Now Speaks the Devil was begun in 1984. First titled The Way, a first draft was completed
around 1986, with a final draft completed in 1991, then re-edited again for its
current publication by Ambler House
(with the fine assistance of Bookbaby).
This was the second screenplay I completed and the first I
considered good enough to show around Hollywood. My first, Under the Gun, was an ersatz “Dirty Harry” farrago about a right-wing
cop forced to team up with a potheaded hippie to wage war against a gang of neo-Nazis
on the rampage. I killed off the entire population of San Francisco in the
course of 120 stupid pages. It remains a-moldering deep in the file cabinet.
I feel quite a bit better about Now Speaks the Devil, though it’s a sophomore effort.The plot uses that old reliable McGuffin—dirty money lost
and found. Its initial spark was an article in, as I recall, The San Francisco Chronicle about a
young Christian man who found $10,000 cash in a bag in an underground Muni station.
After some undoubtedly intense prayer, he wisely decided to turn it over to the
police. A month passed, no one showed up to claim the money, and so it became
his.
Yes, that used to be the practice, once upon a time. The chap
was likely the last ever allowed to reclaim found treasure before the policy
was ended in response to the intensifying “War on Drugs.”
My muse immediately fell into “what if” mode. Might the
young man be a fool in telling the whole world about his windfall? That whole
world includes the money’s original owners. To my evil mind, he’d hung a “shoot
me” sign around his neck.
I know if I were a certain kind of bad guy, I’d want that
money back. And I’d stop at nothing to get it.
And so I set to work. The initial title was The Way.
THE VERY—VERY—BAD
One of my favorite Hitchcock truisms is “the better the
villain, the better the movie.”
The villain of this piece was all saddled up to ride. He’d
been already lurking the alleys of my brain since the late 1960s. Some regular
visitors to this space and those who know me elsewhere, will already know who
he is.
Namely, this guy.
Yup. That guy.
Sadly, by the mid-1980s, Lee
Van Cleef’s thirty-year career was in its final fade. The great movie villain
had not aged well and his films of the last ten years or so ranged from
mediocre to unwatchable. I’d tired of seeing him in bad movies and had about
given up.
Still, he remained an enormously charismatic, ideal bad guy.
Now the Speaks the Devil was, in
great part, an attempt to lift him from obscurity. It would be kind the kind of
movie he should have been in: a sophisticated, solid thriller. He would have
something better than decent to leave behind, a farewell worthy of John Wayne’s
in The Shootist. A great movie? Maybe
not. Just good. Most of the time,
that’s good enough.
It might well have worked out that way, too. I named my
villain Thornton and all his scenes
are first draft, with only minor editing over the years.
Whatever else readers thought, everyone who read this loved to hate Thornton. I bet you will,
too. He’s an avatar for movie villains everywhere.
THE INNOCENT
While I had my antagonist from the first keystroke, the
protagonist, the mouse in this ruthless cat-and-mouse game, was struggle and
nightmare from start to finish.
The young man in the original news article was, I recall, an
Evangelical. My acquaintance with religion was about nil, though I admired traditional
Christianity from a distance for its ritual and music. Nevertheless, my
consciousness was mired in a swampy nihilism where all faith traditions seemed
“the same” to me.
I created a family for this man, the classic stereotype from
the 1950s: dad, mom, and two kids. I built them a house in the San Francisco
suburb of Daly City. The theme of the necessary loss of innocence seemed to require
they live outside of Babylon to make their naiveté credible.
I first named my protagonist “Zeke,” a diminutive of “Ezekiel,”
which I plucked at random out of the Old Testament. Robert Redford could’ve played
him, someone of wide-eyed and stubborn innocence, a very likable if dangerous
naïf. He’s a cousin to Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest and characters in Eric Ambler—the ordinary man over
his head in extraordinary circumstances, sometimes through his own fault. Even
so, no matter how much he’s a fool, you don’t want anything really bad happen to him.
I tired of “Zeke” after awhile and called him “Buddy” for a
time. Knowing little about Christianity, I had a devil of a time figuring out
what kind of Christian he was. I
visited a few denominations in San Francisco to get some clues, but came away
with little. I read books by Jerry Falwell and Dinesh D’Souza in an attempt to see
the world through his eyes.
There was also the problem with the money. By the time I
started writing Now Speaks the Devil,
Finders Keepers policy had ended. Now “Buddy” would have to keep the money and
keep it a secret. This was a positive development. Now the story moved faster.
Further, as the members of the workshop I attended
(conducted by James N. “Not the Author of A Million Little Pieces” Frey) pointed
out, $10,000 was not enough money. The stakes would have to be raised. Ten
thousand ballooned to two million.
In my first drafts, “Buddy” was a stiff-necked barking Fundamentalist.
This did not go over well at all—rightly so. Readers were cheering too much for
Thornton.
