Script to screen with 'The Rose'
Donald Lyons


Percy Shelley died by being injected into fluid. Today's bards of romance die injecting fluids into themselves. In either case, water quenches the self-devouring, briskly briefly brilliant fire of the god. The Rose, a movie about the final plunge of a rock comet, certainly fits the mythic paradigm of the match-like Romantic hero. 

It is a very shapely film, neatly covering a week in the life of an idol. At the start, she - or part of her - wants out of the suicidal star trip. She wants out of the paternal domination of the venal manager. At the end, she gets out. She dies. In the course of the story, she makes a major attempt at escape from her childlikeness, which is the same thing as her vocation. That is, she falls in love with a civilian, a relaxed and relaxing guy. But this stab at growing up, this frantic clutch at maturity, fails. Mr. Right splits thrice, provoked by her lunatic instability. He comes back only twice. But alternating with her systole of eros is the diastole of her career. She goes on performing, being the Rose, flirting with thanatos. Finally, she chooses music, which is death. 

And all this compressed into a week which moves toward the climax of her return concert in her Florida hometown. It is a return home in all senses, a return to where she was literally a child, bored and wounded into art, and a return to the nothingness from which she - we all - came. 

A neat Orphic structure, with the sinister manager as the choreographer for the Maenad fans. But it makes The Rose seem too solemn. It is not solemn. For one thing, it is heir to a lush Hollywood tradition of the "tragic" bio-song-pic. In the Fifties, Susan Hayward as Jane Froman and Lillian Roth, Doris Day as Ruth Etting, Ann Blyth as Helen Morgan made impacts (in varying degrees) by their air of candor. It was the heyday of the black-and-white naturalism and the flavor was: now the grimy truth can be told about the famous. More recently, two biopix of this ilk relied not on candor, but on glamor. Funny Girl (1968) was a top heavy debut vehicle for Barbra Streisand. Its form was that of a Broadway musical, that is, Streisand literally impersonated Fanny Brice on stage and then sang privately to the audience of her secret grief’s. Doomed gangster-love was the by-now-formula plot thread. The persona of Streisand so overwhelmed the Brice  elements that the movie seemed a puzzling and fragmentary backdrop to Barbra. Then in 1972, Lady Sings the Blues, with dope and discrimination doing in Billie Holiday, gorgeously introduced Diana Ross. Ross was a good choice and the movie worked, proving something of a summation of the "straight" Susan Hayward genre. 

These pictures were full-length bios, and they were costumers (more or less). The Rose deals debonairly with time.  First, it limits itself to a week, making quick but sufficient allusions to Rose's past. Secondly, it’s set in a sort of vague, timeless present. True, Rose once tut­-tuts about some Vietnam news she hears on a car radio, and heroin may be a little dated, but mainly chronology is solved by being regally ignored. 

Also, those previous thrushes were of an earlier music as well as an earlier era. Today, shooting star means rock. The rock in The Rose, while purists may quibble about its want of "authentic­ity", is a stylized version of the real thing and quite adequate to the artistic purposes of the movie. (The real thing doesn't work in movies anyway. Ditto for opera: look at Losey's Don Giovanni.) Rock martyrs have not been much biopicked. 1978's The Buddy Holly Story was rather paradoxical-interest­ing only its archeological recreation of Holly's attractive music, and completely insipid on Holly's quite ordinary life. ABC-TV showed, early in 1979, John Carpenter's bio of Elvis, very episodic and (as we now know) laundered, but distinguished by a wonderful Kurt Rus­sell performance in the title role. The Rose is different. Though it puts a Joplin-like story in a Hollywood genre frame, it is not the Joplin-like story - and it earns the right not be judged by any standards of historical accuracy. (One re­viewer complained that, though Joplin died in a hotel, the Rose dies on stage. This sort of hagiographic literalism, which plagued criticism of Lady Sings the Blues, is just what Bill Kerby and Bo Goldman, the writers of The Rose, have cleverly and legitimately evaded by fic­tionalizing. ) 

The Rose is, of course, a meticulously crafted vehicle for Bette Midler's film debut. And it is here, in conforming a very rough equivalent of the Joplin myth to the personality and acting of Midler, that the writers and director Mark Ryd­ell have most significantly triumphed. Streisand and Brice may have canceled each other out, but Joplin and Midler re­inforce each other. The Joplin outline is not deformed by Bette Midler; it is Bette Midler that makes the Joplin tale matter. 

