He looked up. “Huh?”
“They need a fighting corpse.”
Max shut the hex book. “No good,” he said.
“But I bought a miracle,” Inigo insisted. “I paid you sixty-five.”
“Look here—” Valerie thumped Westley’s chest—“nothing. You ever hear anything so hollow? The man’s life’s been sucked away. It’ll take months before there’s strength again.”
“We haven’t got months—it’s after one now, and the wedding’s at six tonight. What parts can we hope to have in working order in seventeen hours?”
“Well,” Max said, considering. “Certainly the tongue, absolutely the brain, and, with luck, maybe a little slow walk if you nudge him gently in the right direction.”
Inigo looked at Fezzik in despair.
“What can I tell you?” Max said. “You needed a fantasmagoria.”
“And you never could have gotten one of those for sixty-five,” Valerie added, consolingly.
Little cut here, twenty pages maybe. What happens basically is an alternation of scenes—what’s going on in the castle, then what’s the situation with the miracle man, back and forth, and with every shift he gives the time, son of ‘there were now eleven hours until six o’clock,’ that kind of thing. Morgenstern uses the device, mainly, because what he’s really interested in, as always, is the satiric antiroyalty stuff and how stupid they were going through with all these old traditions, kissing the sacred ring of Great-grandfather So-and-So, etc.
There is some action stuff which I cut, which I never did anywhere else, and here’s my logic: Inigo and Fezzik have to go through a certain amount of derring-do in order to come up with the proper ingredients for the resurrection pill, stuff like Inigo finding some frog dust while Fezzik is off after holocaust mud, this latter, for example, requiring, first, Fezzik’s acquiring a holocaust cloak so he doesn’t bum to death gathering the mud, etc. Well, it’s my conviction that this is the same kind of thing as the Wizard of Oz sending Dorothy’s friends to the wicked witch’s castle for the ruby slippers; it’s got the same ‘feel,’ if you know what I mean, and I didn’t want to risk, when the book’s building to climax, the reader’s saying, ‘Oh, this is just like the Oz books.’ Here’s the kicker, though: Morgenstern’s Florinese version came before Baum wrote The Wizard of Oz, so in spite of the fact that he was the originator, he comes out just the other way around. It would be nice if somebody, maybe a Ph.D. candidate on the loose, did a little something for Morgenstern’s reputation, because, believe me, if being ignored is suffering, the guy has suffered.
The other reason I made the cut is this: you just know that the resurrection pill has got to work. You don’t spend all this time with a nutty couple like Max and Valerie to have it fail. At least, a whiz like Morgenstern doesn’t.
One last thing: Hiram, my editor, felt the Miracle Max section was too Jewish in sound, too contemporary. I really let him have it on that one; it’s a very sore point with me, because, just to take one example, there was a line in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where Butch said, ‘I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals,’ and one of my genius producers said, ‘That line’s got to go; I don’t put my name on this movie with that line in it,’ and I said why and he said, ‘They didn’t talk like that then; it’s anachronistic.’ I remember explaining, ‘Ben Franklin wore bifocals—Ty Cobb was batting champion of the American League when these guys were around—my mother was alive when these guys were alive and she wore bifocals.’ We shook hands and ended enemies but the line stayed in the picture.