Ron Bass: The Collaborator

That Bass's strongest affinity for an actor is with Roberts, a woman, and that many of his most successful projects have been stories about women, probably stems from the unusual childhood he lived. From the age of three to 11, he suffered from an illness that was never identified but that left him bedridden with high fevers much of the time. He only attended school part-time during those years, which forced him into a universe quite unlike that inhabited by most boys his age. He read a tremendous amount and became fascinated by the psychological insights he found in classic novels. His childhood isolation led him to feel a strong connection to women.

"As I was growing up," he explains, "I found that I could talk about emotional and psychological matters with women very naturally and comfortably, and they liked finding guys who were interested in that stuff. To this day most of my best friends are women. Most of the people in my company are women. Although there are exceptions, I find it generally true that women are more interesting people in life and more interesting in drama. Men are more result-oriented, and therefore they don't want to be in touch with their inner life because that's going to slow them down. They don't want to feel guilty or vulnerable or afraid or embarrassed. They don't want to feel the range of emotions that threaten self-esteem. Women--and I mean women from cocktail waitresses to heads of government--are process-oriented, not result-oriented. They want to know what they're feeling, even if it totally screws them up. That means they go through the kinds of journeys and the kinds of change that make for great drama."

Bass's interest in adapting Richard Matheson's novel What Dreams May Come is in keeping with this view of drama. The novel was first optioned in the '70s, but studios, which don't generally share Bass's view, kept getting cold feet about the subject matter. "It's an extremely romantic piece, and thank God Hollywood has discovered the young female audience that will go to romantic movies over and over again," says Bass. "It's a love story that all takes place in the afterlife. Robin Williams dies right at the beginning of the movie, and the rest of it is set in heaven and hell. A love story that goes beyond death is extremely interesting to me. Whether life and love literally continue beyond death, none of us really know. But at the very least, the story works as a metaphor; it expresses the truth that love is more powerful and more important than death. Our mortality isn't the thing that defines us."

Bass recognizes he's been somewhat typecast as a writer of intimate character dramas, if not women's films, and would like to correct the notion. "I want to write in every genre," he says. "I haven't had a chance to do a gothic horror film yet, but I'd love to. I have written science fiction and action films that haven't been made. I'm dying to write a big tentpole special effects movie. I don't think there's any reason why having terrific characterization and an interesting personal story has to minimize or get in the way of fabulous special effects."

Whatever Bass's ambitions may be in the high-decibel action area, his next film, scheduled to start shooting this fall, is another women's movie, Passion of Mind. It will star Demi Moore as a woman who lives two alternate existences--one as a contented mother and homebody, the other as a hard-driving executive. "Ultimately she has to integrate the two sides of her personality," Bass explains. A great many actresses had been interested in the project, which Bass originally wrote in the late '80s. It was director Alain Berliner (_Ma Vie en Rose_) who finally settled on Moore, a choice Bass applauds.

"We needed an actress who could play both sides of the character," Bass says. "A lot of actresses we knew could play one side, but we hadn't seen them play the other side. Demi has played tough, self-obsessed, driven women, like the character she played in Disclosure. And she has also played loving, family-oriented, more artistic women, as she did in Ghost. I don't feel she's always been appreciated for her range. Also, I was gratified that she was willing to take this part for far less than her usual fee. It's a very low-budget movie, and a lot of big stars talk about wanting to do smaller independent movies, but at the end of the day, they or their agents will hold out for the $15 million fee in the big-studio picture."

Though Bass's productivity and relative satisfaction with his profession seem to derive from his willingness to be a team player, he is successful because he's an unmistakably skilled craftsman with a strong sense of structure and a gift for licking seemingly insurmountable problems of adaptation. Bass disdains the formulaic approach to screenwriting. "When I was a freshman at Stanford University," he recalls, "I took a course in the American novel from Wallace Stegner. He would talk about being in Paris with T.S. Eliot and Fitzgerald. I went up to him after class one day and said, 'Dr. Stegner, I want to be a writer. Which of the writing courses at this university should I take?' He said, 'Never take a writing course. I would never teach one and never take one. The moment you put someone else in the position of authority over you, you are accepting that there is a right and wrong way to do something. If it's going to come through you, it's got to come through you. Read everything you can read, steal everything you can steal. Be a sponge. But don't let someone tell you how to do it.' I've lectured at writing classes, and I've repeated that advice. When some screenwriting manual tells you, on page 62, the heroine's got to have a defeat, I laugh out loud."

On-the-job "stealing" and "sponging" are what Bass is happy to engage in. He's currently working with Steven Spielberg on adapting Arthur Golden's novel Memoirs of a Geisha, and has enthusiastically borrowed a writing strategy from his collaborator. "One technique Steven uses that I've never used before," Bass reveals, "is to color-code the story outline emotionally. If our lead character's principal emotion in a scene is happiness, we're going to write it in yellow. If it's envy, we'll write in green. If it's passion, it'll be red. If it's anger, it'll be purple. Steven feels that gives you an emotional landscape, and if you see too many scenes in a row that are the same color, you realize you may not want five consecutive scenes that are all about anger. Steven is a great guy to always learn something new from."

Ron Bass has perfected a savvy strategy that combines cleareyed thinking with just the right degree of deference. "I've been criticized two or three times by Joe Eszterhas," Bass says, "over something I said in an article in the Writers Guild journal several years ago. I said that ultimately, at the end of the day, the director's vision has to be served, and the writer has to help the director work toward it. I still stand by that. If you want final decision-making authority, you have to direct. I don't want to direct for a whole lot of reasons. I love working on 10 or 15 stories in a year instead of just one. I want to travel with my wife and go to my kids' plays. If you look at power as I think Eszterhas looks at power, as who's going to win in a head-to-head confrontation, I don't think the writer has that kind of clout in our business. If you look at power in a different way, as the capacity to persuade, the capacity to have the strength of your ideas heard and accepted, I think the writer can have a lot of power. This is a business that has to work by collaboration; it can't work by confrontation. I would say 90 percent of the time I feel very comfortable with the extent to which my opinion has been heard and respected. I haven't won every battle and I don't expect to."

__________________________________________

Stephen Farber wrote about action movies for the August '98 issue of Movieline.

Pages: 1 2 3