May 21, 2008

The Sound and the Cinematography

Johnny felt apprehensive as he climbed the stairs of the Writers Building. True, it was a relief to know that the drunken novelist they were to ride herd on wasn’t just another hopeless Hollywood experiment but a veteran screenwriter with some real credits. And the idea Ed had whispered in his ear after leaving the meeting with Horace’s friend certainly held promise. But he knew it could blow up in their faces, too, if they didn’t get it just right. And in any case, he did not look forward to days spent trying to force a man to do work he didn’t want to do. Not to mention keeping him, as their employer had put it, “sober at all costs.”

Ed was both excited and puzzled. He was positively thrilled at the prospect of working with the scenarist of To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep. He’d have to keep the reins on his enthusiasm, of course. Take care of business first, make sure the great writer was hard at work on his script, and only then spring the plan he’d hatched to hitch their stars to his wagon. But the opportunity was like a gift from above. The only troubling thing was that he couldn’t be sure this writer would respond to anything as a sane screenwriter should. After all, here was a man who had scripted two major pictures for Bogart, and yet—and this is where Ed’s puzzlement came in—he reputedly preferred writing weird novels about hicks that practically nobody had ever read. Ed himself was probably the only exception in all of Hollywood, but then he made it a point to read everything.

As they approached the man’s office, they saw that the door was wide open. And what they heard was an ominous silence. No exasperated sigh rent the air, no angry rustling of a sheet of paper being savagely crumpled into a wad, no pounding of typewriter keys. In other words, none of the sounds that would have identified a writer at work. Nervously, they passed through the doorway.

William Faulkner sat slumped in a chair, dusty brogues up on the desk, sipping an amber liquid from a paper cup. He was a very small, wiry man with a sharp nose, a carefully clipped mustache, and depthless eyes. He was dressed all in tweed. When the boys entered he smiled wryly and said, “Ah, my new nursemaids, I presume?” The Deep South dripped from his every syllable.

Ed and Johnny had been instructed to pose as collaborators and not, under any circumstances, to admit the true nature of their task.

“That’s a good one!” Ed barked. “You hear that, Johnny? The great man requires a brace of babysitters. Ha!”

“That’s a whopper all right,” Johnny said.

“Don’t worry, boys,” Faulkner said. “I promise to be on my best behavior.” As if to underscore his point he held up his cup and said, “Iced tea, anyone?”

The boys were disappointed that the cup didn’t contain what they’d both suspected it contained, as they could have used a pick-me-up, but at the same time greatly relieved. Maybe the famous writer really did mean to behave. They introduced themselves and Ed delivered the line he’d been rehearsing since they’d left the meeting with Horace’s friend.

“Hiya, Bill,” he drawled. “What you got in that there croker sack?”

Faulkner’s face went utterly expressionless. Then, from far down in those depthless eyes, a dim light appeared and gradually brightened into a gleam of understanding.

“Very good,” he drawled. “I see you’re alluding to…my Tobacco Road.”

“A hell of a read!” Ed roared.

“You’re too kind,” Faulkner said. “Although I did succeed admirably in capturing the very essence of my native Georgia, if I do say so myself.”

Johnny sensed that something was wrong, but he wasn’t comfortable with this egghead stuff so he kept quite.

“But I gotta tell you,” Ed said. “I liked God’s Little Acre even better. Talk about a book that tackles those eternal verities!”

Faulkner’s face started to drain of expression again and, seizing the opportunity, Johnny quickly suggested they get to work.

“But of course,” Faulkner said. “That’s what some of us are here for, isn’t it?” A smile curled his lips. “Say, how’d you boys like to take over? The thing positively repels me.”

Ed was shocked. He knew that Faulkner was working on a script about Don Juan, and he’d thought that penning the exploits of that famous lover would have thrilled the author of novels known for their saucy sexual content.

Johnny was frowning. He was sorely tempted to take over the writing—he’d already hatched a great idea about Don Juan getting mixed up with a psychotic babe who won’t stop hounding him—but he didn’t want to jump the gun. After all, the guy might regret his offer once he realized that a couple of upstarts had stolen his thunder, and their plan depended on keeping him and their mutual employers at the studio happy. So instead Johnny asked, “How’s about telling us what you’ve got so far?”

“Boy meets girl, boy lays girl,” Faulkner said.

Ed snorted. “That’s a good one! Isn’t that a good one, Johnny?”

