Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (22 page)

Speaking in 1994 to an assembly of admiring Vietnamese filmmakers, Silliphant was asked to describe the role of a screenwriter in motion pictures. “When I write, every shot is there,” he began. “I see in my eye the film before I write it. If I don’t see it, I don’t write it.” But then he said, “Last year I made a film and everybody on the crew changed the script. Everybody! The only person who didn’t change the script was the generator operator, the one who runs the machine. I went out and bought him a gift. I took it to him and I said, ‘I’m very grateful. You were the only man who liked my work.’ And he said, ‘I never read it. If I would have read it, I would have made changes too!’” Once the laughter stopped, he added, “To be a writer, because we are treated so badly, the only thing you have is your ego. Now, they take that away from you, and you have nothing, You have no talent. You are just a rug.”
[264]

After thirty years in the business, Silliphant got tired of being walked on, even if he was well paid. Scuff marks came with the territory, but now there were too many heels. He knew the world was round, and he structured his so he could dodge conflict, except when he was in full charge of it on the page. Confident, even domineering, in pitch meetings, he was often the opposite in his personal dealings, preferring to delegate personnel matters to proxies or through missives. He became a specialist in a passive-aggressive Hollywood technique known as “the non-No ‘No,’” in which you refuse work by setting your price so high that the other guy backs down, thereby making it look like the deal fell apart because of him, not you. At other times he could let proposed projects die on the vine by ignoring them. In addition to faxing himself out of an unhappy marriage with Margot, taking swings at ABC in an interview, and berating the
Silent Flute
writer with angry coverage, he fired his longtime agent, Don Kopaloff, by leaving him a dismissal letter that tried to make it sound as if it was for Kopaloff ’s own good. “I’m writing it so you’ll have time to absorb it without having to look either brave or cheerful or understanding — or what-ever,” he wrote, “and then when you’re ready we can talk about it.”
[265]

Kopaloff was devastated. “He was one of the few people that I represented without having had them sign management agreements,” he recalled. “I trusted him. Next thing I know, I get a letter on my desk — it wasn’t even mailed — that sounded like he was crying, he felt so bad. We had been together for a lot of years. I must say I was absolutely furious with him.”
[266]

Most surprisingly, especially for someone who was so forward-thinking in terms of racial equality and in opposing the war in Vietnam, he was a Republican. “He was a classic Hollywood liberal who voted Republican,” his son, Stirling Linh, reported. “My father was pretty conservative. One time during the Bush years, Mom said, ‘Oh, your father was outraged by the war in Vietnam and he would have been outraged by what’s happening in Afghanistan today’ and I thought, ‘No he wouldn’t; he would have totally supported it.’ He would have seen this as fighting the good fight just like he supported the first Gulf War. He would have had the same subtext of fighting the forces of religious fundamentalism and fascism.”
[267]

Such conundrums add to Silliphant’s complexity, particularly in his functional use of violence in drama but not in reality. “I’ve never been aggressive by nature,” he told writer John Corcoran, perhaps explaining this trait. “It’s the reason why I could never have been able to compete [in martial arts]. I simply do not enjoy getting out there and beating the shit out of some guy. I don’t feel I have the right to harm another person.”
[268]
He could be even harder on himself, even reckless. Although he was paid handsomely, he spent profligately, assured that the work would never stop. After all, with his fame, his skill, and the summit of Hollywood at which he thrived, who could conclude otherwise?

By the early 1980s, however, he was in a financial crunch. The man who had challenged himself to earn $60,000 when he was staring out in 1956 had, by 1984, set a goal of $600,000 to $750,000
[269]
and was being politely dunned by the banks.
[270]
His response was reminding them that screenwriting is an uneven business. Nevertheless, his activities during this period show that he was trying to grab as many assignments as possible to get ahead. His appointment books reveal how determined he was, and begs the question of whether he needed inspiration to write or had developed the skill to just sit down and crank it out. During, for example, April of 1982, in addition to writing the novel
Bronze Bell
for 1983 publication, he was dubbing the TV pilot
Welcome to Paradise
; writing the six-part mini-series
Mussolini
; picking up Krugerrands for bank deposit; finishing
Space, Episode 1
; going to Bora-Bora while continuing to write
Mussolini
; and having meals and meetings with Stan Lee, Irwin and Sheila Allen, and Brandon Stoddard; trying to set up
Forbidden Diary
at Disney with actress/producer Nancy Malone; meeting with Marty Baum on an unspecified Sidney Poitier project; and writing letters to friends and colleagues. And most of it got done (see filmography).

