Richard LaGravenese: The Ladies' Man

"That reminds me, I heard that you used to be a chorus boy..."

"Yes, I did it all. Summer stock, touring, the whole thing."

"'So were you the first straight chorus boy in the history of the chorus?'"

Now he's laughing, "Not the first, it's not something I was very good at."

"Well, thank God you found screenwriting. Didn't you get nominated for an Oscar for The Fisher King?"

LaGravenese nods, yes. "Callie Khouri won it, though, for Thelma & Louise."

"That's interesting, because, besides you, Callie's writing the best scripts for women,"

"We became really good friends, because we were at every award ceremony together. I was really happy to gel the nomination, but I knew I wasn't going to win. Thelma & Louise really hit a nerve, and I loved that movie. If I had to lose, losing to Callie was the best way."

"You know. The Fisher King was the first screenplay I ever read," I say. "I remember being completely blown away. It was so smart and literate. I thought, Holy shit, these screenwriters are smart.' The joke is, I've read thousands of screenplays since, and I've never seen one that comes even close to The Fisher King."

LaGravenese turns a nice shade of pink. "It was the first one I ever wrote, and I had no idea if it was good."

I moan. "You are going to be responsible for at least a quarter of a million assholes coming to Hollywood. They'll read this and say, 'I can do that."

"I worked on that screenplay for years. I wanted to give up on it many times," says LaGravenese. "My wife kept telling me that I had something there, to keep at it. I had gone to school to be an actor--I studied at NYU--but I haled rehearsing and I was always embarrassed, which is not good. I had written skits, so I thought, why not a screenplay? When I finished The Fisher King, my wife and I went away for a weekend to Puerto Rico. I had never gone on a vacation. When I came home, there were 18 messages on the phone machine, because while I was gone, they had sold my script. It felt like in one second our entire lives changed."

"How old were you?"

"Well. I'm 36 now, so I was about 28. I thought it was a fluke, and then they offered me this writing job at Disney. I just took whatever they gave me. because I figured that sooner or later they'd find out that they had made a serious error and I'd be fired."

"But that's not quite the way it turned out," I point out.

"Knock wood," he says, knocking like mad. "I wrote A Little Princess while I was there, although it didn't get made for years."

"So, you didn't find it hard to get into a young girl's head for A Little Princess?"

"What's so hard about imagining loneliness or the loss of a parent or being afraid? I wanted to write something for children, because I love kids and we were trying to get pregnant when I first started on it. By the time it was done, my daughter. Lily, had already been born, which just shows you how long the process was."

"So why is it that so few women's roles are good?"

"Something happened in the '60s. There was a shift in film that started with the sexual revolution. All of a sudden, it was alright to show women being strong and sexy. But because men were making these films, they took that to mean that they could just show tits and ass. And then in the '70s. when, with Jaws and Star Wars, the blockbuster movies were born, films became male-driven. In the '80s, when people like Stallone and Schwarzenegger got so big, the industry changed drastically. A lot of the great works of art in the '70s simply couldn't get made today. Imagine a studio making Five Easy Pieces. The movie business became just a business. Women's voices got reduced a little bit more, and their roles became very sexualized."

"Is all the hoopla about last year being a good year for actresses just an illusion?"

"I think everything is cyclical. Part of it is the audience's responsibility. But also. I think actresses have to initiate their own work, find projects they like and gel them made. I've spoken to some of my friends about this--Marisa Tomei, Elisabeth Shue, Mercedes Ruehl, Jeanne Tripplehorn. These are all smart, talented women. Women have to take more control of their careers. They can't just wait to be cast in a film. Look what a great job Emma Thompson is doing. And if you look back, even under the studio system, when Bette Davis and Katharine Hepburn took control of their careers, that's when things really changed for them.'"

"I must say that I was completely wrong about The Bridges of Madison County. I couldn't imagine how they'd ever make that overblown, embarrassing book into a coherent film, let alone into one that's intimate and moving. I'll tell you what I think you did that was a stroke of brilliance. The book was really about the photographer who comes to this place, but you made the movie so much more about Meryl Streep's character, Francesca.''

"Steven Spielberg's company brought me in and said. 'Would you like to take a crack at it?' I had never read the book, so I read it. I must say that I wasn't really that moved by it, but I asked my sister what she thought of it. and she said. 'It's my life.' She made me feel like I was being a little bit of a snob, that this book was touching people very strongly. I wrote this very wild screenplay, a combination of Diary of a Mad Housewife and Brief Encounter. Francesca was having fantasies, stabbing her son, just going nuts, because she was lonely and frustrated. I had a lot of fun with it. When Clint Eastwood came on as the director, he said that he wanted to bring back some of the book, and he helped me him down a lot of that stuff. He was very smart, very knowing about what to keep. But we both agreed that this was Francesca's story. Clint was right about taking a lot of that stuff out. because Meryl communicates all of that frustration with just a look. She doesn't need long speeches to let you know what she's thinking."

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