In the brightly colored comic book world of my youth, I was infatuated with Time for Beany, a wonderful puppet show recounting the adventures of a wide-eyed boy named Beany as he sailed the seven seas on the Leakin’ Lena under the command of his pompous uncle, Captain Horatio K. Huffenpuff.

The characters were wonderful: their names alone told you almost everything you needed to know about them.

There was Beany’s faithful, if somewhat dimwitted friend, Cecil the Sea-Sick Sea Serpent.

There was, of course, the yogurt-loving Tear Along the Dotted Lion.

And let us not forget his fellow terror of the jungle, Mouth Full of Teeth Keith—the mangy lion with the slippery, ill-fitting dentures.

But my particular favorite was Dishonest John, whose black cape, black hat and black mustache announced his villainy to the world as he swept on stage, holding his cape in front of his wicked face and cutting loose with a nasty, sneering, sniggering laugh.

You had to love this guy, and I did.

The thing is, I’ve always been drawn to villains.

Ming the Merciless of Mong was always more interesting to me than Flash Gordon.

Jeffrey Hunter as Christ was a bit of a snore, but Frank Thring as Herod the Great stepping on his father’s corpse as he ascended the throne, now he was something!

And Darth Vader?

The Dishonest John of the future!

Who would not prefer his “foul stench” and unforgettable voice—the very embodiment of EVIL—to the nice guy heroics of Luke Skywalker?

I like villains, and I’m proud to say that my five year-old grandson is following in my footsteps.

In the games he plays during recess at pre-school, he always wants to be the villain. He almost always gets his wish. And he almost always get the holy crap beaten out of him as his good-guy friends, determined not just to overcome evil but to wipe it from the face of the earth, gang up on him with their fists flying.

He is undeterred, and I admire him for it.

I admire him for succeeding where I myself, in my high school acting days, failed.

I always wanted to be the villain, and I always ended up playing the dull, colorless, nice-guy hero.

I was, for example, doomed to portray Mortimer, that nicest of all bewildered nice guys, in Arsenic and Old Lace when the role I really wanted was Jonathan—Mortimer’s demented brother whose plastic surgery had made him a dead ringer for Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein.

Now there was a role I could really have gotten my teeth into!

But it was not to be.

It turned out that my high school stage experiences were a preview of coming attractions—a trailer for my adult life.

Dull.

Colorless.

Nice.

It’s a sad story and I won’t go into it here, but you can imagine my excitement when I recently discovered that for one brief shining moment I actually achieved my life-long ambition to be proclaimed a villain.

I, it turns out, was the villain who destroyed a masterpiece of filmmaking art.

I learned about it this way.

A few days ago, I engaged in that most popular of current pastimes: I googled myself and discovered that I appear in a footnote to an academic essay entitled “The Screenwriter as Auteur: Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.”

A footnote? you ask.

Well, it’s not just any footnote.

I happen to be keeping very good company in this particular note.

My companion in academic esoteria?

Jeffrey Katzenberg!

The footnote cites the development notes I wrote for Jeffrey about Ephron’s script, and the text which this note documents holds me personally responsible for ruining Ephron’s work!

I can’t say that I fully understand just how I managed this because the essay’s author uses all sorts of wonderful words with meanings beyond my feeble understanding.

She is, in fact, a mistress of academic jargon and clearly more brilliant and insightful than I could ever hope to be.

According to her, I intimidated Ephron and her director, Mike Nichols, into cutting the heroine’s monologues and fantasies…or to put it in her own unforgettable words, “the film omits the diegetic Rachel and refrains from adding any goal or obstacles for the enacted Rachel, [and so] the film’s narrative fails to present a compelling narrative.”

There’s some other stuff about “syuzhet structure” and the film’s “fabula,” but the bottom line is this…

I SINGLEHANDEDLY…well, I may have a little support from Jeffrey.

Let me rephrase that.

I, STUDIO DRONE DAN BRONSON, HAD COMPROMISED A MASTERWORK OF THE CINEMA, REDUCING IT FROM GENIUS TO MEDIOCRITY!

I am so proud.

It turns out that I was, if only for a moment, what I’d always aspired to be.

I can almost hear Hamlet denouncing me.

“Oh, villain, villain, damned smiling villain.”

It was, I feel, a major achievement to have reduced one of the finest writers and one of the three or four most powerful directors in Hollywood to quivering jelly, shaking in fear of the consequences if they failed to execute my notes!

This strikes me as all the more remarkable when I recall an experience at director John McTiernan’s Wyoming ranch. I was there, working with him and Jonathan Hensley on the screenplay for Die Hard: With a Vengeance.

Jonathan and I had just received Fox’s notes on our work, and we were in despair—the notes were so wrong-headed and destructive.

Just then, McT walked into the room, took one look at our faces, and asked what was wrong. The notes, we told him. We just didn’t know what to do with Fox’s notes.

John’s response?

He picked up the notes.

Said, “I’ll show you what to do with them.”

And he threw them into the fire burning on the hearth!

Now John was big, but Mike Nichols was even bigger, and I—little ol’ me—had forced him to alter his entire conception of his film.

