Nicholas Links

Nicholas Green
Foundation

TV Links

 Bates Film &
Television
Checklist

Nicholas' Gift 1
Nicholas' Gift 2
Nicholas' Gift 3

BATES
ARCHIVE

News
In Memoriam

SPOTLIGHTS

Knighthood
American
Film Theatre
Fifties TV
Al Hirschfeld

FEATURES

Biography
Timeline
Photo Gallery
Actors Centre
Piffle
Ephemera

ARCHIVE

Theatre
Film
Television
Audio
Interviews
Writing

t e l e v i s i o n

Nicholas' Gift
1998

2002 update: "Nicholas' Gift" continues to be shown around the world, assisting Reg and Maggie Green in their efforts to bring attention to the great need for organ donors. The film was the recipient of a silver medal in the 1998 New York Festivals and was a 1999 Christopher Award winner for a television special.

NICHOLAS' GIFT, Part 1of 3

December 97: The Greens meet the cast of "Nicholas' Gift" in Rome.
Center front, Eleanor Green and Hallie Eisenberg, who plays her.
Left: Reg Green, Maggie Green holding Martin Green, Alan Bates,
Matilde Bernavei, Francesco Rutelli (Mayor of Rome), and Jamie Lee Curtis,
holding Laura Green, Martin's twin sister. Photo: Stephanie Salter.

Sunday, Dec. 21, 1997. ROME - Reg Green of Bodega Bay stood on a narrow balcony outside the office of the mayor of Rome. Stretched below him in the bright winter sunshine were the ancient ruins of the Roman Forum. Behind him, Mayor Francesco Rutelli could be heard discussing the myth of Romulus and Remus with Reg's wife, Maggie, and actors Jamie Lee Curtis and Alan Bates.
Curtis and Bates were taking a break from shooting "Nicholas' Gift," a CBS television movie about Maggie, Reg and the 7-year-old son they lost - and immortalized - in October 1994.
"There is a little stream down there," said Reg, pointing to a cluster of trees. "It was a very hot day the day we were here. Nicholas had sweat running down his face. He drank cup after cup of what we called "Caesar's water' from that stream.
"At one point, we actually looked up at this balcony. Of course, we had no idea that, a few days later, Maggie and I would be standing up here. It turns out Nicholas would only have one day in Rome; we thought he had a lifetime to come back."
When I learned that Maggie and Reg Green would be in Rome for the filming of a made-for-TV movie about their story, I wondered if the stoic and dignified couple finally would be undone. What could be more disconcerting or intense than watching the most traumatic segment of your life be translated to film?
What I had forgotten, until Reg talked about Nicholas' only day in Rome, was that the Greens already have endured a surreal, bigger-than-life experience. The true story on which "Nicholas' Gift" is based is a saga every bit as compelling, dramatic and ironic as anything Hollywood could create. Despite a powerful script, a gifted director and actors who seem inordinately committed to their roles, the making of a movie about the real thing could never come close to living the real thing.
Robert Markowitz, the director of "Nicholas' Gift," (shown above, on the set) summed it up succinctly when he described his task: "This is a very complicated experience - to do a story of such emotional magnitude and make it believable."

The basics of the story are known to most Europeans and Americans. Reg and Maggie Green and their then 4-year-old daughter, Eleanor, were on Rutelli's balcony in 1994 because, like the rest of Italy, the mayor wanted to convey his deep remorse and gratitude.
After leaving Rome, the vacationing Greens had headed toward Sicily, but were attacked by highway bandits in their rented Fiat in Reggia Calabria. Nicholas was shot in the head and mortally wounded. Reg and Maggie awed much of the Western world by choosing, not to exact vengeance, but to donate their son's organs for transplant.
Over the past three years, as the Greens have been honored by scores of organizations in Italy and the United States, they have also become tireless advocates for organ donation. The $100,000 they received for the film rights to their story went into the Nicholas Green Foundation, which promotes organ donation and opportunities for gifted children.
"The film contract you sign is 10 pages long," said Reg. "You agree that they can create characters, scenes and dialogue that never existed. You expressly give up the right to sue for defamation of character."
And, yet, the Greens signed.
As they have since they were first propelled into the public eye, they once again trusted that their determination to do the right thing would be respected and shared by anyone who took the trouble to contact them.
"From the start, Maggie and I have hoped that the results of this movie -- for organ donations and Nicholas' memory -- would overwhelm any problems that got in the way," said Reg. "We know that we will see things in the final version that probably will make us writhe. But we are dealing with intelligent, sophisticated people here. And to know that people of this caliber care so much about our story -- how could we be other than pleased? So far, the process looks good."

Indeed, the cast and crew assembled for "Nicholas' Gift," which will air in May, are a considerable cut above standard made-for-TV-movie fare. The $5 million-plus budget and two-nation production team are rarities in the milieu, as are actors of the status of Curtis and Bates.
The movie's first assistant director, Antonio Brandt, is a veteran of some 90 films, many with the late Federico Fellini. Isabella Ferrari, a major Italian cinema star, so wanted to be in the movie that she rejected her agent's advice and took a small role as the English-speaking Sicilian doctor who explains the severity of Nicholas' head wound to Maggie.
"We all love this story and want to try to get it right," said Judd Parkin, the film's American co-executive producer. "It's a wonderful story about a horrible thing that happened and how these people made something magnificent out of it."
The Italian co-executive producer, Lorenzo Minoli, said: "I have been stunned by the enthusiasm, by how committed everybody in the cast and crew is. This movie was picked up in June on the first draft (of its script), which is very unusual. It was cast by September."
Minoli approached the Greens in September 1996 about entrusting their story to him and the film company, Lux Vide. He was not the first to propose a film -- one group met the Greens' plane in 1994 when they returned to San Francisco after Nicholas was killed -- but he was the one who succeeded.
"I had a feeling that Reg and I connected," said Minoli, a former journalist like Reg Green. "I was barely holding my emotions in when I met with him. I had to push tears back into me. I was the father of a 7-year-old, and I was deeply admiring of Reg and Maggie as parents, for the strength they showed."

