The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life Page 15

  At the workshop, we also heard war stories. One novelist-turned-screenwriter was still gnashing his teeth in regret. They had taken his literary novel, trampled it with pat formulas, padded it with shapely thighs. In the hierarchy of power and respect, they treated him as though he ranked somewhere below bacteria. They kicked him off the set. Later, he had to endure watching the movie with an audience that included his squirming literary friends, all of whom developed simultaneous coughing fits.

  “Did you feel the movie ruined your novel?” someone from the workshop asked. “No,” he said. “It ruined my life.” Yet later I heard he was doing another screenplay. Why? What was the addiction?

  The Blow-by-Blow

  As well as I can remember, here is the chronology of The Joy Luck Club’s being made into a movie:

  October 1987: Went to China for the first time.

  November 1987: Sold the book proposal to Putnam.

  March 1988: Met Janet Yang, an executive at MCA/Universal. Janet had read the three stories that my agent, Sandy Dijkstra, had sold to Putnam as the basis for a book. Janet and I met in an outdoor café in San Francisco’s North Beach, and there she told me how much she loved the stories, how she sensed she was reading about herself. That’s all she wanted to say, that she was a fan. As I recall, she felt the book would be a hard sell as a movie. But if there was interest once the book was out, she would be waiting in the wings to help.

  March 1989: The Joy Luck Club published. After two weeks, it hit the bestseller lists, much to everyone’s surprise, including mine. While I was still trying to reason that this was a temporary fluke, my literary agent started to field inquiries from movie and television producers. Sandy advised that we find a film agent, and to that end she linked me up with Sally Willcox of Creative Artists Agency, who handles a number of authors.

  During the next few months, between my book promotion responsibilities, I met with a dozen or so producers and studio execs. Out of these meetings, I received five or six offers to option the book. I did not accept any of them, because I was still not sure the book should be a movie. Of course, one could get option money and the movie might never be made. But I had this little worry running through my head: What if the movie was made and it was a terrible depiction of Asian-Americans? What if the movie showed women wearing coolie hats and tight dresses slit up their thighs? What if they were given pointy, red-lacquered fingernails that they used to stab their philandering white boyfriends? (Don’t laugh—Lou, my husband, saw those images on television the very day I received an option offer.)

  August 1989: Met Wayne Wang. After a wonderful conversation about everything from the book to family to Asians and Asian-Americans in the arts, I knew intuitively that Wayne was the right person to direct the movie—if ever there should be a movie. I was glad to meet him, and we thought we could work together on something in the future regardless of what happened to this movie. I thought I could learn from him creatively—about stories, about the emotion of an image.

  January 1990: Team formation. With Wayne, I met the screenwriter Ron Bass at the Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Ron was the only person I met who knew exactly how to turn the book into a movie. He began with a specific analysis about each of the families depicted. I had read many reviews of Joy Luck, but his insights about the characters as people—and not literary themes—made me feel that he knew the book better than I did.

  Wayne and I mentioned the problem of so many stories, so many characters, how everyone thought it impossible to make a coherent movie out of the whole book.

  “Impossible?” Ron said. “Why is it impossible? Let me tell you a few of my ideas.” He pulled out a yellow pad with two pages of an outline. “First, we keep all the characters, all the stories. Second, we do what everyone in the industry tells you not to do: we use a lot of voice-over. Third, we use a wraparound that allows us to tell the stories through an ensemble, no single lead character.” The book could succeed as a movie, he said, only if we broke all the rules. And for the next hour and a half, he explained in detail how the rules would be broken.

  Ron also thought I should be involved in the screenwriting. I wasn’t interested. I wanted to leave the book in these guys’ hands and go on with my work as a fiction writer. But then he said something irresistible to a writer: “I think I could help you find the poetry of the scene.” You have to realize that Ron used to be an entertainment lawyer. He knows exactly what to say to people to get them on his side.

  We agreed with a handshake that we three would form a team. We would also seek creative control. Those two conditions were inviolable, and without them, I would not option the book. The way I figured it, we had about a one-in-a-million chance of getting a movie made, but if it did happen, we’d have a great time.

  Spring 1990: Collaboration set up. Oliver Stone agreed to be our executive co-producer. Janet Yang, who was by then vice-president of Stone’s production company, Ixtlan, had arranged a meeting with him. We met at an editing studio in Santa Monica, where he was cutting The Doors. He said he would help us make The Joy Luck Club under his deal with Carolco.

  Fall 1990: Contract trouble. After six months of negotiating, we found it did not guarantee us the creative control we required, so we walked away from the Carolco deal. Meanwhile, Oliver and Janet continued to help us look for financing elsewhere. They agreed to serve as godfather and godmother, as we sought out the best resources for making the film.

  January 1991: New plan of action. After the Carolco deal fell through, Ron believed the only chance we would have for creative control was by developing the screenplay “on spec.” Ron, Wayne, and I spent three days outlining the script in a narrative format that could be plugged into the grammar of a screenplay.

  August–November 1991: Progress sure and steady. Ron and I completed the first draft of the screenplay.

