TWELVE WORDS THAT CHANGED MY LIFE – AND PROBABLY YOURS

The worst problem about nuclear war is that no one wants to think about it.

I sure had no interest in thinking about nuclear war. I’m old enough to remember having to wear dog tags and hiding from the bomb under the desks in school. I always wondered if low-flying aircraft over Manhattan was The One.

As I grew older, I signed the occasional petition and once in a while showed up for a peace march on Fifth Avenue.

Mainly what-will-be-will-be, was my attitude. Other folks too. We know the bomb is “out there”, but we hope it won’t happen.

(Hope is not a strategy).

Now it’s the ‘80’s, I’m in Los Angeles, and much to my surprise, doing pretty well. My first film is a quasi-hit and my second broke all opening day records.

The candy store was open.

So why think about nuclear war?

Gotta backtrack a little here. While it’s true I was having my fifteen minutes of fame and free run of the candy store, something definitely wasn’t feeling right and I found myself on the couch – full-time formal psychoanalysis four days a week. What brought me there? Good question; maybe things were a tad too easy. Hollywood is a seductive place. There were many sweets in the candy store. There certainly were if you were in my shoes back then. Perhaps it was the very easiness that was making me… uneasy.

I decided to see a shrink. For those unfamiliar with the time-consuming and expensive process of formal psychoanalysis, your shrink is not a guru, doling out advice. The patient does all the heavy lifting. You’re on your back on a couch, staring at the ceiling (oh, those boring ceiling cracks, craters of a nearby moon, which you’ll ultimately know by heart), while the shrink sits behind, out of sight, listening…

To what? Whatever comes out of your mouth. You’re dumping the dailies of your mind into his. The shrink is organizing your disjointed mental dailies, turning them into a coherent daisy chain. Editing, if you will.

At the end of your 50-minute hour, he says something like, “Today you seem to be talking about…” and they play back an edited version of what you’ve been mumbling, rendering it as a crude narrative for you to think about.

Stay with me here. I promise this is a this-better-be-good-story with a real payoff.

So I’m on the couch informing my shrink that I’ve just been offered to direct a tv movie about a nuclear war between the United States and the (then) U.S.S.R.

(BTW, relations between the U.S. and Russia in 1982 are at low ebb. Hair trigger response. Launch on warning, Mutual Assured Destruction, etc. President Reagan characterized the Soviet Union as The Evil Empire.)

I learn I’m not even the first director who’s received the offer. I’m something like number four. Nobody’s racing to make a TV movie about nuclear war, which, come to think of it, will never get on network TV in a million years anyway.

My shrink says nothing.

Besides, I muse, you don’t go from directing features to directing tv. Everyone knows you don’t do that. You couldn’t think of a worse career move. My agents (I have several by now) will have kittens if I do this.

My shrink says nothing.

I whine on in this vein until I finally run out of steam and all that’s left are the cracks in the ceiling.

At which point, much to my astonishment, my shrink speaks. Twelve words.

“I think this is where we find out who you really are.”

Twelve words. Count ’em if you don’t believe me. Twelve words that leave my mouth opening and closing like a goldfish. Checkmate in twelve fucking words.

Who was I? Really. Is this the only way to find out??

So the real truth about how I wound up directing the most watched television film of all time had little to do with either brains, inclination or talent. I was fourth on the list and couldn’t think of a response to, “I think this is where we find out who you really are.”

Possibly I comforted myself with the conviction that as the film would never be telecast, I wouldn’t have to worry about actually MAKING the movie. It would fall apart long before I ever called “Action!”

“I think this is where we find out who you really are.” Handy phrase that. I laid in on my cinematographer from Star Trek II – The Wrath of Khan, when he demurred over photographing my tv nuke movie.

“Lemme get this straight,” I said, blocking his escape route, “the one time this town gives you the chance to put your work in the service of your beliefs, you’re gonna pass and moan about the state of the world at dinner parties? I think this is where we find out who you really are.”

Checkmate. I can’t remember the details, but he did the film.

And for whatever constellation of reasons, the film didn’t fall apart. At one point, I even suggested ABC fire me, but that didn’t work either; they fired me, then hired me back. After over a year of sturm and drang, The Day After made it into the starting block – by which time all the sponsors and advertisers, who’d hated the project from the beginning - had fled the film (not counting Orville Redenbacher popcorn). General Mills, General Motors, General Foods – all the generals went AWOL.

The morning after the broadcast, I was poleaxed to learn that over a hundred million Americans had watched the film. A record that will never be broken - too many channels, so I win.

Then the press, always eager to be helpful, informed me that in their day after The Day After survey, my film had changed no one’s mind about a winnable nuclear war, and what did I have to say to that?

I put the best face I could on matters, opining that few people change their minds about anything overnight, and even if they did, they probably wouldn’t tell reporters about it and so on.

But it turns out one mind had been blown by The Day After and it belonged to the President of the United States. Ronald Reagan, recall, was a former Hollywood B star in such epics as Bedtime for Bonzo. Reagan had come to power believing in a “winnable” nuclear war. Twenty million dead, tops, etc.

But after recording his shock in his diary, Reagan wound up flying to Iceland to sit down with Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev (whom, to his surprise, he liked) and signing the intermediate missile range treaty – the only treaty, as it happens, that ever resulted in the physical dismemberment of nuclear weapons.

I think we finally found out who he was. Handy, that phrase.

You’re welcome.

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An Unexpected Honor

A few nights ago, at the Vogue Theatre in San Francisco, I was presented with a Certificate of Honor by the Mayor of San Francisco — in recognition of two films I made that called that city home: Time After Time and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

I’ll be honest: I didn’t see it coming. San Francisco has always felt like more than a backdrop to me — it’s a character. In Time After Time, the city becomes H.G. Wells’ bewildering, terrifying introduction to the modern world. In Star Trek IV, it’s the destination — the place worth traveling back through time to save. (Along with the whales, of course.)

To have the city itself say thank you — well. That’s something.

I’m still processing it. But I thought you should know.