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CHAPTER

8

Crashing and Burning in Another Genre (North Goes South) I W R I T E . This is what I’m wired to do. To awaken at 5:30 every morn-

ing, sit down with my vocabulary, choose words, and arrange them in an order that would not only hold a viewer or reader’s interest, but also afford them a laugh or two along the way. And if I succeed, well, mission accomplished. There’s no greater feeling. But if I fail, well, I’m sorry, but it’s not a war crime. I swear, I tried my best.

In a writer’s head, all ideas are praiseworthy. It is during the leap from the cranium to the page where trouble can occur. I learned to handle criticism early on when jokes I’d written, whether for others or myself, didn’t get a laugh or when sketches didn’t make it past the read-through at SNL. Or when entire episodes of sitcoms I was doing had to be rewritten the night before they were to be taped in front of a live audience. Or when scenes of a play had to be rewritten after the first preview because at some point the audience stopped laughing and started looking for the exits. Or when editors of books or various magazines I wrote pieces for reacted as if English was not my first language.

But those moments were nothing compared to the reception I received for a movie I wrote called North.

First, a little background. After the demise of Good Sports, I was, as Bernie so eloquently put it, “colder than whale shit in television.”

Although no one really blamed me for that show’s failure, no one was exactly planning any ticker-tape parades for me either. The one exception 165

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to this was my friend Rob Reiner, who always claimed that, at various times during the course of a career, a good writer may not be a hot writer.

That he or she may not be attractive to television networks and movie studios due to a recent flop really had no bearing on whether that writer had talent, as so many other factors come into play when a production doesn’t work: casting, timing, miscalculating what audiences will want to see so many months or, in some cases, years down the road. It’s not unlike, say, how the great poet Emily Dickinson died penniless, but her poems are so beloved today. Not a great analogy? Well, I pray you get my point.

Thankfully, Rob’s faith in me from the year before had not waned, so he and his Castle Rock partners signed me to a television deal and I moved into one of their offices, where I shared a suite with my old pals Larry David and Billy Crystal. The odds of such an occurrence, that three guys who started out together some twenty years earlier should now be in this situation, was not wasted on us. We were giddy and thankful at the same time.

As part of my deal, Castle Rock also bought the rights to North, a book I’d written years earlier about a boy who becomes a free agent and

With Robin and the kids in 1991. We’re all smiling. Must’ve been the day Good Sports was cancelled.

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travels the world looking for new parents. The book was inspired by our son, Adam, who was at that age when he would look at me and Robin while we were all sitting at the dinner table, and, from the expression on his face, it was easy to tell that he was thinking, “I can do better than these two.”

My literary agent at the time, Esther Newberg, sold the book to a wonderful editor named Peter Gethers at Villard/Random House. Peter has edited a number of my books, and, because he’s a writer himself, he’s an author’s dream.

Writing books is a mostly solitary endeavor. A personal vision that the writer feels is best expressed with words to be read as opposed to dialogue to be spoken. As a result, it requires him to go deeper in his specificity. Digressions into the internal lives of characters give understanding as to motive and behavior. Descriptions of wardrobe and demeanor may take pages versus being conveyed in an instant when seen on the screen or stage. So the process is slow and long with extended periods before I ever feel comfortable showing the pages to another human. But with Peter it was different, as working with him was almost like having a collaborator. Someone who didn’t stand in judgment but, rather, gave feedback and suggested what else I could do to accomplish what I wanted to convey. As my friend Tom Hanks, whose bestselling book of short stories, Uncommon Type, Peter edited, puts it, “‘Is this anything?’ I would ask. Because it’s not a test and comes from my head and my own typewriter, the question is as legitimate as a motorist asking, ‘Is this the way to the Hoover Dam?’ We both know the destination but need information. Am I on the right route, not necessarily the shortest way, but, the way? My editor would say, ‘Sure, but take the third left, and ignore the signs. You’ll see the Hoover Dam in the distance.’”

You hold on to people like Peter. And on the television and movie side, I’ve found that the same could be said about Andrew Singer, who is the president of television and head of West Coast operations for Lorne Michaels’ company, Broadway Video. It was Andrew who championed Fred Armisen’s hit show Portlandia when few others believed in it. But Andrew, who thinks like a writer though he doesn’t write, did.

