The Birthday Party with Charles Randolph | Development Hell

The stage of the Dolby Theatre is set with what looks like a thousand candles. Hollywood stars are lined up in the front rows, colourful dresses, careful hairstyles and endless cameras ready to pan from the crowd to the presenters. Ah, here comes Russell Crowe and Ryan Gosling. Ryan Gosling has a gold envelope in his hand.

It's a screenplay adapted from another source, such as a novel play, short story or a TV show.

Agree to disagree, okay.

The video montage for best adapted screenplay lists Brooklyn, Carol Room, The Martian and the Big Short. Gosling opens the envelope and the Oscar goes to.

And when he got the Oscar for Big Short, I was at an Oscar watching party in Brooklyn and I got so emotional I had to hide in the bathroom.

Mr. Randolph.

I love Charles.

Because I love Charles, there was no question I was going to ask Charles for his development. Hell story because I've talked with him at length about every screenplay he's worked on for the last 25 years. And I knew instantly which one he would pick. Welcome back to episode 4 of Development Hell.

So tell me how that whole thing begins? Start at the beginning.

And he is approached by a young Black man on his right, who he realized has a gun, and the young man leads him to a vehicle. That's, I think they're on 13th Street, maybe 12th, 11th, it's right off Fifth Avenue, and there's another young Black man waiting who opens the door.

And a third young Black man in the car, and they basically kidnap him to steal money out of his bank account. And what's interesting is they're incredibly young, I think the oldest one is maybe just turned 18. His name is lucky.

The others are 16 and I think 14.

And they have no clue what they're doing, right? They have no understanding because they don't have bank accounts, right? So they have no understanding that ATMs have a limit. They don't believe it.

At first, they see how much money he has in his account. I think it's over $100,000. So they anxiously want to get that money and it drives them mad, the system that they just can't get that money out over the course of a night, right?

So they decide to hold him in Brooklyn, in an apartment with three young women. It's basically three young women that sort of work for lucky. Maybe it's kind of hard to tell as prostitutes. And he's held there for basically almost, I think, 72 hours. And a relationship develops with these kids.

And at some point, they're offering him pot, they offer him a blowjob. Once they find out that it's his birthday, they're holding him on his birthday. That's why it's called the birthday party.

It'll be his 39th birthday. They want to get the money out, so they sort of hatch a plan to go into the bank with him. Of course, that's not going to work. He sort of talks them out of that.

To keep him honest, they threaten his father, and they sort of ask for his father's address. And Stanley, knowing that his father's business card is in his wallet, can't really lie. They end up discussing killing him, so it's a test they do at one point. So it's just a really tense situation where he's afraid for his life.

And it turns out there's no way they can get the money out and so they decide to let him go.

They have, you know, yet they're very worldly, you know what I mean? And so there's one woman talking about one sexual practice she won't do because she's saving it for marriage. You can imagine what that is, and it's just so heartbreaking that that's the thing she's keeping.

That's the thing that she has to offer, right? And so it's just, yeah, it's that youth, you know, but it's also moving. It's also sort of, I mean, the book's quite good in that sense.

It's like you get a sense of wow, there's a real community amongst these kids, right? They are wholly relying on each other, you know? And this is the only family they've got, and they're down for that family. They'll do what it takes for their families.

It just is one of those books where in reading it, it has a rawness to it and an authenticity to it. That's just very hard to find, right as a story.

I mean, he did a remarkable job. He remembered little bits of numbers that he heard repeated. He remembered the patterns on the floor. He identified the bus schedule going outside the building, He sort of identified the flight patterns to JFK going over the building.

He knew that it was a relatively big boulevard in Queens, he knew he could kind of guess by the seagulls how far the ocean was away. And so he not only managed to save himself by building a relationship with these young people, but he also managed to put the police onto them very quickly.

And it's just it's hard to describe. It has an ethnocentrism to it because it's rooted in the perspective of the white guy. It just feels a little untoward. It's just one of the stories that we in Hollywood can't tell. You simply cannot tell that story, right?

And and you know, if the film were being made, and, you know, in in in 15 years earlier than 1998, he could have gotten away with that. But by that period, it was already too late to tell this story without fully honoring the humanity of the perpetrators. And so the the thinking is, how can we take this and and and and make it work? And what I ended up doing is I turn up everyone's racism, for lack of a better phrase, right? I make Stanley a guy who thinks he's a liberal, but he's trapped by the cat, his own categories in the world.

I make these kids, these kids who have very few opportunities, uh, and and are trapped in their own kind of perspective of the other. So these are. These are a group of people who. Even though Stanley is being held in this apartment, blindfolded and basically in a big room with six kids, six young people. He can't see them really literally and metaphorically, and they can't see him, right. Uh, and then what happens is, you know, in in in the script, you know? He starts to rebel against this situation, he gets, he gets angry, and they start to work through their own prejudices, prejudices against one another.