  March 1992: Met with Disney Studios chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg, and Kathryn Galan and Henry Huang of Disney and its Hollywood Pictures (Galan was then a Hollywood Pictures vice-president, Huang a Hollywood Pictures creative executive). Katzenberg had read the script, and after an informal discussion, we had a handshake deal. He gave us what we wanted—creative control—and he expressed enormous respect for Wayne as a filmmaker. We would be able to make our movie like an independent production, and we’d be supported by Hollywood Pictures, headed by Ricardo Mestres.

  Later, in Premiere magazine, I read about the “control-freakism” that reportedly runs rampant at Disney. Naturally, I wondered what would happen in our association with Disney.

  October 1992: Filming begun.

  February 1993: China filming begun.

  March 1993: Principal photography completed.

  April 1993: Saw the first rough cut.

  I Take a Meeting

  I can safely say that no one I met in Hollywood resembled my imaginings of a high-powered Hollywood type, with the possible exception of Oliver Stone, who happens to look exactly like Oliver Stone. I pictured women who wore a lot of makeup, tanned men who smoked cigars. Most of the film people I met were shockingly young and obsessively healthy, at least compared with writers I know. They sipped water, not bourbon. They didn’t smoke. They wore jeans or leggings, baseball caps and running shoes. They drove Ford Broncos. Of course, I didn’t realize until later: That was the Hollywood type.

  The one Hollywoodish trait I noticed with great delight among some producers I met during the early days of book-option talk was their easy mention of Bob, Jane, Steven, and Francis, as if I too were on a first-name basis with Redford, Fonda, Spielberg, and Coppola.

  Another surprise: There was never an organized agenda to meetings. People talked in broad, imprecise terms. I thought it was code for something else, shorthand for all kinds of criteria. But now that I’ve been in the business for a while, I realize that people leave the precision points to the lawyers.

  I always felt people treated me with respect, with such enormous respect, in fact, that I felt like a fraud. Much to my s
urprise, given the horror stories I’d heard, no one ever discouraged me from being part of the filmmaking process. They wanted me to be involved as much as possible. I was told I would be a producer, along with Wayne, Ron, and later Patrick Markey, who came in during pre-production. But why was I a producer? The reasons: I had selected the director and the screenwriter, we had developed the script on spec, we asked for and obtained creative control. And so I often felt enormously guilty, especially during production, when I was at home writing fiction and not sitting (or freezing) on the set with everyone else.

  I still find it odd to see my credits on the screen as screenwriter and producer. When I started this process, I didn’t know what any of the terms meant: spec, development, turnaround, green-light, above the line, below the line, scale, production, post, bond company, principal photography, second unit—let alone the credits, which I used to ignore at the end of movies: first AD, gaffer, best boy, PA, and so on.

  The only part of moviemaking that I dislike is the business side. And there is a lot of business. I’ve tried to stay away from business as much as possible; the person who handled the business details was Patrick Markey, bless his heart. I thought he had the worst job as producer—talking to people about money and contracts and the like. Yet he never tired of it and, amazingly, never lost his sense of diplomacy.

  Seminar in Screenwriting

  The day the bombs fell on Baghdad in 1991, Ron, Wayne, and I started to outline our screenplay. Our meetings were intense, extremely organized, filled with humor and mutual respect. We had a few minor differences in work styles. Ron liked to get up at two-thirty every morning and start writing; he ate only one meal a day, dinner. Wayne and I were more leisurely, preferring to start at eight or eight-thirty, and for some reason, gosh darn it, we needed lunch, which we often ate during our meetings. Ron worked with yellow pads and a box of a hundred sharpened pencils. I worked with a laptop and a portable printer. Wayne thought aloud.

  We discussed the major elements of the movie, the emotional moments, as well as our view on the use of voice-over, subtitles, flashbacks, and other techniques. We then started to outline the entire movie, scene by scene. Ron had allocated the number of pages for each scene. Three for the opening party. Four and a half for the revelation of the letter from June’s Chinese half sisters in Golden Gate Park. And so forth.

  I didn’t have a lot to contribute in those early days, since I barely even recognized the terms being bandied about. So I volunteered to be the chief scribe, taking notes on my laptop. Ron and Wayne worried that I was denigrating myself, and I told them I had no problems whatsoever with self-esteem. I knew when to shut up, until I had something to say, but when I got up to speed, they would definitely know it. For now, I was happy to be the screenwriting student, soaking up as much as I could. I asked a lot of questions. How does this scene make a transition into the next? What should we feel at the end of this scene?

  After three days, we had sixty single-spaced pages of notes, a narrative form of the script. I volunteered to do the first draft. Ron would then revise it, and thus I would be able to learn from my mistakes. And then we would revise each other, making sure we agreed on every single word, especially in dialogue. The process of collaboration turned out to be, much to my relief, more like a relay race than a three-legged one. It fit my work style perfectly—to be engaged in intense creative discussions first, then allowed to go off and write by myself. Between drafts, Ron and I would meet with Wayne to get his take on how the script was going. It was important that the three of us be in alignment at every step. We were on the phone with one another almost daily.