These same years saw the kind of upheavals that the film industry hadn’t felt since TV shook its financial base in the early 1950s. The tremors begun by the blockbusters
Jaws
(1975),
Star Wars
(1977), and
Alien
(1979) rearranged the Hollywood landscape. Now all anybody wanted to make were youth-oriented action films, a decision that left the people who wrote character-driven scripts, such as Silliphant, striving to reinvent themselves.

Silliphant chose a novel solution. Literally, a novel. “When I undertook the John Locke series of paperback novels, I announced in advance of publication that none of them would ever be available in terms of its motion picture rights,” he stated unequivocally. “I further buttressed that position by writing each of the three novels so far for this series in a style which would make it virtually impossible for any living screenwriter to be able to fashion a script from the work. In short, I determined to be totally out of the reach of studio group-think and to write books I damn well wanted to write for
myself.
” He offered a more cynical reason for this decision by explaining, during a 1983 promo appearance for
Steel Tiger
on LA’s
The Sunday Show,
“It’s the first of a series of twelve books based on the same character. Imagine what would happen if I were to sell it and they were to make a bad film? What happens to the other eleven books? No one would want to read them.” When asked by the host, “What happens if they make a good film,” he replied wearily, “The chances are ninety percent that they wouldn’t.”
[271]

There was pragmatism in his move to Bangkok five years later in July of 1988. Before Skype, international phone calls cost a bundle, and e-mail didn’t become a factor until the World Wide Web kicked off in 1991. So the cheapest and fastest way to reach people in other countries was fax. The advantage of faxes, Silliphant explained, was that, when producers were forced to put their promises in writing, they were less prone to bullshit. Perhaps because of this, the screen offers dwindled, and Silliphant focused on novels. He extolled them to the
L.A. Times
’s Charles Champlin in 1985, saying, “If I could find a producer who would do for me in 1989 what Cubby Broccoli did for [James] Bond, well, now.”
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Published by Ballantine, the first,
Steel Tiger,
came out in 1983; then
Bronze Bell
in 1985; and
Silver Star
in 1986. A fourth,
Iron Kiss,
was never begun, and the series ended after three titles.

Silliphant took a hit in his income to start writing them, but he felt it was something he had to do.
[273]
John Locke is a Vietnam vet, a former San Francisco narcotics and vice officer, the son of a poet, and a sailor-of-fortune who lives aboard a forty-foot ketch, the Steel Tiger, out of San Diego, but can more often be found on the high seas. His voice — which is to say, Silliphant’s — is equal parts narrative and commentary, rich in detail and monologue. Although Locke has left ‘Nam, ‘Nam hasn’t left him, and he is drawn back into the intrigues for which, in an existential sense, he shares moral responsibility. Locke is named after one of the Enlightenment’s most important thinkers, John Locke (1632-1704), whose writings were key in defining the idea of consciousness, much as Descartes postulated, “I think, therefore I am.” For Silliphant’s Locke, it became, “I am, therefore I’d better think fast.” Part of him is Silliphant and part is a Norwegian sailor with whom he formed a disastrous charter boat company called Oceanic Enterprises in St. Croix that magically made money for everyone except him.

Although he had dabbled in novels at the very beginning of his writing career and novelized occasional scripts, those forays had been more utilitarian than literary and were driven by residuals and the need to control his properties. The Locke books were a way to get out of that trap and write what he wanted to write. They allowed him to ponder two subjects for which he held a vast ocean of emotion: Southeast Asia and sailing.

