My Movie Business: A Memoir Read online

  M Y M O V I E B U S I N E S S

  J o h n I r v i n g

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  M E M O I R

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  A Widow for One Year

  Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

  A Son of the Circus

  A Prayer for Owen Meany

  The Cider House Rules

  The Hotel New Hampshire

  The World According to Garp

  The 158-Pound Marriage

  The Water-Method Man

  Setting Free the Bears

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  6190_Irving_00fm_js.qxd 8/23/99 4:57 PM Page v MY

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  BUSINESS

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  6190_Irving_00fm_js.qxd 8/23/99 4:57 PM Page vi Copyright © 1999 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Random House and colophon are registered trademarks

  of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to William Morrow and Company, Inc., for permission to reprint from The Cider House Rules, by John Irving, copyright © 1985 by Garp Enterprises, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of William Morrow and Company, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Irving, John.

  My movie business : a memoir / John Irving.

  p.

  cm.

  ISBN 0-375-504486

  1. Irving, John. — Film and video adaptations.

  2. Novelists,

  American—20th century Biography.

  3. Screenwriters—

  United States Biography.

  4. Cider house rules (Motion

  picture)

  5. Motion picture authorship.

  I. Title.

  PS3559.R8Z468

  1999

  813'.54—dc21

  [B]

  99-15800

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  98765432

  First Edition

  Book design by J. K. Lambert

  6190_Irving_00fm_js.qxd 8/23/99 4:57 PM Page vii For my son Colin,

  who has borne the disappointments

  of this business with me.

  6190_Irving_00fm_js.qxd 8/23/99 4:57 PM Page ix C O N T E N T S

  1. Mrs. Berkeley’s Constipation 3

  2. The Ether Addict 8

  3. Rubber Gloves 16

  4. Not Quite Awake 18

  5. The Great God Irving 21

  6. To Be of Use 26

  7. Paying the Piper 34

  8. But Could It Really Be Taught to a Chimpanzee? 38

  9. The Disintegrating Uterus 42

  10. The Bleak Version 50

  11. No Escargot 57

  12. First Haircut 66

  13. The Motorcycle I Gave Away 73

  14. Not Completely Healed 82

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  15. Not Wang, Not Winterbottom 93

  16. Losing Wally, Keeping Candy 106

  17. A Terse Speculation on the Movie Poster 115

  18. Alone at Their Table 122

  19. The Disapproving Stationmaster 131

  20. Fuzzy 137

  21. Lost Scenes 146

  22. The Twelve-Year-Old Girl 153

  23. Fade to Black 163

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   M R S . B E R K E L E Y ’ S

  C O N S T I P A T I O N

  My grandfather Dr.Frederick C.Irving gradu-

  ated from Harvard Medical School in 1910.

  He was an intern at the Massachusetts General

  Hospital and later became chief of staff at the Boston Lying-In—a pioneer institution, founded in 1832. In my grandfather’s day, the Boston Lying-In had already become one of the world’s leading obstetrical hospitals.

  Dr. Irving was also a professor of obstetrics at Harvard, and the author of three books: The Expectant Mother’s Handbook, A Textbook of Obstetrics, and a biography of the Boston Lying-In Hospital called Safe Deliverance. The last was chiefly a history of obstetrics and gynecological surgery in the United States; it was published in 1942, the year I was born.When I first told my parents that I wanted to become a writer—I was fourteen—my parents said,

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  “Well, your grandfather is a writer. You should read his books.”

  And so, at about the same time I first read Charles

  Dickens, I began to read my grandfather “Fritz” Irving.

  For a fourteen-year-old, the clinical details of the early days of obstetrics and gynecological surgery were frankly more eye-opening than anything in Charles Dickens,

  although Dickens would ultimately prove to be a greater influence on my writing than Dr. Irving. Thank goodness.

  My grandfather was an unusual physician—a man of science, but with Renaissance knowledge and positively Vic-torian prose. A short example of the latter should suffice.

  A student of medicine begins his novitiate when he goes to medical school; but he should have entered upon his apprenticeship as a doctor many years before, when for the first time he was allowed free choice in his earlier education. At that point two roads are always open: one, straight and narrow, that leads through the sciences with only a few brief detours into general knowledge; the other, circuitous and serpentine, that wanders far afield, dips more deeply into the wider realms of learning, and returns to the highway only when necessity demands—

  this is the more entrancing road, for there are more flowers beside it, and from the ancient hills that it surmounts one sees the world more clearly.