Now I have to confess that I didn’t even remember that I had done the development notes on Heartburn until I stumbled across this insightful essay on the Internet, so I headed out to our storage barn, dug up my coverage from my Paramount days, and found a copy of the coverage in question.

I started to read, prepared to be dazzled by my brilliance.

And what did I discover?

That I had loved the Annie Hall approach Ephron had taken to her material!

What?

I’d loved the heroine’s monologues and fantasies?

The very elements the essayist claimed I had forced from the script?

Oh, I’d suggested they were a bit too verbose and could use some tightening, but search as I might, I could find no place in the notes where I recommended they be cut.

You can imagine my disappointment.

One minute, I had stood proudly in the villain’s hall of fame, heir to the legacy of Dishonest John, Ming the Merciless, Herod the Great, and Darth Vader himself.

The next, I was just another nice guy.

Oh, the pity of it!

CLOSE ON A GRAY-HAIRED MAN.

Late sixties.

Weathered face.

Mouth open. Chin on chest.

Sound asleep in a worn easy chair.

PULL BACK to reveal…

…a busy FILM CREW hard at work on a practical set, moving cables, lights, and other equipment into place for a new set-up.

A WAG approaches the sleeping figure and lays a hand-written card on his chest: “WILL DIRECT FOR FOOD.”

The FLASH of a Polaroid camera, and we CUT TO…

…THE SLUMBERING FIGURE, awake now, holding the photo, joining the Crew Members assembled around him in laughter.

And that, my friends, is how I remember Billy.

William A. Graham.

Director of a dozen features and over fifty television films, including the first one ever made, he had started in the days of live television.

He had directed screenplays by giants like Rod Serling, Gore Vidal and Ernest Tidyman.

He had worked with Bruce Dern, James Coburn, Tommy Lee Jones, Robert Duvall, and virtually every other major actor in Hollywood.

He had helmed a handful of classics—features like Where the Lilies Bloom and MOW’s like The Amazing Howard Hughes and Guyana Tragedy: The Story of Jim Jones, and he would go on to do The Man Who Captured Eichmann.

At the time I met him, he was sixty-nine years old, had a thirty-nine year old wife, a four-year old daughter.

He rode a motorcycle to the office every day from what he called “the all too aptly named Carbon Canyon” where he had once stood on the roof of his home fighting a wildfire that destroyed every structure in its path…except Billy’s.

And he flew a helicopter, kept a boat on the coast of France, and had once sailed a private yacht around Cape Horn.

He was, in short, one of the most remarkable men I have ever been privileged to call a friend, but what I remember most vividly about him is that moment on the set of Death of a Cheerleader when he was caught napping and had a good laugh at his own expense.

Why?

It was the essence of Billy.

What? you ask.

Was he lazy?

Disengaged with his own project?

Too old and too tired for the responsibility of directing?

No.

He had so mastered the craft of filmmaking, had such comprehensive knowledge of the script, such command of every aspect of the shoot that he could relax between set-ups, even nap if there were no immediate demands on his attention.

He was, in short, the calm eye in the middle of the storm that is filmmaking.

Nothing rattled him.

The first day of our shoot was dedicated to a sermon by a priest to his privilege parishioners.

Eugene Roche, the experienced character actor whose blue-collar look had inspired Billy to cast against type, gave a wonderful performance but kept going up on his lines.

And so it was that at the end of the first day, we were already behind schedule.

No problem, Billy said.

He’d make up the lost time in the days that followed by dropping a few of the set-up he’d planned for some of the other scenes.

The second day of the shoot, the Network demanded that we fire Bob Steadman, the cameraman Billy had worked with for years.

Now, I had written the film as a noir piece, and Billy, Steadman and I had agreed to go for a high-contrast look with lots of dark, deep shadows.

In those days, Networks hated that sort of thing. They wanted bright, uniform lighting so the images could easily be seen on television, so Billy had expected trouble and was prepared to deal with it.

Trouble is what he got.

The dailies were so dark they could hardly be seen, and the Network wanted Steadman’s blood.

Billy calmly refused to give it to them.

Completely confident in Steadman’s ability, he simply and calmly said there had to be a problem at the lab.

He kept Bob on the picture, the negative went back to the lab, a new print was struck, and guess what?

The lighting was perfect.

Another crisis averted.

And so it went, day after day, with Billy calmly meeting and resolving problem after problem.

No agonizing.

No complaint.

No muss. No fuss.

Billy had the confidence a good director must have—in his case, confidence backed by long experience.

Did he have all the qualities most successful directors seem to share?

Did he, for example, play God on the set?

If he did, he was a New Testament God—more loving father than vengeful tyrant.

Was he ruthlessly manipulative, willing to do whatever it took to get what he wanted?

No, at least not in my experience.

But he got what he wanted…with kindness and reassurance.

Was he completely obsessed with his projects?

Yes and no.

He was in love with filmmaking and grateful that he’d been able to make his living at something he loved so much.

I remember at the end of a casting session, he turned to me and said, “Isn’t this fun? Can you believe they pay us to do this?”

