EVEN ON MY first visit to Alan Pakula at Warner Bros. I was aware that I was being treated a little different from the other few writers I met, and this, I believe, is because, unlike most of the young writers in the barn, I had written a novel. All novelists or fiction writers who went out West to do a little scripting had this edge, although they may not have realized it in time to act on it.
A published novel, whether good or bad, is at least an end product. A work of the human imagination has been embarked upon and completed. Good or bad it belongs to the writer, and has been exposed to the world as his work.
No screenplay, though, is an end product. If it’s a good screenplay it may result in a produced movie. Budgets can be determined or derived from screen work and many are. Casting can begin, at least in the producers’ heads, once there’s a screenplay. Directors can be approached or engaged and financing can be set up. Screenplays are a vital element in the whole process but it’s obvious to everyone that they themselves are not an end product. They’re a blueprint that might become a building, or an orchestral score that might become lovely music.
Many writers hate this secondary nature in the film hierarchy; their complaints stretch back well over a century and continue today, but I feel no desire to add to them, possibly because I have a secure base elsewhere. There’s all those novels I’ve written—about thirty now. If a picture I work on doesn’t get made or is unsuccessful and loses money, I am not much affected. I have my other life, or lives: novel writing and bookselling.
That doesn’t mean I don’t work hard at screenwriting. If anything I work harder at screenwriting than I do at fiction—fiction comes to me easily, and scripts don’t. I have to work at them; they’re a craft I’ve only partly mastered—the character part. I now know what a dissolve is, and I’m more realistic about budgets than I used to be, despite which, had I not managed to persuade Diana Ossana to be my screenwriting partner, I doubt I’d be doing much screen work. She has provided the sense of structure I simply don’t have. Add her sense of structure to my ability to spew out characters and you have what feels like an effective screenwriting team, not that we’re the only such team under the heavens. Movies are collaborative efforts, a truism that’s probably been uttered thousands of times. Woody Allen is the only director I know who writes his scripts alone, and even he doesn’t do it all the time.
Screenwriting presents one with a constant flow of options: should the main character be a boy or a girl. Collaboration usually works because two brains can come up with more options than one brain. I knew this early on, but I didn’t find Diana early on. I’ve worked on film scripts, most of them not bad, with Peter Bogdanovich and Polly Platt, with Diane Keaton, Cybill Shepherd, Goldie Hawn, and the fine novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko. These various efforts only yielded two movies: The Last Picture Show and Memphis, a film I wrote with Cybill, which was adapted by us from Shelby Foote’s September, September. Leslie Silko and I wrote two scripts together, the unmade Honkytonk Sue for Goldie Hawn, and the equally unmade Dance Me Outside, an adaptation done for Norman Jewison from a W. P. Kinsella story; made by others, not Norman Jewison.
Diane Keaton and I labored long on an adaptation of my own Somebody’s Darling; nothing cinematic came of this except a great friendship. Somebody’s Darling is a Hollywood novel—it went nowhere because of Hollywood’s persistent dislike of itself as a subject.
None of the above are projects that I would have taken a shot at alone. But then Peter Bogdanovich and his then wife Polly Platt came along, and the long five-book, two-movie saga of The Last Picture Show began.