AN EXCERPT FROM CRIME FACTORY ISSUE NINE.
Noel King teaches in the Department of Media, Music, Communication and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in NSW, Australia.
He conducted this interview with Scott Phillips in 2005.
My flight into St Louis had been delayed and so I was late picking up my rental car. I was supposed to call Scott while following directions he had given me to get to his place. I got lost a bit but eventually got there after he came out in his car to lead the way back. We stopped on the way for me to buy some French wine to have with the much delayed dinner, which was a lovely time chatting to Scott, Anne and Claire. I stayed overnight in their spare room and the next day we did this interview. Scott also took me around some St Louis book places, including a comic book-graphic novel shop he liked, and a crime-mystery bookshop he liked, both run by friends of his. He gave me a driving tour of the city, providing a thoughtful “urban planning” account of the sort (he says below) he now thinks is at the heart of his writing.
We stayed in email contact over the years, and he has recently published another book, The Adjustment (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2011).
NK: Can I get a sense of your biography? You were born in Wichita, Kansas; how did you get started writing?
SP: Yes, born in 1961 in Wichita Kansas, went to school there, started writing fiction in high school, although I’d always written little things. I was always pretty much encouraged to do it, and took creative writing in college but not much of it. My freshman year English composition instructor was James Lee Burke, and he was always very encouraging. I still know Jim. In fact, a significant portion of his family still lives in Wichita, so I see him and his wife and his daughters from time to time. Alafair, his daughter, is now a novelist and doing him proud.
That was at Wichita State University in Kansas, where Jim taught for many years. And whatever else I was doing, I continued to write fiction. Then I kind of sidetracked into writing screenplays, not very successfully and spent some time doing that. One movie that did get made, called Crosscut (1996), was an interesting, sort of misconceived film. The director, Paul Raimondi, had an idea for a movie, and it had some good things in it. The basic idea was that a Mafioso kills the son of the most powerful mob boss in New York, and has to go on the lam, and he goes to the Pacific Northwest and pretends to be a logger. It sounds like a comedy, it sounds like Steve Martin, and it probably would have been a pretty good comedy, but it was supposed to be serious. Paul described it as Reservoir Dogs meets Sometimes a Great Notion. And it was pretty frustrating because David Masiel and I wrote the screenplay with Paul Raimondi and there were things in it that were good but the whole basic idea, what in Hollywood they call the log line, the high concept, was just not very workable, it was silly. So when I finished that I was pretty frustrated, I decided to go back and write some fiction. I started writing a story, I had an opening scene, the scene where the guy sets his hair on fire, which is something I’d really seen, and I’d always thought I wanted to write that into a book. So I started writing that, and the book The Ice Harvest took off from that.
My immediate thought after Ice Harvest was that I might write a book about Charlie’s kids, which I may yet do. The problem is I’m a little disinclined to write anything that’s a sequel to Ice Harvest because I can’t sell the film rights.
NK: Jim Crumley mentioned a similar thing in relation to a couple of his books, The Last Good Kiss and Dancing Bear. What is the issue here?
SP: It’s called the James Bond clause because Ian Fleming famously sold the remake rights and the sequel rights to all these different books to all these different producers, and it’s provided a livelihood for many a lawyer in England and in Hollywood over the years. And it famously resulted in the making of Never Say Never Again, because somehow Fleming had sold the remake rights to Thunderball to somebody other than Cubby Broccoli, who had the rights to the original, to make a movie out of the book. So the deal is now if you write a novel and you sell the film rights to the novel, you’re also selling the film rights to all of those characters. So when I wrote The Walkaway, which has a lot of characters from Ice Harvest in it, my movie agent said that’s really a shame because now you can only sell the rights to this book to Focus Features. And as it happens I don’t think the book is a movie anyway, I don’t think The Walkaway is filmable, although Robert Benton keeps telling me it is. But my sense is that it’s a lost cause.
NK: How does Cottonwood fit into this rights scenario?
SP: Cottonwood is set a hundred years before Ice Harvest, so obviously there are no characters who appear in Ice Harvest. But in the book I’m doing now, the narrator is the grandson of a character in Cottonwood, and so although I can still sell the rights to Cottonwood, I might have screwed myself out of further possibilities.
So I finished Ice Harvest and my agent sold it. She called me up and she said we have Picador in England which was the first sale. And she said, it’s a two-book deal, and I said I haven’t written the second book, and she said well are you going to, and I thought, well, I guess so. I hadn’t really considered it, I mean, I thought I might write another one someday, but I hadn’t really considered that I would have to write another one immediately. I had this idea about Gunther, the old cop at the end of the Ice Harvest who ends up with the money, walking away from a nursing home, and initially I started writing it as that, and it also had its genesis from a clipping a friend of mine had sent me about an old sex lottery they had at the aircraft plants in Wichita after WW2, and I thought that was kind of an interesting thing to tie this character into in the past. I ended up having so much flashback material in the book that I felt it wasn’t very dramatic or satisfying to have the character sitting there and saying, he remembered the day when, it just drove me nuts. So just for the hell of it, I started writing a passage set in 1952 in the voice of this character who was dead in the present day sequences. I did it as a first person narrative in the style of an old pulp novel. Actually I should say more accurately, and to give the devil his due – though that’s not quite the right metaphor – I was consciously mimicking Charles Willeford in the Wayne Ogden passages, very consciously trying to use Willeford’s voice. In the other first person, 1952 sections, it was more of a Fawcett Gold Medal kind of thing, you know, Harry Whittington and Charles Williams. But that book pissed people off. They found the fact that I was going back and forth in time just infuriating. There were readers who really liked it, but the mystery readers, who had loved Ice Harvest, were expecting another short snappy book with linear narrative, and they hated it. It didn’t bother me that much, because I think every bad review the book got, and it got a few bad reviews, basically said the same thing: ‘I had to really think hard in this book.’ And that didn’t bother me, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with making the reader think. And I didn’t write another book just like Ice Harvest, because I’ve seen it happen where somebody writes a book, it’s a success, and they write another one just like it. But being just like the first book it’s not quite as good, and if it’s still successful, then you’re expected to do the same book over and over again for the rest of your career, and I think that leads to people writing repetitively and badly.
NK: So what prompted the move back in time to the era depicted in Cottonwood?
