I Remember Nothing [31]
But it’s horrible to have a flop. It’s painful and mortifying. It’s lonely and sad.
A couple of my flops eventually became cult hits, which is your last and final hope for a flop, but most of my flops remained flops.
Flops stay with you in a way that hits never do. They torture you. You toss and turn. You replay. You recast. You recut. You rewrite. You restage. You run through the what-if’s and the if-only’s. You cast about for blame.
One of the best things about directing movies, as opposed to merely writing them, is that there’s no confusion about who’s to blame: you are. But before I became a director, when I was just the screenwriter, I could cast blame everywhere. There’s a movie I wrote years ago that didn’t work. In my opinion. You may have seen this movie. You may even have loved it. But it was a flop when it opened; it got exactly one good review in all of America, and then it sank like a stone.
For years I tried to figure out where I’d gone wrong and what I should have done. What should I have said to the director? What should I have done in order to fight for the original draft of the script, the best draft, the one with the voice-over? What could I have done to prevent the director from inserting the fun-house sequence, or from cutting the flashbacks, which were really funny? Or were they?
I spent years wondering about all this. Then, one day, I had lunch with the movie’s editor. I was about to direct my first movie, and I was looking for advice. At a certain point, we got around to the flop. He must have brought it up; I never would have. That’s another thing about flops: you never talk about them afterward, they’re too painful. But he assured me that nothing could have been done; the problem, he said, was the casting. This calmed me down temporarily. This was at least a solution to the riddle of why the movie hadn’t worked—it was miscast. Of course. So it wasn’t my fault. What a relief.
For quite a long time I comforted myself with that theory. Then, recently, I saw the movie again and I realized why the movie hadn’t worked. There was nothing wrong with the cast; the problem was the script. The script wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t funny enough, it wasn’t sharp enough. So it was my fault after all.
By the way, one of the things you hope for when your movie hasn’t gotten good reviews is that some important critic will eventually embrace it and attack all the critics who didn’t like when it opened. I mention this for two reasons: first, so that you’ll understand how truly pathetic you become after a flop; and second, because, astonishingly, this actually happened with a movie I wrote called Heartburn. Heartburn flopped when it opened. A year later, Vincent Canby, the eminent movie critic for The New York Times, saw the movie for the first time and wrote an article calling it a small masterpiece. Those were not his exact words, but close. And he claimed to be mystified that other critics hadn’t seen how good it was. But this was cold comfort, because I couldn’t help wondering if things might have been different had Canby reviewed the movie in the first place. I’m not suggesting that the movie would have sold more tickets, but a good review in The Times cushions the blow.
One of the saddest things about a flop is that even if it turns out to have a healthy afterlife, even if it’s partly redeemed, you remain bruised and hurt by the original experience. Worst of all, you eventually come to agree with the audience, the one that didn’t much like it to begin with. You agree with them, even if it means you’ve abandoned your child.
People who aren’t in the business always wonder if you knew it was going to be a flop. They say things like, “Didn’t they know?” “How could they not have known?” My experience is that you don’t know. You don’t know because you’re invested in the script. You love the cast. You adore the crew. Two or three hundred people have followed you into the wilderness; they’ve committed six months or a year of their lives to an endeavor you’ve made them believe in. It’s