Read The View from the Bridge for Free Online Page B

just turned out to be a friendly place—more friendly than I had imagined. People were enthusiastic about things, excited about new people with new ideas. . . .

HIRED
    When I began to focus on work I made myself a new rule: no speech in a screenplay by me was going to be more than ten lines long. This restriction was a killer. I was going to have to learn to write all over again, write in a way where literacy itself was a disadvantage. Later, watching the work of Steven Spielberg, I understand how much my verbal facility worked against me. It’s better if you can think in pictures. What happens to your scene when you turn off the sound in your head?
    Another rule: how many pages can you write of a screenplay before it is absolutely necessary for someone to speak?
    I was certainly lucky. After three months my agent got me a job writing a movie for two producers at Warner Brothers. Warner Brothers! I was “on the lot.” I had an office in the dream factory, I was one of the chosen few who was admitted by the guard at the gate. I even had a parking space, though the white-stenciled name on it read a sobering VISITOR. No matter. I trudged happily, deliriously, through the rows of soundstages and wardrobe departments, on my way to work in the movies. The first thing I did when the door was shut was slide a piece of Warner stationery into my typewriter and punch out the following:
    Dear Mom and Pop: I am writing this from my office on the Warner Brothers lot . . .
    Don’t let anyone tell you that being “on the lot” is not a thrill.
    I was part of the circus at last.
    Warner Brothers back then was still a real studio, complete with backlot. Although it has more recently been converted to office buildings and parking spaces, in the early seventies you could still wander around back there and see “medieval” wrought-iron chandeliers from which you knew Errol Flynn had swung a million “Action!”s ago, all stacked in neat configurations next to submarines, airplane fuselages, spiral staircases, doors of all sorts, and even a huge castle, which had variously functioned in Camelot (in the eponymous, ill-starred musical) and as a monastery in the Kung Fu television series. There was a “New England” town square, an “Elizabethan” street, a generic “European” street, an Andy Hardy All-American type Meet Me in St. Louis street (the real one at MGM was already apartment houses in Culver City), and several “New York” or “big city” streets with brownstones, stores, and movie theaters. And of course your basic “Western” town street was still in use, though fading fast, even as I explored its dusty storefronts.
    The film I was working on was nothing, in fact, to write home about. The producers wanted a horror film with a twist—a film in which men, and not women, were the victims. The idea pleased me. I recalled a letter to the editor I had read in the Times some years earlier, where a woman had complained about Hitchcock’s Frenzy . “Just once,” she wrote, “I’d like to see a movie where the man’s eyes widen in fear . . .” Armed with the producers’ mandate to that effect, I dreamt up a story about an etymological experiment gone wrong at a remote desert think tank, in which all the women are turned into “queen bees,” whose biological urge to reproduce always resulted in the death of the chosen drone. As their colleagues start mysteriously dying off, the men become panic-stricken, have to resort to the buddy system at night, etc. while the girls grow redolent with health and well-being.
    The film, as I finished it, was called The Honey Factor , a nice, oblique title for a film I felt could play the trendy Cinema I on Third Avenue or the Paramus drive-in with equal appeal.
    The producers seemed pleased. By this time it was Christmas and I made my big mistake: never visit your parents during