SP: Cottonwood came out of a desire that I’d had for a long time to write about this family of murderers in south-eastern Kansas, the Bloody Benders. There’s a lot of material on the Bloody Benders. They were a family of serial killers on the plains, and they operated a little inn which was a tiny little one room house, divided by a canvas sheet. And they lured people in using their daughter Kate and then bashed their brains in with a hammer, and slit their throats and let the bodies drain of blood over a pit underneath the kitchen floor, all of which is still unexplained. Nobody really knows why they did that bloodletting, although it’s been suggested that some sort of cult was involved. A friend of mine who’s a psychiatrist told me that it sounded like ritual behaviour, sacrilegious or religious or occult, behaviour. Kate Bender was known to conduct séances and to be speaking the voices of the dead, so I think that’s pretty plausible. And I’d been hearing this story since my early childhood, because they used to tell the school children in Kansas this story at a very young age, but I never found a way to get into it as a novel. Somebody did write a novel called The Bloody Benders, which was a pretty terrible book. But it had been done that way, as a straight narrative, and I decided I wasn’t really that interested in that end of the story. I thought, you could do it as a movie maybe, but I was driving through that area of Kansas having done some research and I had just kind of come to the conclusion that it wasn’t a novel as it stood. I had written The Walkaway with this character, Wayne Ogden who’s this sociopath. I really liked this character even though he was a sociopath and a killer, I really liked his voice, so I thought, what if I had this same character and he wasn’t a psychopath, what if I took this same character and his irresponsibility, which is sort of a Charlie quality in Ice Harvest, and put him back in the old west, and had him living in this little town and interacting with the Benders. And what I discovered very quickly was that I was more interested in the town and this character than I was in the Benders. The Benders became backdrop. The Benders are important in the book but they’re not the whole book. The story of the book is really the story of the founding of the town and its corruption, the way this cruddy little crap-ass Kansas town gets seduced by the notion that the railroad’s coming through and that cattle drives are coming, even though it’s completely implausible because geographically there’s no reason to bring cattle through there. But they don’t hear that, all they hear is, “railroad’s coming in, cattle’s coming in, money’s coming in.” And it’s a story about how the town destroys itself. The town is destroyed morally by the Benders and the money coming in, and then it’s literally destroyed by a tornado, which is one of those things I’m not sure if I regret doing or not. Because I felt like, gee, a book about Kansas in the 1890s, and I had to put a tornado in it. In retrospect maybe it’s not the best thing to have done. But I did it, what can I say, can’t change it now. What I really should have done is have a plague of grasshoppers, a plague of locusts, which used to happen there very frequently. People would have the clothes literally eaten off their backs by swarms of locusts, trains couldn’t move because the tracks were lubricated by the bodies of the millions of locusts, the train would just sit there with their wheels spinning and not moving. So I wish I’d done that, but in retrospect the reason I didn’t was I was just too lazy to do the research. I had done a lot of research on this book, it was time to quit at a certain stage and just write the damn thing.
NK: Why do you think Cottonwood was a problem for your publishers in the US?
SP: I think one reason that my publishers had a problem with Cottonwood in America was that they had no idea what I was doing, and my editor was fired in the middle of it, so suddenly I had a new editor. My original editor Dan Smetanka was a literary guy, he was interested in the prose, he was not interested in what genre it was, he didn’t care if I wrote crime novels or anything else. As long as it was good he wanted to publish whatever I wrote. And my new editor was strictly crime, and they sent me over to him because they considered me a crime writer, so I should go with the crime editor. And he was a very good-natured guy, but he was puzzled as to why he was editing a western. He had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual editing of the book, whereas Dan was a very hands-on editor. So I think it’s puzzling to American publishers when they have to deal with a writer who’s not following the rules of what you’re supposed to be doing. If you write a crime novel, well you’re supposed to write another crime novel. To have this guy suddenly write a western, they were just thrown. They thought, we can write this guy off, we’ll write off the advance. The book eventually sold fewer than 10,000 copies [in the US], which is pretty good, it did better than Walkaway, not as well as Ice Harvest. I have no idea what it sold in England. Ice Harvest sold very, very well in England, Walkaway did alright. I really don’t know what the figures are, but it hit the W.H. Smith list, so it did okay. I got some cheques in pounds. It’s nice to get cheques in euros too!
Another thing with Cottonwood, it’s not a western in a traditional sense. It’s not a Louis Lamour sort of thing, it’s not a story about the range, it’s as urban a story as anything else. All my books in a strange way are about urban development. In every single one of my books somebody finds himself on the outskirts of town and says holy shit, I didn’t know there was anything out here. And the town is expanding and changing, so that’s probably my true genre, urban planning. I think Ice Harvest is about that, and Walkaway is about that, and Cottonwood is about that more than anything else. The key moment I think for the shifting of gears in Cottonwood is the beginning of the second half. He’s in San Francisco and he gets on a streetcar. Earlier he was sleeping in a bar, he was sleeping in a blacksmith’s shed, sleeping in a buffalo robe, and it was very primitive and he might as well have been living in a cave. And now suddenly he’s getting on a streetcar and living in a big city. And San Francisco in 1890 was a very modern city in comparison to Cottonwood, Kansas, which is not a real town. Cottonwood did not really exist, but it’s like many another town in Kansas, it’s like Independence, and Neodesha and Cherryvale, and Parsons. And there’s also the town where they actually held the trial, but wherever they were, in Cottonwood it’s a composite town of all these others. And so when he goes back to Cottonwood it’s also a much more modern city. So I think it’s fair to call the first half of the book a western, and the second half you’d have trouble calling it a western, because it’s not really a western any more, it’s a proper town now and Kansas at that point had joined the rural Midwest, it was no longer the frontier. That part of Kansas was very sparsely settled, because it contained the Osage territory, and the United States government decided to steal the Osage territory from the Osage, and park the Osage further south, in Oklahoma, which turned out to be a stroke of luck for the Osage, because they found themselves owning, at that time, one of the world’s richest oilfields! So about twenty or thirty years later they became very rich. But at the time they had their land stolen, and so the Osage were gone, and the land was basically empty. So whereas at that time Colorado was very well populated, and northern Kansas was very well populated, the south-western part of Kansas was just empty. So it was the Wild West even though there were places considerably west of it that were very, very Europeanized. So Cottonwood is a western in its way, but like all of my books it’s very hard to place very specifically in a genre.
NK: You have mentioned the influence of some 19th century first person narratives that you read. Were there specific titles that really impressed you?
