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 SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL Page 1 of 3 Scripts written, locations scouted, money squandered:
Is the ghost of Stalin working overtime to prevent the 1930s Russian novel from being brought to the big screen? "'And what will come of it?' you ask. I don't know. In all probability you will put it away in the writing desk or the cupboard where the corpses of my plays lie, and from time to time you will remember. However, we cannot know our future." —Mikhail Bulgakov, in a letter to his wife What do Federico Fellini, Roman Polanski, and Ray Manzarek have in common? They have all tried and failed to bring The Master and Margarita, one of the greatest Russian novels of the twentieth century, to the screen. First published in 1967, twenty-seven years after the death of its author, Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita filled a void in Eastern Europe and Russia, where it was instantly and passionately embraced. In Russia there is a joke that seven out of ten people today will tell you it's their favorite book. Travel agencies offer walking tours of The Master and Margarita's Moscow, and the walls of the building Bulgakov lived in are scrawled with loving graffiti tributes to the novelist and his immortal characters. Phrases from the book have entered the common vernacular. To readers in the West, even those unfamiliar with the political subtext, it is a magical, fantastic tale, a bold retelling of Faust and the Bible. With its vivid, feverish, and hallucinatory descriptions—from a huge talking black cat stalking the Moscow streets on its hind legs and bloodcurdling beheadings to the climactic grand demonic ball attended by history's greatest villains—what filmmaker could resist the temptation to make it his own? It's a stifling spring evening in a Moscow park when the devil, in the guise of a mysterious foreigner named Professor Woland, materializes before two writers debating the existence of Jesus Christ. Woland asserts that Jesus did indeed exist and evokes an eerily vivid picture of Christ's first meeting with Pontius Pilate in Jerusalem. He then prophesies the death of one writer by decapitation, which occurs moments later. Soon Woland and his retinue, including the impudent talking cat, and a seven-foot-tall "choirmaster" wearing a cracked pince-nez, are living in the dead writer's apartment and wreaking havoc throughout Moscow, preying on the greed, pettiness, unbelief, and cowardice of the Muscovites, driving some victims to seek incarceration in the local mental institution. One longtime resident of the institution is the Master, a writer crushed by persecution in reaction to his life's work, a book on Pontius Pilate, a book that bears an uncanny resemblance to the devil's narrative. He tells another inmate the story of his love for his Margarita, whose devotion to him and his art could not save him. Margarita has searched for him in vain since his disappearance. When the devil asks Margarita to act as hostess for his annual ball, her love is so boundless that she is willing to forfeit her soul for the mere chance of saving the Master. Margarita is queen of the ball, the perfect hostess, spending one long night, naked, greeting a seemingly endless procession of ghoulish guests disgorged from hell. In gratitude, Woland reunites her with the Master. The Master himself must first complete his novel, and suffer the fate of Pilate himself, before being granted eternal peace with his Margarita. Rights have been bought, scripts written, rights lapsed, money squandered, locations scouted. Obscure adaptations have even been made, ones that seem impossible to track down. But something seems inevitably to bedevil these efforts. Thirty-three years after the book's publication, the definitive film has yet to be made. Among the idealistic youth who read the book in the late sixties and early seventies were some who grew up to be filmmakers, and some of those were cultural icons of their own generations, like Fellini, Polanski, and Manzarek (Though Manzarek earned his renown as the keyboard player for The Doors, not as a filmmaker). What is it that captivates them? What drives them to cling so tenaciously to an apparently cursed project? What hubris pushes them to attempt the adaptation of such a complex and elusive work? What has prevented their efforts from reaching fruition? Has the time passed for this film? Is it too late? And what would Bulgakov, the master satirist and also a brilliant adapter, make of the movie people and what they want to do to his book? Mikhail Bulgakov was no stranger to heartbreak and crushing disappointment. He lived through one of his country's darkest eras, and his courage and tragic history became part of the novel's myth. Like Pasternak, Mandelstam, Babel, and Akhmatova, he wrote in the shadow of Stalinism and indeed developed a perverse kind of relationship with the general secretary himself. Compared to many of his contemporaries, he was lucky. He was not imprisoned, exiled or executed, but he was silenced. Paradoxically, through sheer will, tenacity, and faith, he was able to overcome poverty, illness, oppression, and constant fear, and