Though the criticism was right, I resisted it strongly, not
just because I hated the Fundies (who were reaching their peak of national
power then), but because I wanted to avoid making him a wan goody-two shoes. If
I took that aspect out of him, I’d have to replace it with something else.
What, I had no idea.
There were also tone problems. I was blanketed by the angry shadow
of Sam Peckinpah at the time, giving
the script a grim punchy tone that clashed badly with the inherent dark humor
of the situation and my own strong comic instincts.
At the same time, I didn’t want a broad slapstick comedy.
(That I’d take care of with Whackers.)
Combining comedy with suspense requires careful stirring. Too much intensity in
the suspense kills the humor while too much humor—or arch Po-mo campiness—can
kill suspense. Young Frankenstein is
hilarious, but it’s neither scary nor suspenseful. And Sam Peckinpah had only a
minor touch for humor.
THE UGLY TIME
During the mid-1980s, feces started hitting my fan (some of
it thrown by me). I became essentially homeless, sleeping on couches, living in
hotels. “I get you,” one acquaintance put it. “Can’t cross the street without
getting intercoursed.”
I wrote little during this time. Still I kept nudging at The Way (a title I didn’t like, and I
bet you don’t either). At one point, I lost an entire draft off a large floppy
disk. I was in another writer’s group, one I didn’t fit in with. (I have
“fitting in” issues, as you may notice.)
One thing the group didn’t like about “Buddy” was his
“weakness and ineffectuality.” He wasn’t “hero” enough. He had no weapons of
his own with which fight Thornton, though I’d woven in a couple of supporting
characters as allies (and who still remain, rough and charming). I was urged to
refashion “Buddy” into an ex-Green Beret, armed with martial arts and automatic
weapons: A Schwarzenegger vehicle in other words. Maybe they could attach
Stallone. And then….
They’d nailed the problem, but not the solution. I could not
imagine any war veteran acting so naively. And if he wasn’t naïve, then he’d be
a criminal himself. By this point, my central theme—the loss of innocence—was
pretty well baked in. Turning Buddy into an action toy would lead to an
entirely different movie, a standard good vs. evil flick, rather than the good and evil story I wanted to tell, a very
different proposition and a movie I wouldn’t be particularly interested in
seeing, much less writing.
Finally, an idea bubbled up, inspiration unknown: What if
“Buddy” were an amateur magician and toy shop proprietor? Now he’d have some
skills and weapons to use against Thornton. Unconventional weapons, sure, but
weapons just the same, clever ones, that reflected his character. That one
decision further inspired a research visit to a Great America Park, near San
Jose. There, I found my “Mt. Rushmore” climax.
One more Hitchcock truism to keep in mind: Imagination is
more important than logic.
I was also finding the right tone between humor and serious suspense.
The theme deepened and clarified, this story of a man clinging to childhood
innocence far past the borders of wisdom. He was a character out of 1950s
sitcoms, such as Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet or My Three Sons, living a blinkered life, siloed
off from the rest of the world, fighting against the stream of time.
From that last show listed above, I lifted a new name for my
protagonist: Chip.
CALM SEAS, QUIET
HARBOR
In late 1990, I landed safely in an apartment in the Haight.
Life settled down. I bought my first computer (using Wordstar). I sent a draft
of the script to former magician, now noted stage hypnotist, John-Ivan Palmer for some tips
on stage magic.
One day I was kicking around my desk, searching for a new
title. I disliked The Way for that
weak consonant and lack of relevance. My thoughts were also wandering around
Thornton. I found it unnerving that such an evil man seemed to also to be some weird
moral force—as though I were “giving the devil his due.”
… The Devil’s Due . .
. now there’s a title! A brief search revealed it had been used only once,
in an episode of Star Trek: The Next
Generation. Titles are not copyrightable and there was remote chance of
confusing the marketplace.
The Devil’s Due:
not just a good title, but a great
title—neatly alliterative, three words that said everything about this script.
If only I could have kept it….
ENTER THE ACTORS
One of my roommates at the time was a San Francisco actor
named Michael Anduz. He loved the script, calling it “European” in outlook. He
had a point: The script is ironic, humorous, and unsentimental, expressing, I
think, a rather stern morality.
Michael was eager to play Thornton. He brought in a
colleague, Claudia Rosa, and together they also acted out a couple of scenes
with Chip and Ruth, his wife. It kept getting better.
Finally, Michael and Claudia talked me into having a bunch
of actors from their theatrical troupe over to read it through. (I’m embarrassed
to admit that I’ve forgotten the troupe’s name. Michael and Claudia, if you
read this….). The reading was a banging success—readers and audience gasped and
shuddered; they laughed, they booed Thornton and cheered and applauded when he
met his spectacular end. Grins all around.
At least, I had the blueprint for a good movie.
TO THE MARKETPLACE
And so, I sent The
Devil’s Due out across the street, to the screenwriting marketplace, sending
many dozens of query letters to agents, producers, and workshops, using the
following high-concept pitch:
“The Most Naïve Man in the World finds $2 million in drug
money in his garbage can. The Most Evil Bad Guy in the Universe wants it back. Or:
Ozzie Nelson meets Alfred Hitchcock and Sergio Leone!”
