. . . March 1993 John Briley '51 by John Krampner Many who saw the movie Gandhi recall the moment when the humble pacifist sums up his philosophy by saying, "An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind." Apt as that summation was, Gandhi never said it. Michigan graduate John Briley put those pithy words in his mouth. "In all of Gandhi, there are only two sentences that come from Gandhi," says Briley, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who received his BA in English and History in 1951 and his MA in English the following year. "All of the ideas are his, but the words are all mine." In addition to the 1982 Oscar-winner about Mohandas K. Gandhi and the founding of the modern Indian state, Briley has written more than a dozen filmscripts, including Tai-Pan (1986), based upon James Clavell's historical novel about the founding of Hong Kong; Cry Freedom (1987), the story of South African activist Steven Biko and his friendship with a white newspaper editor, and Marie (1985), about how one woman overthrew a corrupt political machine in Tennessee. Briley also has several plays and novels to his credit. A Kalamazoo native, Briley grew up on Detroit's southwest side. After leaving Michigan he enrolled in the University of Birmingham in England. While earning his PhD there, he spent a great deal of the next seven academic years at Stratford-on-Avon's Shakespeare Institute. Briley was drafted into screenwriting near the end of his doctoral studies. A member of the U.S. Air Force Reserve, he was asked to write several live shows for American GIs stationed in England. That led to a contract with MGM England writing television shows and screenplays. Until two years ago he maintained a second home outside London, and he still sprinkles his conversation with such Anglicisms as going "on holiday" rather than "on vacation," and showing a visitor how to find "the loo." Briley now lives full-time in the Hollywood Hills with his wife, Valerie, and their son Jamie, 6, but there is much about his native film industry that he would exchange for the British way. Hollywood screenwriters, he points out, do not hold copyright to their work and a screenplay can be rewritten to the point where its creator no longer recognizes it. But in England a screenwriter retains copyright, and with it the final say-so in script changes. "In England, you may argue about scenes, but the assumption is-there's the script, you work with it," Briley says. "In America, if the director can't understand it or some development girl who's just graduated with a master's in fine arts can't understand it-well! Rewrite it! Something's wrong with the scene!" He has little patience with the guff that even successful screenwriters have to endure in Hollywood, and he tried to prepare himself for his new environment when he returned to his homeland full-time. "Before I ever dreamed of coming to Hollywood," he says, "I read books about Hollywood writers-what happened to F. Scott Fitzgerald and things like that. And I used to roll around on the floor laughing, because I thought the writer had comically exaggerated. But when I got out here, I realized that it was literal reporting, and if anything, underplayed." Compounding the problem, Briley says, is that the Hollywood "geniuses" lack their British counterparts' theatrical training and respect for literature. "In England everyone was raised in the theatrical traditions' he points out. "They've come up through the provincial theaters and don't sit down and rewrite Shakespeare or Shaw. Or John Osbome, even." When British director Richard Attenborough put Briley's Gandhi script on film, he changed no more than four words in the three-hour epic. "If I wrote the script instruction, 'She puts his arm on her shoulder,' that's what happened," he says. "Here a director would be insulted to do that. He would have to change it in order to be 'creative.'" Those who've seen Robert Altmans's film The Player know that one of the most perilous environments for the Hollywood screenwriter is the script meeting, in which studio executives and other key figures associated with a film assess what they see as its strengths and weaknesses. "You have to understand the dynamics of a scrip meeting," Briley says. "A studio head really is a very busy guy. There are other pictures being made, and they'll be having trouble with the stars or the locations, or they want to build a new building on the studio lot. HOLLYWOOD'S YOUTHFUL FOLLY "When the studio head comes in, he's probably read a synopsis at most, because that's all he's had time for," Briley goes on. "He always has two young people there, because they think the market is young and therefore these youngsters know better than anyone else what the market is. These youngsters think they know everything, like all youngsters-like we did when we were just out of university-and they want to make an impression. So if Shakespeare brought them Hamlet, they would say, 'Come on! Take arms against a sea of troubles? This is illogical. Throw it out!' " Briley shares a tip on how to get through the ordeal. "When I was working at MGM in England, an American writer was telling me about these meetings," he recalls. 'I asked, 'How do you stand it?' He said, 'I take a note pad. When they make comments, I say, "Good idea" and write them down. Before I leave the building, I crumple the paper up, throw it away and hope they'll all be fired by the time the picture comes out so they can't complain I didn't follow instructions."' In Hollywood, everyone's a critic-including, of course, the critics, a number of whom subscribe to Briley's pet peeve, the auteur theory, which holds that the director is the main creative force behind a film. "What bugs me," Briley says, "is that when a script is a dog, critics blame the writer, although the director may have had enormous input into it." But when the reviewers like a script, he complains, they often credit the director without taking the time to find out that he or she had very little to do with the script. PASTED FOR 'TIE-PAN' One film of Briley's that took a critical pasting was Tai-Pan. Playboy called it "flamboyant pop entertainment with no aspirations to art." Newsweek's reviewer said, "Much of the dialogue defies belief, while the rest is simply unintelligible." Briley agrees that Tai-Pan left something to be desired, but he says