But Johnny was gazing anxiously at the desktop. There was a pile of typewriter paper on the desk, but it was so slim that he almost could believe that Faulkner’s description did describe his entire output so far. And they’d been told that Faulkner had been at work on it for two weeks already!

“Say boys,” Faulkner suddenly said, leaping to his feet. “What say we rustle up some lunch? They can’t expect a man to slave with nary a victual in his belly, can they?”

With some reluctance they agreed, but when he suggested they get off “this hill-cradled patch of desolation” and motor into Hollywood in search of real food, they dug in their heels.

“We always eat in the studio commissary when we work,” Ed said.

“Sure,” Johnny said. “It’ll keep our minds on Don Juan!”

“Just what I’m afraid of,” Faulkner said, but he followed along.

Coming through the commissary doors, Ed spotted Lauren Bacall. “Does that gal have it,” he thundered, “or does she have it not?”

“Cute, Ed,” Bacall said. “What are you two doing in Burbank?”

Faulkner arched an eyebrow. “Why, Miss Betty Jean, how do you know my dear old friends Ed and Johnny?”

“We were all at the same party a few days ago. I couldn’t get enough of their ideas for screenplays.”

“Do tell,” Faulkner said.

“It’s nothing,” Johnny said hastily.

“My perspicacious friend Ed was just telling me how much he admires my God’s Little Acre,” Faulkner said.

Bacall raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah?”

Ed beamed. But when Faulkner started quizzing Ed on what he thought of his characterization of Ty Ty Walden and his lascivious daughters, much to Bacall’s apparent interest, Johnny broke in and insisted that they eat quickly and get back to work.

“Your friend doesn’t appreciate a good literary discussion,” observed Faulkner as they took a table.

“Johnny’s not much of a reader,” Ed said, with a condescension that made Johnny want to retch. “You’d like Bill’s work if you gave it a try, Johnny, coming from a family of sharecroppers yourself.”

“Dirt farmers,” Johnny said tightly. “There’s a difference.”

“I stand corrected,” Ed said. Then, with a long wink at Faulkner he added, “I guess a guy can’t be an expert on everything.”

“Oh, but don’t give up trying,” said Faulkner, patting him on the back.

Faulkner drank a great deal more iced tea during lunch, and the more he drank the further his thoughts seemed to roam from Don Juan and the longer and more elaborate his sentences became. At one point Ed tried to get him to think about where the swordfights would go—the picture was slated for Errol Flynn, so there would have to be swordfights—and Faulkner began to argue that they’d do a lot better with barn burnings. “In Technicolor,” he added.

Finally they persuaded him to return to the office. They both noticed he wobbled a bit as he walked, and were beginning to wonder about that iced tea. Who kept iced tea in a pocket flask, anyway? They plopped him down in his seat before the typewriter and planted themselves each to one side of the great man.

“Hokay,” Ed said. “Swordfights. Are we ready to delve into a swordfight?”
Johnny had a sudden vision of a great swordfight scene, in which Don Juan learns to tap into some nebulous force and fight blindfolded, but again he bit his tongue. Not yet, he reminded himself.

“But with whom shall he match blades?” Faulkner intoned. “With whom in the parched, antediluvian land, like a postage stamp curled and powdery with spent mucilage, a wilderness proud, implacable and unvanquished; who upon this stage will cry: en garde?”

Ed and Johnny exchanged a troubled glance.

“Excuse me,” Ed said. “But isn’t this set in Spain?”

Before Faulkner could reply, a tall, thin white-haired man stuck his head in the door and said, “Billy boy?”

“Colonel Hawks!” Faulkner cried, vaulting to his feet. They embraced and pounded each other on the back.

“What say what say,” the man addressed as Colonel Hawks said. “Shall we drink shall we shoot shall we fly?” He didn’t bother to pause for commas.

“Why not all three?” Faulkner asked, and they broke into peals of laughter. But then Faulkner seemed to remember the boys and said, “Howard Hawks, I’d like to present my lifelong friends, Ed and Johnny.”

“Nursemaids, eh?” Howard said, and this set off another round of hooting. Then Howard was narrowing his eyes and peering at the boys thoughtfully. “Not the Ed and Johnny?”

Now it was Faulkner’s turn to look quizzical. “You’ve heard of them?”

“Heard of them? Hell, these boys are the talk of the town! Out with it, chums. Let’s hear some of those revolutionary ideas!”

