And a screenplay, as a piece of writing, isn’t a finished thing — a screenplay is only a phase of a story, on its way to becoming its realized existence: a movie. So by definition, it isn’t Art; it’s one embryonic part in the construction of Art, the crude charcoal sketch, the stumbling choreography, the sculpture’s wire armature, the mere tinkering with melodic notes. A screenplay is something the screenwriter creates and nurtures and possesses, briefly, then sends on its way. For other people to turn into whatever kind of thing they want. You wave bye-bye from the door and hope it isn’t run over by a bus.
I wrote scripts about characters I told myself not to get attached to, but with whom I always fell, as during a one-night stand, into a passing, passionate love. I wrote sentences I knew I’d wind up cutting in the delivered draft because they slipped into character introspection or an irrelevant linguistic play. I told myself with each assignment that I was going to be a good screenwriter and do whatever the stupid Studio Executive asked, invite in those bikini’d spectral stewardesses, all in order to get those big fat checks (buy a sable coat, or give it to Roosevelt?) and pay for my label as a writer; I’d wind up shrieking in story meetings like a hissing feral cat trying to protect her young, but I’d usually cave in the end and go slinking off, check in hand, final draft delivered with the other.
But if a script is developed in a forest and there is no one there to produce it. .? Amazing, how screenwriters can earn a nice living writing those things and never see anything they write live to tell the story. Time after time I turned in scripts to someone who wrote me that check and then locked my writing away forever in the dark drawer of Development Hell. I thought I heard my characters howl in protest. I told myself these characters weren’t real, and I swore anew, each time, that I would never fall in love again. I told myself that I was not selling myself, but I worried, late at night, that all those characters I was trafficking in would sneak up on me in the dark and take a razor to my throat.
This was much worse than being a plagiarist.
But it would get me closer to that beach house, I was sure. Occupation? I was asked on insurance claim forms, by mail catalogue operators, by people at hipster parties; I wanted to peep I’m a writer, but I still couldn’t. I’d only be found out. The question became ominous, as if asked each time by an Aryan Border Guard. I could never say it; I’m a screenwriter I said instead, filled out, muttered with a sheepish nod, but it didn’t satisfy; it confirmed that I was a mere pimp of words.
I thought about Garp. His glove in the gutter, his hovering piano, his creation of stories that come to fruition there, on the page, and that’s all they need to do. How at one point, that dazzled me, it felt like more than enough to aspire to in life.
For many years as a kid I slept in a T-shirt that said ALCATRAZ SWIM TEAM, a souvenir from one of my parents’ vacations. Alcatraz had always intrigued me: Capone and the Birdman, the fog. The mythic, iconic Rock. I’d seen Escape from Alcatraz at least three or four times. In 1992 I went off to visit friends in San Francisco and took my first tour of the island and learned how the families of the prison staff actually lived there, in an Ozzie-and-Harriet kind of family compound. I thought about being a woman or young girl in this most masculine and foreboding place and was further intrigued. What a great story. A mother-daughter story, on Alcatraz. I start playing with it. It will be a screenplay, of course. Sigh. I think about how to structure it in three acts (the climax: a convict escapes and holds the mother and daughter hostage!) I think about how to pitch it (Chicks on the Rock!). I think about which stupid Studio Executive might like it. It takes place, of course, in another era, in a real environment I know virtually nothing about, and I begin to research it. This absorbs a lot of time, but I want it to be historically accurate, before the inevitable arrival of the buxom stewardesses (plane crash on Alcatraz!). I start dating the imaginary mother and daughter, to listen to their stories, to live with them on intimate terms, although I know in my gut it will be only a brief affair, only a matter of months before our relationship is over and they’re handed off to the highest bidder, handed over to someone else, to be locked away in the bloom of their youth or brainwashed into other beings.
At some point, the idea occurs to me; perhaps this doesn’t have to be a screenplay. Perhaps I could write this as a novel. And when your stories and characters and words are a novel, they’ve fulfilled their destiny. That’s all they have to do; lie there and exist on the page. The Alcatraz mother and daughter would be safe there.
I stop writing screenplays to sell and my agent stops calling. I spend my time shopping, spending the money I’ve stockpiled. I wait to awaken one morning to find all the work done, to discover those blank books packed full of a novel. Maybe Garp will creep inside my head and rewire the circuitry for me; maybe Zhivago will do it for me while I sleep.
I remember a lesson: Writers must go away to write. Fine; I will try, again, to be Stingo. I pack up my computer and rent an apartment in San Francisco on a six-month lease with the last of my screenwriting money. It’s a roll of the dice. I set up my writing space, spend a few more months hanging out on Alcatraz and sneezing in dusty Bay Area archives and libraries. I walk on the beach looking for Eugene O’Neill or a dreamy guy with a bucket of clams or someone to tell me I will move mountains. I fall back on eating cheese and bread and sitting in cafés, holding a variety of blank books and pencils and pens destined to fail me, and drinking far too much red wine. I don’t smoke, but I’m tempted to start, if only to maintain the illusion. I hang out in bookstores, but it begins to feel like chastisement: See, all these people wrote their books. I don’t remember anything I ever might have learned about writing in all those college workshops; I feel I barely remember how to type. I have my four years of accumulated research — this is perhaps worth an honorary degree in the history of Alcatraz, but that’s all. I have facts and figures, an idea, an outline, a metaphor, and characters I’m embarrassed to admit I’m hopelessly in love with. And I’m terrified for them, that their life is fully in my unworthy hands. I can’t even give them voice.
One morning I sit down at my desk. The bathroom is clean, the fridge is stocked with food. The dog has been walked. One sentence, I tell myself. That’s all you have to write. After one sentence, you can go buy a pair of shoes, take the dog for another walk, go to a movie, go back to your lazy-adverb, unproductive waste of a life.
I write my one sentence and hear:
DASH
I don’t know what happened, but you better tear that up. Not that it’s bad. It’s just not good enough.
Nathan calls me puling, mocks me as an artiste. Jack Nicholson, grinning, wants me to take over his axe and go nuts. Nobodies will line up to not buy everything I ever might write, forget about being translated into Apache. I should be a waitress or a fireman.
And where’s my fur hat with the money stashed inside — how am I saving Jews and political prisoners with this sentence? It isn’t even a goddamn lily poem; I’ll never topple a tsar. Garp was wrong, deluded; he was right to stop. I need to stop now, before I even really begin.
DASH
It’s not as if you’ve written anything before, you know. Nobody’ll miss you.
He’s right, I know he’s right.