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North was a thin novella I wrote while I was a staff writer on The New Show. I kept the manuscript in my bottom desk drawer, worked on it before others got to the office or during hiatus weeks, and when it was time to get a quote for the book jacket, I sent the advance galleys to Rob Reiner for a blurb. Rob really liked the book, gave me a very funny blurb (“If you read only one book this year, I would say that you’re not a very avid reader”), and expressed an interest in directing a movie version of it. I was beyond thrilled. I had written the book with a movie version of it in mind, keeping an eye toward the visuals. The book was even illustrated by the cartoonist Alex Tiani. Rob came to New York, we discussed what the movie would look like, and we were both excited about its prospects.

Then eight years passed.

Studios were less than thrilled to finance a movie version of a book whose sales were meager despite the endorsements of my celebrity friends and all of the publicity I was doing. But after Rob and his partners formed Castle Rock, they had the luxury of selecting the movies they wanted to make. When we all met to discuss an overall television deal they wanted to offer me, Rob asked if the movie rights to North were still available. I told him they were, he said he wanted to develop it into a screenplay, and, after I wrote the first draft with Rob’s producing partner Andy Scheinman, Rob attached himself as the movie’s director.

A writer’s dream! To be hired to adapt your own book into a screenplay. Given Rob’s track record, I had every reason to believe that the movie would have a great chance of being a hit. And God knew that after Good Sports I was in dire need of redemption.

Rob and I did dozens of rewrites together—going over every beat and every line time and again to make sure the script was as good as it could possibly be to attract the best possible cast.

It worked. Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bruce Willis, my old pal Dan Aykroyd, Jon Lovitz, Alan Arkin, Kathy Bates, Elijah Wood, and John Ritter all signed on, and North would also mark the first movie appearance of an eight-year-old actress named Scarlett Johansson.

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I had initially envisioned this film, not unlike the book, to be small scaled, a simple tale that took place inside of a young boy’s head. I thought it would have the look of a low-budget independent film, something that would be embraced by children but could also be watched by adults who remembered feeling more appreciated by parents other than their own.

In my mind, this was a $7 million movie, something that could open small and, by virtue of great reviews and word of mouth, slowly gain traction. These were pretty much the hopes that Peter Gethers had for the book—that it start with a cult following, then grow to be mainstream, and ultimately become a classic.

Rob had a grander vision, a $45 million picture that implied a big advertising and promotional budget to help assure a big opening weekend.

Though it took a little while to adjust to Rob’s way of thinking, I understood that it was now Rob’s movie. Television writers become producers so they can have the ultimate word on all creative aspects of a show. From casting to wardrobe to music, etc., all departments report to the executive producer who, even after consulting with his trusted creative team, makes the final decisions as to how the series should look. But film is the director’s medium. It was now my role to support and do everything I could to be in tandem with Rob. So I shifted gears, came to embrace what he wanted to do, and even became enthusiastic about it. I came to feel like an equal partner, as Rob considered all of my suggestions, and he included me in every part of the process, from casting to location scouting.

And once production began, I got the same feeling I’d had when we first started Saturday Night Live. Something I’d written was being taken seriously. People woke up early. Sets were being built. Big burly men were carrying long planks of wood. Other men, not quite as big and burly, were standing atop scissor lifts angling klieg lights. There were catering trucks. Wind machines. Extras wearing makeup to make them look like Eskimos. There were painters. Wardrobe women hurriedly walking, holding three different choices of cowboy hats. People whom I had no idea what their jobs were talking into walkie-talkies. Trailers 169

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With Rob Reiner, who was either pointing at the monitor or the food on the craft services table. I honestly can’t remember.

containing eight fetid toilets being used by a crew who curiously referred to them as honey wagons. All because a writer slapped down a bunch of words on paper.

Hopes were lofty. The actors were happy, the rewrites I was doing on the set seemed right, and the enthusiasm among the crew, even the most jaded veterans, was palpable. As we drove to work every morning, Rob and I had visions of classics like The Wizard of Oz and his own film The Princess Bride. As a result, the buzz about this movie around town was so good that Bernie Brillstein’s phone kept ringing with offers for me to write more scripts, and, even better, we were invited to a ton of parties given by people we’d never met.

“But we don’t know the Schwarzeneggers,” said Robin.

“So what? The Stallones are going to be there.”

“We don’t know them, either.”