Ed started to reply, but Johnny quickly interrupted him. “Not now, Howard. We’ve got our noggins working overtime on Bill’s script here, and well…we gotta keep focused, you savvy?”

“Ah, yes. The old focus pocus.”

Howard and Bill screamed with laughter. Then they punched each other’s arms, promised to get together soon, and Howard took his leave.

“Great guy, that Cunnel,” Faulkner said, staring fondly after his retreating back. Then he spun on the boys. “Now. Out with it indeed, you two. What makes you so notorious in this stump-pocked and untilled vale of barrenness?”

“It’s our…” Ed began, but Johnny quickly put in, “Don Juan, remember?”

“Don Juan be damned,” Faulkner said. “Ed knows all about my writing career. It’s only fair I be made privy to yours. So let’s hear some of these brainstorms.”

Johnny sighed. This was far earlier than they’d planned on unveiling their ideas. They’d wanted the script far enough along that no one could accuse them of derailing the man they’d be hired to keep on track, and they wanted him to feel beholden to them and so less inclined to view them with envy or competitiveness. But really, he had no choice. Ideas were Johnny’s meat. Since the days when the neighbors had whispered about him for walking alone through the woods around his father’s farm telling stories to himself, his ideas had been the fire in his soul. He could no more resist pitching ideas than an actor could resist a spotlight. “Okay,” he said. “But only a couple. Then we’ve got to get back to work.”

“Must you keep reminding me?” Faulkner said. “Now shoot.”

Johnny took a deep breath. “There’s these two young rebels, see, and they decide to quit the rat race and jump on a couple of motorcycles to see America.”

“It’s a hum-dinger, Bill!” Ed put in. “They meet hookers and lawyers and ranchers…”

“Until they run into a couple of crackers who blow ‘em to kingdom-come with a shotgun!”

“Crackers!” Ed cried. “Why Bill, that would be right up your alley!”

A strange light flickered on in Faulkner’s eyes. “Jeeter Lester on a motorbike,” he said, his little mustache quivering. “It resonates. It resonates and reverberates and retrogrades.”

“You really like it?” Ed said.

“Hit your country cousin with another,” Faulkner said. He pulled out his flask and took another drink. Ed wondered about that. Just how much liquor could a little flask hold, anyway? Then he remembered that when Faulkner had excused himself to use the john at the commissary he’d been gone for an inordinate length of time.

“Okay,” Johnny said. “There’s this scientist, see, and he goes on the radio to blow the whistle on this crooked tobacco company…”

“Tobacco!” Ed boomed. “That’s right up your alley, too, Bill! Jeepers. I never realized until this moment that we had so many thematic concerns in common.”

“It simply surpasses belief,” Faulkner said.

Johnny figured there was no point in waiting any longer. “Gee, Bill,” he said, “maybe we could all work on something together.”

“Now that’s a thought!” Ed said. “Now that we’ve realized we think so much alike, I mean. And we’d be happy to do the lion’s share of the work. Wouldn’t we, Johnny?”

“You betcha,” Johnny said. “Hell, Bill wouldn’t have to write a word if he didn’t want to.”

Bill’s mustache was quivering again. “So what exactly would I be doing?”

“Whatever you wanted,” Ed said.

“As much or as little of it,” Johnny said.

“There’s only one thing I don’t understand,” Faulkner said. “Why do you two boys need me? Why, with ideas like these…”

“Nobody in this lame-brained town wants to buy them,” Johnny said.

Ed decided to lay it on the line. “But if somebody of your stature was involved…”

“Yes, yes. I see,” Faulkner said. “The infamous Ed and Johnny teamed with the author of Georgia Boy and Tobacco Road. It does quicken the blood, doesn’t it?”

“You mean it?” Johnny said.

“We’ll have to finish Don Juan first, of course,” Ed said. “But once the Brothers Warner are smiling upon us…”

Faulkner wasn’t listening. He was staring at Johnny through narrowed eyes. “Tell me,” he said, an odd intensity in his voice, “where on earth do you get these ideas?”

Johnny shrugged. “They just come to me, I guess.”

“And suddenly I can see them scrolling down right in front of my eyes,” Ed added.

Faulkner nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, yes. When I do my best work…you might say I just listen to the voices.” For a moment he seemed to be listening to something, and something not in this world. But then he shook himself and said, “Well, let’s hear some more of these ideas! To say you’ve got me fascinated would be a gross understatement.”

