THE STORY THAT COUNTS
Part 2
THE STORY THAT COUNTS
Part 2
Atchity: A "literary" novel in the way that you’re describing it, I’d say no.
McDonald: I mean that in the sense that some books really defy any kind of film adaptation.
Atchity: Well, if we were to fall in love with something… There is a South American novel called Pedro Paramo (written by Juan Rulfo). I’ve read it many times, trying to ask myself, can this be a movie? And I just can’t see it being a movie in the real world. Maybe in European film. Maybe to play at the Angelica for a few weeks… But that’s not what we focus us on. There are other people who can do that and give their whole life to one story like that and we’re just not interested in that. But somebody gave me a story the other day from an agency about Shakespeare’s daughter. It’s a wonderful novel. It’s very literary and I’m debating right now if we should get involved. It could be a film, but it’s going to be a hard sell after Shakespeare in Love. We’re debating it. We don’t have any strict rules in that direction. If we fall in love with something, who knows?
McDonald: Have you passed on something, and later seen it surface?
Atchity: Hubert Selby Jr. offered me Requiem For a Dream to produce long ago, and I just wasn’t interested. I loved the novel and gave it a kind of a rave review — depressing as it is — in the L.A. Times. I just thought, "I don’t want to put that movie into the world." It was too dreary. Too upsetting. Too depressing. So I said no. He finally got it made 10 or 15 years later and I can’t say I’m thrilled with the results. It was a good movie, but it is still incredibly depressing. It all depends. If the next García Márquez came to me with a Magical Realism novel, I would jump on it, but so far I haven’t seen that.
McDonald: I saw somewhere where you are getting something like 15,000 submissions a year.
Atchity: I never counted it on a yearly basis. Something like 200 a week, on average. What is that, more than 10,000 a year? Many are in the form of queries, so they’re not so onerous as you might think.
McDonald: Not so time-intensive?
Atchity: We especially like to have e-mail queries, because we can usually immediately tell in a couple of lines whether it is something we are interested in getting involved with. So much of what is submitted is decided on based upon what we call "the agenda," which is what it is about. It’s not about its style or how great the style is. You can have the greatest style in the world, but if it is about stolen Russian nuclear weapons, we’re not going to jump on it. We’re tired of that story. If you’ve got great style and we can’t resist you as a writer, we’ll talk to you about it, as we did recently with a book that is coming out in October. We asked can you change the Russians to somebody else, and she made the changes, in this case, to the Irish, and we ended up making her a two- book deal. The reason we turn down so much is we know there is no market for it. We prefer to explore with the writer, by e-mail, are you willing to change that element? I like to keep it hypothetical based on a pitch, because the more you get buried in the detail of the book, the more you get attached to what the writer is trying to do. I still, at the end of the day, have to go out and face the market, and the market is still going to reduce the whole thing down to "stolen Russian nuclear weapons — you’ve got to be joking!" No matter how brilliant it is, they’re still going to come down to that. They are going to say "This is what this is about." That is what the marketplace is about. Those people have to pitch to their higher-ups, and their higher-ups will say, "This is about stolen Russian nuclear weapons. Forget about it!"
McDonald: I ran across a May 2001 article that appeared in the Los Angeles Times, dubbed "Dumbed Down by Committee," in which one of your clients, John Scott Shepherd, lays out this agonizing scenario for the deconstruction of two of his scripts. The article seems to illustrate everything any writer who takes pride in work dreads when it comes to Hollywood. I wonder how you soldier on with that, in the sense you go into a room and you meet people for the first time and they start laying out this kind of morass of ideas and epiphanies. How does a screenwriter continue on in the face of…that?
Atchity: You keep seeking power as a storyteller. We (speaking of Shepherd) have more power than we did three years ago, but three years from now we’re going to have five times more than we have right now. Sooner or later, that room reduces down to just you and the director, because you have power. The way a writer "soldiers on" is the same way: He keeps making deals, getting the money, writing more stories, making more deals and, before you know it, he will be powerful enough to knock those other people out of the room.
Atchity: One of the movies John Shepherd did, Joel Schumacher was going to direct it, and he said, "Here’s the condition of my involvement: no studio execs in the room. No more studio development. I will develop this the last bit of the way with the writer — just give me your notes in writing and then go away." And they go, "Yes Joel, whatever you say." If a writer can’t handle the emotion of that and the ego is the problem in the beginning, he is just in the wrong game. This is a game, and part of the game is to go through this hazing where everyone thinks they can do your thing better than you can. It is painful. You just have go through and to survive it as John Shepherd did. He is now working on a very mainstream picture with Marc Platt and he is "soldiering" on through that pain. And how painful really is it when you get paid tons and tons of money to be in that room?
McDonald: You do it for the art, but you don’t want to be above the money?
Atchity: To me, it’s really easy in the management forum: Money buys you freedom. My job is to get you money. What I help people to do is to prioritize, right away. I say, "Let’s prioritize the projects you’re working on." We want the ones that will bring in more money. We want those at the top of your list, because if you put them anywhere else, you’re going to be doing them forever, you’re not going to sell them and you’re never going to find out how great you can be if you have the freedom to create, which is what money can bring you, so let’s go for the money first. That means you will go through those rooms, you will have to suffer like that, but, you know, it’s a better set of problems than you had when you were starving.
McDonald: Have you ever entered into a partnership with an author or screenwriter and later severed that relationship because the writer wouldn’t cooperate or revise — they got into that cycle you just described and couldn’t cope with it?