“Why are you being so difficult?”

A F T ER SEEING A MOV IE T H AT doesn’t work, people often ask—and

I’ve done so myself—“Didn’t they see that this was going to be horrible?

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Shouldn’t they have, at some point, realized they had a huge turd on their hands and pulled the plug instead of continuing to throw good money after bad?”

There’s an old saying in the movie business that no movie is as good as its dailies or as terrible as its first cut. Well, North’s dailies were great. Because the movie tracked North’s visits to a series of prospective parents in Alaska, Hawaii, Africa, etc., the episodic nature of the material seemed to work in the viewing room as individual vignettes.

And even the first cut played well to an audience comprised of friends, family, and employees of the studio, who were thrilled to be out from behind their desks.

But the moment the final cut was shown to people we weren’t related to, it was a different story. Test audiences who came to the screenings excited to see Rob Reiner’s new movie exited somewhat stunned—not only giving the film scores that implied that they wouldn’t recommend it to friends but also demanding we return the ninety-one minutes of their lives they’d wasted watching it.

Some new scenes were written and then shot. Some existing scenes were rewritten and then reshot. The great composer Marc Shaiman (Sister Act, A Few Good Men, and, along with Scott Wittman, Hairspray) wrote a beautifully moving musical score. And Rob, his four Castle Rock partners, and I kept our sixty collective fingers crossed with every hope that we’d not only salvaged the movie but that it would actually be embraced by a mass audience.

We held on to that belief straight through to the premiere, which was a screening of the movie followed by a big party. Sorry, I just lied. It was a screening of the movie followed by a wake. By the time the lights came up in the theater, the audience hightailed out of there as if the place was on fire. And those few who felt obligated to look us in the eye afterward were as euphemistic in their praise as one would be after seeing a picture of an extremely disfigured infant. I heard comments like, “Boy, that’s what I call a movie!” The fact that very few people stayed for the after-party and that both of my parents—whom I’d flown in from Boca Raton for the big night—were weeping in the limo on the way back to 171

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our house gave further indication that North was not destined for the classic status that Rob and I had envisioned.

Any shred of hope I had that I might be spared public humiliation was dashed the following morning when the premier film critic in the country, Roger Ebert, was somewhat less than enthusiastic in his assessment of my baby. At the time, Roger’s syndicated television show “At the Movies” with fellow film critic Gene Siskel was highly rated, and their “thumbs-up” opinions were sure to be boasted in all print advertisements, while a “thumbs-down” verdict was tantamount to a box office death sentence.

For those of you who don’t recall Roger Ebert’s published review of North or didn’t carry an original clipping of it in your wallet until it yellowed and became brittle and disintegrated with age so you replaced it with an internet copy printed on heavier stock as I did, here is an excerpt:

I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated, hated this movie. Hated it. Hated every simpering stupid vacant audience-insulting moment of it. Hated the sensibility that thought anyone would like it. Hated the implied insult to the audience by its belief that anyone would be entertained by it.

Now, because I have a tendency to be a tad hard on myself, I took the time to reread it. Slower this time. Looking for a hidden adjective. Or perhaps the phrase “I’m just kidding” that I had somehow overlooked the first twenty-five times I read this obituary. But no. There was no getting around it. There was something about North that apparently rubbed Roger Ebert the wrong way.

To say the least, Ebert’s review was embarrassing and hurtful. And my guess was, there was no way that other Alan Zweibel was even coming close to getting laid by anyone literate enough to have read that review.

Don’t get me wrong, Roger had every right to dislike, or even hate, this movie. It was his job to give his opinion, and he was a good

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writer, so maybe part of the reason it bothered me so much was that a fellow wordsmith had been so personally negative about how I defined myself.

To be fair, this was not the only negative review that the film received. There were a number of them. Okay, I’m lying again. There was a veritable avalanche of them. But because that review was written

by Roger Ebert, it was the one that everyone on the planet read.

And quoted.

Quoted to me by friends who called to express their sympathies. (“It’s like Ebert stuck two thumbs up your ass and then ran in opposite directions.”)

Quoted to Robin; when she returned home from the supermarket we’d been shopping at for years, she said, “I’m wondering if maybe we should order in for a while.”

And quoted to our son, Adam, who, when he grew tired of defending his dad to his Los Angeles classmates, asked if I’d be offended if he changed his last name to Sorkin.