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  It was clear to me, from an early age, that I would be a traveler on exclusively the circuitous and serpentine road—the one with more flowers beside it. Medical

  school was not for me. I wasn’t a good enough student.

  Yet the only author I actually knew was a renowned obstetrician with a questionable sense of humor.

  Well, maybe that isn’t true. One summer in New

  Hampshire, on the beach at Little Boars Head, when I was still a young boy, someone pointed to a pale, ungainly man in a yellow bathing suit and said: “That’s Ogden Nash, the writer.” To this day I don’t know if it was, but I shall carry the image of that funny-looking man, “the writer,” to my grave. I immediately took up reading Ogden Nash’s humorous verse, although I never thought that Mr. Nash’s sense of humor could hold a candle to my grandfather’s.

  In introducing one of his patients to the read
er, Grandfather wrote: “Mrs. Berkeley had contributed nothing to the world except her constipation.” That would be a fine first sentence to a novel. I’m sorry my grandfather didn’t write novels, for his sense of humor was not limited to his medical writings. He was also the author of a scandalous poem called “The Ballad of Chambers Street”; it is a poem of such astonishing lewdness and vulgarity that I will not repeat more than two stanzas. There are seventeen stanzas in all, four of which are anti-Semitic; another four are deeply obscene. But just so you can appreciate the sound

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  of the thing, here are two of the least offensive stanzas.

  (The poem concerns the unwanted pregnancy of a loose young woman named Rose who has a catastrophic abortion. The procedure is performed by an abortionist named Charlie Green. The real Dr. Green was a respected professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Harvard.)

  High in a suite in Chambers Street,

  ere yet her waters broke,

  From pregnant Rose they took her clothes

  and ne’er a word they spoke.

  They laid her head across the bed,

  her legs they had to bend ’em.

  With sterile hands they made demands

  to open her pudendum.

  “The introitus admits my fist

  without the slightest urgin’.

  Therefore I ween,” said Charlie Green,

  “that Rose is not a virgin.

  And I would almost dare declare

  that she has had coition,

  which in the main would best explain

  her present sad condition.”

  For years after my grandfather’s death, my father

  would receive handwritten and typewritten copies of the infamous ballad; Dr. Irving’s medical-school students

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  had faithfully transcribed “The Ballad of Chambers

  Street” from memory. Medical students have excellent memories.

  Grandfather was a man of extreme erudition and unac-

  countable, even inspired, bad taste; as such, he would have been a terrific novelist, for a good novel is at once sophisticated in its understanding of human behavior and utterly rebellious in its response to the conventions of good taste.

  As Charlotte Brontë wrote in 1847: “Conventionality is not morality. Self-righteousness is not religion. To attack the first is not to assail the last.” I used the Brontë quota-tion as an epigraph to my sixth novel, The Cider House Rules, together with a far more prosaic observation made by a physician named H. J. Boldt in 1906. “For practical purposes abortion may be defined as the interruption of gestation before viability of the child.”

  Grandfather probably agreed with Dr. Boldt. Notwith-

  standing the Hippocratic oath— Primum non nocere (“First do no harm”)—a physician existed “for practical purposes.”

  But Fritz Irving also had a fondness for mischief. He admired a colleague who once noted that many Irish women got pregnant on St. Patrick’s Day. When they were ready to be delivered, Grandfather’s colleague gave them a small dose of methylene blue—a harmless drug that colored

  their urine green, which the Irish women took as a sign of safe deliverance from St. Patrick himself.

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   T H E E T H E R A D D I C T

  The plot of TheCiderHouseRules is far more complicated than the compressed version of the story and

  its characters that I adapted as a screenplay (over a thirteen-year period, and for four different directors). In the novel, I began with the four failed adoptions of the orphan Homer Wells. By the end of the first chapter, when Homer returns for the fourth time to the orphanage in St.

  Cloud’s, Maine, the orphanage physician, Dr. Wilbur

  Larch, decides he’ll have to keep him.

  Dr. Larch, an obstetrician and (in the 1930s and ’40s) an illegal abortionist, trains Homer Wells to be a doctor.

  This is illegal, too, of course—Homer never goes to high school or to college, not to mention medical school. But with Dr. Larch’s training and the assistance of Larch’s

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  faithful nurses, Angela and Edna, Homer becomes an experienced obstetrician and gynecologist. He refuses to perform abortions, however.