Midler's established persona­ - campy, vulgar, and above all witty - is shrewdly woven into the film. Midler loses her preciosity and triviality by con­tact with the Rose, while the Joplinesque singer gains in sass and humor. A prime instance is the Rose's invasion of a men's bathhouse, not to entertain gays as Midler famously did, but to recapture her sulking boyfriend; there is real wit in this adaptation of public fact to fiction. But the key scene is the Rose's visit to a drag show, where she enthusiastically joins three men impersonating Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, and herself ("Mae West" is also on hand). Here the movie sets its complex tone. It embraces a parody of itself, its heroine, and her most notorious recent predecessors in its own weepy Hollywood tradition; and it does this without sacrificing the real tragic energy and feeling that run through it. Like a Metaphysical poem, it handles and contains both fun and pathos. 

Which is Midler's performance in a nutshell. Introducing a blues, for exam­ple, she undercuts its woman-as-victim context with a tart feminist crack. Midler has a phone scene toward the end that makes Luise Rainer's famous one in The Great Ziegfeld (1936 - she got an Oscar) sound like a recorded mes­sage. She's in her hometown, she's dying of drugs, it's the night of the big concert, she's standing right next to the high-school football field where she took on the whole team years ago - and she calls her long-alienated mom and dad for the last time. Midler plays it magnifi­cently, full-bloodedly, even subtly; but somewhere underneath it, there is a sense of the hilarious melodrama of the moment. Indeed the movie as a whole both delicately parodies and seriously tells its tragic myth. This is not camp, but wit. 

Midler's powerful acting includes her singing and moving on stage, which car­ries through the basic point-that this is where the Rose puts her serious life-en­ergy, while the rest is capricious and de­structive play. Frederic Forrest has been justly praised as the pickup boyfriend; with his tranquil, laid back, decent small town sexiness he is the eye of Midler's hurricane, her ideal yin-yang foil. Alan Bates as the brutal but es­sential manager is plausible enough, but garbles a lot, in the Robert Shaw tradition. 

The Rose is, like Apocalypse Now, a Dolby movie. It must be seen in a large, loud house where one drowns in the noise and pulse. In fact, Dolbyism seems a more fundamental sense-revo­lution in moviegoing than any of the 'Scopes or 'Amas of yesteryear. (Luna, that extraordinary Aldrichian comedy, seems to me a misreleased Dolby movie, where Bertolucci uses opera the way The Rose uses rock. And, by the way, The Rose and Luna are not merely good Dolby movies, but also good movies. ) 

The Rose has a very American vitality, the most pungent since Saturday Night Fever, and it has the most spectacular cinema debut since Travolta's. It ends - the third last shot, I think -with a poster of James Dean. That's the thing about myths. They never die. 

Bill Kerby considers himself a profes­sional screenwriter, not an "artist" or a "poet." He writes alone, but all his films carry multiple writing credits, the legacy of subsequent revisions. Some of his better work remains uncredited, as in the case of The Last American Hero, where a Writers Guild arbitration com­mittee determined that his contribution was not sufficient to merit credit. Pauline Kael thought differently and protested in print and, says Kerby, "ev­erybody in town knows I did it." Among his other credits are Hooper, which he co-wrote with Tom Rickman, The Dion Brothers, directed by Jack Starrett, and Firepower, which started as Dirty Harry III but was rewritten to such a degree that Kerby was given only story credit (shared by Michael Winner). 

Kerby, a Kent State University gradu­ate and an MFA holder from UCLA, has been writing since 1969. He's also known in Hollywood as "king of the de­velopment deals" and his business card carries the following inscription: "I'm a highly-paid typist and a well-known cat kisser. " 

All his films, Kerby claims, share a strong sense of morality. "Good is good and bad is bad," he states, "and I want to clarify which is which. I don't believe in selective amnesia and shifting mores. If you want the American Dream, you should be prepared to pay. As the famous prison maxim says, 'What goes down comes around.'" Kerby is cur­rently working on a script entitled The End of the Line, which involves an all-im­moral cast although the hero turns out to be good. It is about cocaine smuggling. . 

 "I had only been writing for a short time when, in 1973, I was hired by pro­ducer Marvin Worth of Twentieth Cen­tury-Fox to do an unspecified rock 'n' roll film about a female singer. I told him what direction I would be interested in taking and he told me to go ahead and get involved. My agent struck a deal, which was really good for me then but in retrospect had been terrible, and I wrote a treatment and an outline-about thirty pages - with all the characters, some of the dialogue, the situations. That was approved by Fox and then we went to first draft. 

During this time, Fox had hired a re­searcher, an amazing man named John Cooke (the son of Alistair Cooke) who had been Janis Joplin's road manager, and worked in various capacities for Al­bert Grossman who, with Cooke, had handled Joplin. So, we went around and visited all the people who had played in Janis's band, who had known her - just to give me some first-hand information about what this woman was like.   

