Steve Erickson - Rubicon Beach

Ten years after White Liars Llewellyn had his greatest success with a picture called Toward Caliente . The picture had been conceived and written by Llewellyn, and in the early stages of the project he had made a bid to direct. This plan was aborted by what he saw as his own lack of temperament conducive to direction and also by the birth of his daughter, Jane. By the time Toward Caliente was released, Jane was two years old; Lew and Maddy had been in the Hancock Park house five years. Toward Caliente provided an experience for Llewellyn similar to that of White Liars , with the writer and director at odds over a crucial resolution. Since Llewellyn believed this to be his movie, with the director merely the pilot of a vehicle the writer had constructed, he warred heatedly for the resolution he favored. The fundamental difference between Toward Caliente and White Liars was that this time the studio sided with the director in the conflict. In a high-level meeting with the studio executives Llewellyn was gently admonished for what were now considered his “arcane” instincts; the director’s position was praised as providing the audience with a “stronger emotional identification.” Llewellyn said, “If I hear another word about ‘strong emotional identification’ from another idiot who’s never written a sentence or directed a foot of film, I’m going to slug him.” It said much about the talent of Hollywood executives for self-abasement that those to whom Llewellyn directed this outburst took it sanguinely; there was, after all, a good deal of money involved in Toward Caliente . “We’ve made our decision,” the production chief explained. “We realize, Lee, you have your artistic conscience to live with in this matter. If you wish, we’d be willing to remove your name from the picture.” Lew was aghast. “This is my picture,” he said.

A woman named Eileen Rader was brought into the conflict. Rader was the head of the studio’s script department. She’d been with the department thirty-five years, having begun in her early twenties. She’d become particularly adept at dealing with what the studios called their literary prima donnas, writers who had detoured through the studios on their way to careers as poets or playwrights or novelists. Only after these writers realized how far they’d detoured and how unlikely they were ever to return to the main thoroughfare did they become reasonable. Rader was successful with this kind of writer because she affected empathy with them; she was admired by the studio for her soft touch. While some complained that she coddled them, the evidence was the writers came around. She demonstrated to them, in ways they found irrefutable, how they could live with the studio’s position and still consider themselves artists. Invariably Eileen reduced the problem to a single question. “Listen to me,” she would say, “we both know these guys are bastards. We both know their taste is what they sit on. But ask yourself this. Will anyone be better off if this picture doesn’t get released? Do you really want to punish the public, who’d be better off with ninety percent of a Lee Edward movie than none at all, in order to try and punish the studio, which you can’t hurt anyway because it’s too callous and bloated to feel pain? I’m not on either your side or the studio’s in this,” Eileen would say, “I’m on the side of this picture which, even slightly compromised, is too good to lose in a world of bad movies. I think that’s the side you’re really on too.” Implicit in all this was the inescapable reality that the studio was going to win and the writer was going to lose. Once the writer accepted this, even subconsciously, it was a matter of time before he relented.

In the case of Toward Caliente the time was long and uneasy. Toward Caliente was Llewellyn’s attempt to turn back the clock and win the battle over White Liars , where his name had changed and he had lost control of those things to which he had once given passion. One night he went home, to the house that reminded him he badly needed another success, and tried to convince himself there was something he needed more and that it was still within his reach. He tried to convince himself there was a way back to the main thoroughfare. Had he convinced himself of this that night, he honestly believed he would have summoned the will for it: he’d have gone into his bedroom and said to his sleeping wife, I’m going to be a poet again, and if it means losing this house, if it means losing my family, if it means losing everything, then so be it. So he tried to be a poet again that night; he sat himself in the study and went to work. All night he worked at writing a single poem, there in the dark of the study with a single light burning over the desk. At four in the morning, after sitting at the desk seven hours, he had written the following:

My love is like a red red pose

He looked at this “poem” and heavily, slowly, picked up the telephone and made a call. “Eileen,” he said, and to his horror felt a sob bubbling up from his throat. To cut it off he croaked, “Give them what they want,” and quickly got the phone back in its cradle before it was too late.

At dawn a few hours later Llewellyn staggered into his kitchen where Maddy was feeding Jane. She looked up and was dismayed at the sight of him. “I gave them what they wanted,” he said in an abysmal voice.

“You couldn’t help it,” she said, “it’s like that in this business. “That’s a lie,” he answered. “That’s what everyone says and it’s a lie. Anyone can help it. It’s not something they do to someone, it’s a choice they give you and you take it or you leave it.” He swallowed; the same sob had been bubbling up all morning. “I tried to be a poet last night,” he explained. “I spent all night trying to write a poem and this is what I came up with.” He handed it to her. “All night and what I came up with was, My love is like a red red rose.”

He turned and left. She looked at the poem. “You wrote pose ,” she said to the kitchen door. She heard the front door close.

Toward Caliente was an impressive success in Los Angeles and New York and Toronto and Boston and did surprisingly well in such cities as Dallas and Santa Fe and Seattle. It got good reviews and, some months later, three Academy Award nominations for the performance of the lead actress, editing and screenplay. That his only Academy Award nomination should feel like such a stab in the back was beyond the understanding of those around Llewellyn, including his close friends and family. As with White Liars , Llewellyn found himself on the losing side of a creative conflict only to see the judgment of the winning side vindicated. The studio was not so heavy-handed as to call this to his attention. They thought it ungracious, though, that he didn’t thank them for making his movie a hit. Part of him genuinely hoped he would lose the award, as though that would somehow prove something to the studio and justify himself; part of him wanted to win so that he might lambaste them from the podium, though in such a triumphant context this action wouldn’t carry much logic, let alone appear particularly at tractive. In fact the worst thing that could happen did: Toward Caliente won the Writers Guild award but lost the Oscar, thus giving Lew’s compromised script the esteem of his peers while denying it the somewhat more tarnished sanction of the industry as a whole. “Don’t you understand they fucked with my script?” he railed at the members the night of his honor, weaving drunkenly behind the microphone. The writers burst into laughter. Since Guild winners usually went on to win the big prize, it could later be assumed the rest of Hollywood didn’t find the spectacle amusing. After that there was nothing like a palpable blackout of his career, it was just that the phone didn’t ring so much. The city assumed that with Toward Caliente something of Llewellyn’s career was dying by his own hand, and they were right.