“They wrote the script out there on Catalina Island,” Koepf said, “and the script they came ashore with was like 340 pages.”
* * *
It’s always the same story. The screenwriter, Towne said, begins “dreaming a dream. The job is to make a dream come true.” As long as he keeps the dream to himself, it stays his own, as pure as it was intended. But for that dream to come true, the writer must sell the script to a producer, giving over creative control and, in most cases, standing by, hands tied, as the new owner of the material hires additional writers to alter the script. The basis for the revisions needn’t be creative; the changing demands of actors, budget, location—any element deemed integral to the production—all necessitate amendments to the original. Then, Towne said, a “very tricky thing happens.… A director comes along, and you recognize that a transference has to take place, and he has to conceive of the film as his film.” The writer’s dream cedes to the next power, and, Towne said, “a natural antipathy between director and writer” sets in. “Classically a director gets the script from the writer and then says, ‘Get that asshole out of here. We don’t need him around.’ If you think enough of a writer to gamble a year and a half of your life on what he’s done, then presumably you should think enough of him to keep him around while you’re doing it. This is done about as often as there are really good movies made.” Perhaps less.
There is only so much any writer can do. While they sit in their little rooms, thinking of words, others are out there really doing things, making actual and appreciable change, saving lives, planting trees, fighting bad guys, “trotting the corridors of power,” Towne said, “and making sure they’ve put their own imprints in it.” The uses of writing? At best they are indirect: “Everybody recognizes ‘in the beginning is the word,’ and all that fucking lip service, but I don’t think it’s in the nature of the writer’s profession to go after that power.” The writer is constitutionally disinclined to act. The inclination to create, to retreat to a world of the mind, where control is absolute, is itself a kind of abjuration, and among all artistic undertakings, few are more inherently abjuring than writing for the screen. It was almost foolish, Towne thought, writing for the screen, describing this thing for someone else to make, particularly when, as Towne said: “The image inevitably conveys more than the word.” The screenplay is merely an industrial document, an idea for a movie, incomplete. In a way, self-destructive. “The only way a screenplay can be evaluated,” he said, “almost by definition, is not on the page, but by viewing the movie it caused to be made. It certainly can be read and even enjoyed, but you’re stuck with the inescapable fact that it was written to be seen.” If a screenplay doesn’t get made, does it make a sound?
Does the screenwriter matter? The unasked question pervades Towne’s characters, instilling them with a sometimes noble, sometimes pitiful futility of purpose. “It occurs to me,” the writer Stephen Schiff observed, “that all his characters are somehow projections of the screenwriter at his Sisyphean labor, that all of their virtues are the screenwriter’s virtues, and all of their dramas are recasting of the screenwriter’s own.” They all have a job to do, and they do it well, but they end up nowhere, wiping the dreams off their faces in impotent rage or despair.
“It’s a sucker’s game,” Towne said of his profession. “But sometimes you do get those moments when it all comes together. And that’s exciting. Nothing can match that.” “Sometimes”—a dreamer’s word.
Los Angeles is their town. Sometimes.
They apprehended Charles Manson, but what did that change? Polanski could not return to Los Angeles. The canyons, the watercolor estates, the ruby red carpet into the Beverly Hills Hotel, the bending banana fronds—they all assailed his brain with Sharon, their swinging over the Topanga cliffs, pasta dinners on the beach, the scorched-poppy sunsets, drive-ins, cotton candy, Cracker Jacks, potted plants, baby books (the books in her hands, her hands turning pages, her fingers, her fingernails). Unlike Sharon, Los Angeles was still there. But his eyes couldn’t see it. Where others saw crimson sunsets fade to pink, he could not stop her bleeding flesh from rotting to darkness, and though, in Los Angeles, there would be women and compassionate associates and the fondest friends, he would hear only what they wouldn’t say: the pity, the admiration of his forbearance, their bracing attempts at wisdom. That alone would be too much. “For the world,” he said, “it was an event. But what about me? My love was gone.” But Manson lived?
He would stay in Europe, based in Rome, in a villa big enough to hold every guest, girl, passer-through, as many as he could imagine. In Europe, with distance standing in for time, it was easier to forget. “In order to survive and function,” his friend and sometime collaborator Kenneth Tynan wrote, “he has had to immunize himself against nostalgia.” He had to keep moving, the faster, the better.
He went to Gstaad. In Gstaad, high in the Swiss Alps, he could ski fast and forget. “I skied for four months,” he said, “every day.”
He would invite friends to join him in Gstaad. “The measure of his loneliness,” Tynan wrote, “is that he’s never alone.” He courted and slept with young women, some, he confessed, as young as sixteen (Switzerland’s age of consent), and refused, whenever he was asked to account for his behavior, to admonish himself for it, claiming instead all manner of justification, citing their “untapped reserves of intelligence and imagination,” how “they weren’t on the lookout for parts,” and other qualities not exclusive to sixteen-year-olds; “and they were,” wrote Polanski in his memoir, “more beautiful, in a natural, coltish way, than they would ever be again.”
Jack Nicholson came to join him on the slopes. Polanski’s father, Ryszard, arrived from Poland with Wanda, his wife. The more he saw him, the more Polanski found himself becoming more and more like his father, overcoming, in a way, the emotional distance that had always persisted between them. Having survived the murders of their pregnant wives, both father and son, Polanski saw, were encumbered by a strain of unworthiness so oppressive it seemed innate, and the persecutory, profoundly Jewish superstition that every joy, every respite, would be paid for in the end.
When Polanski arrived in his father’s hotel room in Gstaad, Wanda was playing solitaire. Under a soft light, his father was sitting on the edge of the bed, his eyes on the floor. He was crying.
“Why are you crying?”
“No, no,” his father insisted. “It’s just the music.” Beside his bed, a radio. A German song. “O Mein Papa.”
Oh, my Papa, to me he was so wonderful,
Oh, my Papa, to me he was so good.
Polanski sat beside him.
No one could be so gentle and so lovable,
Oh, my Papa, he always understood.
“After you ran from the ghetto,” his father began, “and just before the final liquidation of the ghetto, they took all the people.”
Oh, my Papa, so funny, so adorable,
Always the clown so funny in his way.