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TRICKSTERS AND HUCKSTERS: SHOW BIZ ARCHETYPES
by Addison De Witt
“Manny and Morty”
When starting out in Show Business, Dear Reader, you may find yourself, through naïveté or blind hope, taking any number of meetings with people of questionable repute who fancy themselves movers and shakers. All it takes to be a movie producer is a little up-front cash to buy a script or hire a writer to write one. Once you've got a script, if it's good enough, you've got a ticket to play in the lottery of Hollywood's big time.
So it is that I found myself in the hotel suite of an Italian director named Gianni, who had a dream of making a movie with his favorite American star (drum roll, please): Scott Baio. This was a good ten or twelve years after Mr. Baio's career peaked with “Joanie Loves Chachie.” But Europeans are often behind the curve when it comes to American pop culture. In any event, I thought I was pretty clever when I passed on the project. A few years later, I was shocked to see the movie on the shelf of a video store. I didn't have the heart to rent it.
Then there was the time I was served a tuna sandwich in the Upper West Side apartment of the daughter of Eddie Cantor (comedian and movie star of the 1930's), a very nice woman pushing 70 who had an idea for a sit-com she thought I might be interested in writing for her. Or the time one of the former stars of TV's “Laugh-In” performed his nightclub act in my living room when he was looking for a writer to craft his one-man show. Sometimes, it can be difficult to know which wagon to hitch one's star to.
One day my lawyer called to tell me he had clients named Manny and Morty, both in their late 60's, who wanted to hire me to write a movie. Morty was the money guy, but Manny was the “creative” one. He had been an executive at a company that financed some big motion pictures in the early 1970's, with actors like Steve McQueen, Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Since then, Manny had, to his dismay, faded into obscurity and was looking to make a comeback. With Morty's help, he purchased the rights to a book about a woman in rehab for alcoholism and was determined to get Meryl Streep or Glenn Close to star in the film.
So why did he want to hire me? My only credit at the time was one TV movie and a development deal for a feature. The development deal, however, was with Marty, a big New York producer. Manny considered Marty (not to be confused with Morty) to be his biggest rival, and he was green with envy at Marty's continued success in movies. As James Hillman notes in Kinds of Power: "The main method for acquiring prestige is...having a keen nose for what and who is important. Someone with prestige gathers followers simply by following what's in the wind, which way it blows..."(123).
So when he heard I was young and Marty had hired me to write a romantic comedy, Manny was anxious to snag this new young talent for himself. Thus I was hired to write a drama about alcoholic rehab. I was merely a pawn in a pissing game between Manny and Marty, and happy to be one, I might add.
I was summoned to meet Manny and his partner Morty at Orloff's deli near Lincoln Center. I found them in a booth in the rear that served as Manny's unofficial New York office (he split his time between both coasts, he told me). The two men grew up in Brooklyn together, and while Manny worked his way into the movie business, Morty had become rich as some kind of “contractor” (the exact nature of his business was never revealed to me, though he would sometimes say he was “in construction”). Over the years they had gone their separate ways but stayed in touch. And now that Manny desperately needed money to fund his comeback in motion pictures, he brought in Morty as his financial partner.
While Manny ate his knockwurst and sauerkraut, he told me he'd read the script I wrote for Marty and wanted the same kind of youth and humor for his rehab movie to lift it out of the maudlin disease genre. First order of business was to send me to St. Mary's, a rehab clinic in Minnesota, the mecca of the 12-step recovery movement. While Manny was gruff and smoked cigars, priding himself on being a larger-than-life New York character, Morty was a sweet, gentle man who admitted he knew nothing about the business and clearly looked up to his old friend Manny, the big shot. Morty was, sadly, prone to hilarious malapropisms. My favorite one came after some gaffe he had made, and he told me he was “moritified” (instead of “mortified”), which was an amusing, if inadvertent, play on Morty's own name.
When Morty had a check for me, he would leave it with his “drop”, a bartender at a midtown Manhattan restaurant. If I had a script to deliver, I'd leave it with his drop, too. When it was time to leave for Minneapolis on my week-long research trip, Morty met me at the airport and handed me an envelope stuffed with $400 in cash for my incidental expenses for the week (he had paid airfare and hotel in advance). I stuffed the envelope into my pocket and hoped that no one was watching our transaction. Privately, I wondered if fuzzy, zoom-lens photographs of this incident would later show up at somebody's racketeering trial (what is racketeering, anyway?), but I kept these thoughts to myself and boarded the plane.
