read, âall rights to the story of the marriage, the murder, and its aftermath.â And I signed it with eyes wide open, remorse already in place. Pentagonal, which was based in Toronto, assigned the project to a director-screenwriter named Peter Istvakson. I met with him a few times and found him the most severe example of a wonder-of-me type Iâve ever seen. âThe progress of this picture will be the progress of my soulââhe actually said this while we were having coffee in my old haunt, Cyranoâs Last Night. I mean, who talks like that? A real dunce. Go sit in the corner with your dunce cap on, dunce.
The productionâs been up and running for about three weeks now. The cast and crew are set up at the Essex Hotel on Argyle Street. Definitely something perverse in that choice, since thatâs where Lizzy was murdered. âThe hotel manager, Mr. Isherwood, was disgusted, but the hotelâs owner gave us the best rates,â Istvaksonâs assistant, Lily Svetgartot, told me on the telephone. âHe figured having a film crew and all those actors and actresses around would help soften what happened to Elizabeth in the publicâs conscience. Well, a hotel is a business, after all.â
Just yesterday, Lily Svetgartot telephoned again. âMr. Istvakson prays youâll soon visit the shoot,â she said. I immediately arranged for an unlisted phone number for my cottage. The âshoot,â Iâm told, is any location at which the movie is being filmed. Prays, does he?
Night has fallen; full moon; the tide is out. What makes me feel homicidal toward Istvakson is something else he told the
Halifax Chronicle-Herald:
âI no longer think in sentences.â Like heâs transcended language and risen to a higher plane of regardâcinematic images. Gulls tonight are ghosting the shore, along with the occasional petrel. Iâve been studying the field guide, but I donât know the birds around Port Medway all that well yet. The ones Iâm looking at outside my kitchen window might be Franklinâs gulls, little gulls, laughing gulls, or black-headed gulls. Bonaparteâs gulls, mew gulls, ring-billed gulls, herring gulls, Iceland gulls, great black-backed gulls, glaucous gulls, Sabineâs gulls, or ivory gulls. Because all of these frequent Nova Scotia.
Anyway, in just a short while, my sweater and buckled fishermanâs boots onâpurchased at a church yard sale, perfect fitâIâll walk down to the beach and wait for Elizabeth.
Based on a True Story
âI WANTED YOU TO know,â Peter Istvakson said one evening at Cyranoâs Last Night before the movie started production, âpublicity is planning to advertise our film as being âbased on a true story.ââ He set out a mock-up of the poster. The title of the movie was apparently
Next Life.
âYou havenât even started making this movie and thereâs already a poster?â I said.
âNo final decisionâs been made,â he said. âI have final approval.â
In conversations leading up to principal photographyâthe first day of actual film productionâIstvakson used certain pet phrases, and besides making me cringe, these phrases struck me as being encoded: they sounded one way but meant something else, and they seemed to have a deep hostility toward language itself. I suppose they were the standard-issue currency of the movie business, since finally these phrases conveyed nothing. My favorite example of this, which I wrote down in a notebook, was âItâs not a yes but itâs not a no.â He said that one a lot. At various times it applied to (1) whether the recently famous Canadian actress Emily Kalman had accepted the role of Elizabeth (she had); (2) whether
Next Life Might Be Kinder
would be the title (no); (3) whether Matsuo Akutagawa, who had won international awards, would sign on to work with Istvakson again as