  The second chapter of the novel describes Larch’s

  childhood and medical-school years, his first internship in Boston, and the experiences that have made him “a patron saint of orphans” and an abortionist. The history of Homer’s failed adoptions and Larch’s background are not developed in the screenplay. Larch’s ether addiction is developed in both the book and the film, but his sexual abstemiousness, a feature of his eccentricity in the novel, was never in any draft of the script; instead, in the movie, I strongly imply that Dr. Larch may have had (or still has) a sexual relationship with Nurse Angela.

  I wanted to make Larch more normal. There is less

  time for character development in a film than in a novel; a character’s eccentricities can too easily become the character. In the movie, I thought Larch’s addiction to ether was eccentric enough.

  In the screenplay, as in the novel, it is both Homer’s conflict with Larch over the abortion issue and Homer’s desire to see something of the world outside St. Cloud’s that make him leave the orphanage with Wally Worthington and

  Candy Kendall—an attractive couple who come to St.

  Cloud’s for an abortion. But in the book, Homer spends fifteen years away from the orphanage—in that time, Wally

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  and Homer become best friends, Homer falls in love with Candy, and Wally and Candy get married.

  The passage of time, which is so important in all my novels, is not easily captured in a film. In the screenplay, Homer stays away from St. Cloud’s for only fifteen months, Wally isn’t Homer’s best friend, and Candy is the sexual aggressor in her relationship with Homer.

  And in the novel, Homer and Candy have a son, Angel, who they pretend is adopted. Wally, out of love for all of them, tolerates this obvious fiction and his wife’s infidelity.

  In the screenplay, there is no child and Wally never knows about Candy’s transgressions. Developing sympathy, not unlike developing character, takes time; in the movie, I tried to make Homer more sympathetic by making him

  less responsible for the affair with Candy. I made less of the affair, too.

  But in both the novel and the screenplay, what precipitates Homer’s return to the orphanage, where he replaces Dr. Larch as the obstetrician and the abortionist in St.

  Cloud’s, is his discovery of the relationship between a black migrant apple picker and his daughter. Mr. Rose, the picking-crew boss on the apple farm where Wally gives Homer a job, impregnates his own daughter, Rose Rose. In the novel, it is Homer and Candy’s son, Angel, who falls in love with Rose Rose and first makes this discovery, but since I eliminated Angel from the screenplay, I made Homer find out about Rose Rose’s pregnancy directly.

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  When Homer acknowledges that he must perform an

  abortion on Rose Rose, he realizes that he can no longer deny that procedure to other women who want it. All the time Homer Wells is away from St. Cloud’s, the aging and ether-addicted Dr. Larch has been plotting how Homer can replace him; in the end of both the novel and the film, Homer accepts the responsibility
Larch has left to him.

  The doctor’s young apprentice becomes the orphanage

  physician.

  Left out of the movie was the book-length character of Melony, an older girl who befriends Homer as a young orphan at St. Cloud’s. Melony is also the source of Homer’s sexual initiation, and she extracts from him a promise he will break—that he won’t leave her. But I eliminated her from the screenplay; she was simply too overpowering a character.

  Over and over again, the limitation imposed on the

  length of a movie has consequences. The novel of The Cider House Rules was more than 800 manuscript pages long—

  it’s more than 500 book pages. The finished screenplay was a mere 136 manuscript pages. It pained me to lose Melony, but I had to do it.

  It helped me that there’d been a precedent to losing Melony. In several foreign countries where the novel was translated, I lost the title. (Of my nine novels, The Cider House Rules is my favorite title.) In some languages, The Cider House Rules was simply too clumsy to translate. In

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  France, cider is an alcoholic drink; in German, “cider house rules” is one word. I forget what the problem was in Finnish, but the Finns titled the novel The Hero of His Own Life—from the beginning of David Copperfield, which Dr.

  Larch reads and rereads to the orphans at St. Cloud’s.

  Homer Wells takes the opening passage from David Copperfield personally. “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by any-body else, these pages must show.”

  The German title, Gottes Werk und Teufels Beitrag ( The Work of the Lord, the Contribution of the Devil), imitates Dr.

  Larch’s manner of speaking in code to his nurses. (The French made a similar choice for the title: L’Oeuvre de Dieu, la Part du Diable.) This is Larch’s way of indicating to Angela and Edna whether he is delivering a baby or performing an abortion. The point being that, in Larch’s view, it is all the Lord’s work—either he is delivering a baby or he is delivering a mother. (In the film, Dr. Larch’s willingness to give abortions is established in the montage over the opening credits. Homer’s reluctance to perform the procedure is expressed in the first scene of dialogue between them.) I felt that a man who takes on the enormous responsibility of life or no life in an orphanage in poor, rural Maine—a man like Dr. Larch—would be deeply scarred.