The View from the Bridge Read Online Free PDF Page A

Brothers in the late thirties they would have made the picture, no question. Paul Muni would’ve played Schliemann.
    Next.

BABY STEPS
    My father had recently introduced me to an essay in a psychoanalytic journal, written by a fellow shrink, Philip Weissman, on why John Wilkes Booth had shot Lincoln. The piece intrigued me, and with Weissman’s permission, I set about dramatizing its thesis, namely that the real target of Booth’s rage was not the president but Booth’s own brother, the highly successful tragedian Edwin Booth. I produced my best piece of work to date, a thriller that informed at the same time as it entertained, a combination that was to become my specialty—also, on occasion, my curse. The structure of the piece was what made it work: I juxtaposed an hour-by-hour account of Booth’s movements on the day of the assassination with flashbacks to earlier portions of his life, thereby suggesting psychological connections of which Booth himself was not consciously aware but which seemed to explain the true motives behind each of his actions on the fatal day. I called my movie The Understudy.
    We never really understand—at least I don’t—the progressions we make in life, why one thing leads to something else. About the time I was convinced I was going absolutely nowhere, I managed to escape the Snake Pit by getting Paramount to assign me the role of unit publicist on another of their small movies, this one called Love Story , to be shot in Boston and Long Island. A unit publicist is the guy who writes the original press kit and captions the photos taken on location—the stuff that I had previously been hired to translate into English. I leapt at the chance to go on location (a) because it got me out of the Snake Pit and (b) because I could get to watch a movie actually being shot. The director, Arthur Hiller, was extremely encouraging and open and at the conclusion of filming, the producer, Howard Minsky, optioned The Understudy . This left me with the vexing question of whether I should or should not wear my glasses when I appeared on The Johnny Carson Show .
    These grandiose fantasies died with the option expiration date on my script and in 1971 I took another job, this one in the story department at Warner Brothers, where I discovered that I could synopsize any narrative, including War & Peace , in two pages. I also read enough dreck to encourage myself; I had to be better than 90 percent of what I was being asked to read. (Later, I would have occasion to wonder if dreck wasn’t exactly what they were looking for. An executive returned a positive reader’s report I had submitted on a serious novel with the note, “Nick, did you see what was number one this week? The Love Bug !” I.e., Get With the Program.)
    But I was starting to realize I couldn’t keep this up forever. Yes, I had had a script optioned and even acquired an agent; yes, I had watched a film being shot and learned a good deal about the process; yes, I had figured out my stuff was as good, if not better, than the junk I was reading for Warner—but it all wasn’t adding up to anything. I may not have been treading water this whole time but I didn’t seem to be getting any nearer shore, either.
    My poor agent, Janet Roberts, still couldn’t get me arrested. She’d given up, in fact, which I learned in the usual way of agencies: I found myself assigned a new agent, who cared for me about as much as I do for anchovies.
    It was problematic—no, embarrassing—when people asked what I did for a living. How could I tell them I was a writer? I wasn’t a writer; I was a reader. To call myself a writer, I had to write something that sold.
    What the hell could I write that would sell? Not screenplays; not yet, anyway. Not novels, either, obviously; each one of mine was more dreadful than the last.
    What books were selling these days?
    Nonfiction.
    What the hell could I