SP: One of the books we were discussing last night, one of the voices that really stuck with me was from the book, You Can’t Win, by Jack Black. Black was a burglar, worked from about 1870 to about 1905. He was in gaol in San Francisco when the 1906 earthquake struck. He became friendly with the publisher of the San Francisco Call, who offered him a job as the newspaper’s librarian, and while he was the librarian he wrote his memoir. It’s just a great book, a really great narrative. I’ve recommended it on tours, I’ve probably helped sell 1000 copies of that book. I did take one episode from the book and expanded on it. He talks about going to a wine dump in San Francisco on Clay Street and he describes it as this place where people would basically go to drink themselves to death. And when I reread the book, I was right in the middle of researching Cottonwood. It was only a page’s worth of description in Black’s book, but I decided I wanted my guy to be the landlord there. So he leaves Kansas and goes to San Francisco, and at a certain point he is the landlord of this terrible, foul place. His voice is really a 19th century version of his grandson’s voice, which is Willeford’s voice, so there’s a big Willeford influence there too, but I think it’s less obvious in Cottonwood than in Walkaway. I’ve also done a couple of short stories with this character, Wayne Ogden, from The Walkaway, where he’s a teenager in the 1930s, and he’s not quite at the level of malevolence that he gets to later, but he blows up a car, he seduces a classmate’s mother, he kills a bald eagle. That’s a true story, a relative of mine circa 1950 killed a bald eagle by accident. Well, he shot it by accident, thinking it was a hawk, which farmers used to shoot all the time in Kansas in the old days, and he discovered it was a bald eagle, and he and his friends drove away in fear thinking they would be arrested for having killed the national bird. But they decided it was probably worth some money, stuffed, so they drove back to get the body to take it to a taxidermist, and discovered that the bird was alive, so they hit it with a tyre-iron and put it in the trunk of the car. When they got where they were going they opened the trunk and the bird flew out with one damaged wing. And they’re huge birds, enormous wingspan, with really sharp talons and an incredible beak, that’s basically designed as a filleting knife for fish. So they ended up killing it by driving an ice pick into its head and holding its head under water until it drowned. But it was like Rasputin, it kept resurrecting itself. I took that true story and wrote it as a short story, thinking it would be an interesting thing for Wayne to do as an adolescent in the 1930s. Originally I was reluctant to do it, because it seemed like such an obvious metaphor, being the national bird. I worried about being heavy-handed, but I think the black humour makes it work pretty well, it doesn’t seem overtly symbolic.
NK: I read a chapter of The Ice Harvest on Dennis McMillan’s website and then got the trade hardback after that. But I assume Dennis’s version is the ‘true first’, or is it Picador in the UK?
SP: The US publication was actually a few days after Picador brought it out, so they were first. Well, the true first is Dennis, the first trade is Picador. And the first American trade is the Ballantine, that’s usually the one I hear referred to as the first edition, but it’s not.
NK: How well did Walkaway sell, and what were the reviews like?
SP: It’s sold alright, not spectacularly well, to be honest. My American publisher Ballantine really dropped the ball after Walkaway did not sell very well. Ice Harvest sold pretty well for a first novel, Walkaway did not sell that well, and I can understand why, it’s not a straight crowd pleaser. Reviews were actually good. There were, as I say, a few complaints about the denseness of it, but the reviews were generally good. It just didn’t have the mass appeal of Ice Harvest. Then, while I was still at work on Cottonwood, which I thought would really be my break-out book commercially, Ballantine New York fired my editor Dan Smetanka who was a really wonderful editor, and replaced him with an editor who didn’t give a shit and did nothing to promote the book in-house with the marketing and publicity departments, which you have to do to get any money to promote a book. They made no effort whatsoever to sell the book, I mean, nothing. One of the publicists told me, “I have not been authorised to spend one minute of company time on this book.”
NK: So how did you set about generating publicity for the book?
SP: I financed my own tour, I went to the whole southern California area, about eight stops there, maybe six stops in northern California, Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tucson in Arizona, the whole Midwest, St Louis, Kansas City, Wichita, Houston, Texas. George Pelecanos was kind enough to shoehorn me into an appearance that he made at Murder by the Book in Houston. And I did a bunch of appearances in Chicago. So it was a fairly extensive tour, and then New York City. I didn’t actually have New York on the tour initially, I went to New York and didn’t make any in-store appearances, apart from at Black Orchid. For the most part I just went to New York to do some interviews, and I also went to Washington and Philadelphia on that tour, so that’s a big tour, all self-financed. I hired a publicist, Jackie Daniel, on my own and Ballantine did not spend a nickel. Walkaway sold less than10, 000 copies, but I wouldn’t have sold those copies if I had not gone on the road. So that’s kind of how it goes.
NK: How does this compare with overseas publications and sales of your books, for example, in the UK?
SP: Picador has been very good about promoting my books in the UK. Cottonwood is with Random House/Ballantine, they’re the ones who sort of dropped the ball, although they love me now that there’s a movie of The Ice Harvest coming out. However, I have no more books under contract in the US at this point. Picador in the UK has been very good, I have another book under contract with them, the one I’m working on now.
NK: What’s it about?
SP: It’s the story of a very small time pornographer, mainly 1950s. I’m halfway through it, and it’s based very loosely on a real newspaper war that happened in Wichita in 1950, when the two local papers, the Eagle and the Beacon were at odds with each other. The main character is another descendant of Bill Ogden, it’s his great grandson. He would be Wayne Ogden’s first cousin once removed.
The girlfriend of one of the publishers of the Beacon was killed, by a bullet, whether by her own hand or someone else’s has never been determined. But the Eagle, the rival paper, started writing all these articles making it sound very much like she’d been murdered, or at least suggesting she’d been driven to suicide by her cruel married boyfriend. So it’s set in the midst of that background but it’s really about this guy who’s the great grandson of Bill Ogden, and he’s a pornographer. He’s an author of Tijuana Bibles, they’re also called eight-pagers, old comic books that were usually very crudely drawn parodies of other comics, or sometimes of movies, but always pornographic. And he’s the author among others of Dickless Tracy and Sluggo Fucking Aunt Fritzie and all kind of things like that. And he’s also a newspaper photographer, and in his spare time he takes naked pictures of his girlfriends. This is taken from an incident in the biography of a legendary Wichita newspaperman named Ernie Warden who was famous for taking pictures of naked girls. In 1950 Wichita, this was a big deal, getting girls to pose nude for you wasn’t easy, it’s not even easy now, but it was really hard then. And Ernie apparently was very good at convincing girls to strip and let him take their picture. So that’s what I’m writing about.
NK: So you’re developing a series of novels in which characters recur and interconnect across a longish period of Kansas history.