Letters and scripts poured out, rejections poured back in. Many
of the agents and other readers—a couple of them high up the ladder—enjoyed it,
but as with much of my work, criticism ran the gamut: I was either standing up
or sitting down too much; or turning left or turning right. For some, it wasn’t
“political” enough. For others too “political.” And some of course, wanted an
easy “good vs. evil” movie, not a cautionary moral tale.
Finally, though, like all my work, no matter how carefully
crafted and pitched, The Devil’s Due
failed to smell of money. And without that, where Hollywood’s concerned, ya got
nothin’.
In that matter, I was as innocent as Chip. The days of
producing a movie just because it would be good and provide satisfaction to its
producers and a smart decent-sized audience, had long gone. (As one producer, recently
quoted in The New Yorker, put it,
“Don’t send me anything good.”) “Little thrillers” like this are far beyond the
capacity of the giants in Hollywood nowadays, with no improvement in sight.
I kept writing screenplays through the 1990s. They mostly
got better. But I grew older, too old to be taken seriously by the mighty and
youth-obsessed. Unfair, unjust, unwise, unartistic. But that’s how it is.
THE DEVIL IN SUNLIGHT
The Devil’s Due slept
in the drawer for over twenty years. Now, thanks to the revolution in
publishing, I can put it in the spotlight for you, at least as an e-book.
As with the last two scripts I published, Whackers and The Uglies, I am, once again, ruining
my Hollywood career!
What Hollywood career? I was old news a dozen years ago and
they don’t read old news down south. From my view, Hollywood has become so
Stalinist, agents have to fill out a release to read a menu. They sure won’t download
an independently published script.
It will never be bought, never be produced, never light up a
darkened theater or living room; just the inside of your head. This is a good
thing actually, in that it enables me to break away a little bit from standard
screenwriting rules to make it more readable for you non-screenwriting folks.
One unwanted change was forced upon me—the title. In 2015, a
minus-budget horror movie called The
Devil’s Due escaped to theaters. (One of those movies where, if they paid me
to see it, I’d buy a ticket to another movie instead.)
Though that Devil
sank like a stone, I took no chances. I’ve had severe problems with The
Uglies being confused with a popular series of dystopian YA novels with
nearly the same title by Scott Westerfield. With an assist from my wife,
Elizabeth, I found a new title: Now
Speaks the Devil, a good one (but Lord, I miss the old one!)
All of the original cast who acted out the movie on the
screen of my skull have either passed on or aged now. Mr. Van Cleef and the
great Alan Rickman are gone; and Jack Nicholson’s a little long-toothed. Right
now, that brand of easy confident villainy, whose ancestry also includes Basil
Rathbone, Claude Rains and Zachery Scott, seems out of fashion. One current actor
who could capture Thornton’s fatal glamour and power is Hugh Laurie. I
like to think actors would be lining up around the block to audition to play
Thornton.
For Chip—a more challenging role—the dream of Robert Redford
or Rick Moranis has also gone gray. Matt Damon, or someone like him, bouncing
with youthful charm and breathless innocence, would do a great job.
In the years since, my outlook on life has changed a bit. Even
so, Now Speaks the Devil still glows
and sparkles, bristling with noirish charm and hair-raising thrills. It
deserves the sharp-eyed audience of sophisticated thriller fans I’m always
aiming for.
Whatever the “issues” in this sophomore effort, you’ll have
a good time (even if it is a screenplay). It’s not perfect, but perfection is a
mug’s game anyway. As Chip Adams himself has to learn.
And now, it’s time
for the Devil to speak.
Copyright 2016 by
Thomas Burchfield
Cover of Now Speaks the Devil by Cathi
Stevenson/Bookcover Express; images by Adobe
Photo of Lee Van
Cleef taken from ign.com.
Thomas Burchfield’s Butchertown, a
ripping, 1920s gangster shoot-‘em-up, will be published by Ambler House later
this Fall 2016. He is also the author of the contemporary Dracula novel Dragon's Ark,
winner of the IPPY, NIEA, and Halloween Book festival awards for horror in
2012. Burchfield is also author of the original screenplays Whackers, The
Uglies, and Now Speaks the
Devil (e-book editions only). Published by Ambler House Publishing,
those three are available at Amazon
and other online retailers. You can also find his work at Barnes
and Noble, Powell's
Books, and Scribed. Another script, Dracula: King of Nightmares, inspired by the Bram Stoker classic,
will also be out later this year. He also “friends” on Facebook, tweets on
Twitter, reads at Goodreads and enjoys a few beers at his neighborhood tavern.
You can also join his e-mail list via tbdeluxe [at] sbcglobal [dot] net. He
lives in Northern California with his wife, Elizabeth.
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