A screenwriter who doesn't want to direct? Despite his Hollywood success with The Color of Money and Sea of Love, novelist/screenwriter Richard Price knows his talent is writing. Here Price talks about being a novelist and a screenwriter, about working with Martin Scorsese, about his novel Clockers and about writing the new Night and the City.
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As a screenwriter, Richard Price is a remarkable maverick. His debut, The Color of Money (1986), directed by Martin Scorsese, was a strong commercial success that gave him the cachet and the freedom to initiate and develop scripts in his own manner. His work since then has shown a rare personal stamp, a continuity of theme and feeling that extends from film to film. His script for Life Lessons--the "Martin Scorsese" sequence in New York Stories, has much more in common with Sea of Love (which he also wrote) than it does with either GoodFellas or Cape Fear (which were directed by Scorsese but written by others).
This consistency in sensibility, which one associates more with directors than screenwriters, is not so surprising in view of Price's overall career. For Richard Price is the screenwriter as writer, par excellence. He began as, and continues to be, a novelist. In fact, every novel he's published since 1974 has been greeted as an event: Bloodbrothers (1976), Ladies' Man (1978), The Breaks (1983) and now--after nearly a decade--the best-selling Clockers.
Price is right now in the middle of a banner year. Two of his screenplays have been produced, both starring Robert De Niro: Mad Dog and Glory and Night and the City, which opens this month. And Clockers was bought by Universal in a bidding war for $1.9 million (this in the middle of Hollywood's noisily touted "austerity" program) well before it was published.
In person, Price is alert, confident, bursting with nervous energy--more like a stand-up comedian than an off-duty novelist. He starts his day early, and we meet at one of his favorite breakfast dives in the Tribeca area of Manhattan. Later, we stop in at his apartment nearby--a vast converted loft. Trikes and toy vehicles are on the landing; inside there is sunny opulence, with art on the walls, as well as family photographs (shot by Price), primarily of Price's wife Judy and their two children, Annie and Gen.
Many novelists have come to Hollywood and tried to parlay their literary talent into the verbal/visual skills necessary to screenwriting. Some have met with notable success (Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, Joan Didion); some have dealt with the devil and gone back home--or died (Faulkner, Fitzgerald, West). Richard Price stands out as a writer who has straddled the difficult worlds of fiction and film, and distinguished himself equally in both. Since this is such an unusual accomplishment, I decided to begin our interview with this topic.
F.X. FEENEY: As a writer who is esteemed as both novelist and screenwriter, you're an anomaly. How do you explain it?
PRICE: It's because I always wrote novels like a screenwriter and screenplays like a novelist. Apart from little differences of form and technique, I never differentiated--which I think is a generational trait. I grew up watching television, going to the movies. I think it's safe to say that, in my life, I've seen more TV than I've read books. My frames of reference are visual. I think in pictures and scenes, like a screenwriter, and try to take down what I see. This was true when I was learning to write novels; it was just as true when I was learning to write screenplays. There was never any difference for me between the two, if we're talking about basic storytelling craft.
Q: As a novelist, you're used to being in command of your own art. But now you're moving up in a collaborative medium. What do you see ahead for yourself in the movie business?
A: Well, it's like this. I really believe that if you don't watch out, everybody rises to their own level of mediocrity. So many writers feel that if you get to be a really good writer, the next step is to be a bad director. I'm not a visual artist. I'm a writer. I never really want to go any higher with movies than the level of Originator. I'm curious about directing. For example, last night Scorsese walked through the script of Mad Dog and Glory with the director, John McNaughton, and myself after we'd seen the rough cut. He talked about what could be better, all the different options that could have been taken--it was a good learning experience for me. I know less than a first-year film student about actual filmmaking. So I'm interested, but I don't want to be a director. What I'd like to do is exactly what I'm doing right now. I'd like to alternate novels with movies. I'd like to waltz into Universal and say, "Okay, look. Here's what I want to do next." And have everybody go, "Great." Let them call my agent, set the wheels in motion, let me go off to write this picture. And then we'll go find the right director.
Q: That attitude is at odds with the current trend.
A: I feel like a lot of writers become directors purely because they get so pissed off at what's been done to their scripts. Number one, scripts are not usually that great to begin with. You know--writers like to think they're the Dead Sea Scrolls. But by and large, they're just ... scripts. More often than not, the cuts that get made are honorable, and what's lost is not deathless prose. But writers get so pissed off, they devote their lives to getting revenge and taking control--and they become even worse directors than the guys they hated to begin with. At least that hack who ruined your script, knew how to do it. There's a few people who've made the crossover, where I like what they do. John Sayles, David Mamet. But by and large, the writers who've become directors--eehh. Big deal.
Q: What about when the story gets altered to fit the marketplace and actually becomes less of a story?
A: The illusion is, "Gee, if I were a director I'd have more power." That's false. The director is just as much under the gun. Take Sea of Love. There's not one word in it that I didn't write, but ; when I saw it, I was all I freaked out--I never meant it to be a "thriller." I meant it to be two hours of High Mopery. Very angsty. It probably would not have had as big an audience. It might have been more literate. More original. But hey, I'm working with Universal. It got shoehorned into a thriller-mode so that they could sell it. So you think, "That fuckin' director-- that fuckin' Casey Silver, that fuckin' Universal, that fuckin' Marty Bregman, that fuckin' Al Pacino." But to come back to Harold Becker, the director, the illusion is that Harold could have made any kind of picture he wanted to. And yet he's just as much under the gun in that editing room and behind that camera, to make Universal happy, as anybody. And I wouldn't have shot the picture anywhere near as good. My thing would have looked like you'd just held a script up to the camera and flipped the pages. Follow the bouncing ball. What do I know? So I thought to myself, "Grow up. You want the money, you want the big studio, you want the accessibility, you want the star system--that's the price."