And hear ideas he did. Ideas by the gross and ideas by the pound. Bill soon gave up any pretense that his flask contained iced tea and started passing it around to the boys. When it ran dry, he refilled it from the bottles of bourbon he had secreted all over the office. But as much as Faulkner drank, his attention to their ideas did not waver, and he wouldn’t let them stop giving forth. Before any of them knew it, night was falling, and not a word had been composed on the screenplay whose completion Ed and Johnny been hired to ensure. And still the ideas came.

* * *

Ed awoke with a terrible feeling in his gut. There was something he was supposed to be doing, something that wasn’t going right. It wasn’t the Vietnam script, they’d put that down. It wasn’t the taxi driver picture. No, definitely not that. Then he remembered: Don Juan. He sat up. It was still night. He was asleep on the couch and Johnny was sprawled out on the floor beside him. The door was open. Faulkner was gone.

He shook Johnny awake and they stumbled out into the night. They wandered around the eerily moon-washed lot, calling Bill’s name, but to no avail. They did succeed in rousing a security guard who had fallen asleep on a bench. Ed urgently asked if he’d seen a little guy with a mustache who was probably plastered to the gills.

“Oh, sure,” the guard mumbled around a yawn. “Wanted to know how to get to the train station.”

The boys sprinted to their car and tore out of the lot. Or drove, at least, as fast as their thirteen-year-old Nash would allow. Half an hour later they rumbled to a halt in front of Union Station and clambered out of the car. The waiting room was apparently deserted, not an author in sight. Then Johnny spotted a mound of tweed sprawled on a bench. They hurried over. And with great exhalations of relief they saw that it was Faulkner, sound asleep.

Ed bent over and shook him gently. The author slitted his eyes, peered blindly at the face hanging over him, and suddenly his lids snapped wide open in seeming recognition. “THE BEAR!” he screamed.

“No, Bill, it’s just me,” Ed said.

Faulkner calmed down a bit, and Ed helped him to a sitting position.

“Gotta catch train,” Faulkner said. “Goin’ home. Yes, sir, goin’ home to Dixie.”

“No, Bill,” Johnny said. “We’re going to your house right here in Hollywood.”

“Are you the bear?” Faulkner asked of no one in particular. “Primordial, unconquered, and more: implacably resigned?”

“I think the bear’s back at your place,” Ed said.

“That’s right!” Johnny said. “I think I spotted him on the way here. A big shaggy critter.”

They had him on his feet now. “That’s him!” Faulkner screamed. “Major De Spain! Fetch your gun, sir! Fetch your gun!”

Between them, they maneuvered the author out to the Nash.

* * *

The next morning was a bleary one. The sun might have been shining for all Ed, Johnny, and Bill knew, but to their eyes the world was a realm gray and drear. They all shuffled into the office at around eleven in the morning and proceeded to drink enough coffee to drown a horse in. When Faulkner suggested for the third time that they have a hair of the dog that bit them, the boys finally succumbed. Soon they all felt halfway human, and the boys maneuvered Bill to his desk, where Ed rolled a fresh sheet of paper into the typewriter to remind him of his purpose.

“Yes, yes,” Faulkner said. “Worry not. Your visions have inspired me.” And apparently they had, for Faulkner, without further ado, started to type. He wrote without cease for exactly forty-seven minutes. Johnny timed him. But at the end of the time he announced he was through.

“Now, Bill,” Ed chided. “We’ve got to get that script done so we can move on to our next exciting project.”

“Sorry, boys,” Faulkner said. “But I do my best work at night. Did I tell you about my days as a night watchman back in my native Mis…Georgia? Or would that be my nights as a night watchman?” He paused to ponder that for a moment. “Regardless, I wrote an entire book while on the job. The House in the Uplands, if…uh…memory serves.”

“But this isn’t Georgia,” Johnny said. “And screenplays in these here parts have to be turned in on time.”

“Point taken,” Faulkner said. “Anybody for lunch?”

After a two-hour lunch and several glasses of iced tea they managed to dump him in his chair again and prop him up before the typewriter. He actually surprised them and did a little work, but only if they let him have a “toot” now and then. At first he seemed to be consulting them on the task at hand, or at least asking questions like, “What’s another word for retrograde?” Or “Do you think Eunice Habersham is a good name for a spinster?” As the day wore on, however, and he got increasingly liquored up, he’d simply make cryptic remarks: “That French architect. That poor doomed bastard.” Or: “The little panties. The way you could see them when she clumb the tree.” At one point he scared holy Jesus out of them by throwing his head back and bellering incoherently for a full minute. Finally, at a quarter past five, he announced that he was going to take a nap, slumped down in his chair, and promptly fell fast asleep.

But at eight o’clock he was on his feet, breezy and chipper and, as he was fond of saying, unvanquished. “We’re off to the Musso and Frank Grill, boys,” he announced. “My treat.”

They drove to Hollywood Boulevard and found a parking space in front of the bookshop next to the restaurant. In Musso and Frank’s, Ed and Johnny devoured steaks while Bill idly picked at a cheese sandwich and determinedly punished the bourbon. Ed and Johnny watched him in dismay. Didn’t he understand the importance of finishing Don Juan on time? Had he lost all interest in the prospect of a glorious joint venture? But just the day before he had seemed so taken with their idea about a boy who had scissors in place of hands!

Faulkner’s jauntiness started to evaporate before their very eyes. His sentences were growing longer and longer as he waxed indignant about neglecting his real work while prostituting himself in Hollywood. That got Ed’s goat. He happened to think writing for pictures was a noble undertaking. “Oh, come on, Bill,” he finally said, unable to restrain himself any longer. “It’s not like your ‘real work’ is going to win you the Nobel Prize!”

Faulkner blew a raspberry at him.

Ed gave up and looked around. He spotted various famous writers and directors. Budd Schulberg at the long bar, near Robert Siodmak and William Saroyan. At a table in a corner Nicholas Ray and John Huston were arm-wrestling. A guy with big ears egging them on might have been John O’Hara. Any other night he would have been delighted to find himself in such august company. But tonight all he could think about was that a golden goose was slipping through his fingers.

Then a natty gent with a cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth was approaching their table. “Hiya, Bill!”

Faulkner was on his feet. “Erskine!” he cried. The two clasped hands warmly and Faulkner said, “Boys, meet Erskine Caldwell, author of Light in August.”

Caldwell did a double take. Ed could have sworn he saw Faulkner wink at him. Then Faulkner was saying, “Ed here thinks my God’s Little Acre is the greatest novel to come out of the South. What do you say to that, old man?”

“I say balderdash,” Erksine said. “No one would say that—unless he found my Sound and the Fury too hard to understand!”

“Hah!” Faulkner said. “Next you’ll be trying to put your Snopeses in a class with my Lesters!”

Ed felt a chill in his gut. There was something of the burlesque in the conversation these Southerners were having. He began to wonder if he’d made some terrible mistake.

“What the hell’s a Snopes?” Johnny said.

“You’ve never heard of a Snopes?” Faulkner said. “Why, next thing you’ll be telling me you’ve never heard of a Bundren either!”

“A what?”

“Okay,” Faulkner said. “I give you one more chance to redeem yourself in my eyes. Although he’s not my best-known creation, I’ll be sorely piqued if you haven’t heard of my proudest one…Abner Yokum!”

“Well, I’ll be goddamned,” Johnny said, a grin splitting his face. Now he knew who this old hayseed was! No wonder they loved him in Hollywood!

Now Ed knew they were being monkeyed with. He still didn’t know why, but he was damned if he was going to let on. “You know, you fellas don’t have to fight,” he said. “We all know you’re the two greatest male writers the South has produced.”

“Male writers?” they said in chorus.

“Well, sure!” Ed said with an incredulous laugh. “Don’t tell me you’re comparing yourselves to Margaret Mitchell!”

Caldwell blanched. Then Faulkner placed a thumb against his nose and waggled his fingers at Ed. Caldwell laughed, threw his arm around Faulkner, and steered him toward the bar. Johnny looked at Ed and asked if he was feeling okay. Ed’s black eyes burned into his collaborator as he demanded to know why he wouldn’t be. Johnny shrugged and turned back to the bar. Caldwell was there, engaged in a loud conversation with Budd Schulberg. Faulkner was not.

“Oh shit,” Johnny said. He said it many times over the next several hours, as they searched the restaurant, drove to Union Station, rushed back to Hollywood Boulevard and hit every bar, banged on the doors and windows of Faulkner’s rented house, and finally, in desperation and exhaustion, rolled up to the Warner gate as the first light of morning warmed the tops of the San Gabriels. The guard at the gate started to ask if they had any great new movie ideas, but after one look at their faces he fell silent. When they asked him if Faulkner had come back, he only shook his head. Silently they dragged themselves to his office and waited. The sunlight slanted through the windows and the sounds of studio bustle sounded outside, but still no Southern novelist appeared. “Oh shit,” Johnny said for the hundredth time, though now the words echoed with the ritual hollowness of long despair and not the urgency of discovery.

