I Remember Nothing [32]
I now know that when you shoot a movie where the crew is absolutely hysterical with laughter and you are repeatedly told by the sound guy that you are making the funniest movie in history, you may be in trouble.
The first time this happened, I had no idea. The crew loved it. They were on the floor. The camera operator and focus puller were stuffing Kleenexes into their mouths to keep from laughing. And then we cut the movie and it tested poorly. Let me be more explicit: it tested in the way many comedies do, which is that the audience laughed at the jokes and nonetheless didn’t like the movie. This is the moment when you ought to know you are approaching flop, but you don’t; you think you can fix it. After all, they laughed. That must mean something. And there are so many stories about movies that were fixed after they tested badly. There is anecdotal evidence. They fixed Fatal Attraction. Not that your movie is remotely like Fatal Attraction. Still, it gives you hope.
So you recut. And you reshoot.
And it still tests poorly.
At this point, you surely know you’ve got a flop. You’d have to be a fool not to know.
But you don’t. Because you hope. You hope against hope. You hope the critics will like it. Perhaps that will help. You hope the studio will cut a trailer for the movie that will explain the movie to the audience. You spend hours on the phone with the marketing people. You worry over the tracking figures. You pretend to yourself that test screenings don’t matter—although they do, they absolutely do, especially when you make a commercial movie.
And then the movie opens and that’s that. You get bad reviews and no one goes to see it. You may never work again. No one calls. No one mentions it.
But time passes. Life goes on. You’re lucky enough to make another movie.
But that flop sits there, in the history of your life, like a black hole with a wildly powerful magnetic field.
By the way, there are people who have positive things to say about flops. They write books about success through failure and the power of failure. Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from a failure is that it’s entirely possible you will have another failure.
My biggest flop was a play I wrote. It got what are known as mixed reviews—which is to say, it got some good reviews, but not in The New York Times. It puttered along for a couple of months, and then it died. It lost its entire investment. It was the best thing I ever wrote, so it was a particularly heartbreaking experience. If I think about it for more than a minute, I start to cry.
Some plays flop but go on to have a life in stock and amateur productions, but not this one. No one performs it anywhere, ever.
You’d think I would have given up hoping that anything good would ever happen to this play, but I haven’t: I sometimes fantasize that when I’m dying, someone who’s in a position to revive it will come to my bedside to say good-bye, and I will say, “Could I ask a favor?” He will say yes. What else can he say? After all, I’m dying. And I will say, “Could you please do a revival of my play?”
How pathetic is that?
Christmas Dinner
We have a traditional Christmas dinner. We’ve been doing it for twenty-two years. There are fourteen people involved—eight parents and six children—and we all get together at Jim and Phoebe’s during Christmas week. For one night a year, we’re a family, a cheerful, makeshift family, a family of friends. We exchange modest presents, we make predictions about events in the coming year, and we eat.
Each of us brings part of the dinner. Maggie brings the hors d’oeuvres. Like all people assigned to bring hors d’oeuvres, Maggie is not really into cooking, but she happens to be an exceptional purchaser of hors d’oeuvres. Jim and Phoebe do the main course because the dinner is at their