And it sort of culminates in a in a, in a scene where, um, basically, he, he, he unloads on them and he gives voice. I think a little bit of that, uh, old essay, uh from Podhurtz. um, uh, is it Norman? Can you remember? if it was a Norman? Podhurtz? is that right?

And you kind of get a feeling for, for, for, the for the script in terms of it's, you know it. It's taking some risks, let me put it that way. He's been held for a few days, right? So the kids are in the room, Stanley's there, he's looking away from them.

He's, he's not, they let him take his blindfold off, but he's facing the wall.

Lucky Stanley, let me ask you something. If you had a chance to put me away for life, would you do it? Stanley considers.

Stanley, You know where I live, you know where my father lives. I don't know who you are. I don't know where we are. I don't care. I just want this whole thing to be over.

Lucky contemplates the flat sincerity of Stan's answer. Then he laughs. Everyone looks. It's a strained laugh. that's right, Lucky says.

Make the negro think he's got a chance. Open that door wide, then boom. He slaps his hands together in Stan's ear. Stan flinches as Lucky stands and turns away from him. Stanley Mutters grow up.

Pardon, I said, Grow up, yeah, I heard you shoot me or let me go.

Either way, stop pretending that you're the victim here, stop whining. There's no anger in his voice, the door's open. Lucky, okay?

Not always, not everywhere, but after 30 years of people like me, it's pretty much fucking open. If you'd stop worrying about being a negro, maybe you could just walk through it. And if you don't, don't blame the rest of us.

White man's keeping you down, white man's put crack in the hood, white man's giving you aids. Please grow the fuck up, a stunned silence.

Lucky steps back over to him, looks down on the back of Stan's head with confused menace. Stanley's not done, the door's open, he says. Deal with it.

You're just too proud to walk through, or afraid it's either that, or you're just plain lazy. Lucky Grabs Rin's Tech-9. He yanks Stan backwards by the scarf and crams the muzzle into his mouth. Stan retches.

Mystic screams, Stan forces himself to keep his eyes shut, Stan Lucky says. Grabbing Stan by the tie gun still in his mouth. Lucky drags him to the hallway.

Sin and Rin push through. Stay here, Lucky yells, Lucky forces Stan down the hall. He thinks he's taking him to the bathroom to his execution. Instead, he pushes Stan hard against the front door.

There, there's your door, Lucky says. He pulls Stan back, opens it wide, gets behind him. Open your fucking eyes, he says. Stan's Pov on the building landing, framed by the open front door, dark and dangerous freedom.

Lucky presses the gun to Stan's back door's open, Lucky says, Go on, bounce, walk through.

Walk through. He's angry now, Stan doesn't move, can't move. A decisive beat. Yeah, Lucky says. Ain't that easy.

Lucky slams the door, he turns to see. Stan has his eyes still closed, as always, refusing to see him. He gets right in the white man's face and whispers, Negro.

Wait, so in the book.

No at all, so this is the problem, right? The problem is, you know, to earn the right to tell this story. You have to sort of reframe it. And you have to take its underlying racist complexity, and you have to make it the theme, you have to thematize that complexity, right? And that's what we do.

We're back with Charles Randolph talking about his adaptation of The Birthday party and how tricky it can be to adapt a true story for a screenplay.

So you run into the guy who is the real editor of the Boston Globe.

And he says, the truth be told, when that story came in, it was one of 40 stories on the tip line for that week. It was the second week that I was on the job and I wasn't even there that week. I had taken a vacation week in the transition. And so I've always been a little uncomfortable with that scene because my culpability is really not quite what the film portrays. And of course, I'm saying to Robbie, you're not winning an Oscar without that scene, right?

That scene is what makes that movie right, because in that moment we see the people in the spotlight. Team, like all of society, like us, as viewers, are culpable, on some level, right, of ignoring this problem for many years. And that's what makes it interesting. And so this is the problem that you face, right?

And so when taking a true story and building a film out of it, you have to find those moments. How can we take this thing and make it something more dramatic and more politically compelling, let's say, than what it is? And the first problem is easy to solve, the second problem is hard. And in this case, the choice was, in my case, the choice to make Stanley Alpert different than the real.

Stanley Alpert, in fact, is right, because the real Stanley Alpert doesn't have those qualities, and obviously the person who hates this version more than anyone is Stanley Alpert, right? He's always making jokes, he's always referencing things.