maintain the playfulness, buoyancy, and dazzling imagination of his writing. Bulgakov, his voice stifled, his works "corpses," a prisoner in his own country, toiled in secret for eleven years on his masterpiece, knowing he would never see it published. Starkly modern and fresh even now, in 1967 The Master and Margarita was a radical work, both politically and artistically. A dangerous book, it said the unsayable. It expressed thrilling, forbidden ideas and emotions, satirizing Soviet ideology, glorifying individual love and portraying a living Jesus when collective love and atheism were creeds, rejecting socialist realism and unapologetically embracing the supernatural, the irrational, the divine. In the West where it was published simultaneously by the YMCA Press in Paris, it became a cult classic. The Vintage imprint consistently sells ten thousand copies a year. To make a film is never simple. The development process can seem like a labyrinth without exit, financing has to be fought for tooth and nail, egos clash, and scripts are carted to the recycler by the truckload daily, but even by these standards, the unmade film of The Master and Margarita has a particularly snarled history. Some filmmakers have come tantalizingly close to their goal, even reaching the first day of principal photography, only to have the prize cruelly ripped from their grasp. As Woland says to the Master, "Your novel has some surprises in store for you." Andras Hamori: "I went to a Russian high school in Budapest in the late sixties. We had a very rebellious Russian teacher who instead of Gorky and Kataev taught us Russian from The Master and Margarita. It was a subversive cultural icon of the late sixties. It broke taboos. When I left Hungary for good in '81, I smuggled out The Master and Margarita as a cultural asset. I guess the first reason I thought of making it into a movie was I believed this was a hidden masterpiece of the twentieth century, unknown in the West." Michael Lang: "Someone gave me the book about fifteen or sixteen years ago. I always thought it would be an amazing film." Menno Meyjes: "It was a much talked about novel in the late seventies. One reason was the Stones song "Sympathy for the Devil." That's sort of how it entered the cultural stream. Abel Ferrara (director of Bad Lieutenant, King of New York, and The Funeral) and I were in the very early stages of our careers. We had both read this book, were fascinated by it, and decided to give it a shot." Roman Polanski: "In Poland it's a cult book. We were much more sensitive to all that Soviet absurdity and surrealism. I was looking for material in the late eighties, and I thought of The Master and Margarita. The desire to make a movie comes from what you would like to see, and at that time, that was what I wanted to see on the screen. I have a very good relationship with Warner Brothers. When I mentioned the book, the development department got very excited. They knew and loved it. They said yes, definitely, let's do that." Ray Manzarek: "I first read the book ten or fifteen years ago. I didn't necessarily think, I've got to make this into a movie. I thought, how incredibly cinematic this book is. Then I got together with the screenwriter Rick Valentine, who said he was working on a script, and I said, "Impossible! I love it, man, but it's impossible!" Then I read his script—a work of genius! I said, 'Okay, man, let's see if we can sell this baby, let's get it up on the screen.'" Peter Medak: "I read it in the late sixties and thought it was amazing, but I never thought it could actually make a film. It's very difficult to translate into filmic terms, and there were so many special effects needed. I completely forgot about it until Ray Manzarek got hold of me." Bulgakov's first career was as a physician, but after serving in the civil war as a doctor to the White army, he erased his past and reinvented himself as a writer. His first success was as a playwright, but not without cost. From the very beginning, he was plagued by censorship, and denounced from the pulpit of political correctness. In May 1926, Bulgakov's apartment was searched by the OGPU (precursor to the NKVD and KGB), and his diaries and the manuscript of the novel Heart of a Dog were confiscated. After repeated protests, they were returned to him. He burned the diaries, and never again kept another. Ironically, it was the OGPU that preserved the diaries for posterity, as they had made copies. By 1929, all of Bulgakov's works had been banned. He compared his situation to "being buried alive." Bulgakov began work on The Master and Margarita in the spring of 1929, and although he later burned the first manuscript, he continued work on the novel intermittently up until the end of his life. Hamori: "I guess this project has been circling me for the last twenty years. I went to Moscow because I really liked the Russian director, Elem Klimov, the director of Come and See, who in the late eighties had backing from Columbia Pictures and David Putnam for his Master and Margarita project. I thought it should be a Russian director. Plus, economically, it sounded like a great deal, because it was still the cheap ruble Soviet Union. Even if the special effects