It seems that Adam’s main nemesis was none other than Mike Ovitz’s son, who attended the same school. At that time, Mike was the head of the Creative Arts Agency and arguably the most powerful and feared agent in Hollywood. The taunting that Adam was the target of reached an absurd Hollywood low when the two eleven-year-old boys got into a shouting match.

At dinner at home, it was our nightly practice to go around the table, with each of us telling the others what our high and our low was for the day. Adam recounted the scene from school: Young Ovitz: You’re stupid!

Young Zweibel: You’re stupid!

Y.O.: You’re ugly!

Y.Z.: You’re ugly!

Y.O.: Oh, yeah? Well, your father wrote North, which only did $7 million at the box office!

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Adam claimed that this was his low. I asked him how he responded to Young Ovitz, and he said, “Well, at least people like my father.” To which I nodded and said, “That was definitely your high.” And mine, too.

S T IL L , T HE DELUGE C ON T I N U E D. From all directions.

“Hello?”

“Alan?”

“Hi, Dad . . .”

“Alan, don’t read TIME magazine. Page sixty-seven. Third column on the right. Right next to the Subaru ad. Boy, that guy really ripped you a new asshole.”

This was the first I’d heard about the TIME review. After Ebert, I’d vowed not to subject myself to this form of masochism, but it was to no avail, as well-intentioned friends, family members, and every person with the ability to read made a point of conveying their condolences to me in the most random places—like Vicente Foods, the same Brentwood grocery store where Robin had been accosted.

“You okay, Alan?”

“Sure.”

“You look terrible. Is anyone sick?”

“No, everyone’s fine, Rabbi Freiling.”

“I read the reviews of your movie . . .”

“Uh-huh . . .”

“Terrible. Just terrible . . .”

“Well, I tried my best . . .”

“I’m sure you did . . .”

“Well, it was nice seeing you, Rabbi . . .”

“I was talking to a colleague of mine about your reviews . . .”

“You were?”

“Yes, a rabbi from Northridge—a scholar who’s an expert on the Holocaust, mind you—who started comparing the reviews you got for North with the ones Hitler got for Mein Kampf.”

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“He what . . . !”

“And apparently Hitler did better.”

ROBI N T R IED T O HEL P by citing films, now considered classics, that

had received negative reviews when they were originally released. For a while she even gave thought to putting together a book titled Critically Incorrect, compiling those horrible critiques next to the iconic posters of those films.

“It has dwarfs, music, Technicolor, freak characters, and Judy Garland. It can’t be expected to have a sense of humor as well, and as for the light touch of fantasy, it weighs like a pound of fruitcake soaking wet” was what the New Republic thought of The Wizard of Oz. “It’s a Frankenstein monster stitched together from leftover parts.

It talks. It moves in fits and starts but has no mind of its own . . . Looking very expensive but spiritually desperate” is how Vincent Canby of the New York Times felt about The Godfather Part II. Was it possible that North would also eventually defy its detractors, stand the test of time, and be embraced like those beloved classics? That one day things would be reconsidered? That one day, a critic would write . . .

“Savagely maligned when first released a half century ago, North’s rediscovery as an American treasure is reminiscent of how a lot of people initially hate Swiss cheese but eventually crave it”?

—Hubert Ebert (Roger Ebert’s great-grandson) Maybe.

In the meantime, Rob felt bad for me, as I did for him. After a string of heralded hits, he now had to endure his first failure. So we called on our friendship and leaned on each other during the ensuing onslaught.

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“Well, even Babe Ruth struck out,” I said, trying to console him.

“True,” Rob said, “but this wasn’t a strikeout. It’s more like someone drilled Babe in the nuts with a fastball.”

“Poor guy,” I remember saying. “Then again, the Babe may have been so drunk when he got hit in the nuts that he didn’t feel it.”

SHO C K G AV E WAY T O PA R A LY SIS , and I couldn’t write. Few

noticed. Banks stayed open, children weren’t sent home from school, and the flag in front of our post office remained at full mast. But for a person whose earliest filmed speaking role is a home movie of the three-yearold version of himself shouting “Writer” when asked by a grandmother what he wanted to be when he grew up, this was devastating. Or, to be more exact, I allowed this to be devastating.