there were, literally, many problems behind the scenes. For instance, just as filming began on location in China, the film's producer, Dino De Laurentiis, released another movie, Year of the Dragon. Chinese officials regarded that kung-fu classic as false and racist, and transferred their hostility to Tai-Pan. So one day, with cast, crew and thousands of extras ready at 4 a.m. for filming to begin on the Pearl River, a large commercial artery, Briley says, "Our production manager went to the Chinese production manager and said, 'We're ready.' He said, 'Well, go ahead.' We said, 'But there are all these modern container ships and this is a period drama.' He said, 'Oh! You want the traffic stopped!' We had to negotiate, for a huge fee, to stop the traffic another day. Several such failures to communicate, cooperate or collaborate resulted in Tai-Pan's release without several scenes from Briley's script, scenes that would have made the story line less confusing to moviegoers. But Gandhi was a film on which everything went right. "There was an excitement about it," Briley says. "Indira Gandhi started reading it at 2 in the morning after a long session of Parliament. She felt that she would just start it, but she didn't finish it until dawn and cried and cried and cried." Ben Kingsley, who won the Oscar for best actor in the title role, was the ultimate trouper, Briley notes. Because of constant goofs by Indian actors whom the production company was contractually required to use, Kingsley had to do as many as 18 re-takes of individual scenes but never, says Briley with wonder, fell out of character or lost his edge. Briley got the job of writing Gandhi after the British writer Robert Bolt, whose work includes A Man for All Seasons, suffered a stroke. Director Attenborough, a longtime friend of Briley's, turned the job over to him. In several ways, it was a fortunate substitution. First, there was the question of research. "Gandhi's life was so long-79 years-and the research materials so extensive that other screenwriters were just sitting down with the Encyclopedia Britannica and saying, 'I'll make him up,"' Briley says. "Having taken seven years to do my PhD thesis, I at least knew how to do the research." Not only did he know how to research, Briley found it thrilling to trace the evolution of Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence; in doing so, he plowed through the mountain of the Mahatma's speeches and writings, including a speech on the proper way to make goat's milk. 'GHANDI KNEW DETROIT' Non-violence is not ordinarily the philosophy of choice for someone who grew up on Detroit's tough southwest side in the shadow of Ford's River Rouge Plant. Initially, Briley thought, "Gandhi's a great man and non-violence is a wonderful principle, but he should have come live on the southwest side of Detroit some time. But when I got into his writings, I realized that Gandhi knew all about the southwest side of Detroit and everyplace else. He knew about man's inner violence, and he evolved a system that could deal with it." Another virtue Briley brought to the project was his nationality. All of the other screenwriters Attenborough interviewed were British. And Briley says that they tended to look upon Gandhi as "an odd little chap who strangely didn't appreciate the bureaucracy the British had given him, and who kept doing these obscene things like starving himself to make news-it was a distasteful picture of him. Whereas I, as an American, thought, 'He kicked the British out-that's George Washington. Gandhi is the hero." So different were Anglo versus American conceptions that, according to Briley, the hero of Bolt's screenplay was not Gandhi but "a young Englishman who was an agent in a Himalayan village, who did everything; the town could not have functioned without him, and you ask, 'Why would the Indians want to kick these people out?'" But the real thrill for Briley was digging deep enough to really understand Gandhi's method ("something Gandhi never articulated or codified, except in pieces"), and then to make that method "so integral to the script that when it was over viewers understood why Gandhi accomplished so much and had such a hold on the minds of so many people-not just in India, but all over the world." Briley's career began at Michigan in dramatic fashion. He wanted to take a class with his brother, so he signed up for Prof. Allan Seager's survey course in American literature. "When I turned in my first paper, he said he'd had some students who might turn out to be writers one day, but in ten years of teaching at the University, it was the first time he had someone in his class who was already a writer," Briley recalls. It was a galvanizing moment. As a result of praise by a teacher like Seager, who was himself a highly respected writer, Briley finally had the courage to acknowledge his aspiration to become a writer. But he began by pursuing an academic career. Following Seager's advice, he enrolled in several courses taught by the noted Shakespeare scholar G. B. Harrison. "He was a genius as a teacher," Briley says of Harrison. "He did great research, and was a world figure in Elizabethan literature. There's a book a day written on Shakespeare; it's not an easy place to make a mark." These days Briley is working on another historical epic, 0 Jerusalem!, based on the book by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre about the founding of Israel. He is also writing a TV script for the HBO cable network about the travails and triumphs of a Black football coach in the South. Interestingly, an opera on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. that Briley wrote was torpedoed. He was replaced by an African-American writer who claimed no white man could write King's story. "That is a notion that King would have thumbed his nose at," says Briley, himself a veteran of civil rights activism in the South. In any event, the opera flopped miserably. Asked about his long-term plans, Briley recalls the one term in 1970 when he taught courses in Shakespeare and in Elizabethan literature in Michigan's Department of English. "I hope that I never dry up as a screenwriter," he says, "but I love the experience of universities so much, I've always wanted to go back and teach at one." Jon Krampner is a Los Angeles freelance writer who specializes in the entertainment industry. |