Pete Hamill - Piecework

“When I think back,” Huston says, “there seem to’ve been dozens of them. Hundreds of them.”

At first glance, such casting seems odd. Huston’s special talent has always been for the spare and the laconic, as if either Hemingway or Marcus Aurelius were forever present behind his shoulder. There is very little self-pity in Huston or his work; compared with him, Lowry is a babbling whiner. But there are several strains in Huston’s work that do display an affinity with those in Lowry’s. Starting with High Sierra (for which he co-wrote the screenplay from a novel by W. R. Burnett), through The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Red Badge of Courage, Moby Dick, The Night of the Iguana, The Misfits, Fat City, The Man Who Would Be King, and others, Huston has been fascinated with doomed heroes. These men (they are almost never women) accept fate stoically, knowing that for them it is too late to change or compromise; in an odd way, the Consul is one of them.

Huston has also been intricately involved with Mexico. As a young man, or so the story goes, he rode as a cavalry officer with one of the Mexican revolutionary armies. One of his first notable screenplays (written with Wolfgang Reinhardt and Aeneas Mackenzie) was for Juarez (1939), when Huston was a contract writer at Warners. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Night of the Iguana were filmed in Mexico, and since 1974, Huston has lived in a rambling house in Puerto Vallarta. It is easy to imagine Huston and Lowry wandering the streets of Cuernavaca together, visiting its cantinas and brothels, speaking of prizefighters and Mexican gods and the tragic end of the Spanish Republic. But the two men never met. The scripts for Under the Volcano continued to be written, following Huston to his estate in Ireland through the fifties and sixties, to locations around the world, and finally to Puerto Vallarta. None of them were any good.

Then a script arrived by a young man named Guy Gallo.

Although I have had a certain amount of youthful success as a writer of slow and slippery blues it is as much as my life is worth to play anything in the house.

— Malcolm Lowry to Conrad Aiken

March 13, 1929

Guy Gallo is twenty-eight years old, soft voiced, black haired, and handsome. He is also a good whiskey drinker. On this day, he is sitting on a crude wooden box on a path cut into the side of a hill in the village of Metepec, a dozen miles from Cuernavaca. Across the path, perched on the edge of a steep barranca, is a reconstruction of the Farolito, Lowry’s mythical cantina-whorehouse, where the Consul comes to his squalid end. The infantry of a movie location — technicians, grips, actors, drivers — seems to be everywhere; trailers jam a side road; horses whinny in an improvised corral. Behind Gallo, standing on a hill, their flat Indian faces as impassive as masks, a family of Mexicans watches.

Gallo started writing plays at Harvard, and had two produced. “I went on to the Yale School of Drama, to get a doctorate. At some point during that year, I began to think about Under the Volcano. I’d heard of the book before, of course, but it wasn’t in any course work I’d had, and I hadn’t read it. Then I saw this survey of maybe twenty-five or thirty writers, in the New York Times Book Review, asking them for their favorite books and why, and Lowry’s book was on a lot of the lists. So I went out and bought the book and read it. About three months later, I had this meeting with Paul Bluhdorn, an independent producer who was a friend of a friend, and started talking about Under the Volcano as a possible project. And he said, ‘Well, yeah …’ It wasn’t as if it were preproduction — there was no ironey — it was more a friendly challenge than anything else. But it became a kind of carrot that was dangled in front of me. That’s before we knew how complicated the rights situation was.”

Gallo then went to work. He read Lowry’s novel closely, wrote several critical papers on it, made a bony structural outline. Bluhdorn then told him about a possible producer from Mexico. Could Gallo fill in the skeletal outline, for presentation to this Mexican producer? “It sort of seemed silly to write a prose treatment of a novel,” Gallo says, “so I wrote the screenplay very, very quickly, trying to give Bluhdorn something to sell.”

But then it turned out that the rights were not available, and Bluhdorn lost interest. Gallo put the script away, continued with his schoolwork at Yale, arid wrote two original screenplays. Then his name was given to Michael Fitzgerald, the son of poet and translator Robert Fitzgerald, and the producer of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood, which Huston had directed. Fitzgerald was looking for a writer on another Huston film, and wanted to see some samples of Gallo’s work. Gallo told him he had the original screenplays and his version of Under the Volcano; he’d be glad to send them to Fitzgerald.

“Fitzgerald said no, don’t send Under the Volcano,” Gallo says. “Just send me the original work. So I thought Volcano was dead again.” Then a couple of weeks later, Gallo got a phone call from Fitzgerald. “He had mentioned Volcano to John Huston. Michael had never, ever read it, but just mentioned it to John, something on the order of, ‘Still another version of Under the Volcano/ And John wanted to see it. I sent along a copy and that’s when things started happening.”

Gallo’s screenplay was a stripped-down and simplified version of Lowry’s novel. The novel begins on the Day of the Dead in 1939, with Laruelle remembering the events of the Day of the Dead the year before, when borh the Consul and his wife were killed. In his screenplay, Gallo removes Laruelle as a character, merging some of him with Hugh, making a more cleanly structured triangle of the Consul, Yvonne, and Hugh. He gets rid of the 1939 chapter, and has all the action take place in present time, 1938.

“Basically, it was a structural decision,” Gallo says. “If you can do it in one day, how do you do ít? In one of his letters, Lowry talks about his version of Tender Is the Night, and says, when he delivers it, that ’we left out enough for a Puccini opera, but here it is!’ That gave me some confidence. As a writer reading his work, and thinking of it as a film, already the premise was: Something had to go. I mean, you couldn’t do everything. So it became a matter of my reading of the novel, and what could go without a loss. Lowry understood the difference between the two forms, and if he could do a different Scott Fitzgerald, perhaps I could do it to Lowry.”

For Gallo, the task wasn’t simply a matter of chopping away at the book; first it had to be understood. “You see, you gotta distinguish between what appeals to you about Under the Volcano as a writer, which is the lyricism and the complexities of the pattern, and what appeals to you thematically, which is actually the story. It’s difficult to imagine this story without the narrative strategy that he employs to tell it. There is a strong, central thematic line in this book that is not impervious to dramatization: the character of the Consul, and that very central, dramatic issue of betrayal and the times, the historical inevitability. … In the novel you get to the kernel of the story through many different avenues, and the task you have to figure out, early on, is that you can’t duplicate those avenues.”

Gallo remembers working with Huston as if it were an intense seminar with an old master, which, in a way, it was. “There are a lot of things in the book — images, good images, startling images — but whenever I would have anything like that in the script, the question would always boil down to: ‘It’s very good, but what does it mean?* And the answer isn’t: ‘Well, this is a reference to Faustus, and that’s an adumbration of this particular fall and it’s prepared and it has to be.…’ What does it mean in terms of present tense? What does it mean for our character? And our situation? And if it didn’t do both something for the present tense and something for the overall structure, then it wasn’t doing enough.”