cost a lot, the location shoot was inexpensive. So I went to Moscow and got drunk with Klimov. He wanted about seven to eight million, but he didn't have a script. He said we have to make a deal without a script, without a cast, without anything. So we never made a deal. Maybe I should have done it, because at that time you could have gotten someone like a Daniel Day Lewis to work with Klimov, because it was romantic to work with a Soviet director, especially on a novel like this. But I really didn't like Klimov. I felt his reasons were more mercantile than artistic. Then I heard that Roman Polanski wanted to make it. Roman is one of my idols. His script came the closest, but it wasn't entirely there. One day I was sitting in my office on Sunset Boulevard, and Ray Manzarek came in. He had heard from Peter Medak that I'm crazy about The Master and Margarita. He said he owned a script of it, and would I like to read it. I said great, and he put the script on my desk and left. A half an hour later my secretary came and said, this man is outside waiting for you, and I said, which man, and she said, well, the man who was here earlier. I went out, and Manzarek was sitting on the terrace. He said, have you read it yet? And I said, no. He said, well, then, I'll just wait. I eventually read the first twenty pages and it sounded so amateur that I never followed up. And then he hated me. Since then, I've read that it's going into production with this director, or that producer, but none of it ever happened. Later I heard that this guy in New York, Michael Lang, owned the rights. His partner, Ira Deutschman actually brought it to me, when I was running Alliance Pictures. They said they have Polanski attached, so I called Roman, and he said, I used to want to do it, but I don't know anymore. So the whole thing disappeared, but never completely." Josef Stalin himself, at key junctures, intervened in Bulgakov's affairs and decided his fate. A word from Stalin got his plays banned. A phone call revived his career. But it also left him waiting the rest of his life for the other shoe to drop. In 1929, Bulgakov, in despair, took the enormous risk of addressing a frank letter to Stalin himself. "At the end of this tenth year my strength is broken. Since I no longer have the strength to survive, since I am persecuted and know that it is impossible that I shall ever be published or staged within the USSR again ... EXPEL ME FROM THE USSR TOGETHER WITH MY WIFE." July 29, 1929—letter to Stalin, Kalinin, Svidersky, and Gorky He received no reply to this letter, and in May 1930, tried again. "It is not only my past works that have perished, but also my present and my future works. And I personally, with my own hands, threw into the stove a draft of a novel about the devil ... All my things are past rescuing." "Not being allowed to write is tantamount to being buried alive." If they would not allow him to leave the country, he requested some kind of job to keep himself alive. "This letter did receive a reply, in the form of a phone call from the General Secretary himself, one that would haunt Bulgakov for the rest of his life."  The novel's film rights have been in constant question. In most cases, a limited option, a percentage of the final purchase price, is paid to the owner of the copyright. The purchaser must make the film before his option expires. If the film is made, the remainder of the purchase price is paid to the owner of the copyright. If the film is not made, the film rights then revert to the owner, who is then free to option them to another party. Ellendea Proffer: Owner/founder Ardis books, Bulgakov biographer and translator: "We get inquiries about film rights as often as once a month, and it's not that easy to find us since we moved from Ann Arbor." Lang: "It was assumed to be in public domain, but I was never comfortable with that, and I was doing a project at the Kremlin, where I met Bulgakov's grandson. I made a deal with him for the rights. You need a translation to prepare the screenplay from, so we bought the rights to the Ardis translation, which is the best I've read." When Russia joined the Berne convention on international copyright in 1993, it officially restored the rights to Bulgakov's heirs. He left all his copyrights to his "Margarita," his third wife, Yelena Sergeevna Bulgakova. They had no children together, but Yelena had two sons with her first husband, Evgeny Shilovsky, and it is to these descendants that the copyrights reverted. The grandchildrens' Paris attorney, Andrè Schmidt, maintains that since only a censored version was published in the Soviet Union in 1967, and the full text only in Paris the same year, the book has been covered by the Berne convention since its original publication, France being a member. It is the Shilovskys' contention that the copyright has always belonged to them. Further complicating matters, according to Ellendea Proffer, is that under the Uruguay Round convention of '93, if a translation was completed before that time it doesn't fall under Uruguay and therefore is not subject to the family. There are documents proving the Ardis translation was completed by '93.
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