The View from the Bridge by Nicholas Meyer Read Free Book Online

preproduction. When I returned from New York a week or so later, one of the producers made a big speech about how a screenplay is a blueprint for a building that hasn’t been built yet, how there were always adjustments to be made, etc. “You know, maybe we need another window? A few more electrical outlets?” Made sense to me.
    I sat down and read the revised script, puzzled to find that The Honey Factor by Nicholas Meyer was now Invasion of the Bee Girls by Nicholas Meyer and Amy Andrews.
    Amy Andrews? Who the hell was Amy Andrews? Girlfriend of one of the producers, it turned out. All that had been witty and oblique (the Cinema I stuff) had been chucked in favor of dumbed-down stuff for the Paramus drive-in crowd.
    I was furious. Mortified. Impotent. I rang my agent, bellowing like a wounded elephant.
    â€œGet my name off these fucking credits.”
    â€œNo,” he responded, “get her name off the fucking credits.”
    â€œYou don’t understand,” I whined, “this thing is a piece of shit.”
    â€œ You don’t understand,” he corrected. “You need the credit.”
    In any case, the assignment of credits wasn’t up to me or the studio; assigning the final credits for a film is the jealously guarded prerogative of the Writers Guild (of which I was now a member). On this occasion the Guild decided in my favor.
    We will come back to this topic of credits by and by.
    I never did manage to see Invasion of the Bee Girls . Maybe one day. People who see it on my résumé keep telling me it is a camp classic but I never know what this means or if it’s a good thing.
    Meantime it was back to the drawing board. Invasion of the Bee Girls was not going to be my passport to immortality. Looking back on an enterprise of this sort, one is inevitably tempted to gloss over the dry spells and concentrate on the positive events, to telescope time so that good and bad are conflated to the point almost of overlapping. Not the case. There was a year when I made four thousand dollars, in all. My parents were still of the opinion I was heading nowhere fast, but mercifully I heard about their anxieties only secondhand, through my sister and her husband, also now in Los Angeles. Still, a secondhand vote of no confidence was demoralizing enough. TV dinners were the order of the day. As was self-doubt. I spent a lot of time on my own—it had begun to seem like my natural state—wondering if I was ever going to have anything to show for my efforts besides a stash of model boats. I had a chip on my shoulder, exacerbated by an arrogance that erupted when I felt ignored. At the same time, like Groucho, I would never have belonged to any club that would have me for a member.
    I lost my agent, who didn’t trouble to tell me I had lost him, a familiar if unpleasant repetition. One morning the phone rang and someone named Kevin Sellers informed me that he would now be handling my affairs.
    â€œWhat happened to John?” I asked, naively surprised that an agent who had been unable to sell anything by his client should wish to dump same.
    â€œHe’s very busy,” Kevin explained. He turned out to be a good kid, and I liked him a lot. He actually cared about writing and movies.
    Of course he did not remain an agent very long.
    Also I acquired a girlfriend. When I met Kelly she had been working for one of the two Bee Girls producers (not the one with the girlfriend-writer). I was instantly smitten. She had, after all, smiled at me, and we moved in together shortly thereafter, me shifting my Culver City digs for a small house in funky Laurel Canyon.
    Kelly was beautiful, intelligent, musical, and neurotic, though I suppose I ran her a close second in that last department. It was a stormy romance, chockablock with scenes wherein she spoke long monologues about her life and times while I sat cowed and listened, wondering how had I gotten myself into this. Or could wangle my