An Oral History of Glowstring

Sid DelMaar (Producer):

It was called "authentic." "Masterful." "A performance for the ages," and all that bullshit claptrap you see on TV commercials and on the the cover of DVDs and Blu-rays. Or on the back, if you're not yet at the top of the buzzword-addicted, shitty-critic food chain.

In twenty years, some narrator will be saying in a bass voice, "Aaron Klein was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Jimmy Yates, in which he played a young man coming to terms with losing his voice after being hit in the larynx with a baseball." They'll make a documentary of an okay movie. It was pure Oscar bait, but Aaron made it into something honest. God was that a performance.

Tim "Curvy" Cavendish (Writer):

It's a good movie. I definitely recommend it. Caveat: I worked on the script. I wasn't the main writer, but I made some suggestions that made it through to the final draft. I think the best change that I made was to change the character of Jimmy from someone who gets hit in the throat by a foul ball as a spectator into the starting pitcher. It wasn't a real fucking story, so why not?

It made 11 million its opening weekend at the box office. Not a wedding reception, but not a funeral, either. We'd wait to see the VOD numbers. Aaron Klein was a star on the rise -- kid has eyes like wet icicles -- and we were confident we had something special.

Vanessa Scotchson (Actress, "Hilly Dodd"):

Robert would come out of his trailer screaming, "We have him! We have him!" I thought he was on coke or something, but now I realize that Aaron's performance was that good. They saw it in the dailies.

Robert J. Sachs (Director):

I was doing coke. A lot of it. [Laughs] But I was more high on this kid Klein. When I saw his audition tape, I knew he was the one we wanted. Sid knew it, too. But it wasn't until that first day of shooting that we realized we had lightning in a bottle. I was fucking elated. Are you kidding me? No other actor could have played that part. It was manna from heaven.

Jean Dupris (Casting Director):

The studio had two big concerns. One, Aaron had a SAG card, but he was completely unknown. He'd done a few commercials and had a few lines in some DTV movies no one had seen. That's not unheard of: an actor having a breakthrough performance in his first leading role, but it makes the studios nervous. They want something reliable. Two, during the audition recording, before he started saying his lines, the guy looked like he was going to piss his pants in fear or have a nervous breakdown. That was the studio's biggest fear, that he was mentally unstable or had maybe some drug issues. He kept swallowing and tapping his feet nervously. His hands were shaking, and he could barely hold on to the script pages. But when he started reading his lines, my god. He turned into another person! He was confident. He had presence. I've seen a lot of actors fall into a role at the drop of a hat, but I've never seen that kind of transformation. It was supernatural. Sid and Robert can back me up on that. I sent them the tapes, and we agreed that we were going to go to war if we had to to put this kid in the movie.

Robert J. Sachs:

That audition tape! Sid and I were in Vancouver working on reshoots for Pale Sepulcher. Jean sent us the audition. She starts, "Don't try throwing anything pretty, Yates. Just get this last strike and then it's on to Pittsburgh. And Aaron goes--

Sid DelMaar:

"I'll throw it so goddamn sexy that you'll be hard by the time it hits your mitt, Carrington..."

Robert J. Sachs:

"Now get back behind the plate and watch me pop your fucking cherry." Jesus Christ! What a line! And he ad-libbed it!

Tim "Curvy" Cavendish:

That is true. It wasn't in the script. The original line was, "I'll throw it so goddamn pretty the whole stadium will turn to try and look up its skirt. Now get back behind the plate, Carrington, and watch me put some lipstick in your mitt." Aaron definitely made it sexier. [Laughs]

Paul Duncan (Writer):

I wrote the first two drafts. After that, Mark Winter, whom I'd worked with on two previous pictures, was brought in. The story was basically guy loses his voice, guy loses his job, guy gets depressed and starts spiraling downwards, then gets motivated to give it another shot and ultimately finds redemption. That was the skeleton of the script. Without any further details, that's a story that sounds dull and one that's been told a million times. Those first two drafts weren't as simple as that, but something unique was missing. Mark suggested we get rid of the third act, more or less.