SP: For me, the idea of writing a bunch of novels that are linked with one character, but aren’t sequels, aren’t the same type of books, comes from Balzac. I think he was the first to do it, where you have a secondary character in one book appearing in another book as the central character. And I find that idea very interesting. There’s a bartender in Cottonwood, who appears in a short story as a very, very old man. It’s set in the 1930s so he’s aged about 90 and he’s got these big long jug ears, and he’s still tending bar. I like those little continuities across the books, it kind of becomes like a game.
NK: How did you come to connect with Dennis McMillan?
SP:Dennis is from Wichita, and I met him the day after Jim Crumley’s wedding to Martha Elizabeth. He’d been mistakenly pointed out to me at the wedding as Kent Anderson, and I ran into him at a bookstore the next day and I asked him if he was Anderson, and he said no I’m Dennis. And we established that we were both from Wichita and that was the beginning of a long friendship. When I finished Ice Harvest I just shoved it in a drawer, thinking, well I’ve finished that. I didn’t really have any idea of how to sell it or what to do with it, and I wasn’t very motivated because I had had so much failure and rejection in the last few years in the movie business that I just thought, well that’s the nature of things, you write them and you thrown them away. My friend Chas Hanson who also writes under the name of Charles Fischer, wrote a great book called Trips and is a great screenwriter. I write screenplays with him. Trips has this great story, “Fair in Missoula,” about Dennis being in love with a really stupid, mean, stripper, I think Augusta was her name in real life. And Chas wrote this great story with this line it: ‘In Missoula, Montana, a man who drinks a half a case of beer a day is pretty much considered to be on the wagon.’ Anyway, Chas sent Dennis The Ice Harvest, and said you really should publish this, and Dennis said, we’ll nobody’s ever heard of Scott. And Maura Wahl, who was Dennis’s wife at the time, read the book, and she also encouraged Dennis to publish it. Eventually they wore him down and it’s basically thanks to the three of them that I have a career as a writer because I don’t know that I would have done anything with it. So Dennis was going to publish a thousand copies as a trade paper, and that was all he planned to do, he wasn’t going to do a limited. And people kept telling me, you’ve got a book coming out, you should get an agent. And to give credit where credit’s due, it’s my old friend Simon Maskell who made me get an agent. He was the most entertaining office mate I ever had, which wasn’t every conducive to working, just the opposite in fact, but he was always a lot of fun. And we have remained the best of friends. Simon is also a writer and he said, if you’ve got a book coming out, you should get an agent so you can sell the foreign rights and the film rights. And so I did get an agent, Nicole Aragi, who is the best agent in the world, any of her writers would say that. So Nicole said, I’m really sorry that this is a trade edition, because although I can sell this overseas, I can do all kinds of things and I can certainly sell your next book in New York but I could really sell this book to a New York house.
NK: Can you outline the logic of the publishing business situation there?
SP: It’s very unattractive for a publisher to republish someone else’s book. It’s not unheard of for a big publisher to do that but it has to be a big commercial success for a big publisher to republish a book that a small publisher has already done. In any case, you’re not going to get as much money for it as you would have. Dennis would have the rights to the trade edition, I wouldn’t be free to sell the trade rights. So I called Dennis, who said, Well I’ve always had a policy, sort of an unspoken, unwritten contract with my writers that if anybody republishes your book because of an edition that I have done, then I get 25% of the advance. And I thought, that seems okay to me because I would not be getting any money, and now I’m getting 75% of something, as opposed to 100% of nothing. So I called Nicole and said get me as big an advance as you can because Dennis is getting 25% of it. So that worked out pretty well for everybody and that’s how come I have a career as a writer, thanks to Dennis and Chas and Maura.
NK: Thanks to Maura’s work on the website, because, as I said earlier, that was where I first read the first chapter of The Ice Harvest, which I really liked, and so I chased up the hardcover.
SP: Maura is a great web designer, if she’s still doing it, Maura Wahl is who you want.
NK: Can you run me through the process of getting Ice Harvest made into a film? Has it taken eighteen months or so?
SP: It’s been a lot longer than eighteen months. I think I sold an option on the film before the book actually came out, it was a long time ago anyway. Movie time is kind of like geologic time, it doesn’t bear any relation to hours and days. Five years from the purchase of an option to the movie making it to the screen is actually a pretty reasonably short period. Certainly it can be a lot longer than that. They bought the option, these two producers, Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger, and were willing to consider my services as a screen writer but in the middle of that Robert Benton and Richard Russo contacted them and Benton said he wanted to direct and he was going to write the script with Russo. And I looked at it in a very pragmatic way. I thought, if Benton and Russo, for whom I have a lot of admiration anyway but are also very well known successful writers, if they write the script it’s going to get read. Whereas if the script does out with my name on it, who knows? I wouldn’t read it. You know, someone they’ve never heard of, a book they’ve never heard of. But Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize, Robert Benton two or three Oscars on his mantle, that’s not too bad, you know, it’s pretty good! So they wrote the script and then Benton decided he didn’t want to direct it. Benton has told me that at a certain point he felt he wasn’t really right for the material. I also think he would have felt better with a bigger budget, which would have allowed him a little more time. He has a certain way he likes to shoot and he likes to have a little more time than $14 million allows. That is about a 30 day shoot and that is a very European scale movie. A film director told me that in Europe they shoot a movie in 30 days, that’s it, you get four weeks and it’s done, if you’re lucky you get four weeks, and that’s the kind of scale that we were working on here. And I think that Benton just didn’t want to do it that way. He did continue to write the script though, and he and Russo did a very good job, and they kept a lot more of the book than I would have felt free to. There were a lot of my favourite little jokes that stayed in that I probably would have felt honour-bound to take out like the Campus Crusade for Cunnilingus. I don’t know that I would have left that in because to me it’s almost an in-joke. I think it’s funny but nobody else will, and I’d be self-indulgent leaving it in. But Russo left it in, and I thanked him for it and he said, oh, that was one of my favourite things in the book. So you get things like that where they’re very faithful to the spirit and the humour of the book. But I keep getting people asking me, it’s a comedy? And I keep saying well no it’s not exactly a comedy but it is funny. I mean, it’s grim, but I hope people are laughing. I laughed when I was writing it, I think you kinda gotta laugh when Charlie gets run over. I hope people laughed, but a lot of people didn’t. I think it was in a bookshop in Tucson that a woman said, I wanted to ask you about the end of the book because I laughed and my partner cried. And my attitude to that was, they’re both right, both correct, which is kind of the story with Harold Ramis as director of the film. When Harold first agreed to do it there were several directors looking at it, and Harold came on at the very last minute, and he was happy to do a movie that had a short shooting schedule and a low budget and was also a lot darker than he was known for doing. I think his last two movies were Analyze This and Analyze That, I think he did them in a row, there might have been another one –– was Bedazzled in between those two? Anyway, he’s known for lighter, funnier stuff, but, as I’ve said on other occasions, if you go back to the beginning of his career there’s always been this dark streak running through it all, a very mordant humour, and there’s also this sort of rebellious, thumbing-of-the-nose humour. So I think he fits the material very well, though it’s a lot darker than anything he’s done. I think it came out really well.