Suddenly they heard footsteps pounding up the stairs outside the door. They jumped to their feet in excitement and turned to the door with the mingled joy and rage of parents reunited with their lost children. But when the door flew open it was Howard Hawks, not William Faulkner, who burst into the room. And he was mad.

“Wherin hell issat drunk?” he demanded. “And wherin hell is my plane?”

It took a while, for Hawks himself seemed not to be entirely sober, but Ed and Johnny were able to gather from the director that he had entered Musso & Frank’s last night and absconded instantly with their writer, whereupon the two of them had driven out to the Glendale airfield to admire Hawks’s lovely new Beech 35 Bonanza. They sat in the plane sampling a number of bottles the director had left strewn about the floor and seats, and the next thing Hawks knew he was lying on his back in an avocado orchard in Pico Rivera.

“The bastard stole my plane,” Hawks growled. “He stole my plane and flew his drunken bastard ass back to Mississippi the bastard did.”

“Georgia,” Johnny corrected him, but by then Hawks was stumbling back down the stairs and vowing to set the dogs on the bastard.

“Now what do we do?” Ed asked.

“Only one thing to do,” Johnny said. “We finish it ourselves.”

“Of course!” Ed yelled. “Then we hit Jack Warner up for a screen credit!”

“Ixnay,” Johnny said. “If he thinks Bill’s a loon and we can’t handle him, he throws us all out on our cans. We gotta keep him thinking Bill’s a genius and he needs us to ride him. Then when they drag Bill back we tell ‘em we won’t do it again unless we’re guaranteed credit up front. You hep?”

“I’m hep!” Ed roared, and with the first eagerness he’d shown for anything in days he dove for the pages Bill had left on his desk.

Before he saw the pages, Johnny knew they were in trouble again. Ed could not have scanned more than a few lines of dialogue before the color drained from his face. He slumped into a chair, and Johnny plucked the pages from his lifeless fingers. What he saw there scarcely made sense to him. To start with, the words were not in screenplay form but in long blocks of type, with not a single camera angle or fade-out indicated and scarcely anything recognizable as dialogue. Even more disconcertingly, he could find not a single mention of Don Juan, but only of characters named Chick and Nub, who hardly seemed ready to pick up swords in old Spain. In fact, the location didn’t sound much like Spain at all to Johnny, although he was the first to admit that he was no expert in these things.

“Where the hell is Yonkawapata?” he asked.

“In hell,” Ed croaked.

Johnny flipped the pages but they got no better. He stared at them for a while. Then he said, “How long we got?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Ed said.

Johnny nodded. “Then let’s go.”

They went. All that day and all that night they paced and typed and yelled lines back and forth. The story about a Negro unjustly accused of murder seemed to bear no relationship to the project at hand, but they assumed that Faulkner intended the dashing Don Juan to swoop in and save him from the gallows, the young Chick to become the swordsman’s naïve and admiring henchman, and Miss Habersham to be the Don’s next conquest. So they wrote it, adding haciendas to the mills and barns that dominated the location shots, changing the word “nigger” (what the hell had Bill been thinking? Didn’t he know about the Hays Office?) to “Negro,” and trying to squeeze phrases like “faces in invincible profile not amazed not aghast but in a sort of irrevocable repudiation” into the sort of snappy dialogue that Warner Brothers favored. And when the sun began to dip behind Mount Hollywood the next afternoon, it was done. What it was they weren’t sure, but the title page read, “The Adventures of Don Juan, screenplay by William Faulkner,” and they prayed that that would be enough.

Their first disappointment was that they would not be allowed just to drop the script off at the administration building and hightail it home to await whatever news was forthcoming. They were met in the lobby by Jack L. Warner’s personal assistant, an intimidating ex-boxer named Primo Concordato, who instructed that they were to hand the script directly to J.L. and wait while he read the first few pages.

“We’ve got a lot of money invested in this hick,” Warner said as they stepped nervously toward his desk. “I want to make sure you guys didn’t fuck it up.”