In fact, I personally didn't have her in mind for the movie. She was extraordi­nary. I was at Monterey in the first row, with a camera and a press pass, in 1967, when she gave the performance that es­sentially made her career. But she was never my very favorite. At that point, I was undergoing a musical transforma­tion - I was under the spell of David Bowie. His work was miraculous and I thought, why not make this film about a guy? Also, then it's easier to cast. I've al­ways loved almost every aspect of the film business, so when I write some­thing, I think about casting. I think, 'Am I painting myself into a corner here?' I knew as this role was shaping up that it would be very difficult to cast, be­cause there are very few bankable stars and ninety percent of them are men. You have three bankable female stars: Jane Fonda, Barbra Streisand, Diana Ross, which limits the casting in a big, big way. I figured that if we did it about a guy, we might be able to get Mick Jag­ger - I was still under the sway of Per­formance - or even Bowie himself. In addition, between you and me, it was difficult for me to write a woman - hav­ing been a guy for at least most of my forty-two years. So, I kept trying to talk them into changing it to a guy. They didn't want to for reasons best known to themselves but which, in the end, turned out to be right. 

So, I went through with the first draft and finished it. Fox was very happy, considering what it was. They knew it was arcane and difficult material to sell, but it hadn't cost them that much to get a first draft. So we went into the second draft. 

At that point, they hired a director who had just made a wonderful film for Clint Eastwood, Thunderbolt and Light­foot: Michael Cimino. They hired him to direct. We had meetings and brain­busting sessions. We tried to improve my first draft, make it bigger, more socko and less vicious and drug-and­ rock 'n' roll-road oriented. It was more about '68 and what it was like then with a rock band on the road than what we see in the film. 

I did the best I could. But it's very dif­ficult to give a flavor for the time on pa­per; that's for a director and an art director to come up with, and I had al­ways assumed that they would. I be­lieved that art director Jim Schoppe and director Mark Rydell probably figured the important thing was the pain she was going through - the screamin', hell­bound express train that she couldn't get off of and, in fact, didn't really want to. Personally, it doesn't really matter to me. Some critics have just gone nuts with that and I think that maybe it's our fault that we didn't engage them enough in the power of her character and the piece. But they're not supposed to pay any attention to that. Also, it costs a lot to make an intricately-detailed movie, especially in terms of art direction. David Lean does it brilliantly: in his films, everything is in focus from an inch all the way into the horizon. We just couldn't do that. But I didn't have much to do with the making of the film. I was long gone by then. 

Anyway, back to our story: in an inter­esting and Byzantine series of moves, calculated to dismay even Gene Kelly's dance steps, it turned out that Michael Cimino had not only been hired as a di­rector but also as a writer - and had been writing behind me, in another office, unknown to me, down the hall. They still could do that in those days. (Fortu­nately, for the new minimum basic agreement the Writers Guild has struck with the producers and studios, they can no longer do that.)  So, I'm now off the picture and on to other projects. 

Years go by and I don't hear anything. I assume that the project is dead. I keep hearing every now and then that Bette Midler has it but she hates it. . . Blah­blah. One day I read in the trades that they're going to make. . . The Rose! Produced by Marvin Worth and Aaron Russo, starring Bette Midler, and writ­ten by Bo Goldman and Michael Cimino from an idea by Marvin Worth. And I think, 'Wait a minute! This sounds fa­miliar!' So, in the course of trying to get a director, they send the script to a friend of mine, Lamont Johnson, with whom I had done The Last American Hero, and he reads it and says, 'Jesus! This writing sounds like Bill Kerby!' He flips back to the front page and doesn't see my name in the credits. So he reads on and he says, 'This is Bill Kerby!' - because it's well-known that I keep stealing from myself. If Leonard Bernstein can get away with it, why not me? So, back and forth, again and again, and finally he calls me up and says, 'Have you heard about this script?' And I'm on the other end of the phone, breathing faint and white-faced, and I say, 'No, my God!' 

He messengered it over to me and it was essentially mine, eighty percent word for word. And in one case, a typo that had survived five years, four direc­tors, three different producers and a par­tridge and a pear tree. My name was nowhere on it. 

So, as you could imagine, this caused some bad blood between the studio and myself. Eventually, through the Writers Guild and some amusing phone calls by my attorney, who also represented Bette on the picture and who is currently run­ning Francis Coppola's empire, we got my name put back on there. I knew it was eventually going to come down to the classic Writers Guild arbitration, but in the meantime, in the two years they were in production on this movie, my name was very seldom - if ever - men­tioned. I was given third position in the screenplay credit and no story credit at all. As you know, the film ended up be­ing written by me in first position (with Bo Goldman) with full story credit, which is considerably different. 