NK: There has been some discussion about alternate endings, between the book and the film.
SP: Viewers won’t see the original ending where Charlie is run over by a recreational vehicle, with a sign on the back of it, saying, ‘it is not what you see, it is not where you’re going, it is what you see while you’re going there.’ That was a real sign I saw on the back of an RV driving on this twisty mountain road at about 25 miles an hour, and I could not pass them, I was behind them for hours, I hated the driver of this recreational vehicle, so I took my revenge, one of the few times I’ve ever taken revenge in a book, although actually the guy driving the RV, Gunther, ends up probably being the most sympathetic character I’ve ever written. In the film they shot it that way and Harold really wanted to keep it that way and John Cusack wanted to keep it that way, and everybody liked it. And they showed it to the first audiences and the reaction was, they loved the movie and they hated the ending, and it was very consistent. They would get these little cards back from the test audiences, and I’m not a big believer in test screenings, but when it’s that pervasive, I guess you have to look at it and say, well, what is wrong with this? And my theory is that in the book you are filtering Charlie through me, the author, and I think the reader is perfectly happy to have me run over by a recreational vehicle and killed. But when it’s John Cusack, the viewer is disappointed because it’s John getting killed. One of the reasons the movie works so well is that John has in reality that characteristic that Charlie has in the fictional reality, in the book, which is that he can do all kinds of bad things and you still like him. He’s got this enormous charisma and charm. So when John gets run over by the car you feel sad and you leave the theatre feeling sad, and it’s not necessarily what you thought you were going to feel. I think the original ending is going to be included on the DVD, under the extras. So they re-shot the ending, they went out and shot several endings, but the one they used I think was improvised. Pete is the character who in the book is the drunken brother-in-law, in this he’s the drunken current husband of Charlie’s ex-wife. Pete is in the movie quite a lot, he’s played by Oliver Platt really brilliantly. Oliver Platt is so fucking funny that when he turns up again at the end, Charlie survives being run over, and he and Charlie drive off into the sunrise and it works, because you’re really happy to see Pete again. And also, I have this theory which I’ve told Harold and Harold I think does not agree with, which is that Oliver Platt says, where are we, and Charlie says, we’re in heaven, and at that point my theory is that Charlie is dead, run over by the RV, and Pete has died on his couch of alcohol poisoning, and they are in fact going to heaven. So that’s just my alternate theory about the ending, if you want to cling to that as you watch the movie. But I think the new ending works very well, to be honest. The van drives off, Charlie still has the money, and so he and Peter drive off with the cash. It’s not as bleak as my original but what the hell, it works pretty well, and the movie is so faithful otherwise to the book that I feel like I can’t complain. Anyway after that alteration, the test audiences loved it, and so yeah they’re happy to see John get away, so am I. He deserves it. John’s a great actor. People said, when they heard it was John, he’s awful young to play Charlie. But in the book Charlie is exactly 38 years old, born in 1940. It’s not in the book but it’s in my notes. Charlie is 38, John is a little younger than that but not too much. And when I first met him, I thought, wow he is very youthful, and a very exuberant guy, very enthusiastic. And then the cameras rolled and he did this actor thing where instead of being this very energetic guy in his thirties, he became this very bent over alcoholic guy in his thirties, and it works very well. The film was supposed to come out a year ago Christmas, and they were having those troubles with the ending, so they put it off, and then they finished it and they said, well you know this is a problematic movie, let’s release it in March, which is when they release the dross, and so that really wasn’t a good sign. And then the test audiences started seeing it, and they all loved it, so they said screw that, let’s bring it out at Christmas, have an Oscar campaign, so that’s really good. The distributor, Focus Features, the financing organization or whatever you want to call it are really behind it, they’ve been really good.
NK: You saw the film at a film festival in France?
SP: I saw it at the Festival of Deauville, and it went over really well I think, although I think the French are taking it less as a comedy and more as a noir, which I think is a very smart way to promote it over there. Pyramide Films is releasing it there, and they asked me to come up with a new title in French, something more noirish. I haven’t come up with anything really good, I came up with a couple of titles thinking they wanted something less noir, and I gave them these titles and they said, no no no, more noir, more noir and less funny. So my titles were no good. One was Patinoire, and the other one was Pour qui sonne le verglas, a play on For Whom the Bell Tolls, involving ice. And they said no, we want something more noir, not less noir, you idiot.
NK: What about Dark Night in Wichita?
SP: Every night in Wichita is a dark night.
NK: You recently had a writer-in-residence gig in France. Can you say a bit about that?
SP: I was in contact with a bookseller named Christophe Dupuis, in the city of Langon, and he has a bookshop called l’Ours Polar, and he said, I’m involved in this program, for the departmente of Gironde, I’m one of the people responsible for inviting authors, foreign writers who speak French, to come and do a residency. So I said sure, put my name in, I didn’t think they were going to pick me, and they did, so I’m going to go for a month, bookended by a week in Paris before and after.
NK: You spent some time in France as a University student.
SP: Well, I went to France as a teenager on an exchange program, didn’t speak a word of French, and was immediately struck by it, I really liked it over there. This was 1979, the crucial Ice Harvest year. I went over and I was put into a program where I was a dishwasher in a café for a very short time and I had this feeling for the first time in my life that man, there’s people all around me speaking a language I don’t understand, and I really wanted to speak French. I was starting university so I started taking French and got very intensely into it and went to France that summer as a student. That was in Paris. And that probably would have been the end of it but the next year one of my professors offered me a job taking students over. And my French was pretty good at that point, I wasn’t exactly fluent but I could get around and I knew Paris a little bit. So I basically had a job that took me over to France every summer. And then I went to work for another program that the university ran in Strasbourg, so I ended up spending every summer in France for about eight years. And eventually I just stopped coming back, and lived in France, as a permanent resident, from 1988 to 1992, about five years in total.
NK: Where exactly were you in France?
