With Everybody Wins, Arthur Miller has made another foray into Hollywood, 28 years after the misfits. This time, he says, he's written "an entertainment." And does it have anything to do with Marilyn? "Oh God, no, I don't think so." But, it is about a woman with a wayward grip on reality.
As a screenwriter, Arthur Miller makes a fine playwright. Or so has run the conventional industry wisdom about the Pulitzer winner since his doom-laden original script, The Misfits, produced in 1961 to transform his then-wife Marilyn Monroe from screen dimwit to Duse, fell flat on its high-minded metaphors. That view is now about to be tested with the release of Everybody Wins, a $19 million film set in motion by Miller's first original script in twenty-eight years.
Directed by Karel Reisz, Everybody Wins is nothing if not a chancy vehicle in a no-fault moviemaking era. Miller's thriller-cum-smalltown-morality-play, about a P.I. losing his moorings when a schizoid woman hires him to clear the name of an accused murderer, demands spontaneous combustion between its stars (Nick Nolte and Debra Winger), and a peak level effort from a director who can roll with its funny/edgy mood swings, tightwire dialogue and percolating subtext.
And not only that. The deciding factor in whether Miller's oddball script comes to life on screen may well be the believability of the film's leading female character. At the epicenter of Everybody Wins is Angela Crispini, a woman whose grip on reality is a wayward, moment-to-moment thing. Equal parts smoky film noix floozy, Marilyn, and crusader, Angela is some piece of work. Debra Winger hardly leaps to mind when casting a spaced-out mantrap nicknamed "The Swede." (Peak-performance Monroe herself might do, or the hallucinatory Tuesday Weld of Pretty Poison or Faye Dunaway circa Bonnie and Clyde.) But Winger had better make Angela Crispini fly, or several tony reputations will take a shellacking.
If it turns out the movies have not done right by Everybody Wins, it will not be the first time for Arthur Miller. He and Hollywood go way back, eons before The Misfits. In 1943, the New York City-born writer toured army camps to research a script based on Ernie Pyle's Here Is Your War, which, when it emerged ten years later as The Story of G.I. Joe, retained none of Miller's passionate egalitarianism. Following that, the big screen versions of Miller's plays All My Sons and Death of a Salesman, neither adapted by Miller, both managed to undermine the spirit of the originals.
Hoping for better, Miller wrote The Hook, a screenplay for Elia Kazan, about a crusading longshoreman who fights to overthrow union racketeers and winds up on the river bottom in a cement block. Harry Cohn, president of Columbia Pictures at the time, sent Miller's script to the FBI and to Roy Brewer, boss of Hollywood unions. Brewer threatened a strike by every projectionist in the country if the film were made. Cohn and Kazan backed down.
Miller's 1953 play, The Crucible, a lacerating portrait of mass hysteria set against the Salem witch trials (widely taken to be an allegory of the McCarthy era when it opened, and later considered prophetic when Miller himself refused to name names before the House Committee hearings on Un-American Activities in 1956), was adapted in 1957 by Jean-Paul Sartre into Les Sorcieres de Salem, a film little seen in the U.S. The European-American production of Miller's short play A View from the Bridge did nothing to enhance the playwright's experience in the film medium--Pauline Kael described the result as "not so much a drama unfolding, as a sentence that's been passed on the audience."
Then came The Misfits. Miller had encountered Marilyn Monroe at a Hollywood party while he was collaborating with Elia Kazan. They married in 1956--Miller was 42, Monroe 30--to such headlines as "Egghead Weds Hourglass." Monroe, the wet dream who barely existed once the klieg lights were killed, had chosen not another bat-swinging, studly DiMaggio as her mate, but a diffident, even fatherly, Jewish savant. The Misfits, Miller's first filmed original screenplay, was designed around Monroe like a shrine. "Few people besides the actors and [director] John Huston understood The Misfits, "Miller recalls today. "I mean, it was supposed to be a western because it had cowboys. And it wasn't a western. I used to joke and say, 'Well, it's an eastern western.' "
What it was was a nightmare, with Monroe terminally late, constantly consulting with her acting coach, and frequently in no condition to perform. While the Miller-Monroe relationship spiraled downward, critics accused the writer of selling out to the bitch goddess. Then came the movie's release. Casting adrift five lost souls in the Nevada desert, The Misfits was top-heavy with symbolism and high-falutin, actor-defeating dialogue. "We're all dying, the husbands and wives," broods one character. And worse. The Misfits was, in fact, to be the movie headstone not only of Marilyn Monroe but also of Clark Gable, whose heart gave out weeks after completing the film.
Three years after The Misfits, Miller wrote After the Fall, a play widely taken to be autobiographical. Every utterance of Maggie, a ravaged, played-out sex bomb, seemed to strike like a shard of Monroe's psyche, provoking one critic to chastise Miller for creating "an act of exhibitionism which makes us all voyeurs." The controversy prompted Miller to deny in print that Maggie and Marilyn were one. Yet, both The Misfits and After the Fall revealed Miller as a bewildered, searching talent locked in a terrible emotional tailspin. Hollywood had proved devastating as working environment and subject matter. "It may be," Miller has written, "that Hollywood is merely a living Escher drawing with no inside at all, only an outside." Miller's cumulative experience in the film world prompted him to call screenwriting "an act of the will, not the soul."
Given Miller's professional and personal crucibles, the man's willingness to involve himself with another movie may strike some as curious. Yet he is very much entrenched in the fortunes of Everybody Wins, a picture that, if it finds an audience at all, is likely to reopen the debate over Miller's conflicted responses toward Monroe and toward the movies.
Winger's musky earthiness may help mute the comparisons between her character and Monroe. Even Reisz admits he made an early, conscious decision not to raise the issue with Miller. "I didn't think it would be helpful," he explains. But does Miller see a connection between Angela and Marilyn? When I ask him that question, he ponders it for what seems like a small eternity, then, barely audibly, says, "Oh, God, no, I don't think so ... It's a totally different kettle of fish. But who am [I] to control what people are going to make of it? I guess I'd have to take a pseudonym to avoid such things. I've learned this much: you never know what the hell people are going to come up with."
Miller claims that Angela and the work that contains her are merely fictions that first saw life at his desk in workspace adjacent to the Connecticut farmhouse where he has lived for 40 years. "I was sitting in my study one day and thought of this story," recalls the 74-year-old writer in a stabbing, gravelly voice rich in East Coast inflections. "It just seemed to me eminently a movie story; it wanted to be a movie, so I let it. Half the reason for writing anything is to see if you can do it. It was as much an experiment with the [screenplay] form as anything else. Not that it's terrifically avant-garde, because it isn't. I wrote it with no agreement with anyone to produce it. If it didn't work, it didn't work."
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.