As Luck Would Have It
I have written extensively about this elsewhere in a recent piece on Stage32.com titled My Life on Spec: the Writing of Sideways, but I thought it bore being isolated, and amplified, on its own. The subject is luck. Some prefer the term serendipity, but serendipity implies “happy accident,” and, to me, that’s an entirely different preternatural phenomenon all together. Jung’s term synchronicity perhaps better explains what I’m about to write because that word was coined to explain conjoined events that are, well, inexplicable.
As everyone who knows me and the story of Sideways by now knows, my unpublished novel was optioned by Alexander Payne and Michael London in the winter of 2000. Payne’s romantic, somewhat impetuous dream, was to rush it right into production, shoot it in Super-16 mm – a format that automatically ends up in 35 mm, but which allows for the shooting of a lot more footage, since the raw stock is cheaper. Great. After a decade of much-chronicled suicidal despair and destitution I was ready to watch my ship — hell, my argosy! — come in. Not so fast.
In March of 2000, after having taken one reconnaissance trip up to the Santa Ynez Valley where my book is set, Alexander Payne called me. He began by casually asking me for a wine recommendation, remembering a wine I had recently exulted over. I reminded him what it was. Then, in a somewhat halting, sheepish, voice, he told me that he was going to have to put Sideways on hold — my heart fell into my stomach! — that there was another film he wanted to make first — nonplussed would be a mild term for what I was feeling at that seemingly fatalistic moment. That film was About Schmidt. He went off to make it. I didn’t hear from him in nearly two years. He and London kept re-upping the option on my book, but it still remained unpublished, unfilmed.
About Schmidt was released in the winter of 2002 and collected a number of awards. In the winter of 2003 Alexander Payne returned his attention to Sideways. Or, ostensibly. I took a trip up to the Santa Ynez Valley with him and this then wife, Sandra Oh; George Parra and his then wife (forget her name); Michael London and his still current wife, Lynn; and me. It was a heady time, and I sensed that a film was finally in the works.
Then, one Monday, around 10:00 a.m., shortly after this trip, I got a call from Michael London. He was unusually animated for him. He said he had just had the weirdest conversation with Alexander Payne. Apparently Payne, on the previous Friday, had been offered a lot of money to direct a remake of a ‘60s caper film titled Gambit. The script had been retooled by no less than Joel and Ethan Coen and was to star the lead in Payne’s critically-acclaimed Election, Reese Witherspoon. On Friday, as the story unfolded from Michael, and unbeknownst to both of us, Payne told his agent David Lonner to close the deal for him to direct Gambit. Michael swore he no knowledge of this until he got the call on Monday. However, over the weekend, Payne apparently had had an apostasy on Gambit. According to Michael, Payne explained over the phone that he had had a “panic attack” about telling us, after three long years, that he wasn’t going to be making Sideways after all, and that he had phoned his agent and told him to call Paramount – or whatever major studio it was – that he was reversing his decision and wasn’t going to make Gambit, that Sideways was going to be his next film. He concluded the call, in his effusive manner, by telling Michael that he loved him, he loved me, he loved the project, mea culpa, etc. The rest is history.
If Payne had made Gambit I am convinced he never would have made Sideways for a host of reasons, the main one being that the project would had just languished so long on his docket of films that he wanted to make that the bloom would have been off the rose for good. Why he had a “panic attack” and turned down what no doubt was a very healthy payday to accept a way lesser payday — that worked out for him in the end since he got serious back-end remuneration on Sideways — I’ll never know. Understand something, Dear Reader: no one else wanted Sideways. Hell, no one else got it. Not a single publisher, not any other director or Hollywood development company that it had been submitted to. Let me repeat: NO ONE wanted this project. And yet, to this day, the film is fondly remembered. So fondly, there’s now going to be a play that will be staged, premiering May 18th at the Ruskin Group Theater in Santa Monica, CA. So fondly that, as I reported in the below post, that to this day, the Santa Ynez Valley is overrun with Sideways fans more than seven years after the film was released. With no immodesty intended, Sideways has become a certified iconic film/book.
And yet but for a panic attack there almost wasn’t a film. Was it luck? Did some unseen being, smiling down on my wretched soul, inhabit Payne over that fateful weekend and have a little heart-to-heart with him in the middle of a restless slumber? One wonders how many films that could have been a Sideways — now enshrined with commemorative plaques in the WGA Theater in Beverly Hills as one of the 101 Greatest Screenplays of All Time — never got made because that preternatural voice never bothered to raise His voice. Was it luck? Was it “meant to be”? — a phrase that always makes me cringe because, well, was it “meant to be” that 19 religious zealots would kamikaze fly jetliners into three buildings and murder 3,000 people in the name of Allah?
And, yet, it’s true: Sideways was almost never made because of one weekend panic attack. Because of one sensitive artist, with agents and studios pulling at his sleeves every five minutes of the day, imploring him to do this, do that, who had, in a moment of monk-like self-reflection, a true enantiodromia.
The following week after his epiphany that spending two years of his life on some studio remake of a ‘60s caper film would not have been a wise choice for his auteurist oeuvre, Payne settled down and started to write the script with his longtime writing partner, Jim Taylor. In a matter of weeks they had cranked out a first draft. The die had been cast. The hook had been set. I was pretty sure now there was going to be a film.
I always tell aspiring writers that one day they, too, will get lucky, that their work will wend its way into the hands of someone who has the power to make it happen. But when that moment arrives, they have to have the goods. Maybe the strength of the material is what bought me that blinding fulguration of “luck.” Or maybe it was just … luck.
Or, as the great golfer Ben Hogan – a laconic man known for his blunt sententiousness – once answered when asked if golf was a game of luck. “It’s a funny thing, the more I practice the luckier I get.”