SP: I was in Paris, in the 11th arrondissement, I lived at République the whole time, and still have good friends there. My landlords are still friends of mine, which is saying something, landlords and tenants staying friends all these years. It was very much like being part of their family. And eventually I came home. I was drinking a lot back then, and I got fairly depressed, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I was single, and I really didn’t know what I wanted to do. An actor friend of mine and I had written a script together, and he said you should come back to LA because you could make a lot of money from screenwriting. Which, in my case, proved to be patently and abjectly untrue! I made very little money as a screenwriter. But I went to LA and eventually got to like LA. I went back to Paris a couple of times, and thought, this is nice, I like it, but I think the pall of my late Paris period, single drinking guy, depression, was still hanging over the town. I went back with my wife on our honeymoon, and thought, I kind of like this stuff. And then a couple of years ago, after we got the movie money, I said, I’m taking you to Paris, because my wife, Anne, and my daughter, Claire, really wanted to go. And we spent two weeks and I thought, holy shit, I love this, I still love this place. It was you know, not drinking heavily and not being depressed, all this stuff, and being with my family and not living by myself, which was not good for me, I’m one of those people that needs to be married or I will go crazy. I’ve been back to Europe a couple of times since that trip, I went to a great book festival in Belgium called Livresse, a really wonderful little festival, one of the best times I’ve had. It knocks these big conventions for a loop. And it’s everything, it’s not just crime fiction or noir fiction. It’s always in Charleroi in Belgium, always in April, and last year they were nice enough to invite me and pay my way. And this year if I’ve got the cash, I’m going to go on my own dime and get as many people as I can get to go because it’s a really terrific festival that people should know about. It’s all French speaking but if you speak French or think you might want to learn French or whatever, it’s a really terrific little festival. And Charleroi is an interesting little town, not an obvious tourist destination, but I found it very pleasant and the people at Livresse are wonderful. So I was there and then I was in France for Deauville this year. And I am feeling more and more that I would like to be in a big city again. Part of it has to do with the fact that we left Los Angeles, which is a big cosmopolitan city in what we call a blue state, and moved to a medium to small sized city, St Louis, in a red state. And so I go back to France and I think geez, this is fucking paradise. Though St Louis is very religious, it’s less conservative than the rest of the state, it’s a little blue corner of a red state. The population of the metropolitan area is about 3 million, the population of the city proper is about 300,000, smaller than Wichita. It’s very suburban, there’s a lot of sprawl, and the city itself is not huge. And I think there’s a pretty good chance we might move back to Europe. I think Anne would like it, and I know Claire would like it, it’s just a question of getting everything lined up and going and doing it. The books do pretty well in France and the French seem to like me.
NK: Are you happy with the translations of your books? I ask because, being bi-lingual you are in a very good position to judge, and also because I remember Jim Crumley talking about a bad French translation of The Last Good Kiss, which was called The Drunken Dog in French, and it had things like turning a ‘topless bar’ into ‘a bar without a roof.’ The translation was redone.
SP: The first translation of Last Good Kiss was terrible, Le Chien ivrogne, completely incompetent. But Philippe Garnier, who did the new translation, is a great translator. I think he contacted Crumley, and said these people who’ve done your book in France have really fucked it up beyond all recognition. She was translating rifle as shotgun and vice versa, one of these terrible things.
As for my books I’m very happy with the French translations. The translator is a friend I’ve known for more than 15 years now, Patrice Carrere, and one great thing about Patrice is if he has a question he’ll just call me or send me an email, and say what are you talking about here? And since a lot of my stuff is fairly obscure if the translator isn’t calling me about some things, I think, what is this? So Patrice is great, I have a translator in German also who’s very good, several translators in Dutch. I’m in Italian, I don’t know my translator there, never had any contact. Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Polish. So it’s a nice collection of languages. I always tell my foreign sub-agent Paul Marsh, if the translator has any questions, I’m always delighted to hear from them. Some of them take me up on it, some of them just ignore it. Earlier, when I said I have the best agent in the world, I really mean it because my agent reserves all the foreign rights. When she sells my books to Ballantine or whoever, she retains the foreign rights, which means instead of counting against my advance, when I sell to Poland I get the cheque. And my editor in France is a good friend of mine, Patrick Raynal, and I’ve known Patrick for a long time through Crumley.
NK: You said that you were involved in adapting a Sybil Bedford book. Which one, and how did that come about?
SP: I am currently trying to adapt A Visit to Don Ottavio. It’s a fantastic book, a travelogue, novel, memoir, it’s across all the genres, and very unlike my own work. My working on this adaptation is still subject to Ms Bedford’s approval. Apparently she or her agent, or both, read Ice Harvest and I’m told liked it fine but were very leery of me adapting her book. So I am currently on spec, as they say, adapting a few pages of the screenplay in hopes that they will read it and think that I do have an appreciation for this book. That’s very important, I completely understand that. You don’t want someone who just wants a job to adapt your book, because that happens all the time. You find this occasionally in screenwriting too, they’ll assign an adaptation of a book to someone who clearly hates the book, and that to me is a mystery, why they would do that. With Russo and Benton I felt very comfortable letting them do The Ice Harvest. I loved their work and I think what they’ve done together and separately is great. Russo has been one of my favourite writers since I first read him in the eighties. But Russo also wrote me a letter very early on – this was when Benton was thinking about directing it- and said, I just wanted to put your mind at ease and let you know that Benton is a very great respecter of the written word. And that’s a nice feeling to know that the people who are taking care of your baby like your baby.
This book is so wonderful and so different, it really requires the same sort of radical cinematic approach that reflects the book. She’s in her nineties, in London, and still writing.
NK: Who has the rights, where are they located?
SP: The people who bought the option live in St Louis, Carrie Houk and Barbara Jones, and they were talking to me about adapting it. So I read it, and I said I would love to adapt it, and I sent it to Chas because I don’t like to do screenplays by myself for various odd reasons, and I’m very comfortable working with Chas. And when I read it, I have to admit I didn’t quite know how to do it as a movie. And Chas read it, and said here’s how we do it as a movie. He said, here’s how we do the cinematic equivalent of what’s in the book, here’s how we structure it so it mirrors the structure of the book. It would be very easy to make a very boring, lame, Merchant-Ivory sort of movie out of this book because it’s about two women visiting a foreign country, and one of them is English, and it would be easy to turn this into a very conventional movie, you know the kind of movie I’m talking about. And that’s exactly what the material does not want, that would be slapping the author in the face, I think, because it’s a very radical book in terms of structure and style. So right now I’m trying to do something that we can show the author and convince her that I’m worthy of the job. I am trying to get my pages done.