He thinks of himself as a liberal, you know? And it allows me to. In the section I read to you, it allows me to focus on that critique of African-American culture. That at the time was something that went a little bit unspoken, but was in a lot of people's hearts, right, like in the Pirates essay. But, you know, was never sort of portrayed, right? And, of course, that did not end very well.

But it also makes a better story, right? And this is part of the problem with the moment, you know, in which we're recording this podcast is that there is such an attempt to elevate victim stories. To platform people without, often, the sort of constituent internal conflict that's going to make them fully human and fully engaging, right? And that's why so many of those films fail to work or fail to make money, is because they don't solicit our attention fully.

Right, because, you know, there's a reason Schindler's list is focused on Schindler and not the people in the camps, right? because Schindler has a strong internal conflict, right?

Which is much harder to do if you're, you know, a victim of the Holocaust, right? It's just, you know, it's much harder to do.

Because it gives us a sort of an emotional perspective where we do not know. Is character going to choose Option A or Option B? That's what you kind of want to be, and all my films strive for that, right? So we have it here with these three kids in the sense they're having to make the choice. How bad of gangsters do they want to be?

Do they want to kill someone, right? And we watched them in the film discuss that amongst themselves, try and make an effort, and they're not up to it. They each try at some point to try and be the guy and they just can't. These kids just can't do it.

Whereas, you know, Stanley needed the same thing in the story. And for me, that was him basically fighting his own desire. Because he's a talker and he's a man who wants to own truth. He gets up in front of court, he's a litigator, right? He's a federal attorney and speaks truth to people who do immoral things, and so he wants to be that guy.

In the course of that, he starts to realize as they express themselves and their background, as their humanity becomes more fully realized. Over the course of the film, he realizes that he doesn't see them as in the scene that I just read to you.

Wait, just so we can go a little bit more over his conflict.

He believes himself to be a liberal who can see the broader context in which disadvantaged people act. And yet when he is in this situation, he struggles to maintain that perspective.

They all got anywhere from, I think, 15 to 20 years and essentially sort of ruining their lives. And yet he still does it, but he doesn't like it in the film.

In the real story, No, in the real story.

Stan Albert, a victim of crime, wanted to see justice served and justice was served. And I don't think he felt particularly ambivalent about it, I don't know. In my discussions with him. After he read the script, it seemed to offend him that he owed them more than what was given to them in terms of how he portrayed them in the book.

And he may not be wrong.

I'm using his story for my own purposes, right?

So in the movie version, they let him go. The young men are arrested, and is the climax of the movie, him picking him out of the....

They never really get a chance to look at each other. And at the end of the film, he, basically, in the courtroom, has a chance to lock eyes with Lucky, their leader. And the first time, these two people can actually see each other. But he comes to a place where he can see the other finally, and that's the best we can hope for for that story.

That we've two people who, literally and figuratively, cannot see each other, yeah.

Yeah, they occupy the same space.

And certainly, the idea of three black men preying on a white guy has always been.

I mean, not always, but it's been complicated in recent years. In the last 20, 30 years, it's been a complicated idea, right? And really, it's why this thing was sort of in development, hell, because nobody ever got comfortable with it.

Come Monday, he goes in the office. He has two interns who are graduate students from NYU, who are both Black, who say, No, you can't do this, this is not going to work. Um, and and you know, he backs out immediately, so he backs out 24 hours later. But there were a lot of directors who came on board.

Unfortunately, there were no Black directors available. I think, you know, I think we a couple were approach. It was a slight. It was 2008, so there weren't quite as many as we have now, obviously, but no one, no one was around. I think what we tried to do is we tried to tone it down.

We tried to sort of tone down. You know, I remember sort of sitting in the office with going through and counting all the N words and seeing how many we could take out. Just to sort of make it a little bit more palatable, Uh, because it's raw, it's very raw.

In 2007, he's well into his seventies.

And if it's problematic, we get rid of it in the editing room, don't we? At the time, we called it political correctness, right? So don't worry about the political, whether or not it's politically correct or not, if it's real and if it's human. And we, we, we totally fine. And he had another thing he would talk about, which was that, you know, anytime you you not nestle up against censorship, you know you're in the zone where you're making something interesting.

In fact, he talked about, he would talk about how, and he's from Czechoslovakia. How, you know, the great thing about having our actual censor is they tell you exactly where the line is, so everybody knows exactly where the line is. And so that you can, you can, you can approach the line with great subtlety, right? Because because everyone knows where it is. And that's the thing that American culture does not have.

Is that sort of, that sort of, you know, clear sense? Yeah, no line until we, of course, do it well. I. In recent years, we've kind of created some lines for ourselves, but yes, there's no line, right? And so, he said. And so, he said, it's good that we make people uncomfortable.

