When I was 21 I co-wrote a horror movie. I met the would-be director in the lobby of our apartment building. Halloween, he told me, had been a huge success. The industry, and more specifically, some Swedish investors looking for a tax shelter, needed low-budget horror. He agreed to pay me $600, my standard fee for anything at that time, to co-write a treatment. I went to Times Square and watched twenty horror movies in a weekend. All around me, whenever the audience got bored by the story, they would scream at the screen. Or hurl objects at it. That Monday, I went to work. Our treatment told the story of three women friends -- one now urbane, one still a homebody, one something else -- who reunite for a weekend of camping in the woods. They are warned not to go down a road, a bad family lives down there. They go down that road. They get kidnapped by two backwoods boys who have been raised alone in the woods by their psycho mom. Two of the women survive and wreak revenge. Something like that.
To my shock, his Swedish investors had only one note about the treatment. The story, they feared, “sucked too long in the woods.” For another $600, I spent a month or so locked in a room with the director. I typed, he sat on his back on a couch behind me, asking questions: How do they get captured? How do they escape? His favorite question was, “So, what comes next?” He asked this 4,000 times. In retrospect, we were plotting out the story. Contriving reasons for the women and killers to keep making mistakes, so that long second act, to be shot in an abandoned Jersey summer camp, could sustain itself. It was grueling.
A year later, the movie came out to what were… mixed reviews (“It’s as if there were some force, heretofore unknown in the universe, called anti-talent,” said the New York Times.) Somehow I managed to find another job, co-writing with an Italian director. E.G. hoped he was beginning his triumphant third act, in l’America. His actual story would prove to be less ascendant: Director pays his dues, director makes it, director goes to America and piddles it away. But he didn’t know that – in real life, and in good drama, the character should not know where his story will take him.
We went to watch the movie in Times Square. The Swedes were right, it sucked too long in the woods. The audience was way ahead of it. They yelled at every contrived plot point. They yelled even more, or turned up their boom boxes, whenever the women reminisced about their past. Exposition of backstory, it turned out, was not dramatic. The director, who loved other people’s misfortune, was delighted by my failure.
“In Italy, we have the laundry test, but this audience, this is much better.” I asked him what the laundry test was. “My god, don’t they teach writers anything in America? The laundry test happens Sunday morning, when two women are folding laundry next to each other. One says, ‘I saw a good movie last night.’ ‘What was it about?’ ‘There’s this woman, Cabiria. Sweet, scrappy. She and her boyfriend go for a nighttime walk by the sea. She thinks, perhaps he is about to propose. In mid-embrace, he pushes her into the waves, and runs away with her purse. She almost drowns…’
The other woman stops folding, and asks, ‘what happens next?’ If your story is good, she keeps asking. If it is instead, like your movie, they go back to their laundry. ”
E.G. and I went back to plotting our schlock comedy. Whenever we would get stuck, he didn’t ask, “so what comes next?” Instead he’d say. “No, no no. Stop. Now we are lost. This is not about dialogue. We have to go back. To our original story. The original impulse. Who is the boy, what does he want, why can’t he get it?”
E.G., like so many of the people I learned from, was a wounded mentor. Our screenplays were mediocre, and he, like Cabiria, kept trusting the wrong people. But in retrospect, he taught me a lot about story. That it came from character. That your characters had to want something. That they had to keep getting up after they were knocked down. In another world, E.G. might also have taught me that eventually your hero learns from his struggles, and/or remembers something he’s known all along, and finds a way to triumph. E.G. didn’t teach me this because he wasn’t interested in that sort of story. He liked stories about little guys who get knocked down over and over but never realize the game is rigged. The characters we created never had a chance of succeeding, which is probably why our screenplays never had a chance of getting made.
I spent the next dozen years getting knocked around. I wrote cabaret acts, musical revues, monologues. I did stand-up. I learned how easily an audience of drunks gets bored. I ghost wrote for madmen and millionaires. I doctored vigilante films and documentaries. Employers bounced checks. Collaborators stole material or credit. I kept getting up. I learned that actors like to have something to do, or want, when they’re on stage. I wrote screenplays that didn’t get made. Or if they did get made, they’d get rewritten by the director’s lover. Somewhere in there I began to make a decent living. I turned in another screenplay, and an LA producer mentored me in public: “This is shit. Who cares about your little people and their little lives?” I ended up completely lost. I’d forgotten why I wanted to be a writer in the first place.
I had to stop. And go back to the original premise: I’d wanted to write because there were stories from my childhood I had wanted to tell. Stories about jazzmen and broken-hearted wives. Middle-aged hepcats who never saw next month’s rent coming. Friends of the family who envied my veins. The world I’d grown up in was all but gone, and I didn’t want it to be forgotten.
Once I remembered the original impulse, I realized I’d been working on this for years, in stand up, in monologues, in short stories. Now, suddenly I was ready to pull it together. I also knew all too well that if I turned this world into a screenplay, it could be taken from me, rewritten by others, put on a shelf. The story was too personal to piddle away. I started to cut and paste the pieces into a play. A really long play. A really long play that finally got a workshop, in the basement of the West Bank Café. The same bar where I had done stand up and one-acts.
After the first rehearsal, Michael Mayer, the director, turned to me and said, “honey, something has to happen in the second act.” That night I went home and rewrote the second act. I realized there were scenes I had been avoiding my whole life. A mother’s breakdown, a son’s showdown with the passive father. The scenes tumbled out, they’d been waiting for me. The first act was still unruly, there was a lot of backstory I felt the audience needed, but when we got to the second act, when the characters finally confronted each other, something happened. It was cathartic for me, the actors had something to play, and the drunks in the audience stayed quiet.
The workshop led to an upstate summer production. It was there I met my first dramaturg, Len Berkman, a sprightly wizard. I didn’t really know why he was there. He sat in as we slogged our way through that first act. After a few days I asked him if he had any thoughts. He asked what I thought. I said I knew it was too long, I just couldn’t figure out which scenes to cut, which to keep. Some scenes had nice moments of character, or humor or … After a while Len said, “When you have the choice, choose a scene of action over a scene of ambience.”
Oh. The horror movie audiences, the drunks in the cabarets, that’s what they had been trying to tell me. Move your story forward. I went back to the dorm, cut lots of scenes of ambience out, or at least down, and what was left was Side Man. The story had been sitting there all along, waiting for everything else to get out of the way.
The characters wanted closure, or love, or just to play their music. They got knocked down, some got crushed trying to get what others couldn’t give them. They all managed to survive, even as their world disappeared. The audience cared about these little lives, and wanted to know what happened next. It had taken what felt like three acts of my career to find the three acts of the play.
The limos started coming up from the city, the run sold out, everyone said it would go straight to Broadway, and then, in a twist that delighted E.G., it was turned down by pretty much every theatre company in New York.
Three years later Side Man won a Tony Award. And just last week I found out someone is about to do a remake of that first horror movie.
If you’ve found your story, the ending sometimes writes itself.