“Us, J.L.?” Ed asked with an attempt at bravado, but his voice was thin.

Johnny could not remember the last time his hands had trembled, for he had always prided himself on his steady nerves, whether playing mumbledy-peg back on the farm or purposely shooting six inches off the bullseye so he would not be assigned to sniper duty during the War. But the script was rattling loudly as he handed it over to J.L.

The boss’s expression was a pleased one, even jolly, as he began to read. Just getting a script on deadline was a great triumph when dealing with temperamental novelists. But about the middle of the first page his lips stiffened. At the top of the second his brow furrowed. Seven lines later (by Ed’s estimate), his eyes narrowed. And by the time he flipped to page three, his skin blazed crimson.

“What the fuck is this shit?” he roared.

Ed and Johnny both opened their mouths to answer, but the voice that filled the air was deeper, more resonant, and distinctly more Southern. “That’s the wrong script, J.L.”

Ed and Johnny wheeled to find Bill Faulkner strolling into the office with a script under his arm. He looked dapper and amused and completely sober.

“I have a confession to make, J.L.,” he said. “While I was cranking out the swill you hold in your hand, these boys were writing their own version, planning to pass it off as mine and save an old, wrung-out novelist’s dignity. I’m afraid my vanity got the best of me at first, and I insisted that they bring you the script I’d written. But after they left, I sat down to read their script, and I couldn’t deny that it was far better than anything I could have produced.”

He tossed the script onto Warner’s desk. Ed and Johnny gaped at him. They had no idea what was going on, except that somehow it must surely lead to even greater humiliation. But Faulkner winked, and as the boss began to read this script, they saw the same facial transformation in reverse. His beet-red flesh turned to a mellow tan. His eyes unsquinched, his brow lifted, and by the bottom of the second page his mouth had relaxed into something between a smirk and a smile. “Okay,” he said. “It looks good enough.”

* * *

Outside, in the setting sun, Faulkner lifted the script from Johnny’s fingers and began to read. They were still gaping at him in astonishment, and as he began to laugh they gaped wider. “May I keep this?” he asked, wiping a tear from his eye. They nodded dumbly. “I should have explained to you lads that I do all my screenplay work at home. I use my office time to work on my novels.”

“Then what we rewrote…” Ed began.

“Was a little book I’m working on just now. Not one of my best, I’m afraid, but a man has to keep the pot boiling.”

“And when you left with Hawks the other night…” Ed began again.

“I went home to crank out the last of Don Juan. Which is what our esteemed employer is reading right now. Hawks, the fool, took to the air in a blind drunk and flew his own little plaything into a guava orchard.”

“Avocado,” Ed said.

“But Bill,” Johnny said. “We come out of this smelling like roses, but you…”

“Don’t waste a tear on me,” Faulkner said. “It’s the least I could do. You see, I felt completely stuck on this novel of mine until you favored me with your cornucopia of ideas. I don’t know where these visions of yours come from, lads, or what otherworldly voices whisper them to you, but there’s something… well…something more to them than the usual insistent rattlings of Hollywood clichés being reassembled in a screensmith’s otherwise vacant skull. God only knows what, but it’s more. And when you told me that astonishing notion about the young man with scissors for hands…”

“Buddy Snipfingers,” Ed said.

“That’s the one. When I heard your notion that he would be unjustly accused of a crime and that the people who distrusted him would have to defend him, only to find their own redemption thereby…well, the lights went on. There was the plot I’d been groping for! I simply had to make it about a Negro in the South instead of…”

“Buddy Snipfingers,” Ed said.

“Precisely. And in gratitude for that, I found it in myself to finish this bit of swill for our dear friend J.L. And did a good enough job, evidently.”

“But he may never hire you again!” Johnny said.

“Oh, I’ve had about enough of this Hollywood hospitality for a while,” Faulkner said. “I have an idea for a whole series of novels to write after this one, you see. A trilogy about Ty Ty Walden’s family. God’s Little Acre, God’s Little Hectare, and God’s Little Square Mile.” Ed’s grin looked especially pained. Faulkner gave him one last wink and turned toward the parking lot.

“I still don’t get how a guy could trade in celluloid for pulp,” Johnny said. “But thanks.”
The great man called back over his shoulder: “Just don’t you trade in celluloid for anything.”

By the time he started his car, the typewriter in his old office was already clattering.

 

Coming in June: Ed and Johnny's lives take a sharp turn as "Boys Meet Girl"!