Page 53 of Safe Enough

“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 together. 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.”

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