It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive by Evan Handler Page B
Authors: Evan Handler
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simply took up where he’d left off, as if we’d never had any conflict at all. “Two pages. You’ll do the hallway in two pages. Now give me some shorter scenes. We’ve had a couple of long scenes, so now I’m going to need some shorter ones.”
He was smoking a cigar as he barked these orders. My old friend Tim, with whom I’d shared so many laughs over so many silly moments. With whom I’d created my own history, and whom I’d helped create his. Many people had criticized him to me in more recent years. They saw me huddled with him at a party and came over to talk after he was gone.
“Do you know him?” they asked. “He’s so arrogant.”
My old friend Tim, whom I defended on those occasions – strenuously – had come to fancy himself the auteur of my autobiography. As the result of a few seasons on a TV show, a couple of roles in feature films, and a few books he’d read, Tim had come to see himself as the reincarnation of Orson Welles. As they say in show business, “Oy, vey.”
I felt attacked, misled, and trapped. I had already accepted money and agreed to terms. I was under obligation to deliver a screenplay. And I was heartbroken. One moment I seethed with rage over the seventeenth of Tim’s daily slew of insults. The next moment I realized that this was what it looked like to watch a friendship die.
Of even greater concern than friendship and professional obligation, however, was that I had only one life story to tell. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t told in the dismal fashion of most of the films in its genre. More than that, I wanted to make sure it didn’t fall into the genre most people would have categorized it as belonging to. The fact is there has
still
never been an American theatrical release film in which the main character’s life-threatening illness drives the plot, and in which the character survives. It’s never been done. Never, ever. They always die. Every single time. Conquering this issue was one of the creative challenges that had me excited about the prospect of writing the script. I wanted to give the film an unconventional, uncertain ending. I wanted to leave the audience with an image of the lead character physically safe, but walking off into an unknown future. This goal, too, turned into a point of contention.
“You can’t break the rules until you’ve mastered the rules,” I was told. (To my amazement, a quote from my sixth-grade gym teacher upon doing a reverse, double-pump layup instead of a traditional one during basketball drills.)
I sensed that the showdown wasn’t destined to go my way, and that ultimately I was going to have no say whatsoever in how the film got made. Besides my emotional investment in the material being battled over, I didn’t know how to deal with being badgered, bullied, and shouted down for hours on end. In one of the oddest ironies of my strange existence, I had somehow mastered surviving treacherous ordeals while not knowing very well how to take care of myself in a creative collaboration.
At night, after “working hours” were through, I was living in my
old-friend-and-current-adversary’s guesthouse. I didn’t own a car. I was 150 miles from my apartment in Manhattan. Unless I was willing to walk out on the whole endeavor, I had nowhere to go. I’d slink back to my quarters and wait to get up the next day to go at it all over again. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether it’s a distortion or not, but I felt like I was fighting for my life all over again. Or at least fighting for the right to tell the story of it in a way that made sense to me.
And that’s when Patricia stepped in. She became my knight in shining armor. More accurately, she became my knight in a ten-year-old, beat-up, rusted-out Volvo she called “The Moo Monster.” Patricia was playful and childlike in that way. She named her cars. She even spoke to them.
“Come on, girl,” Patricia would appeal when the car made ominous sounds.
He was smoking a cigar as he barked these orders. My old friend Tim, with whom I’d shared so many laughs over so many silly moments. With whom I’d created my own history, and whom I’d helped create his. Many people had criticized him to me in more recent years. They saw me huddled with him at a party and came over to talk after he was gone.
“Do you know him?” they asked. “He’s so arrogant.”
My old friend Tim, whom I defended on those occasions – strenuously – had come to fancy himself the auteur of my autobiography. As the result of a few seasons on a TV show, a couple of roles in feature films, and a few books he’d read, Tim had come to see himself as the reincarnation of Orson Welles. As they say in show business, “Oy, vey.”
I felt attacked, misled, and trapped. I had already accepted money and agreed to terms. I was under obligation to deliver a screenplay. And I was heartbroken. One moment I seethed with rage over the seventeenth of Tim’s daily slew of insults. The next moment I realized that this was what it looked like to watch a friendship die.
Of even greater concern than friendship and professional obligation, however, was that I had only one life story to tell. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t told in the dismal fashion of most of the films in its genre. More than that, I wanted to make sure it didn’t fall into the genre most people would have categorized it as belonging to. The fact is there has
still
never been an American theatrical release film in which the main character’s life-threatening illness drives the plot, and in which the character survives. It’s never been done. Never, ever. They always die. Every single time. Conquering this issue was one of the creative challenges that had me excited about the prospect of writing the script. I wanted to give the film an unconventional, uncertain ending. I wanted to leave the audience with an image of the lead character physically safe, but walking off into an unknown future. This goal, too, turned into a point of contention.
“You can’t break the rules until you’ve mastered the rules,” I was told. (To my amazement, a quote from my sixth-grade gym teacher upon doing a reverse, double-pump layup instead of a traditional one during basketball drills.)
I sensed that the showdown wasn’t destined to go my way, and that ultimately I was going to have no say whatsoever in how the film got made. Besides my emotional investment in the material being battled over, I didn’t know how to deal with being badgered, bullied, and shouted down for hours on end. In one of the oddest ironies of my strange existence, I had somehow mastered surviving treacherous ordeals while not knowing very well how to take care of myself in a creative collaboration.
At night, after “working hours” were through, I was living in my
old-friend-and-current-adversary’s guesthouse. I didn’t own a car. I was 150 miles from my apartment in Manhattan. Unless I was willing to walk out on the whole endeavor, I had nowhere to go. I’d slink back to my quarters and wait to get up the next day to go at it all over again. I’ll leave it to others to decide whether it’s a distortion or not, but I felt like I was fighting for my life all over again. Or at least fighting for the right to tell the story of it in a way that made sense to me.
And that’s when Patricia stepped in. She became my knight in shining armor. More accurately, she became my knight in a ten-year-old, beat-up, rusted-out Volvo she called “The Moo Monster.” Patricia was playful and childlike in that way. She named her cars. She even spoke to them.
“Come on, girl,” Patricia would appeal when the car made ominous sounds.
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