Mark Winter (Writer):

I wanted to go dark. I was in a pretty dark place myself. I was going through a divorce and was drinking a lot. I wanted Jimmy Yates to die miserably and have the closing music an upbeat pop song as a fuck-you to how I was feeling. I was still drinking, but I sobered up on it being totally mean. I still wanted to get rid of the third act, though.

Sid DelMaar:

The third act was shit. We went over and over it, and it was like a Chinese finger trap. But we had to end the fucking picture!

Robert J. Sachs:

We brought in Curvy. That's how he got his nickname. We tried to call him The Closer, which seemed apt for a baseball movie. He didn't like that a bit, so it became Curvy. He didn't like that name either, but he didn't hate it. 

Tim "Curvy" Cavendish:

The name bothered me because the movie isn't a baseball movie. Sid and Robert didn't consider it a baseball movie, either. There's no more baseball after the first act! But they kept calling me first The Closer and then Curvy, and I couldn't fucking stop subconsciously inserting baseball analogies into the rewrite. It was beyond distracting. We finally came to an agreement that they could call me Curvy if I completed the script to their satisfaction, and I could call them whatever I wanted if I couldn't. And so now those assholes always call me Curvy. [Laughs]

Sid DelMaar:

We premiered at TIFF. Robert and I got lit on gin and tonics in the hotel bar before the show. It wasn't our first rodeo, but we were terrified. What if everything we believed this film was was a lie we were telling ourselves? It didn't help that when we sat down in the theater Aaron was blanched. His knees were knocking together. He looked like a six-year-old afraid to get a shot at the doctor's.

Robert J. Sachs:

I sent the new script pages to everyone the day after Curvy came on board. There was a third act, but it was very different from what we wanted, even though we didn't know what we wanted. Jimmy Yates didn't kill himself [Editor's note: In the original script, Jimmy Yates runs onto the field during a baseball game and shoots himself in the head on the pitcher's mound], but there was a shoehorned romance angle I wasn't fond of.

Vanessa Scotchson:

I wanted to be in more of the movie of course, but I realized it would kill the narrative. I emailed everyone and gave my honest opinion. It was a shitty idea. I didn't want to be hated as a person because a scriptwriter had tried to use my character as a spare tire to fix the movie's problems.

Robert J. Sachs:

Vanessa's shortened role is very bittersweet for me. She's one of the greatest actresses we have, and all of her scenes were brilliant. Bless her, she bit the bullet on the picture. She could have kicked up a fuss. I like to think that her soul remains in the finished film, like the scent of perfume left behind on a blanket after a daliance.

Vanessa Scotchson:

Did he really say that? God, that's Robert. A lot of sociopaths hide their malice behind charm.

Tim "Curvy" Cavendish:

We had to shoot. Something. Aaron sent me an email after Vanessa had bowed out that said, "Why doesn't Jimmy learn sign language and become a sign-language teacher?" "You can't be fucking serious," I wrote back immediately. That sounded like the stupidest idea to fix this movie, and I had a lot of bad ones. Some including robots. "Who cares about a baseball pitcher who loses his voice and goes on to teach sign language? It's a shit idea. My beagle could come up with something more creative than that."

"I'll buy you a coffee and we can talk it over tomorrow morning. Keep writing if you think you have something better," he replied.

Sid DelMaar:

So Aaron convinced Tim to make Jimmy an ASL teacher. Convinced everybody. Eventually.

Robert J. Sachs:

Tim called me down to the hotel restaurant. When I got down he just pointed his finger at Aaron, who was making these hand gestures. They were fluid. He was break dancing with his hands. But I didn't know what the fuck was going on, you know? I called Sid.

Sid DelMaar:

I knew he was using sign language, but I didn't know if he was using it correctly. It looked authentic, but so does a plastic snowplow to an Ecuadorian.

Robert J. Sachs:

"Knock off the spastic shit and just explain what the fuck you're doing, Klein!" That was Sid. The kid wouldn't budge. He gave Sid a napkin that read, "I'm not talking until this movie has premiered. Get an interpreter that knows ASL if you have something important to say. And let's finish this fucking movie."

I saved that napkin. Sid didn't care much for the bravado it contained, and I tucked it into my breast pocket when he wasn't looking. It might still be there; I don't know because I lost the jacket.