NK: What French fiction are you reading?
SP: Patrick Raynal, my editor, is probably the only contemporary noirish writer that I read very much. He writes these great sort of strange noirish books, and you don’t ever know quite whether it’s fact. A recent book was about an ex-Maoist, which Patrick is, running around trying to relocate all the members of his cell that have been separated for like 35 years, and they’re trying to track them all down, because one of their number has died and has willed them some money, and so he’s trying to track them all down. And it’s kind of weird because this ex-Maoist has become very rich and has died and willed these people the money. And it’s not a noir really, except that it’s about people who were once willing to murder. Patrick says he never actually murdered anyone, never got to the point where they were planning that, but he was at that point where they were sort of asking themselves, are we willing to do this?
I’m kind of interested in reading the new Houellebecq just because everybody’s talking about it. I need to know whether I like it or hate it. I’m hooked on Simenon. Simenon has been my obsession for a long time, I think I’ve read about 125 of them, which is nothing, that’s like I’m a third of the way through. He was nuts, but he was a great writer, a really wonderful writer, and he wrote these almost formulaic books, the Maigret novels, which nonetheless are wonderful sociological studies of the city of Paris, for the most part, but also other places, and those are books that you can read like you eat potato chips, you just pick em up and you read one and then you read another one, and another one, and they’re very entertaining, wonderful books. And at the same time, Simenon also wrote these really dark books, Dirty Snow, The Watchmaker of Everton. The Watchmaker of Everton is the bleakest book I have ever read in my life. It’s very interesting. His American books are way bleaker than his French books, and I don’t know if it was something that America did to him or that he was feeling bad when he lived here, but the books he wrote and set in America are particularly bleak, I think. It may just be that it was right after the war, but they’re insanely bleak. The watchmaker of Everton is a man whose life is over, and he’s got another 40 years to live. What can you say about that?
NK: Is this the book that became The Watchmaker of St Paul when Bertrand Tavernier directed a film version?
SP: The book is set in Everton, Connecticut but Tavernier didn’t want to do an American movie, he wanted to do a European movie, so it became the watchmaker of St Paul. But god, it’s like this guy, he’s a single father, who can’t figure out where his kid is. His whole life is organised around his son, and he realises that he’s done a lousy job bringing his kid up. The kid has just committed a murder, and it’s not a justifiable murder, it’s not a murder where you can hope he’s going to get off, it’s a murder that if he were an adult, he probably would have been executed. It’s a horrible murder of a random stranger so he can get his car. And this is the kind of crime book I think is really worth writing, where the crime is in it, but the crime is not what it’s about. The subject of the book is this man’s life and how it revolved around his son and how even though the son is alive this guy’s life is over, everything he lived for is now gone, destroyed. He has no hope for the future, and he is going to live another 30, 40 years in this tiny little room above his watch repair shop. And he’s going to go down every day and repair watches. And goddamn it’s a bleak book, talk about despair, I mean Céline has got nothing on Simenon.
NK: You said you like Russo. Who else in American writing do you like?
SP: I think Russo has got a great voice, and he writes about people who don’t always get a lot of attention in fiction, in America anyway. I like Rick Demarinis, who I think is the best short story writer in the world. And he’d be in my top five novelists as well, just an amazing writer, with an amazing range. I’ve only met him twice, but the second time I met him I told him I thought he was the best writer in America, and it made him very uncomfortable. He is a very modest guy, but I do think he is certainly the best short story writer, and maybe the best writer in America period. His books, The Year of the Zinc Penny, The Burning Women of Far Cry, they’re just wonderful books. He’s a Dennis Macmillan writer, and that’s how I met him on both occasions, one was at a convention, one was at a signing. Rick Demarinis, it’s just his range, he’s like Jack Black –– I’ve never recommended him and had somebody not like him. Every person I’ve ever recommended him to has said, holy shit, how come I’ve never heard of this guy? I think he’s famous among other writers but not that well known among the general public yet, and this is to the great detriment of the reading public.
Now let’s see, who else? Jerry Stahl’s books, Permanent Midnight, and I, Fatty. Peter Fenton’s book Eyeing the Flash. Peter was a carnival con man in the early 1960s, during and right after high school. He was a carny con man and eventually ended up being a reporter for the National Enquirer and now he’s just writing books. I guess you could say he’s reformed, though I’m not sure writing is any less shady than con artistry. But he’s a terrific writer. I picked his book up in a bookstore at random, the jacket grabbed my eye, never underestimate a good jacket! I picked it up and started reading a couple of pages, I thought holy shit, I have to buy this book. I’ve been recommending it to people all year long. He’s really a fantastic writer, really gifted.
NK: Had you read books like Scott Smith’s A Simple Plan and Craig Holden’s The River Sorrow before writing The Ice Harvest?
SP: You know, I’d never read A Simple Plan until I saw the movie. Then I read the book and it is very similar to Ice Harvest, much longer but it’s got that same feeling. And people are always comparing Ice Harvest to Fargo, the Coen brothers must hate my guts. That doesn’t bother me because I’m sure at some level I was probably thinking about Fargo, which is a movie I love, you know, it’s not a conscious thing but sure, on some level. I think the Coen brothers are great, they’re friends of George Pelecanos.
NK: He produced one or two of their early films didn’t he, around that time that he was also producing some records, as well as writing.
SP: I think he produced Raising Arizona, and one other. George has this interesting other life. He reads books that are full of music and you can really see that, and he’s producing music now. I don’t think Little, Brown gives George the credit he deserves. To me, George is one of the few crime writers who’s really worth reading. I don’t need another fucking private detective book to read. One of my good friends Reed Farrell Coleman has been writing private eye books for quite a while, and he’s quit writing them. And I have to say I’m glad he’s writing something else now, because the last book of his I read – which I blurbed, I liked it enough to blurb – I thought, this guy is a fine writer and he shouldn’t be dealing with the kind of formula stuff you have to deal with when you’re writing a genre book. There aren’t many examples of a really good crime writer who’s still able to stay within the genre. Dennis Lehane is a great example of somebody who was writing a book a year, doing that grind of writing a genre novel a year, then he quit. I hear all these people say, gee he wrote Mystic River and then he stopped writing, and then Shutter Island came out, it’s been two years since Shutter Island. Well, how do you think he’s able to write Mystic River, you know, do you think he could write a Mystic River once a year? You can’t do that, you have to stop and let things gestate. And I think that’s almost a heroic thing to have done, to say, look, I’m not going to do a book a year, that just kills the desire to do it. And I know people who can do it and keep the quality up. Mike Connelly is a good example, Denise Hamilton, they’re both newspaper people and they can do a book a year because it’s in the blood, you write a certain number of words a day. They can do it, but I think for most writers it’s detrimental to do a book a year.
