Here’s to You, Mrs. Robinson
By Thomas McKelvey Cleaver
I suppose everyone who ever met the great Anne Bancroft has his own story that
he remembers well. She might not have ever remembered meeting him, but everyone
who ever met her, remembers the event.
My own came in 1986, when I was making the rounds as my agent put out my
Vietnam script, In The Year Of The Monkey, the piece that made my
reputation and ultimately allowed me to move out of a rented room in Hollywood
and up to a nice little house in the hills, though unfortunately it never got
made (though it was once called “the best unproduced Vietnam script in
Hollywood” by no less than American Film-- that and three bucks will get you a grande at Starbucks).
I had a meeting with Mel Brooks at his offices over in the old writer’s building
at Fox; he’d read the script and wanted to meet me. I walked down the long
second-floor hallway to his offices, which were halfway down on the right as I
recall. Just as I got to the door, it opened.
And there was Anne Bancroft.
Don’t let anyone kid you, people in Hollywood are the most starstruck fans on
the planet. She saw “the look” on my face, and then she broke out in The Laugh
(you know it, you’ve heard it on-screen; it’s even better in person), and said
“You must be that talented new writer my husband’s so anxious to meet.” I think
I replied that I hoped that was true-- at least I know I said something she
liked, since she gave me The Laugh again, and then said, “Don’t worry--
remember, he’s just another writer, and if he wasn’t a nice guy I wouldn’t be
married to him.” And then I stepped out of the way and she headed down the
hall.
I was glad to hear her remind me of that, because to tell the truth I was
anxious about meeting a man whose work I respected as much as I did that of Mel
Brooks. No, my script wasn’t a comedy. Mel may be known for making the audience
laugh so hard their faces hurt when the movie’s over, but he’s also a fan of
serious work, and has produced some serious work over the years.
The meeting went really well. He really did like the script, and totally “got”
the story of a boy who goes to war a believer, becomes an unbeliever, and
ultimately discovers what he really believes and finds the strength to act on
it. The meeting became one of those classes you don’t have the money to pay the
tuition for, given for free as he went over the script in detail. What was Mel
Brooks teaching me?
What to leave out. What to cut. What was unnecessary.
I think the single biggest thing I learned that afternoon-- since I have used it
in every script I’ve ever written since-- was to stop having a nice little
“moment” at the end of a scene. “You don’t need that,” he told me. “Cut it out
and the scene falls into the next one, and you keep their attention.” He said a
script should be like a runner, who only stays on his feet because of his
momentum, until the end, “when you can pause and give them that moment-- they’ve
been wanting it, now they’ve got it, and they’ll thank you for it.”
I also remember the one thing he congratulated me on: “You have a nice emotional
hook in each scene for the actors to hang their performance on. That’s really
helpful.”
Unfortunately, though Mel did in fact want to buy my script, other events got in
the way and in the end it never happened. But I wasn’t unhappy-- I was a better
writer as a result of that meeting.
My good friend Eric Bergren likes to say that everything he learned about
writing a screenplay, he learned from Mel Brooks. Eric and his then-writing
partner had adapted The Elephant Man, and it was bought by Mel Brooks and
then produced, winning my friend an Oscar nomination his first time out
(something he’s lamented ever since, even though it is still his “ticket to
ride” that keeps getting him work 27 years later). As Eric once told me, “What I
learned from Mel Brooks was we had done everything wrong, but it didn’t matter
because the story was so good, and then he taught us how to do it right.”
Anyway, reading about the death of Anne Bancroft reminded me of this, because
theirs was one of the truly great love stories of Hollywood. They met in 1958 at
the Actor’s Studio, where she was readying herself to do “The Miracle Worker.”
He chased her till 1964 when they married, and it really was “happily ever
after, till death us do part.”
Thinking of her as I read the obituary, and reading a quote by a very good
screenwriter talking about the pleasure of working with her and how much better
she made his screenplay, I also thought about the really good lessons I’ve
gotten about screenwriting from the actors I’ve known who have done my stuff.
There’s a line in the script for The Terror Within, dealing with the death of
one of the characters, that merely says, “she spits out the sleeping pills, and
finds something more lethal.” In the movie, that becomes about 75 seconds of
screen time (more than a whole page) as Starr Yelland does exactly what that
line says, with no words, but with all the pain of a person who knows this is
the only step she can take to save her friends. When I first saw the movie with
an audience, I was with a good friend, an actress/writer/producer (who some of
you might have known as Robin’s high school girlfriend in the old “Batman” TV
series), and she later told me that moment made the hair on the back of her neck
stand up. It had such a strong effect on the audience that there was an audible
“whoosh” after it was complete, as people remembered to breathe again.
That’s why screenplays aren’t literature, and movies are a collaborative medium.
If I was writing The Terror Within as a novel, I could have done
something similar, with perhaps four or five pages of prose, but it wouldn’t
have been close to the power of those 75 seconds. Yes, Starr had found enough
“hooks” in the script to know the character, and yes, Thierry Notz ran a set
that was comfortable enough for her to do it, but it was her work that made the
moment live. After I saw it, I asked her where she came up with it, and she said
she was thinking of what a close friend who committed suicide must have been
thinking in the final moments when he found he had no way out.
In Anne Bancroft’s Hollywood-size obituary in the hometown paper, The Los
Angeles Times (it was on page one), there was a quote from an earlier article in which she analyzed Mrs.
Robinson-- the role she hated to be remembered for.
“Mrs. Robinson was using sex as a way to diffuse this rage inside of herself.
The rage was about her dreams not coming true, her youth being gone. She’s out
to assuage all these terrible feelings she has. And the only thing she has been
able to find, since art was taken away from her-- you see, she studied art in
college-- is sex. It’s easy. So having this naive little kid, Benjamin, teaching
him everything she liked and wanted-- what could be better? She uses sex to
forget. She just punished everyone and everything, and used the sex.”
Go read the script to The Graduate. None of that is there on the page,
but what is there could let an actor with the intelligence and insight of Anne
Bancroft bring that knowledge to the work. And that is why she will always be
remembered in that role.
At the beginning, she said, “My goal was simply to be a movie star. I had no
idea what to be an actress meant. It was just to be famous and popular and
powerful and rich.” But, as she related, she found no satisfaction in what she
was doing until she returned to Broadway and did “Two for the Seesaw.” She said,
“I began to know what I wanted. I really wanted to learn how to act.”
Yes. Being rich and famous and invited to the right parties and getting the good
awards and having that nice house just off Mulholland is really nice. But as
everyone-- actors, writers, directors-- has found, ultimately what you
do has to be about something. If it isn’t you’ll die, even if you’re still
walking around.
“And here’s to you, Mrs. Brooks/Jesus loves you more than you will know (Wo wo
wo)”
Thomas McKelvey Cleaver has been (and still is) a freelance journalist; he
was a staff writer and editor at several publications prior to accidentally
becoming a screenwriter 20 years ago. In addition to writing 15 produced
movies, he has been a development executive in independent film, and a story
editor and supervising producer for three cable TV series. His credits
include the cult horror hit The Terror Within (though his only connection with TW II is a credit "based on characters created
by..." which he was forced to take). He is currently in development
on a World War II script optioned by Greenwich Films, and has recently completed
an adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer. Reach
Thomas at tom@absolutewrite.com.
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Thomas McKelvey Cleaver.
