.”
She rattles off my two telephone numbers, home and office, and my two addresses, home and office, and I confirm that yes, that is me all right. No, I still don’t have a fax, I tell her. Yes, I lie, I’m thinking of getting one next year.
Shifting gears, she inquires, “Do you plan to be in town, in New York, I mean, on the twenty-second and twenty-third of February?”
“Yes,” I tell her, “I think I will be in town on both of those days.”
“Mr. Cromwell is planning to come to New York for the presentation of the Spirit of Freedom Award to Vaclav Havel, and he wants to know if he could see you while he’s in town. At first he didn’t think that he could attend the ceremony, but a change in his schedule …”
She goes on, telling me what a very busy man Mr. Cromwell is and how he is really looking forward to seeing me.
She is sure, she tells me, that Brad will be calling me soon to verify the dates and the particulars.
“I’d rather have you verify my particulars, Bobbie,” I tell her.
She laughs her little laughter into my ear and then, wishing me a good day, and I wishing her the same, we hang up on each other.
Perhaps it’s ironic but, despite my many diseases, my nickname in the business is Doc.
Doc Karoo.
I’m a small but comfortable cog in the entertainment industry. I doctor screenplays written by somebody else. I rewrite. I cut and polish. Cut the fat. Polish what’s left. I’m a professional hack with a knack that’s come to be regarded as a talent. People who live in LA and do my kind of work are called “Hollywood hacks.” The term “New York hack,” for some reason, does not exist. A hack in New York is called Doc.
I have never written anything of my own. A long, long time ago, I tried, but after several attempts I gave up. I may be a hack, but I do know what talent is and I knew I didn’t have it. It was not a devastating realization. It was more in the nature of a verification of what I had suspected all along. I had a PhD in comparative lit, I was a Doc to begin with, but I didn’t want to teach. Thanks to some contacts I made, I segued quite painlessly into my true calling, where for the most part I rewrite screenplays written by men and women who don’t have any talent either.
Every now and then, very rarely, of course, I’m given a screenplay to fix that doesn’t need any fixing. It’s just fine the way it is. All it really needs is to be made properly into a film. But the studio executives, or the producers, or the stars, or the directors, have other ideas. I am confronted with a moral dilemma. I am capable of having a moral dilemma because I have this mascot within me called the moral man, and the moral man within me wants to stand up for what’s right. He wants to defend the script that doesn’t need fixing from being fixed or, if nothing else, he wants to refuse to be personally involved in any way in its evisceration.
But he does neither.
The moral man within me feels uncomfortable and pretentious at these times. He feels, as I do, the burden of precedents we have set for ourselves. Why should we stand up now for what’s right when we remained comfortably seated on other, much more crucial occasions? In this way, the moral dilemma becomes diluted and rationalized, and I accept the assignment and the money that comes with it, enormous sums of money, knowing ahead of time that my contribution, my rewriting, my cutting and polishing, can only cause harm or ruin to the work in question.
These occasions, when I’m given something I admire to ruin, are fortunately very rare. In the last twenty years or so, I have eviscerated no more than half a dozen screenplays and of those only one still haunts me.
The young man who had written the original screenplay for Cromwell showed up uninvited at the sneak preview of the film in Pittsburgh. I now remember only two things about Pittsburgh. I remember the beautiful view from my hotel suite of the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers and the painful scene that the young (he was so young) writer caused in the lobby of the theater after the film was over.
Like some clean-shaven Jeremiah, he shrieked at us, trembling with rage. The director was a pimp. The producer, Jay Cromwell, was a fucking monster. The studio executives were castrated piranhas. I was a worthless slut. Personally, I had no quarrel with any of these terms. They seemed quite accurate to me. What hurt me was seeing how hurt he was. He wept while he tried to insult us, not realizing, because of his youth, that we could not be insulted. He was too young and he had loved what he had written all too much. He never wrote again. Perhaps it was unrelated, it’s hard to know for sure with these things, but a year or so later he committed suicide. I still remember the sound of his voice. The film, like all films produced by Cromwell, did well at the box office and my reputation as a man who can fix troublesome screenplays received yet another boost.
Most of the time, however, I work on screenplays that are so bad I could have written them myself.
My job for the most part involves cutting the fat and adding jokes. I’m handy at both. I get rid of subsidiary characters, dreams, and flashbacks. I cut the scenes in which our hero or heroine visits his or her mother or his or her favorite high school teacher. I get rid of aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters. I have cut entire childhood sequences from the lives of characters and have left them up there on the screen without a mother or a father or a past of any kind.
I keep my eye on the story line, the plot, and I eliminate everyone and everything that doesn’t contribute to it. I simplify the human condition of the characters and complicate the world in which they live. I’m aware at times that this approach has been put into practice in real life, that men like Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Nicolae Ceausescu, and others have incorporated some of the techniques of fixing screenplays into their endeavors. Sometimes I think of all tyrants as being glorified hacks, rewrite men like myself.
In addition to working on screenplays that were taken away from their original writers, I have also been employed, thanks to what somebody called my “facility with celluloid,” in fixing completed films that were taken away from their directors.
The work is essentially the same. I sit in the screening room with a producer or studio executives and watch the film. I do what I always do. I follow the story line. I suggest cuts, reversal in the order of scenes. I look at the outtakes and rummage through them for bits and pieces that could be put back. I recommend pieces of music with which to underscore certain scenes and, in extreme situations, when no other mean of giving a film cohesion are available, I recommend voice-over narration, which I then write. Sometimes the powers that be follow my advice and make the changes I suggest. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they hire another fixer. Sometimes they hire a whole team of fixers. If the film I’ve worked on succeeds commercially, I get a lot of credit in the so-called film community, and my reputation grows. If the film I’ve worked on does not succeed commercially, even if it fails completely, I’m never the one who is blamed. That film joins the ranks of those films that “even Doc Karoo could not fix.”
I am paid extremely well for what I do. Thanks to Arnold, my former accountant, who now manages Dianah’s financial affairs, thanks to him and his conservative but relentless management of my money, I am a wealthy man. If I’m not independent in any other way, I am financially independent. I don’t have to worry about paying the outrageous rent for my office on West Fifty-seventh Street. I only have to worry about what I do when I get there.
One other worry has emerged recently. It seems to me at times that all the so-called fat that I cut from all those screenplays and films is beginning to wreak its revenge on me. There is mounting evidence that my personal life is now composed almost exclusively of those very fat, unnecessary scenes that I so skillfully eliminated from the films and screenplays of other people.