As far as I can tell, the stuff that Bo added is real nice and, in fact, I think the best line in the film is his. It's when she's looking out at the clouds, waking up, and says, 'All these fuckin' clouds look alike. I don't know where I am!' That's so good! At this point, I could no longer tell who did what, but in the course of gorging through eight scripts on this, page for page, we decided that most of it was mine - as did the Writers Guild arbitration committee. 

As for all the stories that happened during production with people splitting up, loving and hating each other, I don't have a clue. I met Mark Rydell for the first time at a preview of this film in Dallas, which was in May '78. I had never met Bette Midler before the world premiere at Filmex. I still haven't met Vilmos Zsigmond. Writers basically live in a hole. 

I've only seen The Rose twice, and I'm proud of it. I was all ready to hate it, but found it stunning. It looks big and rich and powerful and, like all things big and rich and powerful, certainly isn't flaw­less. There are lots of mistakes in it, some of them mine. I wish that some­body had called me when they were making the movie to try and help out. When I wrote it, back in 1973, what did I know? I've learned so much since then. I would want to go to work imme­diately on the character of Rudge (Alan Bates) and how he relates to what I al­ways intended in my mind would be the love of his life - the Rose. It was a mis­take I thought I'd get to in another draft. I wish I could do it over again. 

It's funny that you see a similar sense of doom here and in The Last American Hero. I don't see that at all. Lamont Johnson and me and the guy who did most of the writing on it, Bill Roberts, had always intended a sense of absolute, clean-cut triumph in the film and we fought for it like crazy. But there was a man named Marvin Birdt, who, at sev­eral times I was very close to, but in those days was the head of the story de­partment at Fox and was functioning, we always felt, as the company's hatchet man. And he was absolutely opposed to us putting anything with bright hope and shining light. He wanted a down­beat ending: in order for Junior Johnson (Jeff Bridges) to get his car and ride with the big money, he had to give up all his friends. The studio wanted a film about how it feels to sell out, which I suspected reflects more on their particular pain in their personal lives and movie ca­reer than it did on Junior Johnson and the stock car of 1966/7. But when a stu­dio says, 'Motherfucker, we don't want it good. We want it thirsty!' and you see the light of cold steel and fire in their eyes, you know they're not foolin' around. If you don't give it to them, they're going to call Tom Mankiewicz and somebody will be there to do what they want. When push comes to shove, it's their ball game because it's their money. 

But Bette is doomed. It was always there, but I didn't think about it much. I tended to think along character lines more than along story lines. I purposely tried to stay away from an actual plot and go more toward plotting out characters and how they change, for themselves and to each other, because I felt that a plot implies some sort of narrative and sometimes that will distract viewers. As John Cheever said, it's 'an attempt to hold their interest at the sacrifice of moral conviction.' I knew that we had your knocked-down-cried-out-Susan Hayward-getting-the Academy-Award­ screaming-and-yelling piece here. And I just couldn't see putting a caper on top of it or a brother dying of cancer. Not that I don't love those things, but I didn't feel it was going to work right in here. This movie is more or less a slice of life, although certainly not a documen­tary. 

Do I feel the film has a camp sensibil­ity? I don't think so. I've never been crazy about Bette's sense of performing before. I felt she was wildly talented, but sort of arcane in a camp sense. But this is acting. The thing that galls me is when reviewers say, 'It's just Bette Midler doing her same old act.' That's ridiculous. She has never sung rock' n' roll screaming-down-shit-in-­your-pants-no-foolin'-around music like this. I mean, she is down in this movie! She's a different kind of person entirely in this film. I don't care what she says ­although she doesn't deny it - this is dif­ferent. This isn't Bette Midler. This is Mary Rose Foster, played by somebody truly bigger than life - Bette. Bette is so smart it's appalling. And she had worked this thing out - she and Rydell, who is a wonderful director for actors, I'm led to believe - so that it's not that kind of camp. Something like that would set my back teeth going, especially if I had writ­ten something to be straight-down rock'n'roll and all of a sudden they came up with a bus-and-truck Noel Coward. I'm just not interested in that. 

There's that one thing, of course: the drag queen sequence in Club 54, or whatever its name was changed to - and we intended that to be a tour-de-force only. Just a straight set piece that, if the movie was running too long, could be cut out. I think the movie is a little too long - I'd like to see it ten to fifteen minutes shorter - but Mark is not going to cut a frame of it anymore."