The seafaring worm, picked up as a seven-year-old in San Diego, bored deeply into his soul. Over the years he had owned a succession of vessels: racing daysailer, Laser, Montgomery, 470, Sansare, then a Hobie Cat. He sailed out of Marina del Rey in an Islander 36 (the Tiana I) that slept seven and of which he was so proud that he said, “the first night aboard, I slept in every bunk.” Later he admitted that it slept seven only “if the seven have just come from an orgy and don’t mind the close contact.”
[274]
One of the reasons he eventually sold it was that the five-man crew he hired to staff the boat got to thinking that they owned it; he’d come aboard and find women’s underwear and the residue of parties that neither he nor Tiana had thrown. He got rid of it.
[275]

Now he could focus on writing. For
Silver Star,
John Locke learns he has a half-Vietnamese son living in Hanoi whom he must rescue from the slave state that has devoured the postwar nation. The title refers to the medal for gallantry that Locke received, and which he entrusted to Doan Thi, the woman he loved, and who, when she died, passed the talisman to their little boy.

Facing a comparatively forgiving publishing deadline, he could allow ideas to simmer until they were ready to hit paper, and then type furiously as they poured out. Like an athlete unable to explain the ineffable, he allowed his instinct to guide him. But he also stored notes, sometimes as scribbles on the backs of restaurant tabs, sometimes as neatly typed musings on blue, white, or yellow pages — whatever was handy when the spirit struck — or, if he was in one place, in loose-leaf notebooks. One such tan, padded binder is labeled “scenes” and is filled with an inch of disgorged thoughts for Locke novels, chiefly
Silver Star.
His notes stockpile research from the broad to the narrow. On the mundane side, there are pages of synonyms for words such as
danger, dissent, thought,
and
disregard.
A more detailed set of pages lists possible character names by nationality (Arab, French, Thai, and Vietnamese) and by first and last names that he can mix and match. He wrote page upon page of possible scenes:

One way for Locke to get into Vietnam is aboard a Thai trawler. These trawlers leave from ports along the southeast coast and carry textiles, medicines, and a broad range of consumer goods to Rach Gia and other points in South Vietnam.

A worker’s basic wage hovers around $1 a month at the black market exchange rate; about $25 at the inflated official rate.

To protect themselves from the enemy arrows and bullets, the Vietnamese made bed-sized shields of water-soaked straw mats, each carried by 20 strong men. These shields served as armor in modern war.

You could still get a good bowl of Pho soup from the mobile vendors’ carts.

The Armson O.E.G. [gunsight] is a single-point type scope, made for use with both eyes open.

The war in Vietnam was a signal that national governments could no longer get away with such things.

The [Silver Star] medal is hidden within the frame of a photograph of Doan Thi — along with a note in English — which his father will read to him if he ever finds him — and translate to him.
THIS HAS TO BE A BIG, BIG SCENE IN THE STORY.

For scene with prisoner: truth-inducing drugs.

Scenes: [Locke] has to choose between Thanh Hoa and Dasima. He chooses Thanh Hoa — but she is killed. When Doan Thi dies — and he realizes he would have taken her to America with his son, then to France to meet his mother — he knows that his love for Dasima is not conclusive enough. He will call her from somewhere and tell her not to wait.

When Clotaire II, King of France (615 A.D.), was at Sens in Burgundy he heard a bell in the church of St. Stephen, which pleased him so much that he ordered it to be taken to Paris. The bell was so distressed at being carried away from home that it turned dumb on the road and lost all its sound. When the king heard of this, he was much concerned. A few years before, the French army had been frightened away by the ringing of the bells in St. Stephen’s church, and now the king was perhaps no less frightened by the silence of this one. He commanded that the bell should be carried back to Sens. No sooner did the bell approach the town than it recovered its voice, and rang so loudly that it was heard at Sens while it was yet seven miles away.
[276]

The longing for Southeast Asia started in 1971. Asked to adapt
The Khaki Mafia,
the explosive Robin Moore/June Collins expose of graft in the U.S. Army in Vietnam under General William Westmoreland, Silliphant visited Saigon with director Jules Dassin and producer Hannah Weinstein to research the project. “Understandably,” he reported, “we were not warmly received at MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam).
[277]
The financing was supposed to come from [Edgar] Bronfman and all his booze money, but the final important money never came our way. The production funding stayed locked up in Toronto, Jules went back to Athens, Hanna to her apartment in New York, and my twenty-two-year love affair with Southeast Asia kicked in, ultimately causing me to write and write and write about Vietnam, but without much success (
The Fall of Saigon, Fly Away Home,
are two primary examples). Ultimately, as you know, I moved to Southeast Asia in July of 1988, but that 1971 trip solidified my knowing that I belonged over here, not in Hollywood.” It also reminded him of his roots as a novelist. “It took me 17 years after
The Khaki Mafia
to make the move I should have made when I was still in my twenties and wanting to write only novels and poetry,” he said. “Ah, Graham Greene, Andre Malraux, Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham — how I envy those guys.”
[278]

The moving process began at the beginning of 1988, in January, when he had finally had enough of Hollywood. Holding what he sarcastically called “a Beverly Hills garage sale,” at the Camden Drive house, he and Tiana sold (directly or metaphorically) two houses, six cars, and a yacht, and put the rest in storage. For the next six months, with little Stirling in tow and Melissa in a relationship in Montana, Silliphant settled in Thailand while Tiana took off for Vietnam to begin work on her autobiographical 1992 documentary,
From Hollywood to Hanoi.
When they needed to return to Los Angeles to wrap up business, they accepted the largesse of Abe and Muriel Lipsey, who lent them one of their spare Beverly Hills homes. By July they had made the final break.

“I think I was born on the wrong continent and into the wrong race,” he would come to say of this move. “I cannot explain it. I have always been fascinated with Asia, with its history. I know far more about Asian history, including the history of Indonesia, the history of Burma, than I do about the history of Germany or France. I have never been that interested in Europe, but have always been fascinated by Asia. I am happier in Asia aesthetically and emotionally. I feel somehow safer.”
[279]

Silliphant settled into a lordly residence atop Bangkok’s Natural Park Apartments. When asked, he said he made the move so he and his family could further their study of Buddhism. He also mentioned starting a film school for Thai filmmakers and had written a script about an adventurer, that, according to fellow novelist Christopher Moore, he hoped would do for Thailand what
Hawaii Five-O
and
Magnum P.I.
had done for Hawaii.
[280]
To those who knew him better, he added that it was the credits flap surrounding
Over the Top
that was the final insult. To those who knew him much, much better, he admitted that it was for tax reasons: “He told me he owed a million dollars in taxes,” said one friend, “because business people had put him in tax shelters that didn’t work. So he got out of the country.”

“I didn’t come here on a fling,” Silliphant maintained to Los Angeles
Times
writer Daniel Cerone, who tracked him down for an interview in 1994, “but to change my whole existence, my personality, my understanding of life, and to leave what I call the eel pit of Hollywood behind. And it feels so good to be part of the human stream and not some Hollywood big shot who worries about what table he gets at Jimmy’s and won’t let the parking attendant touch his $80,000 Mercedes. That seems so far away now. That’s not the way we’re supposed to live.”
[281]

The Hollywood lifestyle may cost less in Bangkok, but it still costs. No longer able to be the romantic expatriate who could make do on a paltry book advance in Cuba in 1954, Silliphant — in his early seventies when he moved to Thailand — was disappointed when the job offers slowed down. The young people he embraced in the
Yaqui
days had by now taken over the industry and forgot who he was. He was even told by his new agent, “For God’s sake, don’t take in a list of everything you’ve written, nobody will believe it.”

One project did come through. In 1992, he adapted Truman Capote’s 1951
The Grass Harp
for Charlie Matthau, Walter’s son, to direct. The rights had been obtained by Matthau’s colorful mother, Carol, who had been a close friend of Capote (and was believed to have been the model for Capote’s eccentric
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
heroine, Holly Golightly). The picture would not be released until 1995, and it became Silliphant’s last produced script, but it would be one of his favorites.

