Richard Price: The Originator

Q: What was it like being the novelist, then the scriptwriter on Clockers?

A: Clockers was 990 loose pages in a 20-pound box when Universal bought it for Martin Scorsese and Rosalie Swedlin, who had just come over from CAA and was starting her own production company. I didn't really want to write the script. I figured, I just spent three years writing the book. Not only that, it's not mine anymore. Somebody bought it, so it's like going from being the parent to being the babysitter. When the book first started going around, all the people who were interested in buying it said, "Well! You're going to write the script, aren't you?" At first I said, "No, but I'll supervise whoever's going to write it." They made all these, like, "eehhh" kinda noises. And then I realized, I don't know who can write this. So I figured, in for a penny, in for a pound. I'd do it.

Q: When you were writing the novel, did you think it was going to generate the kind of interest that would get Hollywood bidding on it?

A: I didn't think--frankly, I didn't even care. I'd had some success as a screen writer. My price was getting pretty high. And I thought, "I've got to start writing novels again. What's it going to say on my tombstone? Sea of Love?" Clockers is my Russian novel. So when it sold to Hollywood, I was surprised. I mean--yeah--on the one hand, there's my scripts, which do real well. It's natural there'd be an interest. But otherwise there's not a whole lot about the story, as a story, that recommends itself in a marketing sense. It's not like Jurassic Park. So when it sold for what it did, I was really proud-- because to me that meant that something in the writing must have been very compelling. It's like, I passed this fuckin' test and I got a hundred.

Q: What about the controversy surrounding the sale?

A: Tom Pollock had touted this big austerity program over at Universal, and when he saw the figure on my book, he had a shit fit. I don't know about these controversies. It's like "Controversy Du Jour." A week from now, nobody's going to remember, but now it's like the end of the world. It's always the end of the world for movie executives. That's why they're always drinking mineral water: They're afraid of dying. That's why they're always getting up at five in the morning-- makes the day last longer.

Q: How did you research Clockers?

A: When I was researching Sea of Love, I found myself seeing the world through a policeman's eyes. Then I started thinking about the reverse angle--all these faces looking back at cops--the policed. I was hanging out in North Jersey. Newark, Jersey City, Bayonne, Secaucus--all the places with showbiz joke names. I grew up in the projects in the Bronx, but just to say that you grew up in a housing project in the 1950s--you know nothing about what it's like to live in a housing project now.

Q: What do you think are the major differences?

A: Well one is crack. I got all messed up on drugs in the early '80s. I mean, messed up: I was heading down the tubes at 90 miles an hour. If that can happen to me, with all my position in the world and all my advantages, what chance does some little 13-year-old over in Newark have against crack? See, bad as it got for me, my problems all happened before the advent of crack. Crack would have been the end of me, for sure! What chance does some kid have? The thought really haunted me. It became an obsession. I had to know.

Q: What were the mechanics of hanging out?

A: I'd go to the homicide office, hang out with Larry Mullane. You bullshit, you get to be friends with these guys. So I meet Larry's partner, John Bartucci. John says, "So Rich. What's your book about?" I tell him drugs, and he says, "Well, you know, I run a methadone center in my spare time, maybe you ought to come down some time and check it out." So I go down, and finally he says to me, "Rich, you know if you want to get into the projects, Leroy over here used to be a heroin addict. He just got out of jail for armed robbery, but he's my point man. He goes out there, recruiting junkies to come in for AIDS tests. He'll take you to all the junkie encampments, the shooting galleries."

So now I'm going around with Leroy. And Leroy says, "Man, I had a really good lawyer named Bobby Desmond." So now I'm hanging out with Bobby Desmond. And Bobby says, "Well, you know the guy you should really talk to is Dennis Woods." BAM! Now I'm talking to Dennis Woods. Next thing you know, he's telling me: "Hey. The guy you should really speak to is John Bartucci." But I started with him! I go back to him anyway. He says to me, "Oh, you're asking about crack dealers, Rich? Well, the guy you should really meet is Rodney, because Rodney is heavily into everything. Nobody messes with him, because he's a killer. And he's perfectly safe to hang around with, because he's a killer.

Over the last 15 years I must have arrested him 10 times on outstanding warrants. We're friends by now. We grew up together. Let me get him on his beeper!" So now I'm running with Rodney. He shows me how he bags up the bottles, and--you know--he's got 14 kids out working the street. He's saluting the troops, and they're saluting him, all up and down Martin Luther King Boulevard. He introduces me to this guy who's about to do an armed robbery. They call it "going shopping," where they sneak over the river and rob drug dealers on the Lower East Side. Next thing I know, it's whoa, and we're speeding through the Holland Tunnel. Next night I'm back with the cops again! I say to them, "Gee, I'd really like to go through a door with you guys, you know, next time you're serving paper." So Larry says to me, "You should meet Kenny Tcschlog. He's got the housing police." And pretty soon it's, "Hey Kenny, this is Rich, he's not an asshole, he's doing a book, he did Sea of Love." "Sea of Love?. No shit!! You know Al Pacino?"

Q: When you reenter your own world, are you disoriented? What does it do to your head, to suddenly wake up a millionaire?

A: First of all, I've been doing really well for a number of years. It's like Elmore Leonard said, when he started getting big hits with his books, and everybody started asking, "How does it feel to be successful?" And he said, "Shit--I was in advertising. I'd been successful for 20 years. It's not like I was picking Coke cans out of the garbage." I've been making really good money for at least five years. This is just sort of like a windfall.

