Hollywood vs. The Author

Stephen Jay Schwartz

• Publisher: Rare Bird Books, A Barnacle Book
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781644280225
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Screenwriting

It's no secret that authors have a love-hate relationship with Hollywood. The oft-repeated cliché that "the book was better than the movie" holds true for more reasons than the average reader will ever know. When asked about selling their book rights to Hollywood authors like to joke that they drive their manuscripts to the border of Arizona and California and toss them over the fence, driving back the way they came at breakneck speed. This is probably because Hollywood just doesn't "get it." Its vision for the film or TV series rarely seems to match the vision of the author. And for those rare individuals who've had the fortune of sitting across the desk from one of the myriad, interchangeable development execs praising the brilliance of their work while ticking off a never-ending list of notes for the rewrite, the pros of pitching their work to Hollywood rarely outweigh the cons.Stephen Jay Schwartz has sat on both sides of that desk—first as the Director of Development for film director Wolfgang Petersen, then as a screenwriter and author pitching his work to the film and television industry. He's seen all sides of what is known in this small community as "Development Hell." The process is both amusing and heartbreaking. Most authors whose work contains a modicum of commercial potential eventually find themselves in "the room" taking a shot at seeing their creations re-visualized by agents, producers or development executives. What they often discover is that their audience is younger and less worldly as themselves. What passes for "story notes" is often a mishmash of vaguely connected ideas intended to put the producer's personal stamp on the project. Hollywood Versus The Author is a collection of non-fiction anecdotes by authors who've had the pleasure of experiencing the development room firsthand—some who have successfully managed to straddle the two worlds, seeing their works morph into the kinds of feature films and TV shows that make them proud, and others who stepped blindsided into that room after selling their first or second novels. All the stories in this collection illustrate the great divide between the world of literature and the big or small screen. They underscore the insanity of every crazy thing you've ever heard about Hollywood. For insiders and outsiders alike, Hollywood Versus The Author delivers the goods.

Los Angeles Times bestselling author Stephen Jay Schwartz spent a number of years as the director of Development for filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, In the Line of Fire, The Perfect Storm, Air Force One), where he worked to develop screenplays for production. He also worked as a freelance screenwriter before writing his two novels, Boulevard and Beat. Stephen’s short fiction and essays have been published in collections such as the LA Fiction Anthology (Red Hen Press), and Jewish Noir (PM Press). He is a regular moderator at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and has judged and been the panel chair for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for three consecutive years, starting in 2015. His film work has been exhibited in the AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Stephen received his MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside and is currently on faculty at Emerson College Los Angeles.

An Interview with Jonathan Kellerman

I sat down with Jonathan Kellerman for lunch at an upscale Hollywood steakhouse where we dined on salads and proceeded to explore the lure of the film and television industry on an author whose work is grounded in fact.

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Stephen Jay Schwartz: Your first published novel, When the Bough Breaks, was purchased in 1985 and fast-tracked as a television movie of the week. How did that happen? Did you have contacts in the entertainment industry?

Jonathan Kellerman: So what happened was that Ted Danson wanted to do a dramatic project and after he read my book he and his business partner approached my literary agent. I didn’t have a film agent at the time.

SJS: At this point your book was a best seller?

JK: It was a NY Times bestseller, to everyone’s amazement, including my own. And it actually got made! I think it was one of the highest-rated NBC movies of the week ever made. Now, this was pre-cable, it was 1986. It had something like a thirty-three share—it beat 60 Minutes. Ted was huge then, as you know, but he also did a movie at that time that didn’t do so well. So I like to think that it was a combination of Ted’s star power and the quality of the product itself that made it so successful.

SJS: Did you have any influence on the teleplay?

JK: My attitude has always been that it’s like surrogate parenting—I birth it, I give it to you, and I walk away. I really didn’t want to get involved. I told you, Stephen, I have an aversion to screenwriting. I like writing novels, it’s all I like writing. But what happened was they hired a writer from their panel—they had a panel in those days, it was a list of writers they worked with—and he did a draft, then he went away to an ashram—

SJS: To a what?

