Take the $ and smile

by Michael Dymmoch

In the late ‘80s, I had an idea for a movie I thought would be perfect for Sean Connery. I didn’t know anyone who knew Sean Connery, or anyone else in Hollywood. I’d never written anything longer than a short story or had anything published but bad poetry. Because I had no clue about how to get my idea to Mr. Connery (or if he’d be interested if I did), I went to the library and took out books on screen writing. I followed the directions and wrote my idea into a screenplay. I even lucked out and got someone in Hollywood to read it. When he called me to discuss it, he gushed about what a great writer I was.

But ...

Maybe I could rewrite the script to make it more like Back to the Future or A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. And why not call him after the holidays to discuss it?

I never called. Green as I was, I realized it would be easier to write another story from scratch than to rewrite my story to fit his ideas. Eventually I novelized the screen play; finally published it, The Cymry Ring, in 2006. (And I have a rewritten script available if anyone’s interested, though Mr. Connery is now too old to play the lead.)

Today I know people in Hollywood, though it isn’t any less crazy. And it’s no easier to get a story made into a movie. Everyone involved wants to make his contribution. People whose only qualification for writing is that they watch movies and have read Syd Field’s book want to tell the writer how to improve the script. Everything has to be like something else. Only different.

It’s all about the story. But...

Like publishers, movie companies have been bought up by international conglomerates. Except for indies—financed by indie film makers, passionate fans, and dentists—movies are made today by For-Ginourmous-Profit corporations, that don’t care if a movie makes sense as long as it makes money. And American audiences want circuses and happy outcomes. Very few writers have the skill to pull off a deus ex machina ending that works. (Neil Jordan comes to mind.) Writers have to know this to make it in film. (So if you want your book on the screen, exactly as you wrote it, you'll probably have to film it yourself.)

For novelists, adapting our own work is hard. Cutting a 300+ page novel into a 95-110 page screenplay—without gutting the story—is an art-form in itself. Best selling author and screenwriter Lee Childs has said he doesn’t want to adapt his own books. (And he gets hired to fix other writer’s scripts.)

Novelists realize the Moody Blues were right: Thinking is the best way to travel. And the cheapest. Actors are expensive, especially when they have speaking parts and box office draw. And car chases really co$t. Novelists don’t have to get permission to write a shoot-out in a public place. Or worry about crowd control, collateral injuries, lawsuits... Or idiots wandering through the scene demanding autographs.

We novelists don’t want anyone tampering with our characters or stories, but we don’t have to worry about convincing a bankable star or competent director to sign on. Even when the characters have minds of their own, we don’t have to settle disputes about who gets top billing, or think about whether the weather will cooperate or who’s going to pay the caterer and that long list of people named in the credits.

One of my books has been optioned; I wrote the SP. At the request of the producer, I’ve eliminated characters, added a chase, and blown up a boat (or maybe it’ll be a car if the movie gets filmed in winter). And the producer's indicated he wants the villain to have a larger role. He has his reasons. And they’re good ones from his point of view. Maybe the movie will never be made. Maybe a studio will buy the rights and hire a “real” screenwriter to rewrite it. And if they change everything but the title, I won’t care. They’re not gonna change my novel.

So I’ll cash the check and wish them luck. I’ll take the money and smile.

Once I Had A Love, And It Was A Gas

By Kevin Guilfoile

I bet there's a statistician somewhere who could tell me the best place in the United States to grow up if you want to be a writer. Some little town tucked away somewhere that produces prose masters and poets by the busload. No doubt if you had the time to do all the research and graphing and geographical mapping you'd find such a magical spot, probably down south, a place where they wonder about the water, a village that defies probability.

