Authors: Tom Grimes

Mentor: A Memoir (14 page)

At some point, I actually said this. But, to write the play, I compressed conversations that took place over several years into one scene, then mixed what we said with what I invented, and the scene continued:

AL
It’s familiar. Everyone knows what a virus
is, so there’s no lack of audience identification.
This is what makes it universal. We start
with a common cold. Do a real Spielbergian
domestic Cuisinart blender household number,
open up with a lot of real Americana
tracking shots, establish the scene. Now. The
parents leave pretty seventeen-year-old Sally
home for the weekend. You want to get the
parents out of the way immediately. Parents
are death at the box office. Kill the parents.

Mike begins to take notes.

MIKE
Parents dead.

AL
OK. Good. Now. Sally calls her friends the
instant her parents leave in the Saab. They invite
some boys over. This is where we throw in the
sex angle.

MIKE
They all start jumping into bed.

AL
Right. OK. Now, little Joey, Sally’s little
brother, suddenly comes down with a fever.
He comes home from school . . . he looks like . . .

MIKE
Casper the Ghost.

AL
Great! Terrific! Write that down.

MIKE
He picked up the virus in school. Like, we’ll
see him at the water fountain with some
lower-middle-class kids—

AL
No. School is out. You gotta get a building, fill
it full of kids, the whole thing costs too much
time and money. I want to keep it simple. I
want a virus to appear, wreak havoc, then get
wiped out by some new brand of mega-
antibiotic. The virus can run rampant, but
only on one block. Remember: horror movies
are microcosms of society. So: Think small.
Think microcosm.

Short pause.

AL
Help me. I’m totally lost.

MIKE
Joey.

AL
Right. Joey. Joey comes in, his stomach hurts.
Sally, like a good sister, tucks him in, etc. In
spite of this, his temperature climbs. Sally calls
the doctor, a good-looking intern named . . .
Matt, who Sally has a crush on.

MIKE
And he wants to get into Sally’s pants.

AL
No. Sally’s the heroine, therefore her pants
never come off. Pants come off secondary girl-
friend characters who are slaughtered by this
raging out-of-control virus ten seconds after
they have sex with their boyfriends. Got it?

MIKE
Got it. Secondary characters fuck and die.
Keep lust to a minimum.

AL
Good. Now, Matt leaves, the other kids
come over, they’re jumping into bed, etc.
What happens? Little Joey’s temperature
SKYROCKETS! He starts changing, getting
more hideous. He’s turning into this, this,
this . . .

MIKE
Thing?

AL
Thing! Exactly! You know, the red spots in the
eyes, the vomit spewing across the room.

MIKE
Sounds like
The Exorcist
.

AL
The Exorcist
. Nobody’s made an
Exorcist
rip-
off for years. It could be viable.

MIKE
Are Sally’s parents religious people?

AL
When confronted by grief and death, yes.

MIKE
So this couldn’t be a speaking-in-tongues,
gospel-type experience then, could it?

AL
Definitely not. (Beat.) Although, if you could
imply that without stating it, so that we have
this straightforward virus thing, and then tie
in on a subliminal level this cultlike Black
Mass religioso mumbo jumbo-type theme, we
could double our audience.

MIKE

Like, “ Was it a virus . . . or was it . . . God?”

Ingrassia settled my divorce within weeks. My wife kept everything we owned (which wasn’t much); I became solely responsible for our five-thousand-dollar credit card bill. But Jody’s husband refused to surrender a penny of their joint property and ignored motions demanding his appearance in court; her divorce took seven and a half years. During that time, Ingrassia closed his office and would vanish for months. When he reappeared, we’d meet him in odd places. One afternoon, Jody waited outside a Banana Republic store while he bought a safari jacket. Then he emerged and had her sign some papers on a metal trash-can lid. One evening, over cocktails in the Cornelia Street Café, he said to us, “But forget Jody’s divorce. I can get financing for a biker movie. You want to write it?”

I said, “Okay.”

Then, on spec (the Hollywood term for writing a script, then hoping someone buys it), Jody and I wrote Ingrassia a biker script in three days. As I sat at my battered desk and typed, Jody stood behind me and read over my shoulder. We began our marathon sessions by drinking coffee. After sundown, I switched to beer, and Jody switched to wine. Our task was to craft an interestingly terrible script, and we exchanged ideas like, Should the car sail off the bridge here? (Ingrassia planned to rent a car, have a stuntman drive it off a bridge into a lake, and then report the car as stolen. “Insurance pays for the loss,” he said. “It’s win-win for everybody.”) Then he saw a Sylvester Stallone movie and he liked the knife Stallone’s character used. “Give me an unusual knife,” he said. “Something menacing.” I gave him a mechanical arm that fired six-inch bullets. “We can actually fake this,” he said. “I love it.” But his mysterious investors backed out and we didn’t make the biker film. Instead, we made
Hot Splash
, a semi-soft-porn surfer flick, which went straight to videotape and late-night American TV. For the play’s next scene, I didn’t even need to invent dialogue. I simply transcribed Ingrassia’s words verbatim:

MIKE

So you want me to throw in a little more
character.

AL
Character is a wonderful thing. But we don’t
have the money to buy actors who can act like
characters.

MIKE
Well, what do we have?

AL
Basically . . . ? Some girls who’ll take off their
clothes.

The
Citizen Kane
of Ingrassia’s oeuvre, however, was
Snake Island
. By the time he began filming it, Jody and had I moved from New York to Key West. Up the coast, in Cocoa Beach, Ingrassia had bought a modest villa, turned it into a small production studio, and convinced a retired stuntman who’d worked in James Bond movies to loan him his house, which was inland, surrounded by palm trees, near a swamp, and an ideal location for shooting
Snake Island
. The guy said, “Just stay out of my bedroom.” Otherwise, Ingrassia had permission to transform the two-story hut into a creepy, decrepit hovel, inhabited by snakes. Crew members leased machines that worked like vacuum cleaners in reverse and sprayed dirt, dust, and mold over the living room, dining room, and kitchen walls. They infested the place with spiders and let them spin webs. They slathered the house’s exterior with mud. A makeup person showed Ingrassia a sample of fake blood. “Darker,” Ingrassia said. “Use more chocolate.” Filming began with two couples—the girls wearing bikinis, the guys wearing swimming trucks—who get lost in the swamp. When their motorboat’s engine sputters and dies, they’re forced to step onto the island. “Stay together,” one of them said. (I didn’t write that line.) They soon lost track of one another anyway. The blonde couple’s response is to immediately undress. A few days later, the rented snake and his trainer arrived. Uncoiled, the snake was four feet long. While two dozen of us stared at it, Ingrassia sent for Murray, the twenty-three-year-old actor who played “Snake Boy.” As a child, a snake had poisoned him. Now he could inject venom with his tongue. We waited. Twenty minutes later, the casting director returned. Murray was having difficulty “getting into character” and had locked himself in his EconoLodge motel room. Baking in the hot sun, the snake rested in his cage, coiled like a bullwhip. Ninety minutes later, Murray showed. Ingrassia raised his megaphone, ready to shout, “Action!” Then he signaled the trainer to release the snake. But the snake had fallen asleep. The trainer dragged him out of his cage, and the snake uncoiled, but remained limp. We gathered closer and watched it lie on the ground in a stupor. Ingrassia shouted, “Okay, forget it. We’ll shoot the fight scene on the roof.” But the roof’s sundeck had been sturdily built, and as one of the crew’s carpenters sawed partially through a wooden railing so the actor punched in the jaw during the fight sequence could fly backward through it to his death, the house’s owner bounded down his dirt driveway in his Jeep, skidded to a stop, stepped out, looked up, and yelled, “That’s it! Everybody get the fuck out!”

Ingrassia finished the movie on another location and released it with the title
Kiss of the Serpent
. We never made
Virus
, but Ingrassia read its script. After we talked about it I had:

SCENE FOUR

Al’s office. Lights up. Mike paces, eyeing Al. Al, seated, reads Mike’s script intently. When he turns the last page, Al flips the binder closed and launches into his speech.

AL

I have to tell you something. This is a script
I could love. (Beat.) If there could be physi-
cal bonding between a man and a screenplay,
Virus
, for me, would be that screenplay.

MIKE
The gasoline . . . ?

AL
On the hair—

MIKE
The beach, the night—

AL
The terror, the bondage—

MIKE
The whole sexual subtext—

AL
The gunpowder in the mouth—

MIKE
The exploding head!

Beat.

AL
I cried. (Beat.) I’m a man, I cried. (Beat.)
Sweet little Sally dead? This was the death of
innocence.

But I had a collection of scenes, not a play. I needed a plot, a through line, and a time frame within which all action had to take place. The play was stillborn.

One afternoon at the restaurant, I’d finished polishing wine-glasses, filling salt and pepper shakers, folding napkins, and setting electric candles on my tabletops. It was August. We wouldn’t be busy. So I sat on a stool at the short service bar and opened
Premiere
, a new movie magazine. I read an article about films currently being made in South Africa. Apartheid was ending and wealthy, white South Africans wanted their money out of the country. But transferring funds was illegal. If wealth disappeared, the regime would collapse. Money had to be invested in projects developed in South Africa. Except there was a loophole.
Profits
from investments could be deposited in overseas accounts. This money became known as “flight capital.” One of the best ways to create it was to make a movie. Investors pooled their money. Fading Hollywood stars were recruited to play the leads in mediocre action films. South African death squads supplied weapons, transport vehicles, helicopters, and planes. And military personnel were hired as extras. I put my own twist on the story. Browner, a CIA agent, convinces Ted, an investment banker, to make an action film, which is a cover for a coup:

TED
You want a script.

BROWNER
That’s right.

TED
Of this idea.

Ted indicates the envelope Browner has set beside him.

BROWNER
Right.

Short pause.

TED
What is this idea, Petey? As you see it.

BROWNER
In a nutshell? An exiled leader, a hero of the
people, puts together an army of freedom
fighters. He trains them in a country adjacent
to his homeland that is sympathetic to his
plight. The freedom fighters go in, depose the
brutal, non-Westernized dictatorship, democ-
racy and free trade are restored, and our hero
rides off into the sunset with pledges of U.S.
economic aid and contracts for billions in
military hardware. So get us a script, Ted. And
a crew. A film crew.

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