NK: Well, Elmore Leonard’s been doing it for forty years or so! Can you say something about your experience in the publishing industry.
SP: I entered at a fairly high level, I got very lucky in the agent department. I think sales have gone down for series books. They say, do us a series, A is for Apples, J is for Jacks. They think they can create another Sue Grafton every year and they can’t. And the fact is they’re trying to funnel a lot of writers into that mould of somebody who comes up with a book a year and it’s always the same protagonist and it’s always the same kind of book, you know, Janet Evanovich, Carl Hiaassen kind of books, even when the author isn’t particularly suited to that kind of thing.
NK: So what crime fiction do you read?
SP: I read my friends, I read Connelly and Pellecanos, Crumley. Ellroy puts out a book every three, four or five years. There are some sort neo noir people I find very interesting, David Corbett who’s a good friend of mine, Jason Starr, who I think is doing some very interesting work. He’s a very sick guy, but it all comes out in his books, in real life he’s a nice family man. People are always shocked to meet me and find out that I’m so boring and mild mannered. But Jason is the same way. I have to admit the first book of Jason’s that I read I didn’t get. It was the one about the guy who works for the fish market, and I read it and I thought wow this guy, he’s in love with this girl and he’s doing all these crazy things, and he’s kind of stalking her and I was thinking, does the author not realise that this guy’s a stalker, does he think that this guy is in love with this girl? And the guy ends up in gaol and gets the shit beat out of him, and he gets out of gaol and he’s gotten away with this murder and the first thing he thinks is, I’m going to go into that girl’s house now because she’s in love with me and I’m in love with her. And I’m thinking, is he putting me on? He sent me a copy of his next book with a nice letter and I read this one, and I realised that I had really misread the previous book, that yeah, the guy was off his fucking rocker and Jason knows it, but it was so artfully done that it threw me. I think it takes a lot to fool me, and he completely fooled me. And Twisted City which was the one I blurbed, is fucked up in a great way, in the way you want it to be, fucked up like Jerry Stahl’s books are, like mine hopefully are. I tend to like people who are writing dark stuff. I don’t want to read about detectives with superhuman skills, that crap just bores the shit out of me.
Who else? Did you ever read Derek Raymond? I think I was Dora Suarez may be the best crime novel ever written, certainly the best police procedural ever written, and it’s totally a work of pure high literature.
NK: When we were in email contact setting up this meeting you mentioned that you liked the Australian author Garry Disher.
SP: I like Garry Disher but he sort of vanished from the American scene. He was never published in the United States until recently, but the Allen & Unwin editions were imported here, and Book Star, which I think is now out of business, carried them, so I bought all the ones they had, and then they never showed up again. And I sort of forgot about it and then I was in a friend’s bookstore and she had the last couple that I’d never seen so, I bought them. And then I looked them up on the web, and this friend of mine started buying them from Australia, and right around the time I was on tour for Cottonwood, I looked him up and it turned out that the last one Dragon Man, his most recent series, was coming out in America, in Soho, and my publicist was handling it. So I called her up and said, send it to me, I’d love to blurb it, I’d consider it a huge badge of honour. There was something about Garry Disher’s ability to write a funny scene and also to keep it very, very grim that appealed to me. There’s something about his use of the vernacular. I’ve had Australian friends for years, but I’ve never been to Australia and when I read Garry Disher I feel not only like I am in Australia, I feel like I am an Australian. He does a wonderful job of seeing something, and they work as genre novels also. He’s not strictly a genre novelist, he writes other things as well, and he’s a poet, but I think he does a wonderful job of adhering to the rules of the genre and yet delivering a real literary book experience.
NK: You must have visited London for the John Creasey Awards; how was that?
SP: Yeah I went to London in 2001, in November, for the Silver and Gold Daggers, and the Creasey, and that’s the first time I’ve been in London in years.
NK: Did you read at Murder One bookshop in Charring Cross road?
SP: Not Murder One, it was another one, in Haymarket. I did go to Murder One. Do you remember Mike who worked there? He died about three or four years ago, he was a friend of Maxim’s, he was the manager for Maxim.
NK: Do you have any comments on the comparison between the publishing industry as you experience it in France, with your knowledge of that culture and language, and the publishing industry in the US?
RP: I think it all depends on who your publisher is and how much they value you. I have had very good experiences overseas. I think Gallimard was a very good place to be with. Unfortunately I had to leave because my editor left and went to Fayard, which is fine, I’m really happy about that, but it’s terrible to leave a publisher that you like, especially where there are publishers one doesn’t like! As for publishing in America, there’s an old joke that show business is high school with money, and I think that publishing is show business without money. It’s very childish and there’s a lot of back biting and intrigue.
NK: You’ve seen the film industry from ‘both sides now’, from two different perspectives: one as a struggling screenwriter scrounging around LA and another as the person whose first novel is adapted by celebrated writers and directors and ends up being a movie with John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton.
SP: Well yeah I sort of came in off the street as a struggling and unsuccessful screenwriter and I have now seen the film industry as a somewhat more successful novelist whose work gets adapted by distinguished Oscar winning writer-director and Pulitzer Prize winner. Harold Ramis’ associate producer, Laurel Ward, used to get notes from the studio regarding the script and she said yes, I will refer your notes to Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Russo as soon as possible. And she said that after she did that about eight times, they said, we get it. So yeah, so I’m treated much better now, but I think also, to be honest, I’m doing better work, I’m writing better than I wrote when I was a struggling screenwriter, partially just because when I was a struggling screenwriter, it never occurred to me to write a movie I might actually want to pay money to see. At the time, I would say, well what’s selling now, and I would come up with these great ideas but nothing you’d ever want to watch. They were pitchable things, but they were never very inspired and were things that I didn’t like very much. And eventually I think I learned basically not to do that. Now, when I write a screenplay, if I’m polishing something, my test for a scene is, I imagine that I’m sitting in a dark movie theatre watching this movie for the first time and I didn’t write it, and I have a pressing need to urinate. Do I get up now, or do I wait? And the thing is, in the old days, I never wrote a movie where urinating would have been a problem. I just would have gotten up at that point and come back and not cared what I missed.