The Screenewryter's Tale

I was sitting in my office at Existentialist Pictures near Sunset and Gower. The office adjoins the producer's and is connected by an anteroom. It's used by the writers. Nice. Rug is blah color to hide blood from script altercations (or alterations) and there is a well-found bar to anesthetize your brain before reading the latest noodlings on your script by the new-breed producer, who pitches in to help with the writing. Hip producers are real cool. They co-opt the best of both worlds, sporting long hair and flowered bells and traveling with manicurists in arriviste automobiles they tip a dollar. The phone rang and the voice said it was Maurice. "Maurice?" I asked.

"You know, man; I'm the cat did the full lotus headstand in the producer's anteroom and I laid that yoga exercise on you to clear up your bronchia and showed you how to do the spinal rock to introduce vibrations into your spine."

"Oh, yeah--you're the dude who wears the yarmulke and plays the pre-Columbian clay flute and is into Jewish (continued on page 110)screenewryter's tale(continued from page 105) mysticism." None other. Maurice appears every three or four days and when he leaves there isn't an unhappy face in the anteroom.

But what exactly does he do? Is he a hashish runner? Own a string of girls? Industrial spy? He comes, does his little office cabaret for everybody and then splits. "What's up, babes?" I asked.

"I'm going to be a producer," he said.

"Congratulations. How does one become one?"

"Easy. You get a property, tie it up on option. Then you take it to different people. You tell Willie Wyler that Dusty Hoffman flipped over it and Liza Minnelli that Burt Bacharach is all set to do the music and Terry Southern and Doc Simon are wild about adapting it. Then you take it to the moneymen and tell them you got all these people, and you'll umbrella the whole thing. But ... I don't have a property yet. That's my hang-up. Can you make the Cock & Bull for lunch tomorrow? I wanna rap with you."

Well, what the hell, I figured. A free lunch, and the Cock & Bull does have choice, succulent waitresses. So next day he picked me up in a '46 Morgan roadster, a beautiful car, comparable in power, speed and handling to the classic '38 Willys. "By the way, whydja happen to pick on me?" I asked, as I got in. He leered like a Fellini freak as he worked the stick through about five speeds to get the bomb up to 25.

"Aih, you're hip. I see you down in projection room three all the time, huddled in the dark with those chicks, and that smoke coming up, that ain't Pall Malls." I hesitated to tell him that my chronic bronchitis forbids my inhaling anything--including mild euphorics of the hemp family--not wanting to destroy the reputation for freakiness that I built at the studio by wearing a denim bike jacket with the sleeves cut off and a Nixon button upside down. It would have destroyed my hip image even further if he'd known that I saved the sleeves for resewing, in case the Hollywood caper fell through.

At the Cock & Bull Maurice got right down to his tacks, which were very brass. "What's a good property?" he asked, in sidewise prison fashion. In any other town that would mean, Which way is the freeway going, so we can buy up ahead of it, but in Screenland property means the blood, sweat and tear-wrung memories, the heartaches, traumas, bankruptcies, divorces, bereavements and nervous breakdowns of some writer, all on paper and suitable for transposition to scenario form.

Responding half seriously, I said, "Well, I dig The Teachings of Don Juan, by Castaneda, but at the pace they set in this town, by the time it's in the can it'll be about as relevant as Our Town."

"Hey, but that's not true, man, they say Our Town comes on real strong in revival. It's about death!" My God, I thought, they've rediscovered death, too.

At this moment the sidecars we had reserved an hour before arrived and, surrendering our plastic numbered tickets to assure that it was really our turn, we fell to. I make it a point never to be serious after one o'clock or one sidecar, whichever comes first, so when Maurice pursued his point about a property, I winged it a bit--thinking to rid myself of him forever. "Maurice, babes, I got just the thing for you and it's there for the taking. It's Now, With it, Hip, Relevant, Trippy and Today. The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer. For example, take The Pardoner's Tale. What could be more relevant than the story of three men destroyed by greed in a materialistic world that has mislaid its moral priorities? [I glossed over the fact that it had already been made into a feature called The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.] Or The Wife of Bath's Tale. That anticipated the sexual revolution by six hundred years. Or The Man of Law's Tale, which has more gratuitous violence than The Wild Bunch and A Clockwork Orange. Or The Manciple's Tale, where the crow losing his feathers underscores the irreversible damage we have done to our delicately poised ecological environment."

"Heav-ee!" said Maurice.

"Then take the merry band of pilgrims. The nun, like all nuns in those days, no doubt wanted to wear shorter skirts and sing a modern lute-and-recorder Mass and get married. You see, it was a period of great turmoil and change. Old time-honored values were being overturned."

"Outasight!"