“Stop being a self-indulgent idiot,” said one of my idols, James L. Brooks, who wrote and directed Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News, when he called to congratulate me about the movie, even though I tried my best to talk him out of it. But he wouldn’t listen.

“Listen, there was a void in the universe, and you created something to fill it. Don’t give those people the power to affect you like this.

Come on, it really doesn’t matter what Ebert or TIME or that guy on Channel 4 thinks.”

“The guy from Channel 4 didn’t like it?”

“Oh . . . Hey, that’s not the point. Now get back on the horse and do what you were meant to do.”

The best advice, however, came from our then ten-year-old daughter, Lindsay. Tired of seeing her father lying on the couch in his study, gaining weight and basically conceding all his power to those who don’t create but, rather, criticize those who do, she approached me after arriving home from the fourth grade one afternoon.

“Daddy?”

“Hi, angel.”

“Have you moved at all today?

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“What do you mean?”

“This is the same position you were in when I left for school this morning.”

“Of course . . .”

“Yeah, that’s a different f lavor of Häagen-Dazs, so you must’ve moved.”

“Well . . .”

“Dad, if I tell you something, do you promise not to punish me?”

“Ah, sure.”

“Promise?” “Promise.”

“Fuck ’em.”

“Lindsay!”

“You promised.”

“Okay.”

“Dad, didn’t you once tell me that Angie Dickinson never sold any of her poems while she was alive but kept on writing them anyway because deep down she knew they were good poems and that she was a good writer?”

“Emily Dickinson.”

“Hey, you smiled . . .”

T I ME PA SSED. And, like all wounds, Roger’s words receded into the

past, where they eventually became shielded by scar tissue.

And life went on.

Ebert went on to give other movies both good and bad reviews, and I tried my best to take back the power I had given him by saying on one of my early David Letterman appearances that O. J. Simpson claimed that he went to see North the night of the murders but there was no one else in the theater to corroborate his story. I’ve even read Ebert’s review on talk shows and during speaking engagements, not only because it’s laughably bad but also to convey that wounds such as these, though painful, are only temporary. It’s like the quote by Henry Wadsworth 177

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Longfellow that my old friend Herb Sargent sent me: “The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.”

Or as Hyman Roth told Michael in Godfather II, “This is the business we’ve chosen.” Yes, if we are willing to accept the excessive accolades and awards bestowed upon us for work that’s lauded, we have to brace ourselves with the expectation that we can be publicly criticized for work that is, well, unappreciated. Or even, well, abhorred.

Still, in the spirit of Hyman Roth, for years I wondered whether there’d be any bloodshed if I ever ran into Roger Ebert.

Eventually I did.

It was March 2006, and I was on a book tour promoting a novel I had written called The Other Shulman, when someone I was having lunch with in a Chicago restaurant pointed him out. Yes, there was Roger Ebert, about three tables away from us, wearing an absurd-looking sweater boasting every autumn color imaginable—three different shades of brown, muted gold, burnt orange, baby puke green—a sweater that not only was far too big even for his rather portly body type, but that also made me immediately envious of anyone who was color blind.

I became transfixed. I watched him eat. I watched him laugh.

And when he got up, I watched him as he worked his way to the men’s room. Within seconds, I excused myself and did the same.

So there we were. Downstairs in the men’s room of a restaurant and, as if I was now a spectator to this scene, I was consciously curious as to how I would behave. Completely detached. As if a second head hovering above me was saying, I wonder what Alan is going to do to Roger Ebert?

“Roger?” I heard myself saying as we were both washing our hands afterward.

“Yes,” he answered, as he looked up into the mirror on the wall above the sink in front of us.

A beat of silence.

One during which he appeared to be trying to figure out where he may have seen my face before. And one during which I tried to figure

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out what I was going to say next. It was clearly my turn to talk. Some twelve years after that review.

“Alan Zweibel,” I said.

Another beat of silence.

Roger appeared to be using this moment to tighten every muscle in his body.

A moment that I broke by saying, “And I just have to tell you, Roger, that I hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate, hate that sweater you’re wearing.”

One last beat of silence.

Then I smiled.

And then he smiled.

Then I started laughing.

And then he started laughing.

And then we shook hands.

That was the last time I saw Roger Ebert, who passed away in 2013. I’m happy he and I met that day.

Rest in peace, Roger.

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