I grew up in Cooperstown, New York, which in just the last couple years has produced three novelists (and possibly a fourth one soon): The talented Eugena Pilek (Cooperstown) was a year or two behind me, and Lauren Groff (whose novel The Monsters of Templeton will be published next month) graduated in 1996. That might not seem like a lot. Maybe it isn't. But when you consider that the public high school in Cooperstown boasts only about 90 kids in a class, that's better than one novelist for every 300 graduates over that span. It seems like a fair percentage.

Cooperstown is a village steeped in mythology. Pioneer myth. Native American myth. Baseball myth. There was always someone who had claimed to have seen a monster in the lake. Every third Victorian home had a ghost. It's a place where the cemeteries outnumber the traffic lights seven to one. It was where America's first homegrown blockbuster novelist was born and raised.

Cooperstown is a factory town where the factory makes stories. Or it was.

In her debut, Lauren Groff changes the name of the village to Templeton, just as James Fenimore Cooper did in his books. But she gets everything else about the place astoundingly accurate. Even when the lake monster dies and they beach his mammoth, prehistoric carcass in Lakefront Park, the nonchalance of the townfolk, while all the rest of the world loses its head over the discovery, is spot on.

If I can quote her:

In the past, the tourists had never really taken up much of our attention. They held no part in the social strata of Templeton: they existed in our periphery, essential but unimportant. Since the hospital came in 1918, the doctors had made up the highest base, filling the town with money and brains, running the country club, opening the galleries. The only rung above them held our few millionaires: the ambassador, the railroad magnate, the wonderful wealthy woman who made sure there were flowers everywhere, the Falconers with their beery fortune, not to mention both sides of my family until we lost it all. Below the doctors were the other white-collar people: hospital administrators, attorneys, librarians, and below them were the farmers, who used to be important, but with the decline of the New York dairy heifer were now associated with malt liquor and bonfires and hickishness. Below them the random townies who filled the Bold Dragoon on weekends. When the new Opera House opened in 1986, we reluctantly opened ranks for the Opera visitors with their couture gowns and Mercedes, but even they were eventually shunted off to Springfield on the other side of the lake. When the Park of Dreams opened in a cow field in Hartwick Seminary, south of town, we thought that a few Little Leaguers wouldn't be able to change the topography of the town that much. We didn't expect that they would bring their parents, and that the parents (cheesy, loud people with cellulite under their shorts and minivans soaped up with TEMPLETON OR BUST! and CHESTERTON CHARGERS ARE #1) would demand cheap restaurants and a better grocery store and plasticky chain hotels and miniature golf. We had no idea that the Park of Dreams would expand to hold 1200 screaming baseball brats per week, plus about 600 of their awful parents. Though we tried to keep them relegated to Hartwick Seminary, three miles south of Templeton proper, we didn't know that such demand would transform the face of the town. The sewing store, the dollhouse store, the toy store, even the Farm and Home would become stores that merely slutted themselves to baseball. Now, nearly every store was brimming with memorabilia or bats. The tourists were getting harder to ignore.

I know anyone who grew up in Cooperstown, anyone who has ever loved the place, will find a lot of painful truth in that. As a former stock boy at the Farm and Home Bargain Center, I know I do.

The Monsters of Templeton is getting big buzz in advance of its publication February 5. In his EW column a few months ago, Stephen King raved: "(Templeton is) a town that will remind readers of Ray Bradbury at his most magical. There are monsters, murders, bastards, and ne'er-do-wells, almost without number. I was sorry to see this rich and wonderful novel come to an end, and there is no higher success than that."

I would suggest to the half million or so tourists who are headed to Cooperstown this year that The Monsters of Templeton is the book you need to take with you. Read it on a bench in Lakefront Park, or in an Adirondack chair on the Otesaga Hotel veranda. Take it with you to the Dreams Park and dip into it between your kid's at bats. Finish this book while you are there and I promise you'll really have learned something about the place by the time you leave.

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As long as we're talking about new books, I want to remind everyone that Marcus Sakey's latest, At The City's Edge, is off Marcus's laptop and in stores now. Get it. Open it. Smell it. Read it.