Swooping up his untouched sidecar, I pressed on. "The franklin is every establishment sellout chasing the almighty farthing, and all you have to do is give him a rebellious son who questions dad's whole system of middle-class, Middle English values. The clerk is obviously a graduate school dropout conspiring to cross county lines to stir up trouble at some university. Sal Mineo would be great in the part. I see Rod Steiger as the sleazy pardoner and Jon Voight as the amorous squire.

"And they nearly all wore their hair down to here then! And the freakiest costumes. Doublets, hose, capes, hoods, boots, beaver hats...."

He was quiet.

"Of course you'll need a rock group to do the score. Some up-and-coming-but-not-quite-there outfit you can get cheap, like the Oil Depletion Allowance or the Silent Majority."

Maurice was deep in thought. At last he made a move to speak. I thought he was going to say, "Come on, man, I mean, you know--this a put-on?" but he said:

"He's dead, isn't he?"

"Chaucer? Well, we don't know for sure. He seems to disappear from sight around his sixtieth year, but it's been so long now that we can assume that he eventually bought it."

"Come on, now, quit putting me on. I meant is it, like, in public domain?"

• • •

Well, I figured that was that, and worth two sidecars and a chef's salad with green-goddess dressing. But four or five days later the office phone rings and Maurice says, "Is your head together?" Never having the answer to that. I said nothing. I mean, how does your head feel when it's together? Then he went into some numbers about the two of us doing a "summary" and he'd be right over.

I said, "Wait a minute, you can't come now, it's my hour to have my nails done," and he says, "Don't put me on, man, no freak like you gets manicured." I protested that the producer doesn't allow me to talk to laymen during vespers and he says, "I talked to the producer and the studio heads want to see a summary of the Chaucer bit and they want you to do it."

I said, "What about my picture? It was somewhere on their schedule, you know."

He says, "They'd rather have you do this, so it must mean your little piece of schlock slipped to the back of the pack." I said it was always in the back of the pack--right behind the integrated remake of Jane Eyre, with Jayne Meadows and Godfrey Cambridge.

This put me on a real downer, so I opened a bottle of Almadén, poured myself a big Cheez Whiz glass full and slugged it down while I stared gloomily at the story cards of my movie we'd pinned on a board, the effect being that of a coach's diagram of a single wing left against a shifting 5-3-2-1. I began vehemently throwing weighted thumbtacks at the board, making them stick--a trick every good screenwriter knows--while calling the studio brass Yiddish epithets like farshtinkener and meshuganah.

Maurice made a cinematic entrance. Through the window. A cat producer. He probably walks up the sides of buildings. "I convinced them the Chaucer thing will be a stone gas," he said, tilting himself into a full lotus headstand, "but I need somebody to put it into the right words." I began to think fast. No freakin' youth-cult version of a (concluded on page 194)screenewryter's tale(continued from page 110) 14th Century poem is going to take over my last position on the studio charts. So I reared back and--with a shot of the grape now and then to stimulate invention--dictated a neopastiche of Chaucer so unblushingly outrageous it would be jeered off the boards of a third-rate prep school in French Lick, Indiana. It wasn't even all Chaucer. I threw in parts of Rabelais, Homer, Cervantes and Susann (Jacqueline). I even threw in a Harley chopper because I once heard there's never been a bike movie that lost money.

Spent, I went home for the weekend. On Monday Maurice was sitting at my desk. He said that as producer of Getting It on with Chaucer, which the studio had agreed to underwrite, he would be needing the office; but as his writer, I would be welcome to work on his sofa. I said not to worry and wedged myself in on the anteroom couch between a convict's widow come to demand more pay-off money for her late husband's film biog and two leather-coated Panthers waiting to audition for a sadie-massie called Off the Pigs!

When the producer looked free I barged in. He was trying on this wild tie-dye tunic that looked outasight with the Afghanistan love and peace symbol around his neck. I told him I didn't want to work on a rock version of Chaucer, I was determined to work on my movie, my own little movie, with all its faults and foibles and its crazy, lopsided plot that I have been fooling with for years and which I have begun to love as one loves an old lame cat. He answered quickly, for he had four movies going now and amenities were too costly:

"You do that, you'll never work again in this town."

I considered this for a moment. They actually say things like that. They speak dialog. I thought of the nightmarish months ahead necessary to wrench, flog and cajole a rock Chaucer into a producer's vision of art, a young untried cat producer whose weaknesses I couldn't even exploit because I didn't know them--of the hours of trying to explain to him what each line meant only to find I wasn't even sure myself what it meant, and the further hours of explaining that every line doesn't have to mean anything. "Never work in this town again," I thought. Well, different strokes for different folks. I took the producer's small soft hand in mine and said:

"Thanks. I needed that."