It's good that it's raw, it's good that some of it's incredibly provocative because that's what's going to make it real. And and and he fully owned it. And, you know, I get I get emotional thinking about it, but he, he was just so open to what the thing was right.

And then, you know, I, I. I get a series of notes from him, and I realized they're notes on a scene he's already done, and I get another series. And I realized they're notes on something entirely different. And I call his wife and she's like, Yeah, you know, he's not been feeling well, give me a couple of weeks and then he never came back to it.

At that point, I think she had realized that he just wasn't up to it, you know, he was quite old.

So if you see problems at the beginning, you know, you gotta remember, where's this kind of person going to be in two years?

Do not worry, this is not our, this will not be our problem, yeah.

Right, that's not you, though. There is a privilege in writing something like this. There is great advantage and privilege in not having a dog in the fight. In in not being part of the worlds that you're portraying. So we understand the privilege that comes from belonging.

The person who belongs can tell a certain kind of story with a degree of confidence and accuracy and verve that the outsider can't. But then, but we're forgetting that there's a. There is a separate set of advantages that come from being someone who doesn't belong to either of these worlds. And my point about you was that, in this context, you're not part of Stanley's world, right? That's that you're Charles from Texas, you're not part of his world, and you're not part of Lucky's world.

You're, you're off on your own little island and that there's so, so much. That's an incredibly liberating, um, uh, moment to be the, you know, to be. So. I feel like we're overprivileging the set of advantages that comes from belonging, and we're under. We have underestimated the set of of storytelling advantages that come from being the fly on the wall. Who's just like, I, you know, you don't know anything to Stanley. That's why you're able to do that.

You're not. If you were part of his world, you would have been constrained in your portrayal of him. Similarly with Lucky. If you were part of his world, you would have been. You're un. You were unconstrained because you weren't. This wasn't. And that's like why it's so important for all of us in storytelling to defend the right of the storyteller to describe worlds of which they are not a part. That is, it's so essential that we defend that.

And I do think you're right. We've undervalued in a way what it means to be, you know, to be someone who lurks above it. A little bit, right? Certainly in my field now, maybe in, maybe in other fields, that it would be different, right? I think I think, what? What the the end that people want is?

They want everyone from different backgrounds to be able to tell their story. To be in the position to sort of sit in the director's chair if they want, or, or, or to sell screenplays if they want, and that is that is the goal, right? That doesn't necessarily mean, however, that that we should silo off our industry in that way, you know, and silo off our subjects because we do. We do lose something when we are no longer communicating across, you know, not just cultural or racial lines, but ideological lines, you know?

And a white project is done by a white person, and a Black person, a project is done by a Black person. But this movie isn't black or white, it's about black meeting white and white meeting black and like. So it's like, it's not clear each side has a right to tell the story, right?

And a lot of what's what's going on in this kind of like, like when you talked about the one director loves it, and then the interns read it. The Black and say, you can't do it is that it's a dispute about. They're obviously, understandably, reading this through their eyes as black beats white, Stanley's reading this as white beats Black, right?

So the sort of message of the film was actually, we're on the road, we're not there yet, but we're on the road. And of course, that didn't happen. Where I thought society was going is not where we went. We retrenched back into even stronger understandings of the importance of race, and not to some idealized version of.

We're all just going to learn to ignore our differences more and more and embrace these things that won't matter. And you couldn't, I mean, you couldn't do the film today. You've been reading it today. I read it today in a restaurant, and I just found myself wincing every other page because I really went for it. I really, I mean, it's very provocative in places and people saying the things that they're not supposed to say.

I'm always interested in things that feel uncomfortable and awkward for me. I don't know, I want to go there. Because what that gives you, if you will sort of take on those subjects, is the texture of the world starts to become really interesting. You know what I mean?

Because suddenly, every little choice matters, and that's why it's one of the scripts that I enjoyed writing the most, because every little choice starts to matter. Right? Because it all comes laden with meaning. Part of it's just a professional habit of, Okay, it's awkward, it's uncomfortable.

That's where I'm going to go, right? But also part of it is, you know, I do feel like, you know, this is not writing a novel. This is a collective endeavor and we get to check our work with people of all sorts, of all stripes. And you know, if we're open, and if we're all working hard, you know, we can get to something that feels very true.

You try things, and if they work, they work, and if they don't, they don't. That's what this is. That's why I do this business, and it allows us to take greater risk, I think, instead of less, right?

Because, you know, we're working together.

I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

Next time on Development Hell, Patty Jenkins talks about her R-rated dog movie This is I Don't. Is this? This sort of on one level is super bleak.

Laurie Santos Any day over at the Happiness Lab.