He loved it so much that he sometimes made as many as three films in a single year.

Was he confident?

Oh, yes!

So confident that he could take those little naps between set-ups.

COMING SOON!

BILLY GRAHAM’S RULES FOR DIRECTING

Years ago, I was on the faculty of an innovative school with a fellow by the name of Sam Kean.

A mainstay of Esalen, a touchy-feely type who was in many ways the incarnation of the sixties, Sam had written a book called To a Dancing God.

His thesis was that Apollo, the god of order and reason, had become too powerful in our society—a repressive tyrant—and that the time had come to overthrow him and put Dionysus, the god of spontaneity and creative disorder in his place.

I’ve always wished I could do that, but to be honest, the only place I’ve ever succeeded is on the page.

I once wrote a screenplay for Disney called Blood Money. The premise was simple. A tough, by-the-book FBI agent—the first female Special Agent in Charge of the Seattle office—is forced to recruit the services of a drunken ex-cop who quit the force because he hated the goddam rules.

She’s a feminist with a broomstick up her ass, and he’s an outrageous sexist. In fact, she first meets him when he’s playing tittywinks, using an opulently endowed barmaid’s cleavage as the cup.

These two characters are Sam’s Apollo and Dionysus, left-brain order and right-brain chaos, the outer me and the inner me.

When I begin a project, Apollo has the upper hand.

My first step is exhaustive, obsessive research—initially in libraries and on the internet and eventually on the scene of the story.

Take the example of Juggernaut, the sci-fi epic I wrote for director John McTiernan. The story of an alien machine invading the earth, it required weeks of study in the bowels of the UCLA library, where I read everything I could about NASA’s plans to send probes to other worlds and about the organic machines they planned to use to accomplish the task.

This led me to late-night sessions at Jet Propulsion Labs, where some of the world’s most accomplished scientists helped me work out the physics and the chemistry of my story.

Then it was off to the Central Plains of Montana.

Why?

Both John and I loved the notion of this highly sophisticated machine from the future landing in a remote part of a state where most of the residents still had one foot in the nineteenth century. We wanted to place the responsibility for stopping this technological marvel squarely on the shoulders of a small-town sheriff more comfortable on his horse than behind the wheel of his patrol car.

So…two weeks on patrol with a back-country deputy sheriff, questioning him relentlessly about his job, the scattered communities he served, the world in which he lived and worked—observing him and his friends, the way they talked, the way they dressed, the way they moved.

Then back to my study in Studio City, where my left brain continued to work away, preparing outlines, character sketches, notes.

Only when I felt I had completely immersed myself in the two worlds of my story…

Only when I was convinced that I’d learned everything I could about my characters and the place that produced them…

Only then could I let go.

I turned my back on Apollo and fell down in worship of Dionysus, giving my left brain a well-deserved rest and placing the burden of creation on the right.

How did I achieve this?

I isolated myself on the small power cruiser we kept at Channel Islands Harbor.

Allowing myself conjugal visitation only on the weekends, I locked myself up, saw no one, and walked the empty beach, waiting for my characters to start talking to me.

I’d get up at 5:30 in the morning, jog, shower, and after a quick breakfast fortified by a few quarts of coffee, go to work.

Work consisted of reviewing the basics of the scene I hoped to write that day, grabbing my pocket recorder, and heading to the beach where the white noise of the breaking waves let me slip away to the world of my story and encouraged my characters to speak.

I always felt that I myself had little to do with it. I was simply observing these people as they lived out their lives, making a record of what they said and did.

Once I had a scene on tape, I’d return to the boat and transcribe my characters words and action onto yellow legal pads, revising as I went, amused to find that when I was voicing the female players, I sounded a bit like Norman Bates voicing his mother.

I’d ordinarily do two or three scenes this way, and then, at the end of the day, I’d transfer the material on the legal pads to my computer, once again revising as I went.

A simple dinner, a book or a movie in the same vein as my current project, and early to bed before beginning the process all over again the next morning.

And when I finally finished and returned to Studio City, I would collapse, physically and mentally spent, afflicted with what felt like terminal cold or flu, abandoned by both Dionysus and Apollo, neither right brain nor left capable of functioning.

Do all writers work this way?

No, certainly not.

I am, I suspect, more controlling than most.

I give Apollo more than his due.

Most, I’m sure, are more like Jameson Parker, possibly the finest writer I’m privileged to know. Oh, he does his homework, but he often begins a story with nothing more than a character and a situation, and has no idea where his tale will take him.

Very different from Yours Truly who often knows the end of his story before he figures out the beginning.

Every writer develops his or her own “daily ritual,” but most of these rituals have elements in common: a rigid routine, isolation from the everyday world, a stimulant to stave off exhaustion.

And the objectives of these rituals are always the same…

To overcome the fear of the blank page.

To dwell in a world elsewhere—a world where the writer can observe his characters acting out their lives.

To meet the overwhelming mental and physical demands of the job of creation, a job that requires the blessings of both the tyrant Apollo and the dancer Dionysus.