Judd Parkin has dozens of based-on-a-true-story movies behind him. Usually, he said, a cast and crew's relationship to a film's real-life subjects "tends to be detached." Not so with this movie.
"We've gone out of our way to incorporate Reg and Maggie every step of the way in this," he said. "We didn't want them to be blindsided by anything."
Thus the Greens and their children on the Rome and Anzio sets of "Nicholas' Gift." Thus the movie's writer, Christine Berardo, asking the producers' permission to send the script to Reg and Maggie and -- although not legally obligated -- incorporating some of their suggestions and requests into her revised version.
Berardo said that "the essence of Maggie and Reg's story is really very simple: It's about two people who did the right thing." Translating that essence to a made-for-TV movie, however, was the antithesis of simple.
"In a two-hour, commercial television movie, you end up with just under 89 minutes of story time," she said. "What I cared about most was showing who Nicholas Green was, his love for mythology, his incredible imagination. I had to get that across in one act; you had to fall in love with him right away."
For those who knew Nicholas, falling in love with him was apparently easy. They recall the boy as a generous "wise old soul" who gave away his own candy from pinatas when other children had been left out. His fantasy life was rich, too. A ferocious Frank Sinatra fan, Nicholas once transformed a souvenir Venetian gondolier's hat into the kind of hat Sinatra wears on the cover of an album, "Come Fly With Me."

Berardo included many details gleaned from the Greens. As did Reg, Bates tucks a coin in his dying son's pocket to pay the ferryman at the River Styx. The opening scene of Berardo's script is so powerful, said Reg, that "we shivered."
Yet during their time on the sets, neither Maggie nor Reg said they experienced any jarring deja vu or disorienting flashbacks.
"I wonder if I'm repressing all this," said Maggie, "but, so far, there hasn't been one moment that's been exactly as it happened so I'd think, "I did that.' The meeting with the mayor might have been evocative, but meeting the mayor with two movie stars and with the two babies made it something else. The babies have been very useful in our lives."
The babies, 19-month-old twins Laura and Martin, not only won the hearts of the predominantly Italian technical crew but promoted a natural bond between Maggie Green and the woman who plays her in the movie: Jamie Lee Curtis.
Curtis' 18-month-old son, Tom, was along for the entire shoot. When the actress wasn't changing his diapers, feeding him peas and pasta for lunch or sewing toys from powder puffs, she was doing the same for Martin or Laura.
"I've worried about Maggie's reaction to how I'm playing her," said Curtis one day during a shooting timeout at Rome's Campidoglio, or City Hall. "I can't play it stoically the way she is.
"Robert (Markowitz) told me the other day, "You can't break down again. Not for the rest of the movie.' But this story keeps wiping me out. I keep getting caught by these intense moments."
Maggie Green said she was thrilled to be portrayed by Curtis, although she joked: "She's the exact opposite of me -- organized, confident, warm and generous, and is always doing things for everybody around her."
Said Curtis: "I just hope I somehow do Maggie honor. Having them on the set has been a very weird experience, because this is fiction that we're doing. But it's also been like completing the process. On some level, we're all holding their lives in our hands."

Alan Bates, the British stage and film actor who plays Reg, had a similar reaction to having the Greens on the set.
"I didn't find it difficult at all," he said between takes in Rome's dismal Forlanini Hospital. "In a strange way, I found it reassuring, to see these personalities and know the script is faithful to them. Having them here makes you feel you've got their approval or OK."
Eight years ago, Bates' 19-year-old son died after an acute asthma attack. Bates' wife never recovered from the grief and died two years later. Along with their mutual English Midlands upbringing, Bates' and Reg Green's shared sorrow seemed to cement a quiet but powerful relationship between them. The actor told Reg that during a scene at a movie set of Nicholas' grave, he did not have to manufacture tears.
"I didn't do this film because I thought it would be cathartic for me," said Bates. "But I suppose it is a catharsis. I suppose that revisiting the major moments of life can't help but be cathartic."
Like all the people I spoke with who are connected to "Nicholas' Gift," Bates said he had mainly wanted to do the movie because of who it's about.
"Nicholas made sense of his own life by having lived it," he said. "But his parents made sense of the life he didn't get to lead by doing what they did. They weren't vengeful, they saw what had happened for what it was -- a horrible mistake -- and they cut right through to the positive. They have kept a steady line on that ever since.
"There are too few of those people around, people who can get above it. They have to be highlighted because that's what we all need to know exists."

Although he was not hesitant to submit corrective memos to the film's producers during his time in Rome, Reg Green said, "Everything I've seen since we arrived in Italy has been reassuring on the points we cared about." An undertaking such as this movie, he said, is inherently "a leap into the dark."
What never left him the entire time, even when he met Gene Wexler, the child who plays his son, was an all-permeating feeling that someone was missing. "The thought of Nicholas is with me every day," he said. "He would have enjoyed this very much."

© 1997 San Francisco Examiner