Captives - Hardcover

LOS ANGELES
It’s impossible to explain what anger the screenwriter felt, what humiliation, due to reality of course.
–Orly Castel - Bloom,
“The Screenwriter and Reality”
1
And in July of that year, on an otherwise uneventful morning, Daniel suddenly found himself confronting an unmistakable reluctance to continue writing stories. For seventeen years Daniel had dedicated a good portion of his waking life to doing just this, to crafting stories, which in his case took the form of screenplays. He had completed fourteen full scripts, had sold eight of these, three of which were in fact turned into movies. One of these, his eleventh screenplay, entitled Captives, grossed over one hundred and sixty million dollars in the United States alone, though the director chose to rename it Helsinki Honeymoon, a clause in the twenty- eight page contract giving the headstrong Frenchman permission to do so. Regardless, Daniel had earned for himself and his family nearly five million dollars through the sale of these screenplays, enough to purchase a beautiful, spacious home in the expensive Southern California real estate market, enough to send his son to a competitive, pricey private school, enough to provide his wife the freedom not to work for nine of these past seventeen years. Though not one of Hollywood’s leading screenwriters, Daniel’s name had become well known and respected, such that a major studio would occasionally approach Daniel with hopes that he might be willing to fix someone else’s screenplay, as the studio had decided, either before or during production, that the screenplay required the attention of a professional. Often Daniel would decline these offers, his own projects obviously more important than someone else’s, but when the timing was right Daniel would agree and be paid handsomely for his services.
Though Daniel has remained, until this July morning, determined to continue writing his own screenplays, the possibility of script doctoring full- time, on the off chance that he one day finds himself uninterested in or incapable of writing movies on his own, appeals to him as an insurance policy of sorts, because, to be sure, there are times when the pressure, much of it manufactured in his own head, along with the intimidating lunacy of the movie industry, the egos, the indecision, the absurd budgets, the reluctance to take risks, the prevailing culture of remorseless dishonesty, leads him to conclude, nearly, that the work involved in realizing his own screenplays is no longer worth the effort. Not in the monetary sense, in this regard it is undeniably worth it, but rather in terms of the emotional and almost spiritual investment necessary to conceive of a basic story, envision the main characters who would be the agents of its action, select a proper setting in which they would perform these actions, patiently massaging these interrelated but inchoate concepts into being, waiting out the days when he could not concentrate, finding a balance between the steady, clever, and original, but not too original (this being mainstream Hollywood, after all) development of plot, character, and setting, all in order to complete a first draft, at which point it would be necessary to show the script to his agent and then wait a week or even a month for his comments, feedback that often strongly suggested, if not necessarily required, that he perform major, however elective, surgery on his screenplay, a process that was invariably more painful and less enjoyable than the invigorating, though still anxious early days of sketching out the basic contours of his new story, a process that would often be repeated once, twice, even three or four times, at which point the diminishing returns on his sustained effort and anguished focus would nearly get the best of him, bringing him to the brink of despair, which he would only be able to avoid by drinking in the evenings, watching hour upon hour of vapid late- night television and eating vast quantities of imported semisweet chocolate, causing him to gain weight and lose sleep and become, more or less, an insufferable asshole, a man his wife and son, who loved him to be sure, learned to identify and then avoid almost entirely, until one night, it always seemed to happen late, late at night, Daniel would have his breakthrough, and though work would remain, it would all be downhill from there, until two to four months later a well- earned bottle of wonderfully overpriced champagne would be popped open in nearly anticlimactic celebration, while Daniel’s checking account would wait with silent and cooperative patience to be inflated to the tune of six figures or more.
The negative features of this process were only heightened by Daniel’s knowledge of what awaited his screenplay once it was acquired by a studio, as a clear majority of studio executives, directors, and leading men thought nothing of altering his screenplays beyond recognition to suit their infantile needs and desires, needs and desires that invariably led to a final cinematic product of undeniably lower quality than what would certainly have been produced had this executive, director, or leading man done his best to faithfully translate the words in Daniel’s script into the visual and aural language of film. After the success of Captives, that is, after the success of Helsinki Honeymoon, Daniel sought to leverage his newly well- earned clout within the industry into more control over the various complicated and high- stakes processes that took place between the initial sale of a script and that unlikely final and fateful moment the very first moviegoer voluntarily approaches the box office to buy a ticket. Daniel joined forces with an up- and- coming director who had recently completed his first feature, and the two set out to take Daniel’s next screenplay, Locked Up and Loaded, which the up- and- coming director read with great enthusiasm, and sell it for a truly enormous sum of money to the studio that had produced the up- and- coming director’s successful first film, with this director signed on as director and with the two of them signed on as producers, all with an eye on not just turning Daniel’s outstanding screenplay into precisely the great movie this screenplay could be, but, in the process, on turning the two of them, Daniel and the director, into major players in Hollywood, into an unstoppable two- headed creative force that would leave its mark on American popular cinema.
Despite the dense character of this opening, a full account of what stood between Daniel, the director, and the realization of their ambitions would simply be too involved to detail at this time. Suffice to say that the pathological lunacy of the movie industry, in particular the egos and the remorseless dishonesty, seemed, in Daniel’s eyes, to grow only more unpredictable and treacherous as the daunting peak of this foolhardy madness finally came into full view. None of this was helped by the fact that the up- and- coming director turned out to be a very different man than the man Daniel had initially thought him to be. Most of all, Daniel learned that the successful navigation of the decidedly rockier terrain of actual production required all manner of endurance and fortitude that easily outmeasured the endurance and fortitude that one had to bring to bear on the creation of an industry- worthy screenplay, this more substantial endurance and fortitude involving not just sustained focus and creativity, but the ability to outlast and simply intimidate rivals and adversaries. What Daniel learned was that while the far-from- modest demands involved in successfully writing and selling a screenplay were, indeed, far from modest, when considered against Daniel’s character, in particular his strengths and weaknesses, it turned out that the fulfillment of such sizable screenwriting demands was not such a surprise after all. By contrast, Daniel and his character, his strengths and weaknesses, turned out to be ill suited to the realization of the more considerable demands at the heart of taking a promising screenplay, or even, or especially, a truly great screenplay, and turning it into a movie that might find its way to thousands of cineplexes here and abroad. What Daniel learned was that he was not equipped to overcome the various interpersonal obstacles that invariably present themselves on the path to postproduction, the lying, the confrontations, the final, decisive act of resigning oneself to the fact that a mortal, lifelong enemy, an enemy with considerable power and clout in the industry, has been made in order to properly realize, say, the relationship between leading man and leading lady. To be sure, Daniel had come to dread the various difficulties that predictably emerged during the extended solitude of writing a screenplay, but the amount of drinking and late- night television and bittersweet chocolate Daniel found himself having to consume to surmount these production- related interpersonal hurdles transformed him into a purely insufferable and truly self- loathing asshole, such that his wife, a woman who certainly has her own shortcomings, told him one evening, with an impressive lack of ceremony or even warning, that marriage contract or no marriage contract, she was most certainly not willing to share her life and raise a son with the contemptible prick that Daniel had become while wrestling with the world- famous action hero over whether or not his character would get the girl in the end. Though their personal finances had never been better, this movie having more than funded his and his family’s much- needed getaway to the South of France that spring, Daniel unequivocally regretted, or at the least most certainly enjoyed no aspect of the experience that was transforming the screenplay Locked Up and Loaded into an actual movie, a movie the viewing pub...