By Elaine Lennon.
Robert Towne
Oscar-winning writer, producer, director and actor Robert Towne is widely considered to be one of Hollywood’s finest screenwriters, contributing to such films as Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather. In the 1990s he wrote screenplays for several of the biggest blockbusters, including Days of Thunder and Mission: Impossible, hitching his career to that of Tom Cruise.
In the second of a series of articles about Robert Towne and his collaborations with Tom Cruise, we examine The Firm, directed by Sydney Pollack, for which Towne co-wrote the screenplay with David Rabe and David Rayfiel, also an award-winning screenwriter.
Tom Cruise as Mitch McDeere in The Firm
David Rayfiel had been helping Sydney Pollack on material, sometimes uncredited, dating back to the Natalie Wood vehicle, This Property is Condemned, in 1966. As commentator Michael Sragow commented, “a director like Sydney Pollack deserves all the praise he gets for keeping a complicated movie coherent, but he still needs screenwriters around to get scenes down on paper before he puts them on film.”
Robert Towne had also worked with Sydney Pollack before in the 70s, when Towne wrote the screenplay for The Yakuza.
Robert Mitchum as Harry Kilmer in The Yakuza
The Adaptation
The Firm, by John Grisham
The Firm is based on a novel by John Grisham of the same name. In short, Mitch McDeere, played by Tom Cruise, accepts a job in the law firm of Bendine, Lambert and Locke, where he is mentored by Avery Tolar (Gene Hackman). Discovering that the firm is connected to the Morolto mafia family, Mitch works with the FBI to provide evidence against the firm.
The Firm contains familiar Townean themes: power, the abuse of power, and the corruptibility of ordinary people. Specifically, the power wielded by Bendini, Lambert and Locke, and the hold they have over their young associates. In other words, what Nick James calls “festering immorality.”
Thus, aside from the undoubtedly welcome paycheque and the opportunity to continue a fruitful working relationship with superstar Cruise, Towne was able to work in fertile and familiar territory. How Mitch McDeere turns the tables on his mentors is an exercise in brainpower and courage that is both audience-pleasing and cunning. The alterations made to the novel also raise the stakes in expert fashion, shifting the balance between Avery and Mitch in see-saw manner until the final, excruciating showdown.
By the time Towne was brought on board, Rayfiel had already written an early version of the screenplay. However, director Sydney Pollack was not happy with it. As Towne comments:
“He [Rayfiel] had done an early version of it that he and Sydney felt was structurally not working, and both he and Sydney, who are friends of mine, called me. We all worked out an outline, or a new treatment, frantically. And then I was pretty much left to myself to write all night, with the two of them revising during the day.”
Towne lived across the street from Pollack, and when Pollack asked him for help he thought it was to help “lift a garbage can,” not to work on his film.
The final screenplay mainly follows the narrative of the novel, but with some inevitable alterations, in particular the ending. In the novel, Mitch swindles money from the firm, as well as receiving money from the FBI for his cooperation, then going into witness protection. In the screenplay, however, Mitch makes a moral rather than financial desicion, exposing an overbilling scheme by the Firm, and committing no illegal activity himself.
Most of the alterations may seem minor in the light of the novel’s length (forty chapters told over four hundred pages), but every change lends greater impact, and heightens personal conflict, helping create cycles of greater drama in the screenplay and finished film. And one of Towne’s proudest achievements in the adaptation was in turning Avery from a hardboiled villain into a malleable, emotional character.
With regard to the altered ending, perhaps the most major change, Towne justifies the alternation by explaining that “You can’t just let a guy take the money and run; it’s disgusting. He should learn to care about something.”
However, the ending for the hero in Grisham’s book carries its own punishment: life on the run, permanently afloat in the Cayman Islands under the witness protection programme. He has made a Faustian deal. In the film, on the other hand, Mitch is basically unharmed.
Gene Hackman as Avery Tolar and Tom Cruise as Mitch McDeere in The Firm
Shooting
Pollack seems to have had extraordinary respect for Towne’s abilities. And the following example illustrates also the extent of their co-dependency. A practical problem arose during the shoot which required consultation with Towne:
When Sydney was shooting The Firm, he ran into problems right in the middle of shooting that had to be solved with a new scene. I had written a sequence where Tom [Cruise] was to hold a fire hose and jump down the stairwell to get away from the villains there. Well, Sydney couldn’t find an open stairwell. They did have a building that had a boiler room. Faxing back and forth, we finally came up with Tom taking the briefcase and pummelling poor Wilford.
Sydney would describe the room in a fax, I’d send some notes, he’d send some back, and that’s how the scene developed.
Robert Towne
Sydney Pollack
Authorship
The film credits three screenwriters: David Rabe, Robert Towne and David Rayfiel, in the following manner:
David Rabe and Robert Towne & David Rayfiel
The amphersand normally suggests a co-written draft, whilst the appearance of David Rabe first would indicate that his was the first draft – the first writer on an adaptation is generally assumed to have written it. However, according to Towne, he never saw a draft by David Rabe. So it is imposible to know exactly who was responsible for which parts of the script.
The similarities to Towne’s previous screenplays –the pattern of writing and the structural elements – are certainly evident in the script. The mentoring relationship between Mitch and Avery, in particular, could be seen as a continuation of previous similar relationships in Towne’s screenplays, including that which immediately preceded it, Days of Thunder. And this clearly points to Robert Towne’s influence. But whether these similarities are all a direct result of his writing, or aspects that drew him to the project, is hard to say.
So who can be said to have written The Firm?
Paramount rewarded Tom Cruise, Sydney Pollack and Scott Rudin with $100,000 Mercedes convertibles for making the film a hit, but not Robert Towne, even though “his deft doctoring was credited with saving the movie”. (Variety magazine.)
That, however, is hardly an indication of authorship.
Lovell and Sergi claim that:
The authorship of a film always has to be established, it cannot be taken for granted. It is likely to be collective; the most likely candidates for inclusion are director, producer, star and writer. Other candidates are always possible.
And the idea of collective authorship is one that seems applicable to The Firm. Indeed, Towne has always persisted in the view that writing a film script is always a matter of collaboration, if not total compromise. So if it is difficult, if not impossible, to accurately assess the contribution of the various contributors to The Firm, perhaps it is not necessary.
Not yet read the first article in this series,
Days of Thunder: An Exercise in Speed?
Check it out Here!
Or read on to the third article in this series:
