In the office by the beach, I began writing the screenplay from the familiar material of the book. Naturally, I knew I would find it hard to combine characters, or to get the tumultuous conglomeration of tales contained in the book down to the compass of the screenplay. I particularly did not want to sacrifice the interesting connections Oskar had with the Abwehr, or such incidents as his journey to Budapest to meet Mr. Springmann and company and tell them of the monstrousness being practiced in the camps. I did not, either, try to introduce any false suspense or melodrama, at least no more than that huge amount that existed in the tale already. The film, I felt, should have that feel of intimate experience. And it must have paradox. If Schindler were turned into a stock hero, an unalloyed saint like Raoul Wallenberg, the particularity of Oskar’s experience, and that of his prisoners, would be lost.
Obviously, I did not quite know how much of his full story a character like Schindler should carry with him into a film script. For example, could his motorbike rally-racing stand as a model for his later daring? It was my suspicion that a film audience would accept a greater degree of initially unexplained facets of a character than is normal in a novel. And I didn’t need to go into such things as why he was a civilian, and thus had escaped conscription, or why he was married to Emilie, a local farmer’s daughter in his hometown. The ambiguity between them could be revealed by events inside the film—the arrival of the wife in Kraków, for example. Was this why film stars were so dazzlingly handsome, or had such presence—so that their beauty could sustain the tension of audiences not knowing who they were until events revealed the answer?
The truth is that I knew, at least at the rational if not the emotional level, that to make a film from a book, I must ruthlessly limit the action of the film, so that it is a river of semi-mysterious derivation with no backwaters or billabongs to delay the traveler. And I had to write so that people under forty would not even ask themselves how this man escaped conscription. Or, if they did, the potent momentum of Oskar’s adventures must allay such concerns.
I was not a complete screenplay virgin. I had written the screenplay for a television drama named Essington, in honor of an ill-fated attempt to create, on the northern Australian coast in the nineteenth century, an alternative port to Singapore. I had written a few other things which had never been produced. I’d dabbled with plays. But in narrative terms, I was temperamentally a novelist, likely to break out into subplots and sub-narrations even when telling a story in dialogue. I enjoy the technique of the screenplay, the rationed description, the attempt to get a complex subtext into what is quite often sparse dialogue. But it was not necessarily natural to me.
At the end of three months, by mid-1983, when I had edited and reedited the screenplay, it was still two hundred and twenty pages long. I delivered it to Spielberg in Los Angeles. Loyal Poldek thought it was exactly what was needed. He would ever after say, “They should have made your screenplay, Thomas!” But in his office at Amblin, in the Universal lot, Spielberg told me that perhaps I was too close to the material. I should give it one more try. I should pretend I hadn’t written the book, and that I had the task of making someone else’s work—work in which I felt no proprietary right—viable for the screen. And I should try to get the length down. Two hundred and twenty pages were nearly two and a half hours of film. Look at the films in the video stores, said Spielberg. They were 118 minutes up to about 125 minutes tops—the average endurance of the human bladder.
Though I begged him not to, Poldek kept calling Spielberg’s office and telling them, “Just make Thomas’s script, Steven, and you will have an Oscar for Oskar.” Indeed, I could not see what the basic film narrative problem was with what I had written, but then I suppose the screenwriter never can.
For the next eighteen months, I kept working on the screenplay, and on the beginnings of a new novel. Time evaporated, as ever when one is writing hard. Even so, 1985 rolled in without my finding a satisfactory resolution to the writing of the screenplay other than to reduce it in length. It was now that the writing school at the University of California at Irvine asked me to come as a visitor. Oakley Hall, the founder of the program and of the Squaw Valley Summer School to which the nation’s notable young writers and top editors and agents were invited, was having a semester’s rest and wanted me to take his place.
I went to this campus among the old orange groves of Orange County, inland from John Wayne’s Newport. There were some splendid writers among the students at that time. They included Michael Chabon and Whitney Otto, of whom one heard that they wrote astonishing novels in class. Indeed, the most astounding thing about this program was its capacity, built up by Oakley Hall and MacDonald Harris (Don Heiney), to put the students in contact with agents and publishers. The students seemed very companionable, tended to be in their late twenties and upward, and had in most cases already been toughened by the American workshop process, which I found rather harsh, if not brutal. There were twelve graduate writers chosen from all over the country, one of whom—a very engaging young working-class man from San Jose, James Brown—already had a novel, Hot Wire, published, and would produce many more.
The process was like this: we met in a dedicated seminar room named “The Writers’ Center,” and in consultation with the twelve graduate writers—chosen, in theory, from all around the world, but chiefly from North or Central America—worked out who would present a chapter of his or her novel, or a short story, at each of the weekly sessions. Then, for that first week, the visiting writer gave a lecture on his own experience of writing. In subsequent weeks, each novice would have provided us with his chapter/short story and have gotten twelve written critiques, including mine. On top of that I was meant to sum up the responses. Many of the writers in the workshop had been through this experience as undergraduates as well. As a published writer who had never been to any such class, I was nonetheless considered quite up to scratch for managing this situation.
In between pontifications on the art of the novel, I received from Spielberg my writing instructions concerning the script. Thus was the teacher taught. It was now a little more than two years since the contract had been signed. The urgency which had attended the signing had not seemed to translate itself into the pace of preparing it for production. When I went up I-405, exiting at Santa Monica Boulevard to go toward Beverly Hills to visit the Pfefferbergs, I would encounter a slightly glum Poldek, and a philosophic Misia. Though Amblin kept us well-informed of the progress of our film, we learned of Spielberg’s current projects generally through friends sending us clippings from Variety or other magazines or newspapers. Spielberg was about to make Alice Walker’s glorious The Color Purple into a film, it was said. In fact he already had it in the can. It was also said that he had acquired J. G. Ballard’s extraordinary book Empire of the Sun—indeed, what book of J. G. Ballard’s is not in its way extraordinary, or marked by reminders of mortality and the amorality it produces in the living?
In Spielberg’s eyes, I had not overcome the documentary feel of the book. I was still too attached to incidents which did not contribute to the direct line he wanted the screenplay to follow. Indeed, he had now come up with a formula for the film. There would be an SS man whom the charming Oskar could not “corrupt,” and who accumulated accusations against him and tried to destroy him. SS Inspector Javert would pursue Jean Valjean Schindler, who had everyone else enchanted, into the final moments of the war. This was not quite the story as I saw it.
Early in that northern spring of 1985, in the nicest possible way, I was sacked by Spielberg. He said he would try some other writers. I had taken to the meeting an E.T. doll that my daughter Jane wanted signed, and I got him to sign it. I was not aware of any bitterness at all, and there was none on my part. I had ideas for new books and felt, however ill-advisedly, liberated. Steven told me he intended to bring in Kurt Luedtke, who had won an Academy Award for the screenplay of Out of Africa.
Luedtke, formerly a journalist, brought to the Schindler story a journalist’s skepticism. He wanted to begin before the beginning, with the Schindler research itself. At a meeting with him and Gail Mutrux, a young Universal producer who was put in charge of briefing him, Poldek would say with exasperation, “Of course it’s all true, Mr. Luedtke. I saw it with my eyes.”
Ultimately, and for whatever reason, Luedtke was also unable to produce a screenplay Spielberg wanted to make. I never found out why, but there were rumors he had felt so overwhelmed by the material that he had been unable to produce even a first draft. In the meantime, every time newspapers or magazines mentioned Spielberg’s future projects—and there were generally two or three things on the boil at any one time, including the first Indiana Jones feature—Schindler went un-mentioned. “I call him and tell him this is his film to make,” Poldek would inform me regularly and with touching bemusement. “But can I make the boy listen? Has he ears?”
Back in Bob Hawke’s Australia after the Irvine stint, I had begun work on a novel about the very first European play performed in all the immensity of the Australian continent, which was staged by a group of convicts on June 4, 1789. A friend accused me, in my fascination with convicts and Holocaust victims, of being obsessed with the theme of imprisonment. There was certainly some justice to that idea. But though I had many alternative lives to deal with, for Poldek his one mission was Schindler, and as the film script failed to emerge, he was the terrier who kept barking as the rest of us got on with our sundry enthusiasms.
At home, I would receive evening calls—that is, late morning calls in Poldek’s terms—from his office in Los Angeles, during which he would detail his conversations with Amblin, and the messages he passed on to Steven via a good Jewish girl named Cathy Niebuhr, and the good Irish American girl Kathy Kennedy. One call in 1987 was different from the rest. Poldek and Misia were going to come and visit us in Australia. “I can’t get to see enough of your beautiful girls, and that beautiful Judy,” he declared.
With balloons and flowers, we met them in the early morning at Sydney Airport, as they descended from one of the increasingly numerous flights from Los Angeles. The girls had made signs welcoming them, a gesture which echoed Poldek’s unconditional affection for us. It was a joyous time, of course, a bright Sydney winter’s chance for reunions with Poldek’s fellow welder Edek Korn and his wife Leosia, one of the women who had escaped Auschwitz with Misia. There was a slightly later reunion with the accordionist Leo Rosner, a man after Poldek’s heart, and his wife in Melbourne. Poldek drew the interest of the local media and gave exuberant interviews, full of his standard predictions. A headline declared, AN OSCAR FOR OSKAR, SAYS SCHINDLER SURVIVOR. If only Spielberg would get on and make the film.
Prime Minister Bob Hawke had an intense, and many said exceedingly partisan, attitude toward Israel. He invited Poldek and Misia to a Labor Party fund-raising lunch, where they sat at his table. Poldek, of course, cherished his time with the rough-edged but clever and amusing prime minister, and Misia was enchanted with the much-admired but utterly unassuming Hazel Hawke, a woman who was not entirely confident in her role, one felt, perhaps because she was not entirely confident in the solidity of her relationship with her husband.
I remember a day when we had a barbecue for Poldek at the Bilgola Surf Club—the sort of place on the edge of the beach where surf rescue gear was stored, and where the members themselves had leisurely Sunday barbecues. The club possessed a beautiful little fenced garden, right by the sea. Poldek exclaimed how lucky we were to be Australians, and Misia extolled the beauties of Sydney, which she had not quite expected. At least one of my daughters had already stayed with Poldek and Misia in California, but as adolescents they were again overwhelmed by his restless energy, his demands that everyone line up because he intended to “make a picture!” “Misia, darling, stand next to Mrs. Keneally, and Margaret, honey, so beautiful, will you close up to your mother just a tiny bit? You’re adorable, darling Jane. Such an adorable Australian girl.” My father, who liked such parties, possessed in Poldek’s eyes the honor of having fought the Nazis in North Africa.
And still the opening gambits—“I called Steven…,” “I tell Steven all the time…”—were the staple of Poldek’s conversation. Not for effect, either. Though raucous, he was not a boastful man, and offered nothing for effect except his flattery, which itself, by mere force of character, sounded like the truth.
I was privately sure, though, that nothing would happen with the proposed film now. Fred Schepisi, the Australian director whom I was occasionally lucky enough to meet socially, either in Australia or at his apartment in New York, told me that the response to The Color Purple and to Empire of the Sun had convinced Spielberg that the critics were determined not to give him a fair hearing as a serious producer and director. Yet still, Steven had made some approaches to the renowned playwright Tom Stoppard to work on a Schindler screenplay. Meanwhile, press reports showed he was busy on a huge project named Hook, a retelling of Peter Pan, and as far from Schindler as one could get.
Scattering thanks behind them, after a month Poldek and Misia caught the plane home. I could see in both of them an authentic and touching gratitude for the small mercies of food, sunlight, brotherhood.