“I couldn’t pay Stirling to do a first draft based on what he would normally make, or even, for that matter, WGA scale,” Matthau said. “I was a big fan of Stirling’s and really liked him when I met him, but I figured nothing was going to come of it because I didn’t have a paycheck for him. He called me a few days later and said, ‘You know, I have a really good feeling about the project and you. I’ll write it on spec.’ I worked with him for about a year on it.” The two men communicated by fax.

The Grass Harp
is a picaresque story of a young boy, Collin Fenwick (Edward Furlong), who comes to live with his two aunts — the straightlaced Verena Talbo (Sissy Spacek) and her free spirited sister, Dolly (Piper Laurie) — when his parents die. Its incidents range from the poetic to the outlandish, yet remain rooted in Capote’s strong notion of character. Set in 1930s Alabama, partly in a tree house, the script attracted a cast befitting its pedigree: Nell Carter, Charles Durning, Jack Lemmon, Mary Steenburgen, Scott Wilson, and Charlie’s father, Walter.

“Stirling had a great sense of story and he was great viscerally,” Matthau continued. “He knew what would work well on screen. Of course, he was delightful to work with — I had a great time with him — a gentleman. He was also very intelligent. He could ‘get’ these things that were ephemeral and abstract and could relate them to a story that was being told visually, and not lose the audience, and also keep the spirit and the idea that were the reasons that you fell in love with the material to begin with.”

Silliphant, in turn, expressed his confidence in young Matthau’s talent and abilities. “I must tell you,” he wrote, “that, of all the directors with whom I’ve worked over some thirty-plus years, you, without any question, have shown me the keenest story and construction sense.”
[282]

While the project was still in development, Matthau asked Kirk Ellis, his classmate from the University of Southern California Cinema-Television school, to do a rewrite. “[Kirk] was working for me at the time as a story analyst,” Matthau continued. “He had some coverage of the draft that Stirling wrote and he had some good notes on it, and I said, ‘Well, why don’t you just take a crack at it?’ I think it was a nice mesh of all of their sensibilities, mostly Capote’s, but I thought Stirling was great because he’s a wonderful craftsman. He was able to make sure that there was a real story and that it didn’t just drift off into being poetic. It was an instinctual thing and sometimes when you’re developing stuff, especially from books, you can be dead wrong or dead right, and in this case it worked out.”
[283]
The move was enough to finance the $8 million picture, but it also meant that, in accordance with industry standards, Silliphant’s deferred writing fee would be shared with Ellis so that, instead of $600,000, he received half.
[284]

Throughout this, the dream of starting a Thai-centric film industry never left his mind. He tried to make films there with Robert Ginty, a heavily credentialed theatre actor who became better known as a TV and movie action star. The two men decided to shoot an adventure film in their country in 1992. They didn’t exactly use Silliphant’s John Locke novels, the ones he had declared unfilmable. Instead,
Day of Reckoning
grew from his proposed Thailand-boosting TV series whose main character, “Jack O’Brien,” is an American Special Forces captain who served in ‘Nam and then moved to Thailand, became a Buddhist, and opened a travel business. All Silliphant and Ginty needed was THB 38 million (USD $1.5 million)
[285]
,
the Thai baht being the crucial part because they wanted to shoot the movie in Thailand with a Thai crew and evocative locations that revealed the sensibilities of the country and didn’t just serve as picturesque backgrounds. When they had no luck raising the money after a year of trying (“Most Thai investors would still rather fill a swamp and put up buildings than back a film,” Silliphant said bitterly), Ginty — Silliphant insisted it was without his knowledge — sold the property to Paramount and NBC where Fred Dryer, fresh from the success of his
Hunter
TV series, was looking for another project. Dryer and Victor Schiro were executive producers, and Ginty and Silliphant wrote the teleplay with Dryer’s input (via fax). When Dryer arrived in Thailand to shoot the picture, however, the script, said Silliphant, was vastly different from his own.

“There really was no story there before,” Dryer told Daniel Cerone. “It was about a guy who lived out on a rice barge in front of the hotel. He had a travel agency, with these slow-turning fans, and a lot of women taking care of him. He was a typical American expatriate who lives in Asia for specific womanizing reasons, and he was very sexist. It was very deprecating to the Thais. I brought in a guy who’s there because he has found a place in the world that fits him.”

Silliphant disagreed with the accusations and charged that Dryer “slashed and burned” his work: “I saw all the grace notes and textures of the writing and characterizations vanish one by one — the dialogue reduced to easy banality or to strong, silent looks; the story line pounded into an A-B-C linear form. There may still be two scenes left in the entire two-hour movie in which some hint, some faint luster of the original writing, may be sensed.”

The final picture, which cost $4 million, aired on NBC on March 7, 1994. It did not inspire a series, as was hoped. “Obviously, no word from NBC, Paramount, Dryer, et al,” Silliphant wrote after the movie aired and the Cerone article broke. “It is as though a massive non-event has just occurred, something you thought might be as disastrous as the earth abruptly becoming a black hole but which turned out to be as unnoticed as a silent (but non-deadly) fart. Only in Hollywood do people destroy each other during a fractious production, waste four million dollars and months in post-production hassling, then all on a Monday night the boil breaks. And — nothing. Well, not that it matters. Here in Bangkok, infants slept soundly in their beds. Nobody knew about
Day of Reckoning
and, had they, they couldn’t have given a fuck less, so why should I?”
[286]

The experience massively reinforced Silliphant’s image of Hollywood as an “eel pit” and stiffened his desire to establish an indigenous Thai film industry. To that end, he announced plans to write a screenplay called
Forever
that would be directed by the Thai director Prince Chatrichalerm Yugala. The next year, in fact, he co-wrote with, and Yugala directed, the Thai-based action picture
Gunman II.

What troubled him the most, he told Cerone, was “the American insular point of view. Our refusal to learn languages. Our refusal to really look around and see this is one big world… . We are so absolutely insulated — and Hollywood, in particular. We’re like in a shell. We’re like the crab. We scuttle around on the rocks but we can’t break out of the shell to realize this is a huge world. And there are wonderful films to be made.”
[287]

Life in Bangkok wasn’t just movies. As a famous ex-pat, Silliphant lived well, courtesy of “raids” that he would make to Los Angeles. He would fly there without announcing visit, make a script-doctoring deal, and flee back with money in his pocket that he never told Uncle Sam about. He downsized from his penthouse and he moved into a house, throwing parties for visiting Hollywood friends. Writer Jerry Hopkins noted one such affair where he asked several of his ex-pat friends to bring their Thai girlfriends so his Thai girlfriend would have someone to talk to. Once the women realized that they all came from different social classes, however, they refused to mingle and silence enveloped the festivities.

In Thai culture, a mistress is called a
mia noi
(minor wife), and Silliphant had two of them. By then, Tiana was in Vietnam shooting
From Hollywood to Hanoi
and editing it at DuArt in New York. She and Stirling remained married while inhabiting separate worlds. “It was a difficult time for her,” the son knew, “because she was, on the one hand, being pushed away by a husband who wanted to live his own life however he wanted to live it, and then, on the other hand, he was very much into the idea of them being husband and wife. He refused to consider a divorce, not that she pushed for it, but that she was getting, as any woman would, just kind of wondering what was up and where it was going.”
[288]

Friends also reported that, despite proclaiming the spiritual, Silliphant reverted to the sybaritic life he had known in Hollywood, the one he insisted he’d left behind. To his new friends he was a king. To his old, he was distant. “He and I had plans that I would come out and visit,” recalled writer and protégé David Morrell. “The schedules were always a little strange. I sent him a letter and I got a letter back and I know Stirling’s stuff, and I swear he did not write it. It was full of all these Britishisms, and I’m sure somebody else wrote it, telling me that it wasn’t going to happen. It wasn’t in character for him, as I knew the guy.”