JK: An ashram, you know (laughs), like a mystical retreat like they had in those days. And they weren’t happy with it when it came back. Ted said it wasn’t what he wanted, and he was producing as well as acting, so it meant a lot to him. This was with Taft Entertainment, they used to have offices on Wilshire, and they begged me to do something, and I don’t think they even paid me—

SJS: You read that screenplay?

JK: Yes.

SJS: And you had the same feeling that Ted had? You didn’t feel that it really represented your book?

JK: I mean I thought it was okay, but they wanted more. So here’s what we did. We met in a windowless room at Taft and Ted and a secretary read the script line by line out loud, and if something wasn’t good, I rewrote it. It took a couple days, and then they liked it. The irony is that the script won an Edgar Award, but my name wasn’t on it (laughs).

SJS: It was kind of like a page-one rewrite—

JK: Line by line. I gotta tell you, Ted was so serious about it, he’s so good at his craft. He’s a great guy, I like working with him.

SJS: Was it mostly dialogue that needed changing? Was the draft structurally sound?

JK: Honestly, I forget. It was thirty years ago. But I remember that it was a fun experience, and I had no experience writing screenplays. I’d only written one published novel—I think I’d written two novels at that point. The funny thing is that I’ve written fifty books—forty-four novels—and that’s the only thing that’s ever been produced, ever. I always get the question, “Why don’t they do movies out of your books” and I really don’t know. But I really don’t care, either. I’ve had plenty of sales, I’ve made a lot of money off options and sales. I did another deal where I had to rewrite a script—I won’t mention names, but it was written by a very famous guy who was my friend and, because I rewrote his script, we are no longer friends. It’s really kind of sad. I didn’t want to do it, but my agent said, “You’ve really got to do it because it’s not going to happen otherwise.”

SJS: Was this one of your books?

JK: Yes, it was one of my books that Francis Ford Coppola bought. He had a deal with Hallmark, and he bought three of my books outright. So I rewrote that script to toughen it up a little. I lost a friend, and they didn’t make it anyway because, well, you know Hollywood—a new head of TV comes in and she decides she doesn’t like it or you know, for some reason the new guy decides that he has to destroy whatever his predecessor has done. I don’t like this business. The reason I like writing novels is because I’m the producer and the writer and the actor. I sit in a room, I type, and I get minimally edited. It’s my book. If you like it, you like it, if you hate it, I take the blame. I don’t like collaboration. My son (NY Times bestselling author Jesse Kellerman) loves collaboration. He was an actor/director at Harvard and he loves playwriting. He enjoys the process. He’s very good at it. I like collaborating with him because he’s such an ace, he’s such a talent. But otherwise, the joy to me of writing novels is that it’s a solitary endeavor.

SJS: Who do you go to for feedback on your novels, is it Faye (Kellerman, NY Times bestselling author and Jonathan’s wife) or—

JK: Nobody.

SJS: Does anyone give you notes on a draft?

JK: No! I’m so arrogant (laughs)! In the beginning, Faye and I started off together, I got published in ’85 and she got published in ’86. We were a couple of doctors, a couple of young kids getting published, so in the early days, every Friday, I would give her what I did, like a chapter, and she would give me what she did and I have to say, there were some cold nights (laughs). We had to learn how to do this—she’s real sensitive, I’m sensitive…it’s the closest thing to criticizing your own child. As we got more confident it would stretch out. I would give her like a month’s worth, about a hundred pages. And now she writes her book, I write mine. I always respect editing. I think it was Fran Leibowitz, the humorist, who said, “What’s this about editing? You don’t go up to a painter and tell...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Betting on Bosch
• The Burglar on the Screen
• This Time it’s Personal
• The Seductress
• Writing Homeland or How Living with Bipolar in Hollywood is Redundant
• Suing Hollywood
• On Selling a Novel to HollywoodFrom his Memoir The Los Angeles Diaries
• Tales of Woe in Glittertown
• An Interview with Jonathan Kellerman
• Where the Author Fits in the Movie Food Chain
• What Not to do to Make it in Hollywood
• Does it Have to be an Earthquake?
• Independent Will
• Jeff Parker Goes to Hollywood
• Detour Takes a Detour
• Goliath Beats David (Often)
• An Interview with Gregg Hurwitz
• A Woman Wouldn’t do That
• Acknowledgments