PRODUCERS ARE WONDERFUL PEOPLE, PARTICULARLY Dino De Laurentiis, who recently delivered himself of a judgment that has his customary almost scriptural force behind it. “A book writer can never write a screenplay,” he said, reportedly, oblivious to—if not contemptuous of—what one might think to be a massive amount of evidence to the contrary.
If this evidence were brought to De Laurentiis in the form of screenplays by book writers—the mountain to Mohammed, as it were—it would bury the Paramount lot to a depth of about forty feet; possibly it could be stacked up in a papery pyramid that would make a fitting tomb, not only for De Laurentiis but for such other little pharaohs as happen to be around at the time.
The remark was quoted by Robert Altman to Charles Higham (New York Times, 26 September 1976), and from the context it seems probable that De Laurentiis considers himself already in danger of such an entombment, the putative tomb being the 390-page script E. L. Doctorow contributed toward the projected (various estimates here) two-and-a-half to ten-hour film of his acclaimed book Ragtime.
De Laurentiis went on to point out that the $7 million that will eventually be spent on the film is, after all, his $7 million, a fact overlooked by writers, but not, in many cases, by directors. It appears that in this case Robert Altman may also have overlooked it, since it was his thought that the picture might need to have a ten-hour maxi-version, for eventual, and one would hope segmented, television release. For this and who knows what other offenses against scripture, Altman had the rug yanked out from under him. Milos Forman, newest winner in movieland’s $100 million sweepstakes, is standing on the rug at the moment; how solidly his feet are planted no one but De Laurentiis can say.
There is one point to be made about l’affaire Ragtime, and that is that we live in an age of oversell. Certain writers, actors, directors, athletes, and rock stars are so ridiculously overrewarded—or let’s say overpaid—as to make the word ridiculous seem altogether inadequate. Of course, any writer who has not been sensationally overpaid—myself, for example—will be thought to be merely pissing sour grapejuice in pointing this out, which in my view only makes it the more worth emphasizing. In the last few years we have seen Peter Benchley become the richest writer of all time on the basis of a trivial book; while Doctorow, whose book is not trivial but is also no sort of masterpiece, commands such sums himself as to probably be unimpressed by De Laurentiis’s comment about whose $7 million it is.
If a producer had suddenly proposed to spend $7 million on The Book of Daniel, Doctorow’s last book—in my view an equally ambitious if less promotable effort than Ragtime—I doubt that he would have allowed himself to get quite so wrought up about the filming. Having been raised, myself, in oil-boom country, I have several times had the opportunity to witness what a calamity it can be, socially and morally, when an honest roustabout rents himself a little oil rig and actually strikes it rich. Big money has a way of convincing people that they deserve it. Maybe they do and maybe they don’t, but it is nowhere evident that the pressure of millions, added to the pressure of life, has ever improved anyone’s prose style. Being rich is an occupation in itself, particularly for people who arrive at it via parachute in middle life.
It is clear from the mass of interviews and journalistic trivia already piled around this project like uncollected garbage that somewhere along the way Doctorow has deluded himself into believing that the film that may eventually be made of his novel can actually be a serious work of art. To believe that is to believe in miracles. Doctorow is not your ordinary reader of movie magazines, either. He is not one of those people—if there still are any—who consider the word Hollywood synonymous with miracle. Rather, he is a seasoned editor and a gifted writer, a man, one would think, with some skepticism. He might even be thought to have what scripture according to Hemingway would have as the first essential of a writer: a built-in shit detector.
Where is his skepticism, not to mention his nose? What clearer evidence could there be that the incandescence given off by big money far exceeds the light of reason? If Charles Higham’s reporting is accurate, Doctorow now wishes he had occupied, and held, higher ground to begin with. He wishes that he—like Salinger—had held aloof and not sold the book to the movies at all. Perhaps it is unfair to attempt to deduce his reasoning from a piece in The New York Times, but it does appear that he feels that since the book had already made him financially secure (the child establishing a trust fund for his parent, as it were) he ought to have locked it in his house and spent the next few years protecting it from the sordid molestations of moss-ridden old moguls like De Laurentiis.
Here again, it seems, we encounter the age-old confusion between book and film. Doctorow really has nothing to worry about; his book is perfectly safe. To the extent that it is an art work, it is done and immutable, secure between its covers. De Laurentiis may end up making a sappy movie of it, but that won’t cause Doctorow’s lines to shriek with shame and embarrassment and run off the page. The book holds a piece of ground that the movie can neither overrun nor erode: its own ground.
