Excerpt from Making Movies
Sidney Lumet:
What do I owe the writer? A thorough investigation and then a committed execution of his intentions.
What does the writer owe me? The selflessness that Frank Pierson showed on Dog Day Afternoon or that Naomi Foner showed on Running on Empty.
Naomi is a fine, talented, and original writer. Somehow she fell in love with a scene that, to me, was her only bad idea in the whole movie. The young boy, played by River Phoenix, comes into a strange house, sits down at the piano, and begins to play a Beethoven sonata. Eventually he notices that he is being watched by a young girl, about his age. In the script, he segues into boogie-woogie piano music.
I explained to Naomi why I thought it was a bad idea. There was a feeling of pandering to the audience: See, he’s not really an egghead he likes jazz, just like you and me. I’ve seen the same scene as far back as Jose Iturbi tickling the ivories in some remote Gloria Jean movie or Jeanette MacDonald singing swing in San Francisco. Naomi fought for it, so I decided to leave it in to see how it played in rehearsal.
When I began to stage the scene, River asked if we could cut that bit. He felt false playing it. I saw Naomi pale. We started to talk about it. River told Naomi with great simplicity and earnestness how it compromised his character. (It was enchanting to see this 17 year old arguing with a serious writer twice his age.) Finally I suggested we try it for a few days to see if there was a value to it.
At the end of rehearsal, Naomi came over to me. She said she didn’t mind if I had to stretch to accommodate the scene, but she couldn’t bear to see River turning himself inside out to make it work.
She loved the scene, but she said, “Let’s cut it.”
Romulus Linney, head of the playwrighting division of my grad school, would tell the playwrights that they needed to be willing to “kill their darlings”.
Naomi Foner, in that excerpt above, was courageous enough to kill one of her darlings. The moment didn’t work. It was a dear moment to her, but it didn’t work.
Part of any talent includes the ability to recognize what ‘works’ and what doesn’t. So maybe it’s not so surprising, after all, that a supremely gifted writer would eventually come to the conclusion that, no matter how much she liked them, the lines she had written weren’t going to work.
What’s interesting for me is how collaborative effort brings about a better result sometimes. We all have our blind spots, and obviously come to things from a perspective that might not always confer an advantage. I think writers are maybe especially susceptible to self-delusion about the quality of work sometimes, simply because they lack the benefit of outside criticism during the creative process. And by the time a work is done, it’s probably natural to not want to hear that what has been produced isn’t absolutely good.
But that’s not always the case. I recall a writer – I think it was Updike on Dick Cavett – being asked if any of his stories were ever returned anymore unaccepted. “I should hope so,” he said. And I love that answer because it says to me that, no matter how good you are, there is always the possiblity that at any given time you aren’t as good as you think, and that it’s wise to listen to those who might wish to tell you.
There’s an old saying that “if you never redlight (try so hard to jump the other driver as to leave the line too early) you ain’t dragracing.” Unless you push the limits to the point of risking failure, you haven’t found your limits. In drag racing they have photo eyes at the starting line; the determination is far more difficult in creative endeavor.