THE GREATEST MOVIE NEVER

The Un-Making of The White Hotel

Paul Newman
Bleak Hotel by D.M. Thomas
Quartet Books £15

“In 1981 I published a novel, The White Hotel, which unexpectedly aroused in
readers a passionate admiration or equally passionate distaste. Within a few months
of its publication, I received an offer to option the film rights. My novel’s heroine,
Lisa, born in Odessa in 1890, walks a tightrope between Eros and Thanatos. She has
a great gift for happiness and pleasure, but is tortured by the suffering of others and
the intuition that great suffering will come to her. She is right, for in 1941 she
becomes caught up in the massacre of Jews at Babi Yar in Kiev. The ‘white hotel’ of
her sexual fantasy, written for her analyst Sigmund Freud, encompasses the extremes
of pleasure and pain, joy and grief. The novel is complex in structure, moving from
Lisa’s sexual fantasy in verse to a prose expansion of it, then to Freud’s ‘intellectual’
fantasy, to the nightmarish ‘real’ fantasy of Babi Yar, and finally to a spiritual
fantasy. Each section is stylistically different. The novel therefore poses serious
challenges for a film Maker” – D.M. Thomas

Invoking the litigious fog of Dickens’s classic, Bleak Hotel is a painfully hilarious
account by D.M. Thomas of the failure to make a movie out of his internationally
acclaimed, prize-winning novel The White Hotel. A screenwriter’s nightmare that
defied the conventional three-act structure, the novel was climax from beginning to
end. To shoot it as written would result in an arty piece that would prove
impenetrable; to re-write it in dramatic terms would result in something unfaithful to
the story. Like a cinematic Everest, this novel has scattered on its slopes the body of
many a valiant director, actor and screenwriter, including Bernardo Bertolucci,
Dennis Potter, David Lynch, Barbara Streisand, Meryl Streep, Geoffrey Rush,
Anthony Hopkins and D.M. Thomas himself.
Basically Bleak Hotel relates how Trusting Thomas and his agent allow a
couple of likeable swindlers, Geisler and Roberdeau, to take up the option on his
controversial, visionary novel that stunned the literary world by intruding aspects of
the final solution into a female opera singer’s sexual fantasies. Naturally the pair
treasure every word and want to make it into the greatest movie ever. With loyal
sincerity, they beguile and entice the author, sending him fresh holly boughs each
Christmas, arranging champagne parties, meetings with great directors, pointless but
delightful trips to America, France and Italy, paying for these excursions and soirees
either not at all or with money from a generous backer who has faith in their talents. A
mysterious pair, devoted to artistic movie-making, yet without financial scruple, they
are in no way vicious or malevolent but – like characters in Samuel Butler’s Erewhon
– joyously throw around wads of ‘musical money’, cash printed for ostentation and
show but with little hard delivery value. After their facades have imploded and the
venture foundered in debt and bankruptcy, another crusading producer is allowed a
last-ditch attempt. Susan Potter gallops in with an evangelising fervour that even
outdoes the previous pair. Initially warmed by this naïve expression of hope, the
author manages to revive his high spirits as more big stars are courted and locations
discussed and explored, but alas Trusting Thomas becomes Doubting Thomas when,
after another swarm of setbacks, Susan confesses she is hoping the intervention of
Jesus Himself may save the movie. Ever upbeat, she brings to mind one of those
forlorn characters in a Samuel Becket play, with names like Glug or Ham, who spout
enthusiastic hymns to existence and the glory of the springtime as their bodies sink
deeper into gigantic pots filled with mud.
While the anchor of Bleak Hotel is the absorbing, subtly analytical account of
the pitfalls that subverted the making of the movie, parallel to this footage another
reel is unwinding: the big dipper of the author’s private life, involving the tragic death
of his wife, Denise, a bewitching shade who swans through the narrative, offering
cigarettes, camaraderie and consolation; the kindly intercession of the poet, Ted
Walker, who counsels him during dark nights of mourning and later abruptly breaks
with him; the valedictory walk-on of the dour sea-dog laureate, William Golding, who
promptly expires after a party; recollections of Thomas’s mother and father at
Carnkie; teenage memories and erotic forays. These subsidiary dramas flicker in and
out of the shadowy endeavour to embalm in celluloid the doomed sexual oasis of the
White Hotel, a sanctuary besieged on all sides by an impending holocaust just as
Thomas’s psyche is stormed by thunderclouds of guilt, regret and trauma. This
insertion of autobiographical and historical fragments (including an ironic appraisal of
Stockhausen’s reading of the Twin Towers spectacle as fine art rather than human
tragedy) may disrupt the reader’s concentration, but after a while he attunes to the
rhythm of shifting vantage-points, the swoop from the objective long shot to the
intimate close-up.
In some ways, this is the America Dream seen through wry European eyes. At
the end, punch-drunk by outrageous fortune, Thomas crawls out of the wreckage,
apparently witty and upbeat. He forbears from condemning the duplicitous duo,
Geisler and Roberdeau, promoting them to the mythological status of tricksters who
celebrate and honour existence by the audacity and magical inventiveness of their
deceptions (unlike the humble burglar or lowly mugger whose paltry pilferings and
inelegant, drug-dazed assaults simply land them in gaol).
What is plain is that so much microbial energy goes into the making of a large
film that it is bound to engender in equal parts elation and devastation. Producers strut
in and out like miniature Tamburlaines. Actors accept and reject offers in alternate
breaths. Locations are made available then barred by warfare. The project bleeds and
staggers like a wounded warrior whose breath is just able to lightly mist a mirror. To
travel hopefully is better than to arrive, even after twenty-seven years have passed and
youthful flower-faces have crumpled into cauliflowers and the final reckoning looms
complete with cloak and scythe. Nevertheless, from still-warm ashes, D.M. Thomas
has created a phoenix of a memoir, a successful and moving companion to his earlier
Memories and Hallucinations (1988). In fact, Bleak Hotel would make a truly
compelling movie, if only some far-sighted, amazing person would be willing to put
his heart and soul and billions into it.