In my view it is preeminently silly for Doctorow to give a damn about what happens to Ragtime as a film. His work is done, and his tale now belongs, most properly, to its readers, not to him. The film De Laurentiis may eventually make of it is another problem, but it is clearly De Laurentiis’s problem, not Doctorow’s. If De Laurentiis is willing to spend $7 million on a problem of this magnitude, I don’t see that there is any need for anyone but him to lose sleep over it. He has bought it, after all, and it will assuredly bear his stamp, whoever ends up directing it. Milos Forman is a director with great gifts, but so far money is directing this picture, and money will no doubt continue to do so. Money may not be that gifted, but it’s awfully consistent.
Doctorow’s evident anguish at what is about to happen is an interesting indication of the ambiguities of literary success in America now. Probably no good book has been as oversold as Ragtime. Doctorow must recognize that he has been the beneficiary of a terrific hype; the price paid for the paperback rights to Ragtime is an index, not to the book’s merits, but to the character of our publishing industry. Though it is really reductive to call what we have now a “publishing industry,” when what it is is a media complex, in which promotability, not literary merit, is the sine qua non. On rare occasions—so far, only this one—promotability and literary merit may coincide, but such occasions are only flukes, and even Ragtime will occupy a larger chapter in the history of agentry than it will in the histories of literature. It has proved to be the most promotable good book of its day.
The heart of De Laurentiis’s problem is that he bought a product that had already been oversold. In order to come out on his investment he is going to have to engineer something amounting to double-sell—that is, forcing twice as many people to see Ragtime as really want to, and probably the only way he can accomplish that is by rounding up everyone involved: Altman, Forman, Doctorow, perhaps even Joan Tewkesbury, and burning them at the stake on camera. (The book has, after all, an elastic plot.) De Laurentiis is no doubt realistic enough to know what he’s up against here: Dragging Altman and Forman to the stake is going to be some chore.
The consequences, for literature and film, of this rollicking media complex of ours are sure to be many and various; some of them, like the consequences of atomic radiation, may not become evident for a few years. Obviously, this complex now has the capacity to generate blockbusters—media megabombs—and nobody’s going to put anything like arms control over on it. It will generate blockbusters as rapidly as it can.
What harm? Plenty of harm. The overselling of mediocre products debases any craft, partly because in order to oversell them it is necessary first to overrate them. Perspective—the nitrogen of art—is lost: The populace is encouraged to forget that most of what is being acclaimed as good or even great today will be totally forgotten within ten years.
Then, too, having to witness the overselling of mediocrity demoralizes the young, those would-be apprentices who must be encouraged to love craft first and money second, if craft is to survive and be passed on. This overselling either disgusts the young or it overstimulates them, and in either case they lose and the craft loses. Consider Paul Schrader, a screenwriter of at best modest ability. Schrader has commented lately about how easy it is for him to swing deals in the $300,000 to $600,000 range. News like that, affably served up in the Village Voice, besides being in abominable taste, does an active disservice to the craft of letters—in which, if we suspend our disbelief, we might include Screenwriting. Making it sound easy will send God knows how many youngsters (and oldsters) rushing to their typewriters, futilely; and, worse, it will send them rushing to the typewriters to try to become Paul Schrader.
Most of them, of course, will fail—but failing to produce something mediocre and promotable is not quite the same as failing to produce, say, The Brothers Karamazov. There are levels of dignity to be observed, even within failure. Failing to produce a mere blockbuster is to be doubly cheapened.
Just conceivably, the source of Doctorow’s distress at the contemplation of what De Laurentiis might do with his book lies in the recognition that he was overpaid to begin with, making him thus desperately anxious to have it, at least, remain clearly Art, wherever it goes. In this case, agentry got him his riches, and also his predicament. Probably he is too good a writer to think like an agent. To an agent, a book is worth what it will bring—writers operate with a somewhat subtler sense of the value of their work. A writer with Doctorow’s experience and integrity will be well read enough to be aware that he writes with great ghosts at his side. He will have read of Baudelaire’s hunger, of Dostoevsky’s debts, of Marx’s poverty, and the scramblings to which even the great Dr. Johnson was forced. Remembering all the shabby, harried masters who have preceded him, he will doubtless—now and then amid his comforts—feel an occasional twinge of conscience. He will have occasion to consider the arbitrariness with which great artists have been either starved or surfeited, and, with literary history a turmoil in his head, if some film producer should suddenly pile yet more money on him, his twinge may become a twitch.
Doctorow shouldn’t worry so much. Most of the great dead wouldn’t begrudge him his money, but many of them would laugh at him long and hard for harboring such unreasonable expectations of De Laurentiis, who needs a marketable product, not a work of art. He will probably have to flog dozens of scriptwriters, and perhaps even another director or two, before he gets it: Whether the result will be worth looking at, much less worth taking seriously, seems largely to be in the hands of chance. Doctorow should look sharp, and make sure he’s not underneath De Laurentiis when and if that gentleman falls of his own weight. After all, it would be embarrassing if a good writer got crushed by a feather.