Arthur Miller: Return of the Misfit

The script, which Miller describes off-handedly at one moment, a la Graham Greene, as "an entertainment," then, later as "a love story," presents the socially aware writer without an ax to grind. The work treads lightly on the issues--justice, the geography of disintegration, the seductive power of impossible relationships--eschewing the scolding that has hobbled his later work. Call it Miller lite.

Everybody Wins, Miller says, is "an exercise in experiencing reality and unreality. It's about the arbitrary way we decide what's real. I was trying to write an intimate movie--a mysteriously intimate movie--that deals with the question of what is real, not on a philosophical level, but on a behavioral level. There's a murder that's been committed and a woman claims to know who did it. But lying behind all that is what's really foremost in my head. Namely, the question of reality. So, what [the woman] seems to be saying has a certain persuasive sense to it, but it is very soon apparent that her sanity is in question. You find yourself a bit on cloud nine as to what to believe. It turns out that the society is as crazy as she is."

In the film, Miller draws a bead on '80s America as typified by "a conventional, beautiful New England town on the surface while surreptitious, nasty stuff goes on underneath."

"Whether it be Connecticut, Massachusetts or Vermont--any of these New England towns, "Miller observes, "I can't ever wake up in the morning without the wildest events suddenly emerging from below. You're constantly aware of that difference between the appearance and the reality. The difference is that, this time, I'm not making any speeches about it. It's almost normal now, you see. It's hardly necessary to make any comment. It's just there."

The underbelly of the town's life is embodied by the jailing of a young man innocent of the ritualistic murder of a pillar of the community. Because such Miller works as All My Sons, The Crucible, and A View from the Bridge, have sprung from true incidents, it's difficult to avoid noting that the plot of Everybody Wins suggests at least an oblique parallel to a legal case Miller became involved in. In 1973, an 18-year-old Connecticut boy, Peter Reilly, was convicted of murdering his mother, purportedly on the basis of a confession, though friends and neighbors protested Reilly's innocence. Miller took an interest in the case and brought in his own lawyer, which led to a spate of coverage in The New York Times and a new hearing, during which the charges against Reilly were overturned. But Miller bristles at the suggestion that Everybody Wins bears anything more than a passing resemblance to the case documented in A Death in Canaan by Joan Barthel, or to the 1978 TV movie made of that book by director Tony Richardson.

"It has absolutely nothing to do with that case," Miller insists, as if stifling indignation. "Most of the stuff I've written really has to do with unveiling the appearance of things and revealing what lies hidden. In that sense, this story flows directly out of all my other work."

All such questions of passing resemblance aside, Hollywood's decision-makers, whom Miller often refers to as "they," initially didn't know what to make of the playwright's script. "They probably couldn't find their way through it, "he says." It required some kind of concept to follow which, given what they generally read... Anyway, the fundamental thing was that they didn't understand what I was writing about. This script falls into some kind of pattern--the police pattern, the detective story--so they subconsciously want it to follow that pattern. If, as happens here, it varies somewhat, they get unhappy with it or lose track of it. They don't know what the hell you're doing."

Miller 's agent, Sam Cohn, persisted in circulating the script. "Finally," Miller says, "it just fell into place with Karel Reisz because he was free. So I said, 'Let's go with him.' First, he's a wonderful director. Secondly, he's ready to do it, which is even as important as being a wonderful director." Reisz, the 63-year-old director of such films as Morgan, Isadora, The French Lieutenant's Woman and Who'll Stop the Rain, says that Miller's script "fascinated" him, despite its time-honored genre. "In a thriller or detective story," Reisz explains, "it is implied that, when the crime is solved in the end, the world is set to right. In this story, the crime is solved and the world is left as complicated, weird, inexplicable and corrupt as it was at the beginning. [Arthur] was interested in all kinds of things that this [kind of] story doesn't normally throw up."

