A man is traveling by train from Minsk to Pinsk. On the train he meets a mind-reader. “You are thinking of getting off the train at the next stop,” the mind-reader tells him, “and going back to Minsk.” “No,” says the man, “but it’s a good idea.”
When I was getting ready to pitch “The Sender,” back in 1982, I ran the story past my brilliant friend Paul Gurian, producer of “Cutter’s Way,” later of “Peggy Sue Got Married.” “You mean,” he said, when I’d finished, “the mother is [spoiler deleted]?” “No,” I said, “but it’s a good idea.”
The premise of the movie was “reverse telepathy.” If the Sender’s dreaming about you, you live his dream; if he’s hallucinating, you see it too; if he’s feeling something, you feel it. But without Paul Gurian’s creative mis-hearing, there was no payoff. So, armed with the new twist, I pitched the idea to Ed Feldman, who had a producing deal at Fox. His eyes gleamed. He took me in to pitch to his exec, who in turn pitched it to the committee. They couldn’t make head or tail of the story. I was given a chance to pitch it to the other execs, and Fox made a deal.
The script I wrote followed the pitch, with some crucial difference that I’ve forgotten. “I knew you couldn’t make that story work,” Ed Feldman told me. (Then why were his eyes gleaming?) I gave the script to Stanley Donen, who’d liked an earlier script of mine (“Carny”) and who’d become a friend and tennis partner. He had one note: take out the speech “I love you.” I took it out, and I’ve never written that line since. (“To speak is to lie.”)
The script went up the ranks to Sherry Lansing, then head of production at Fox. She didn’t get it, and this time I didn’t get a second chance. The project went into turnaround. Some weeks later it was picked up by Paramount. Jeffrey Katzenberg was the executive. He had a director in mind: Roger Christian, who’d won an Oscar for set decoration on “Star Wars.” He screened the short Roger Christian had made using leftover film stock from “The Empire Strikes Back.” To me the short made almost no sense. But Roger was now the director.
In his memoir, Tell Me How You Love the Picture: A Hollywood Life, Ed Feldman devotes a chapter title to the casting of “The Sender”: “Forget Cruise! Forget Penn! Get me Zeljko Ivanek!” Tom Cruise and Sean Penn, who’d both appeared recently in “Taps,” were available for the title role. But Paramount wanted Zeljko. A friend of mine told me how lucky I was: “He’s the next Brando.” Kathryn Harrold was signed to co-star as The Sender’s shrink, and Shirley Knight as his mom.
I was told “The Sender” was a favorite script of Charles Bluhdorn, head of Gulf & Western, Paramount’s parent company. And Roger Christian couldn’t have been more optimistic. “We’re going to be one of the top-grossing films of all time,” he told me, before leaving for England, where the movie was to be shot, owing to a money-saving plan in force at the time.
A couple of weeks into the shoot, my wife Carol and I flew to England. The mood in the production office was grim. “The Sender” was supposed to be a thriller, and the dailies were looking poky. Ed Feldman had called Roger Christian on the carpet. “I’m not making a John Carpenter picture,” Roger declared. “I’m making an Ingmar Bergman picture.”
Kathryn Harrold also had misgivings. “He doesn’t talk to the actors,” she told me. “He thinks he’s sending in his direction from the sidelines.” But Roger Christian stayed on, finished the picture—and many years later went on to direct “Battlefield Earth,” often cited as one of the worst movies ever made.
When “The Sender” was screened for a test audience on the Paramount lot, the film broke three times, and when The Sender, for whom we were supposed to feel sympathy, tumbled down a flight of stairs, applause broke out. Michael Eisner, then head of Paramount, suggested ending the movie after the tumble. This suggestion was as crazy as it was desperate. The ending stayed as it was.
The reviews were a lesson in subjectivity. A critic for Film Comment put “The Sender” on his Ten Best list, along with nine Japanese movies. “A monument of incoherence,” said Vincent Canby in the N.Y. Times. “Not one loose end,” said Molly Ballantine, in the USC campus paper. “Pray for a sequel.”
The grosses were less ambiguous. The movie played to $100 houses, and was immediately pulled in favor of “Heidi.”
Some months later, Carol and I had dinner with Jon Boorstin and his wife Leni. Back when I was making the rounds with “The Sender,” I’d pitched the story to Jon, and he’d given me an important note that helped unlock the story. “Nightmare on Elm Street” had just come out. “That’s the way to do this material,” I said. I’d let myself believe, somewhat grandiosely, that I’d invented a genre, and nothing much had come of it.
And yet…
When I went to interview to write and direct one of the sequels to “Nightmare on Elm Street,” the exec greeted me with “You wrote ‘The Sender,’ right? That was kind of a forerunner to ‘Nightmare.’” So my grandiosity was confirmed—and reconfirmed when a collection of “Video Trash Treasures” opened its review of “The Sender” with ”Before Freddy Krueger, there was The Sender.” I never asked Wes Craven whether “The Sender” actually triggered anything—Wes didn’t need me to inspire him—but he did ask me in for a meeting, and over the next couple of years we wrote two movies together and co-created the short-lived NBC series, “Nightmare Café.” And “The Sender” also attracted the attention of Lewis Chesler, producer of HBO’s “The Hitchhiker,” and I ended up writing six scripts for the series, and directing one of them.
Last but not least…
After “Reservoir Dogs” came out, Carol, who was co-running a movie company, Sandollar, invited Quentin Tarantino in for a meeting. “Are you any relation to Tom Baum?” he asked her. “Yes, he’s my husband.” “Well,” said Quentin, “’The Sender’ is one of my favorite movies. And when it was broadcast on NBC, they showed a different version. So I cut that version together with the theatrical version, and if Tom will autograph my copy of the novelization of ‘Carny,’ [for which I’d written the script] “I’ll give him a copy of the tape.” We never took him up on his offer, but I’m always ready to tell that story—here, for maybe the hundredth time.