But it's not like I was going, "Gee, how am I going to pay for the kids' schooling," and all of a sudden-- "Ah! Queen for a day, I won the lottery, I won, I won." The only thing it makes me realize, now that I allegedly have all this money and I don't have to work, is that, number one, work is so important to me that I don't think of it in terms of, "Now I don't have to work." I've got work up the ying-yang that I want to do. That's number one.

Number two, it makes me realize, I don't have any passions or pursuits. It's not I'm like this wacko trout fisherman, or, "God. Now I can finally buy that Bugatti." It made me realize, I only have my family and my work. It's kind of unnerving, in a way.

Q: You've partly answered this by discussing your research methods, but when I asked, "What does this do to your head?" I was really asking, what it does to your ability to see the world through the eyes of people who still have to struggle for a living. Is there a danger of being cut off from your best material?

A: Not at all. In fact, the good thing about Sea of Love, it gave me the cachet to have access to the world of Jersey City. This drug dealer who's in my book said to me, "If God invented anything better than dope, he kept it to himself." [Laughs] When I heard that I thought, "Yeah, that's pretty good." But then it occurred to me--there is one thing that's more powerful than dope, and that's movies. Because even people who don't like dope love movies. Everybody loves movies. All you've got to say is, "Sea of Love," or "Color of Money," and people look at you. They go weak in the knees. Like, "Would you call him Al, or would you call him Mr. Pacino?" All of a sudden you're like this bridge standing between them and this dream factory we all grew up on. And we're all dopey about. And you've actually been there. You know, it's like when you meet somebody who's actually been in combat in Vietnam. And you just get real quiet. And you look at the guy kind of differently.

Everybody's conditioned in this society to be stunned by Hollywood, by the bigness of it. And that gave me access like you can't believe! If I say to them, "Hey. I'm a writer," they're going to look at me strange. "What the fuck do you mean, you're a writer?" "I mean I wrote Sea of Love." "You wrote Sea of Love?." "YES. And now I'm interested in ... YOU." "Yeah? No shit?? Well fuck, man. WHAT DO YOU WANT TO KNOW???" What I want is a ticket in--and by that I don't mean a ticket in to hang out with Felix Rohatyn or David Dinkins. I've never been interested in how it works at the top. I've always been interested in how it works at the bottom. That's not going to change because of all this money. And I spread around a lot of cash on Clockers. Anybody I could help, I did, though ironically the people who need money the most are the last to accept it--they don't want handouts. So I would find other ways to be helpful. I financed a barbecue for a whole housing project. My attitude was, "You're doing so much for me, what can I do for you? I've got my checkbook, I've got my mouth. How can I help?" One kid lived with my family for a month. I brought him out of the projects and he stayed with us.

Money isn't necessarily going to make it easier to do what I want to do-- because it's always been easy for me to do what I want to do. I've been lucky all my life, in terms of what I made from my writing.

Q: What about your mid-twenties. How was it going then?

A: When I was 24 and I was sharing an apartment with four other guys, I didn't need much. Hollywood handed me $35,000 for The Wanderers. Back then it felt like $35 billion. Nowadays, $35,000 would put me in the poorhouse--now that I'm raising a family. Come up in the world, your needs change. But I've always been incredibly lucky.

Q: Have you ever taken on a project because of the money?

A: I've never gone after the bucks. I never decided, "Oh, now I'm going to be a screenwriter so I can clean up a bit." I didn't know what I was doing. It took me a solid year to write a $30,000 script, which was my first, a little thing I did for Marty Brest called Wingo. That was very difficult. It took forever. This was back in 1984-85. I was trying to clean up my act, on a lot of levels--and that created problems. There were a lot of distractions in my life. Also, I was learning the craft. That took about a year of fucking around. Marty Brest is kind of a perfectionist, and I didn't know what I was doing. Just the combination of working with a perfectionist and not knowing what you're about--that can automatically take you forever. By the time I finished it, Brest had been hired by Simpson and Bruckheimer to shoot Beverly Hills Cop.

Q: Did you ever study Syd Field, or any of the other screen-writing "how-to" gurus?

A: All I ever studied was the movie executives. What soothes them, what scares them.

Q: Given that they spring from the same imagination, how can you tell when a screenplay is on the way, as opposed to a novel?

A: For me, writing screenplays is like speed chess. A page is a minute; it's a race. You've got your pyramid, you've got five characters, you've got two hours. You can't do any dallying in the valley the way you can with a novel. When you're screenwriting, you've got to be LeRoy Neiman. You're painting a horse race from the instant they leave the starting gate, and you've got to have it done before they cross the finish line. A PHOTO FINISH! With a novel you've got your easel overlooking the Hudson River Valley and you can ask yourself, "Is that cloud right?"

Q: Where do you see yourself heading now?

A: I feel like I just gave birth to an elephant. For now, I'm going to steer clear of novels and do only screenplays for awhile. High and Low, for Scorsese--a remake of the Kurosawa picture--and then the adaptation of Clockers. Novels and screenplays are perfect antidotes for one another. After doing two screenplays you want to kill all the assholes in the world--a novel is perfect for that. You're telling yourself, "I can't wait to be back on a novel, so I can be my own boss again." Then after two years of that, you're going stir-crazy. "I can't wait do a screenplay again, so I can be around people."

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F.X. Feeney is a screenwriter and film critic living in Los Angeles.

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