Morty had strongly hinted that he had alcohol and/or substance abuse issues in his own family, so it was no accident that he was connected with this book, and his interest went beyond the financial. The original author had done his research at St. Mary's, and that's why I was being sent there, to go through “family week” myself and gain some first-hand knowledge.
My week at St. Mary's was a very powerful experience that I'll carry with me the rest of my life. I sat in on sessions with alcoholics and family members as they confronted each other and I wept along with everyone else in the room. At the end of the week, these strangers embraced me as a friend, surreal as that may sound, since they knew I was a writer who had merely come there to observe. Whatever would happen with the movie, I was grateful to Manny and Morty for that week in Minneapolis.
I wrote my first draft, but the first notes meeting with Manny and Morty did not go well. Manny reminded me that I'd been hired to bring youth and humor to the disease-movie genre. What he wanted to know now was, “Where is the humor? This isn't funny.”
Trying to remain calm, I quietly defended my script. “Well, it's not knee-slapping funny, if that's what you mean, there are no `jokes', per se, no one-liners. But it's full of humor.” Manny looked at me incredulously. “Show me. Where's the humor? Maybe I'm not getting it,” he said, disingenuously.
It's the kind of humor that naturally evolves out of situations that our characters find themselves in, I tried to explain. Page 26, for instance, when our lead character makes a sarcastic, self-deprecating remark. That's humorous.
Manny just stared at me. Clearly, I wasn't making my case very well. Morty chose that moment to chime in: “I can see the humor in that.” Manny shot his partner a withering look: “You think that's funny? What do you know about funny?” Chastened, Morty kept his mouth shut, while I went on to point out humorous lines on pages 11, 19, 31, 38, 52, 69, and 73-74.
Finally, I admitted, there's not a lot of obvious comedy in rehab. But there is denial, there's shame, there's guilt, there's anger, there's even hope and the possibility of redemption. In short, the human condition. Or, as William Saroyan put it so well, the human comedy. The follies and foibles of life. And that's where the humor in rehab is found, the comic relief amid the drama and pain of confronting our worst demons.
All of this seemed to fall on deaf (real or metaphoric?) ears. I was dispatched to rewrite hell, not quite knowing what was really going to please disillusioned Manny. Morty looked at me sympathetically, apologizing for Manny's rough treatment with a warm pat on the back. “Don't let Manny get to you,” he whispered, “You did a great job.”
When I arrived at the notes meeting for the next draft, I was surprised to find we were joined by a young woman who was introduced as Manny's “development girl”. I looked over at her copy of my script and my worst fear was realized: It was dog-eared on nearly every page, and a hundred little post-its stuck out from everywhere. Manny made a brief introductory speech and then turned the floor over to his d-girl, who proceeded to give me a lecture about screenwriting that sounded suspiciously like something she had recently read or heard at one of those weekend seminars about story and structure that were so popular at the time.
As she droned on, with Manny's nodding approval, about character arcs and such, I knew it was my time to find the humor in the situation, and I soon found I could barely contain my laughter. The big challenge came when the d-girl mentioned something about the lead character's facade – which she pronounced, and I kid you not, “fa-kade”. I couldn't control myself any longer and I burst out with a loud guffaw, which I instantly tried to mask as a cough. I grabbed for a Kleenex to blow my nose for dramatic effect, but I don't think I fooled Manny. Though the d-girl was blissfully unaware of what she'd done, I was moritified (misspelling intentional). Morty, God bless him, may have assumed he'd been mispronouncing “facade” all his life. But Manny had to realize how foolish she looked. Though, if he did, he didn't show it.
I delivered a third draft, and my contractual obligation was complete. I saw Morty one last time when I met him at his “drop” to collect my check. He offered to buy me a drink, but I told him I was in a hurry. I never saw Manny again. I heard through the grapevine that another writer was hired to do a new script – the original author of the book. The movie was never made, and Manny never had his last hurrah, but my version of the script got me a new agent and lots of work for the next several years. Isn't thatterrifical?
Work Cited
Hillman, James. Kinds of Power. New York: Currency Doubleday, 1995.
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