Miller, who "kicked things around " with Reisz for several days at his Connecticut home, sized up the director as "a sensible guy" who" tried to make [the script] as visual as possible. He has a holy terror of dialogue. Sometimes he'd come up with questions that, in my trying to answer, I found pictorial solutions for." Counters Reisz, "Arthur's notion is that unless somebody says it, nobody in the audience will know it. "Although the give-and-take lobbed off some thirty-odd pages of text, Miller asserts, with amused defiance: "There is still plenty of dialogue in the movie."

Miller oversaw about one-third of the shooting of his script in Connecticut. "[Karel Reisz] wanted me to be there more, but I'm very diffident about dealing with directors. If you begin putting your finger in the machine, it begins not to work. I'd rather forego some useful direction and allow him the feeling of creativity than make my point and have him lose his self-confidence. With [making] movies, the thing soon takes on a life of its own. Pretty soon, everybody's trying to find out where that life is leading, rather than them leading it to someplace. The nature of the beast is that every picture worth making is an experiment. Anybody who thinks he's going to turn out a perfect package of spaghetti is probably making a simple, not very interesting movie."

During production, Miller caved in to a change of title. The original title, Almost Everybody Wins, "was funnier, but maybe too subtle for the people," Miller says. "They were all on me all the time and I said, 'Oh, God, all right change it. 'They felt the title made the point. And it probably does."

Just before the shooting of Everybody Wins stopped, Miller observed, "I cannot imagine a personal experience less abrasive than the making of this film. I think that Karel and I saw eye to eye as to what gets up there on the screen." By the time we talked, the writer had viewed an early cut of the film. "I felt, as Karel did, that it was a little too tight," he said. "It went too wonderfully fast. That sense of what life is like down below there, I think comes over in what I saw. It's not exactly the way I envisioned it in the beginning, but it's fairly close."

Yet, as we conversed, Miller's unease with moviemaking surfaced. "I wish to God we had a theater, a continuity," Miller says. "If we did, I would prefer to be in the theater. I guess that's because you don't lose control quite the way you do in the movies. With the best will in the world, the writer of the screenplay, as far as I can tell, is not going to control things the way he can a play. You're at the mercy of so many exterior factors--the actors, the cinematography, the quality of the music, the sound, the whole technology of film. All that is so potent, it's not something a screenplay can at all predict."

Can Miller sit through any movie version of his work? "I can bear to look at pieces of them," he quickly answers, "though they've all got something, I guess. I dislike the original movie version of Salesman with Freddie March because it distorted the script. Dustin [Hoffman] did a very good job with Salesman and [director] Volker Schlondorff found a superb way of doing that film without changing the words. In the French movie of The Crucible, Simone Signoret was unforgettable. But practically the most perfect production of anything of mine that I've seen was All My Sons done for television by Jack O'Brien with James Whitmore, Joan Allen, and Aidan Quinn."

Miller's immediate career plans do not include another screenplay. "I'm not mad about the whole medium," he says. "I'm glad I did it. I enjoyed it vastly. One great thing about [movies] is that, on the stage today, you can't get really top actors anymore to stay for more than a month. In smaller parts in films, you can get people like Jack Warden or Judith Ivey or Kathleen Wilhoite [all supporting players in Everybody Wins]. But, as far as expressing what I want to express, my theatrical experience has been a little better."

Excusing his chomping as he dusts off a lunchtime snack of sardines, Miller alludes to his current obsession, a play. "I can't talk about it," he says, "because I haven't finished it and once I say something about it, it will sound like I have. I'm always ready to abandon these things and maybe I'll abandon this. I wait until they tear it out of my hands before I feel that I've written it.

"Before we say goodbye, Miller describes a recent cartoon that spoke to his nagging discontent over the current state of things: "Two schoolkids are listening to their teacher saying 'And Bush is starting a big campaign for education. 'One of the kids says, 'Who's Bush?' " We share a laugh, then I ask the playwright to speculate on how post-literate audiences might take to his strange, insular movie. "At my age, I can't figure what the hell they're after and what their reactions are. It takes me forever to do my work. I just hope to be able to hang in there."

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Stephen Rebello wrote Movieline's cover story on Daryl Hannah in November.

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