Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories
- Автор: Хантер Эван
- Год: 1963
- Язык: английский
- Год: Simon and Schuster
- Жанр: Современная русская и зарубежная проза
Электронная книга - «Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories». Краткое содержание книги:
“I got the title for the picture,” Epman said suddenly, interrupting a handshaking scene that was becoming awkwardly incessant. “You remember when I talked to you at the Waldorf in New York, I didn’t have a title. Then I only knew I wanted to do Julius Caesar, but I also knew Julius Caesar we couldn’t call it. If you bring Julius Caesar up to date, you don’t still call it Julius Caesar, do you? You also don’t call it Big Julie or something like that. This is the one thing you don’t call it. This picture has got to have class, so you don’t start with Hollywood craperoo. I know Hollywood craperoo from the time I was eighteen years old and running inter-office memos for Irving Thalberg.”
“Did you work with Thalberg?” Wainwright asked in his deep, well-modulated voice. He leaned forward in expectant interest, his brown eyes alert in his narrow face, his brows raised in anticipation.
“I worked with all of them. You name them, I worked with them. All the big producers, the directors, the stars, you name them and I worked with them. You talk about competition — the picture business got competition like the World Series.” His hand came up to stroke the mustache. “But I’m still alive and kicking, thank God, and I got enough dough to be an independent and to pay the talent I need to make a class movie. Gentlemen, this picture ain’t going to be a Metro musical or a Warner Brothers gangster epic, and it ain’t going to be either a thing where some smart jerk buys a best seller and then hires a screen hack for fifteen hundred bucks a week he should louse up the story by sticking in it original ideas he never had in his life. This is going to be class, which is why I hired talents, not hacks, talents who are capable of thinking original, who can take a play like Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar which has withstood the test of time for what — three centuries? — take this play and translate it into English which the average moviegoer, Mr. and Mrs. America, can understand without we have to put titles on the bottom of the picture to translate from the blank verse.”
I glanced at Wainwright, but he seemed completely absorbed by what Epman was saying. I felt again the twinge I’d first felt at the Waldorf last month when Epman initially outlined the project.
“Did Shakespeare write in Latin?” Epman asked now, as he had asked that day last month in his Waldorf suite. “No, he wrote in Elizabethan blank verse, and the people who watched his plays were used to listening to this blank verse and to understanding it. This was a language that was immediately understood by the crowd that had come to the Globe Theatre to be entertained. So Shakespeare entertained them. He stole these solid plots from sources God knows where he found them, from Plutarch, from Thomas Lodge, from Fiorentino — anybody who ever put a good story on paper, Shakespeare swiped it. In those days there were no copyright laws, gentlemen, he saw something he liked, he grabbed it. The son of a bitch never had an original plot all the time he was living. And he took these plots and wrote this glorious poetry around them, but is it the blank verse that plays today, or is it the construction of the plays, the fire they’ve got underneath all that poetry? I’ll tell you what it is.”
Sam Epman lighted a cigar and passed the box around. Both Wainwright and I refused. Sucking on the cigar, Epman said, “It’s the story. Story, that’s the secret. Poetry is great for English literature courses; am I trying to take away from this glorious poetry the man wrote? But poetry don’t sell tickets. In Elizabethan times, yes, it sold tickets because it was the language they understood. Today the people don’t understand it. It detracts from the play; it detracts from the psychological penetration this man Shakespeare had. It detracts, to put it in terms you writers understand, it detracts from the universality.”
“What the hell is Julius Caesar if not universal? What is this, the story of a dictator? The story of a band of patriots? Baloney! This is the story of a power grab, that’s what this is the story of. You can set this story in a New England factory town, and it will still play. Why? Because man has been concerned with power from the minute he discovered he could hit another man on the head with a club and take away his woman and the saber-toothed rug from his cave. Power and success, what the hell is Julius Caesar all about if not that? And what is life today all about if not power and success? Today there’s no cavemen to kill. Today you got to kill some son-of-a-bitch account executive. Today, when you make your grab, you don’t get Gaul; you get maybe the right to tell people how mild Chesterfield cigarettes are, but this is a piece of the world, this is what buys you that Cadillac or that Mercedes, this is what puts that luscious blonde on your arm, this is what pays for those hand-tailored suits. Don’t kid yourselves, it’s the same today as it was then. Today you don’t use daggers; you use words and smiles, but you’re bucking for the same thing: power! And you can equate that with success, and that’s where we grab Mr. and Mrs. America by the genitals, because success or failure, power or lack of power is something they live with every day of their lives.”
Sam Epman began pacing the rug-covered floor of his suite, a short bald man wearing a gray tropical suit and bright green slipper socks. He sucked interminably on his cigar, leaving a trail of agitated smoke behind him.
“So what’s our movie all about? Our movie is all about power. And we are going to tell our story of power in modern, everyday, American English. We are going to tell this story of a political assassination in terms every citizen of the United States will be able to understand. We are going to keep the old Roman setting, and the same situation, but we are going to relate this tale of a power grab so that there will be no mistake about it. We are going to tell it so that everybody seeing this first-rate motion picture will understand that it applies to their lives today, now, this minute, we are still assassinating people in our grabs for power, does that make sense?”
“It seems to make a lot of sense,” Wainwright said quietly.
Epman turned to face me, and I nodded quickly.
“You want to know the title?” Epman said. “This is the title — hold your hats. The title is S.P.Q.R.” He paused for effect. Wainwright and I stared at him blankly. “Does it mean anything to you?”
“Is it a cryptogram?” Wainwright asked.
“No, it ain’t a cryptogram, but it has mystery, you got to admit that. It also has six-foot-high letters we can spread across a Cinemascope screen one letter at a time, S...” He wrote the letter in the air with his cigar. “... P... Q... R... can you see those letters materializing on the screen? S.P.Q.R., with the triumphal music of ancient Rome in the background, starring Burt Lancaster or whoever, superimposed over a reconstruction of old Rome, a Roman street teeming with life, jumping right into those opening lines of—”
“Do you think you can get Lancaster?” Wainwright interrupted.
Epman waved the interruption aside impatiently. “Lancaster, Shmancaster,” he said, “who cares what star we get, a star we’ll get, a whole bunch of stars we’ll get, don’t worry. What the hell are actors but instruments a director blows on them and he gets from them the music you wrote? You got money, you get stars. Only in astronomy are stars life-giving suns. In real life stars are only a fiction we made up to keep the people happy. These are the Roman gods and goddesses of today, only we don’t erect statues of them, we make celluloid pictures instead. Don’t bother me with stars, stars we’ll get by the bushelful. How do you like the title?”