Sid DelMaar:

The TIFF buzz was deafening. The snowball started rolling down the mountain.

Aaron Klein [Actor, Jimmy Yates]*

I called my mom. I was frantic. I couldn't even tell if people hated my performance or loved it. It was like I was stuck in a garbage can for three hours with lid held on tight. That's the worst I've ever felt in my life: waiting for someone to judge me and tell me if I did a good job or not. I thought I did a pretty good job, but I don't know. It was up to the arbiters of art now."

Robert J. Sachs:

We had a cinematic rarity. All the bullshit that we hated and kept being fed by the studios was about to be reversed. This was a film! It was magic! They hated the title, though. So did I.Glowstring? It had no meaning. It sounded so cloying. I wanted to change it two weeks before Cannes, but by then Aaron was in the hospital.The title stayed. I'm glad it did. It makes no sense, but few things do.

Tim "Curvy" Cavendish:

The original script was titled Foul Ball. How awful is that? For a while it was Playing Catch, which was even worse. Aaron suggested Glowstring. I can't remember if he was high or not. He rarely was, but sometimes he'd partake, especially during press junkets. We needed a title, and it stuck. It's an awful title, but it weirdly fit the picture. Maybe Aaron knew some deeper meaning behind it. If he did, he never told me.

Edith Klein (Mother, Aaron Klein):

Glowstring. My lord. Aaron used to have nightmares as a kid, and sometimes he'd wake up screaming in the early morning. I'd go into his room and lie in his bed to settle him down. After a few minutes, or sometimes a few hours, he'd get tired enough to fall back asleep, and then he'd say, "It's okay, Mom, I can sleep now. The glowstrings are coming."

Sid DelMaar:

Oscar Night was such a...it was scary. We were nominated for Best Film, which I knew we had no chance at. Bob was nominated for Best Director, which he had no shot at, either. Curvy was nominated for Best Original Screenplay, but he was fucked, too. Daedalus was going to kill us. It was a juggernaut. But Aaron had a chance as Best Actor. The press was already calling it a pity party award if he won, but fuck them.

Edith Klein:

Aaron was really frail. He was throwing up every twenty minutes or so. His eyes were so sunken in his head that they might have burrowed into the back of his skull. "Mom," he said, "I have to be at the ceremony." 

Robert J. Sachs:

I remember Jake Gyllenhaal opening that envelope. I was thinking in fast forward, and my eyes were watching his lips in slow motion. You form an A with your mouth open, and a D with it partially closed. It's a subtle difference, and I was waiting to see which appeared. When I saw that mouth open wide, I stood up and started clapping. I knew.

Sid DelMaar:

He looked like a skeleton. He practically was. But that acceptance speech -- if you can call it one -- will live forever.

Tim "Curvy" Cavendish:

He was signing. No one knew what to make of it. He could barely hold the statue, so he put it down by his feet and started signing.

Sid DelMaar:

You could hear the entire audience shifting in their seats. Coughs, rustling. It sounded like a wave of crumpled paper slowly being blown down the aisles.

Edith Klein:

I have the acceptance speech. Aaron gave it to me that night and told me he had it memorized. It reads, "Thank you for this honor. I am so thankful. You have bestowed on me a great honor. Thank you to everyone I have worked with on this great film, and thank you to everyone I have encountered in this great life. I have been blessed. And lucky. Maybe it's the same thing. I think it's more of the latter, but I have never been distrustful of luck. If not for it, where might I be? Unfortunately, unluckily, my time around here seems to be up. I'll be gone soon, but others will go on, always building on this great cosmic snowball of life. You are all pretty."

That's how it ends.

Tim "Curvy" Cavendish:

There's one more part from that acceptance speech that Aaron tagged on at the end. I know because it was on the napkin he gave me in the hotel restaurant in Toronto before Rob and Sid sat with us. It says, "When I win the Academy Award for Best Actor, I'm going to sign my entire speech." The last part is a post-script confession: "I got a Polaroid camera for my eighth birthday. I took a picture of my dick and shamefully hid it in my bedroom ventilation duct. Maybe it's worth something now."

Maybe it is.


* From Klein's Esquire interview, published 2 weeks after his death.