  Our collaboration was so thorough that by the time we saw screenings of the movie, we often could not remember who had written what. There’s one line audiences seem to love, when the character Rose says to her mother, “I like being tragic, Ma—I learned it from you.” Ron and I argue over who wrote that line. He says I did. I say he did.

  I can’t remember any major disagreements. Certainly we had “discussions,” and when we didn’t reach an immediate consensus, both Ron and Wayne would start pacing like stereotypical expectant dads. The project itself was always paramount, and each of us was willing to find a solution that satisfied everyone.

  And so our “disagreements” went like this: Ron would say, “I’m concerned.” Or Wayne would say, “I’m worried.” Or I would say, “I’m confused.” We would discuss the difficulty, separating out the strands of what was both important and problematic. And in this logical way, we’d get rid of problems, without sacrificing what was essential.

  I would characterize Ron, the former lawyer, as our chief negotiator in most cases. If I said something like, “I’m worried about this line, it just seems wrong,” he would reply, “Tell me exactly what bothers you about it.” I’d start off nebulous, because I didn’t know what to say specifically: “It just doesn’t seem like something a Chinese mother would say.” Ron would probe further: “Is it the words or the thought or the emotion?” Back and forth we would go, until we had saved the baby, thrown out the bathwater, and added a nice warm towel.

  I Learn to Argue

  We handled our differences this way throughout the project—screenplay development, casting, filming, editing. While we shared equal creative control, each of us took on a specific role as arbiter. In general (but not always), I was the arbiter of character questions—that is, whether a scene seemed true to the heart and soul of what I felt about the characters as I knew them. Ron’s hobbyhorse was overall structure and emotional truth—namely, did the particular “beats” of the scenes lead to what we had intended? Was each emotional moment truly earned, or did it get shorthanded and appear contrived? Wayne, we realized, had to be the final arbiter on everything, because he was, after all, the director, and had to feel that everything was as he wanted to see it on screen.

  Only once did I not get what I wanted. It was a late afternoon and we were all a bit punchy with fatigue and the natural high of knowing we were lines from having the script we all wanted. Ron and Wayne decided we needed a new scene, a sex scene between a young woman in the 1940s and the man she has fallen in love with. To me, the idea of a sex scene was an automatic red flag for exploitation and gratuitous thrills. Ron and Wayne asserted the importance of showing how quickly and thoroughly the character lost herself to this playboy. I countered that they wanted the requisite sex scene because they were boys. They retorted that I was nervous about seeing a sex scene with a character who emotionally represented my mother.

  Our discussion degenerated from there:

  “Just how do you see this sex scene happening?” I asked.

  “They’re at the back of the nightclub stage,” Ron said.

  “Onstage? In public?”

  “No, no, it’s after hours. And Ying Ying is leaning back as the playboy starts to kiss her tenderly, then more passionately—”

  “They’re standing?”

  “Right, standing up. And then the bad man starts to brutally make love to her—”

  “Standing up?”

  “Right.”

  “I see. . . . Does he make love to her from the front or the rear? You see, I have to know these things, because it makes a difference whether we get a PG rating or an R.”

  “From the front, of course.”

  After Wayne added a few more details having to do with silhouettes and voice-over, he said, “All right, we agree, then—now let’s write the scene.”

  I stood up and said: “You two want to do that scene, you write the scene. How long does it take you guys to do sex? Five minutes? Great, I’m going out now for the postcoital cigarette.” And when I shut the door behind me, I could hear them howling in the room. Anyway, that was the best time I had not writing something. And now that the scene is on the screen, I’m rather fond of it.

  The Asian Question

  From the beginning, I had a fair amount of cynicism about the possibilities of turning a book about Asian-Americans into a movie
. I knew there would be no big-name stars, no male lead, no car chase or trains being blown up. I tried to figure in my head what a movie could do to distort the story into something commercial and tailored to a mass audience. Turn it into an interracial love story? An internal dialogue ran through my head in which a high-powered producer told us, “Loved the book, loved the script. Only one thing I’d change: Make the mothers and daughters Russian.”

  Fortunately, nothing even close to that happened. Or at least we never met anyone who suggested such a thing. But I do think we understood the doubts about this movie without having to speak about them. How would a movie about eight non-Caucasian women play in Peoria, or particularly in Los Angeles suburbs, where focus groups were organized.

  I discovered that there were a fair number of Asian-American directors on the scene. Most of them were making independent films that were shown in small art houses, if at all. They couldn’t obtain the financing to do anything commercial. And we knew that if a studio sank money into a film about Asian-Americans and didn’t earn it back at the box office, this might cast a pall on the future of other films about Asian-Americans. So, yes, I was aware that Hollywood might look at The Joy Luck Club as a proving ground.

  That’s a terrible burden, especially when you’re just trying to create your own vision and not necessarily right past wrongs, or set the record straight on the history of China, or break down cultural barriers, or open film job markets for other Asian-Americans, or put every single stereotype to rest once and for all. If we had set out to do all those things, we would have been looking over our shoulders all the time, running scared, and would have been unable to make a movie that was personal and intimate, that had more to do with universal emotions than specific cultural concerns. Certainly, the movie’s context is Chinese-American. But the subtext, or the heart of the book, involves emotions we all have.