Zen in the Art of Writing

night or with the son on the porch. You don't have to do it too heavily. That's the great thing about film work: you just have someone look a certain way or sense the wind a certain way, and you don't have to go through all the speeches.

There's a wonderful scene when the father's sitting on the porch with Will late at night, and the little boy says, 'Sometimes I hear you moan late at night. I wish I could make you happy.' And the father says, 'Just tell me I'll live forever.' It breaks your heart.

What about hyperbole? I guess there's no question of retaining 'The billion voices ceased, instantly, as if the train had plunged in afire storm off the earth. '

My dear young man, there's a scene where the boys (Peterson and Shawn Carson) run through the graveyard and watch the train go by. They're huddled against the embankment, and a certain moment the train whistle screams and all the stones in the graveyard shudder and the angels weep dust. Ah ha!

You have an eye-catching way of using nouns as verbs. At one point you describe Charles Holloway as 'a father who storked his legs and turkeyed his arms. ' Can descriptive language like that ever make it to the screen?

A good director could do it.

Would you still see the bird?

A good director would find a way, because what you're shooting is haiku. You're shooting haiku in a barrel.

Let me give you an example of what we're talking about. I've been lecturing at the University of Southern California cinema department for twenty-two years-I go down there a couple of times a year-and various students have come up to me and said, 'Can we make films of your short stories?' I say, 'Sure, take them. Do it. But there's one restriction I put on you. Shoot the whole story. Just read what I've done and line up the shots by the paragraphs. All the paragraphs are shots. By the way the paragraph reads, you know whether it's a close-up or a long shot.' So, by God, those students, with their little cameras and $500, have shot better films than the big productions I've had, because they've followed the story.

All my stories are cinematic. The Illustrated Man over at Warner Brothers a couple of years ago (1969) didn't work because they didn't read the short stories. I may be the most cinematic novelist in the country today. All of my short stories can be shot right off the page. Each paragraph is a shot.

When I first talked to Sam Peckinpah years ago about directing Something Wicked, I said to him, 'How are you going to shoot the film if we do it?' He said, 'Tear the pages out of the book and stuff them into the camera.' I said, 'Right.'

The job finally is to pick and choose among all metaphors in the book, put them into a screenplay in just the right proportion where people don't start to laugh at you.

For instance, I saw The Only Game in Town, George Stevens' film about gambling in Las Vegas, on TV recently. Warren Beatty and Elizabeth Taylor, who is a little bit Porky Pig. About a half hour in, Taylor turns to Beatty and she says, 'Carry me into the bedroom.' Well, there's no way to do anything but laugh. I thought, 'He's going to throw his back out.' I mean there goes your film.

So when you do a fantasy for the screen, make sure people don't fall off their seats.

How do you begin the process of adapting for movies?

I throw it all out and start over.

You never look at the original material?

When I write a screenplay or stage play based on my work, I never look at the original work. I get the play done, and then I go back and see what I've missed. You can always insert things if they're missing. It's more fun to hear characters speak thirty years later.

I did Farenheit 451 for the stage in Los Angeles two years ago; I just went to the characters, and I said, 'Hey, I haven't talked to you in thirty years. Have you grown up? I hope so. I have.' And, of course, they had, too. The fire chief came to me and said, 'Hey, thirty years ago, when you wrote me down, you forgot to ask me why I burn books.' I said, 'God damn! Good question. Why do you burn books?' And he told me-a glorious scene that's not in the novel. It's in the play. Now, at some time in the future I'm going to go to the novel, open it up, and shove in the new material, because it's glorious.

Could you do another film about it?

It's not necessary because I love the Truffaut film, but I would like to do a TV special of the play with all the new material; give the fire chief a chance to tell you that he is a failed romantic: he thought books could cure everything. We all think that at a certain time in our lives-don't we?-when we discover books. We think in an emergency all you've got to do is open the Bible or Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson, and we think, 'Wow! They know all the secrets.'

With all your knowledge of screenwriting and what can and cannot be done on screen, are you not interested in taking the step into directing films?

No, I don't want to handle that many people. A director has got to make forty or fifty people love him or fear him, or a combination of both, all the time. And how do you handle that many people and keep your sanity and your politeness? I'm afraid I would be impatient, which I wouldn't want to be.

I'm accustomed, you see, to getting up every morning, running to the typewriter, and in an hour I've created a world. I don't have to wait for anyone. I don't have to criticize anyone. It's done. All I need is an hour, and I'm ahead of everyone. The rest of the day I can goof off. I've already done a thousand words this morning; so if I want to have a two or three-hour lunch, I can have it, because I've already beat everyone.

But a director says, 'Oh, God, my spirits are up. Now, I wonder if I can get everyone else's up.' What if my leading lady isn't feeling well today? What if my leading man is cantankerous? How do I handle it?

Your characters never present those problems?