Q: How did Sea of Love get turned into a thriller?
A: My first draft was naive. Dustin Hoffman was going to play it, but by the time I completed the draft, he was all tangled up with Rain Man. So I became the writer on Rain Man for six weeks, but then I quit, because I couldn't stand it. After that, things kind of cooled between us, and he decided to back away from Sea of Love. And then I just hand-delivered it to Al Pacino, myself. In this first draft, the woman character did not come in until page 90. It was all like, "Woe is me," for 90 pages--90 pages of really good scenes, but it was a character study. And then, finally, when this guy can't stand it anymore, he runs into Miss Wrong, and the whole thing happens in one explosive night. The last 15 minutes of the movie are him saying, "I don't care if I die, I've got to get laid, I've got to have some contact."
So all this Did-She-or- Didn't-She was shoved to the end. So everybody says to me, "Hey, the babe doesn't come in till 90, who are we going to get for that? She's got to be there from the giddyap." So I says, "All right, but not from page one. How about if I bring her in at 30?" They said okay--finally--but even then they were kind of hinky about it.
Now, the point is, if I've got a story where the organic structure of it is that the woman comes in on page 90, and all of a sudden I've got to bring her in on 30, what the fuck am I going to do with her for 60 pages? That's when I had to spin a whole line of Did-She-or-Didn't-She bullshit.
Q: Were you completely alienated from the project at that point?
A: I no longer felt involved with it. What do they say? Comedy is Tragedy plus Time? Everybody's telling me I've got to turn my movie into Fatal Attraction. Next thing I know, about a year later, I'm at a party and I run into James Dearden--the guy that wrote Fatal Attraction. And I said, "Oh. So you're the prick who wrote that thing. I can't tell you how miserable that made my life, I had to make my story like yours." And he said, "Look. I've just got a job directing a movie"I forget the title, something with Matt Dillon and Sean Young "and everybody's telling me I've got to make it like Sea of Love."
Q: Tell me about Night and the City.
A: I originally wrote it for Scorsese, back in about 1985. Apparently, [French director Bertrand] Tavernier came to Scorsese and said, "This is ripe for a remake." It was the first thing I ever wrote for Marty. After I turned it in, he decided he didn't want to do it-- because when I wrote it I was in awe of him, and it showed. It was like a compendium of Scorsese's Greatest Hits. He said, "This would be too much like editing my own films. But there's this other thing I'm trying to develop for Paul Newman--a sequel to The Hustler, maybe you'd like to come in on that with me."
Q: Years ago, you caused a stir when you cited Mean Streets as an influence on your novels. Did Scorsese know that? Was it a factor in your first meetings?
A: There was a lot of natural sympathy between us-- though that's not always a good thing. Sometimes, that can be a disaster: "This is my turf." "No, this is my turf." If you think too much alike, you can end up fighting over how many angels are dancing on the heads of pins. Much easier to bring in a Paul Schrader, who's more of an architect. With me, when I do a script, it's like, down to the semicolon. Marty is a great bullshit detector.
He's good at provoking you to go for a kind of artful rawness. His confidence in me gives me confidence--it frees me to fly this fuckin' plane. He never fucks with my work. At most, he'll say, "This is phony." And he's never wrong.
Q: The original Night and the City isn't particularly cherished or well known. Why remake it?
A: You'd have to ask Tavernier. I don't know why. Maybe because he's French, and it was an American B movie, which the French always love even though we don't understand why.
Q: How well did you know the film? Was it a favorite of yours, too?
A: No, I'd never seen it. I looked at it beforehand. Kept the convolutions of the plot. Got rid of the Linda Darnell character, or maybe it was Gene Tierney. [It was Gene Tierney.] Changed it from wrestling to boxing. Brought it up to date--changed it from London to New York. Oddly enough, some time after I finished writing it, I read the original novel by Gerald Kersh, which was much more down-and-dirty than the original movie ever was.
Q: How much rewriting did you do when the project got reactivated?
A: I didn't touch it.
Q: You didn't rewrite it at all?
A: Just minor changes to update it. For instance, I dropped a reference to Mount St. Helens. Big volcano, right? It used to be common knowledge; now it's Trivial Pursuit. I changed it to the Berlin Wall.
Q: What was your level of involvement during production?
A: Nothing. A little ego boost once in while. I'd hike down to the set and be a big shot for two minutes. Everybody loved the script--they didn't ask for any changes. I didn't have to tailor the roles.
Q: How did you get along with the director, Irwin Winkler?
A: What's good about him is he knows how to work with people. We didn't get too much into the artistry.
Q: One reason I ask is, he's an interesting anomaly: a producer who's decided to direct. What do you make of that?
A: Everybody wants to be an artist. How many artists do you know who are yearning to be businessmen? And what bigger artist is there than a film director? You're captain of the biggest artistic enterprise around. If you hang around long enough with Marty Scorsese, Nic Roeg or whoever--and Winkler's worked with a lot of the heavy hitters--you can begin to feel, you know: "I'd like to do this." Then you begin to think, "Maybe I can do this." Pretty soon you feel, "I've got to do this." Irwin's got balls; I admire him for trying. It's only his second movie as a director, no matter how many years he's been producing.
He doesn't have an inflated sense of his own importance. His strategy was to surround himself with the best people possible. The result was a happy set, an atmosphere of real generosity.
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.