Typing for the Pope
It's 1987 and screenwriter Jeff Andrus is living in Rome, just off the Via Veneto, trying to turn a play into a film. The play isn't by any old hack, though. Pope John Paul II wrote it. Back in the day in Krakow when he was plain Karol Wojtyla he tried his hand at drama and The Jeweller's Shop was one of the results. When he became Pope in 1978, The Jeweller's Shop suddenly sold 50 million copies in 22 languages. For some, this was a sign that money, big money, could be made by making a movie of the story. And that's how Jeff Andrus came to be in Rome, typing, for four weeks, in a five-star hotel.
And he had a lot of work to do. The play's subtitle, A Meditation on the Sacrament of Matrimony Passing on Occasion into a Drama "didn't exactly suggest bofo box office," but La Bottega dell'orefice was made and Andrus got a call from Rome after it was premiered to an audience of 5,000 invited guests in the Main Hall of the Vatican. "You could hear a pin drop," after the lights came up, said the director. "When I finally saw the film two years later, I understood the initial silence," writes Andrus. "The movie was so bad, it took your breath away."
In Typing for the Pope, Andrus has written a bittersweet reflection on the madness of moviemaking. We meet shady Italians reluctant to pay any bill; there's the Polish connection represented by the saintly Monsignor St. Pasierb; the director is a famous Brit (Around the World in Eighty Days, Logan's Run), and there's the French money personified by Phillipe, "a dapper, Marlboros-smoking Socialist with a tuxedo jacket he usually wore over Levis." His favourite saying was "Ah dawn care."
And he didn't. The result of all the midnight typing, horse trading and back stabbing, says Andrus, was "a movie which, unfortunately, wasn't nearly as good as the great man who authored it." Still, it was memorable in the making.