Atchity: Definitely. In fact, we dropped a pretty important writer a few months ago, because despite the fact that he had written 40 novels, his ego was so enormous that he wasn’t in the category, of "I want to be the best I can be." When I left the academic world and got into this cruel world of publishing and production, I put a little sign above my desk which is still there in L.A. It says, "No ego." Everything I’ve seen in terms of people screwing themselves up has all been caused by serving their ego. I say in A Writer’s Time, take your project, not yourself, seriously. So many people, the minute a few projects have done well, start taking themselves seriously. That is just depressing. Here they have a right to be craftsmen in the most exciting craft — the craft that everyone in the theater wants to go to the theater and see the results of — and it’s all focused on their ego. If they think that everything they write is perfect and they don’t want anybody messing with it, then they should go off to Iceland and do that on their own, but not be resentful at the very industry that they were basically cutting off their fingers to be in.
McDonald: (Laughing) Okay….
Atchity: Hollywood is like this big happy prostitute that you pay to sleep with. Whatever you have to pay, people are lined up to sleep with her and the minute you start sleeping with her you start complaining about her and bitching about how she’s "too fat" or she’s "too ugly" or she’s too this or too that. Keep in mind: You’re the one that walked into the brothel in the first place. You’re the one who wanted the excitement and you’re the one who suffered through it. Complaining is part of the game, but let’s not forget the fact it stops at the Academy Awards. You can see the change of attitude when people get an Academy Award and suddenly realize that without all of these people in the room they wouldn’t have gotten where they are. It takes a lot of people to put together a story at the level of a big movie. When you’ve got a story, my job as a manager is to help you project that flame that came out of your unconscious. Then, our job as producer, is to find somebody to hand that flame to who can sharpen that flame further. Not somebody who can screw it up, but somebody who can make it even brighter. You do the same thing when you go to an actor. You go to somebody who can make your flame brighter. You don’t want to have somebody who is going to make it more diffuse, you want somebody who is going to make it from a sulfur into an argon flame. Your chief defense is to continue creating flames. People worry about this: "If I don’t do this, then somebody is going to steal it." Well, it’s true. Stories are out there in the ether, and you need to write them quickly.
McDonald: Are there writers who are not in your stable, writers you wish you could bring under your aegis? Writers who you sense are doing it right or who you could take to the next level?
Atchity: All the time, from the commercial end of the spectrum to Michael Chabon, the New Yorker writer. I would love to find a client like that. At the other end of the spectrum, there is Michael Crichton. Even Stephen King, who I would work to make his writing sharper, but I love his attitude. I was reviewing one of his collections of short stories for the L.A. Times and in the preface he was kind of warning critics to lay off of him. He said, "I want you to know, I am very happy with my position as the McDonald’s hamburger stands of American Letters." I thought what a wonderful statement. He’s not pretentious, he understands where he fits in and he is just an incredible storyteller at the level that he is at. He could be better if somebody would stand up to him and fight with him about it. In the old days, that’s what editors did. One of my great heroes was Maxwell Perkins —
McDonald: Hemingway, Fitzgerald…
Atchity: — Yeah. All of these people seem like classics now, but you see the things that he did to them and made them look at.
McDonald: Thomas Wolfe, particularly — Perkins cut his manuscripts by what, two-thirds?
Atchity: Exactly. Malcolm Cowley edited Faulkner ruthlessly. One of the books that inspired me when I was a teenager was a book called The Cowley-Faulkner File (Viking, 1966). They were just letters between Faulkner and Cowley. Cowley had been hired by Random House to put together The Portable Faulkner. Well, Cowley started finding things wrong in The Sound and the Fury which had already been published — he found huge contradictions in it, where the dates were off by ten years in some cases. Faulkner’s answers to him were just amazing to me. In that particular case, Faulkner said to Cowley, "I’m glad you noticed that, but to tell you the truth, these characters are still alive and continue telling me their stories and it turns out in some cases they were wrong or they were lying. The longer I’ve lived the more I understand their story." He would be explaining to Cowley how that date got changed in one of his character’s mind. They ended up making some revisions in The Sound and the Fury when they republished it for Random House based on this. Just the process by which Cowley got into Faulkner’s brain — and Faulkner let him, because he respected the fact that all Cowley was trying to do was sharpen the story. That’s what writers don’t have anymore.
That’s what my partner Chi-Li (Wong) and I do — we dedicate ourselves to doing that for our writers. I just got a manuscript revised by one of our best new writers — he’s already published one book — and he just sent it in with a beautiful letter at the end saying, "I was so inspired by our lunch and what you guys had to say, that I went back and I’ve been in a fever for eight days and here’s the whole book again, incorporating these ideas." We’re thrilled that he will take us seriously. In our mind, the writer is always the final authority, but before he makes that final authoritative decision about what he’s going to do our not do, we want to show him everything we can about how to make the story an even better story.
McDonald: Do you read for pleasure anymore in your life? Can you shut off the editor/manager and just go with a story?
Atchity: I do, but for me reading is the pleasure. I came in last night on the red eye, a four-and-a-half hour flight. I read for two hours and tried to sleep for the other two hours, but I prefer the reading to the sleeping, and I was reading two scripts that I have read two times before. But because they are scripts that are good, I enjoy reading them again. If I have to weigh picking up a novel that I’m not involved with against reading a client’s work, I almost always choose the client's work or the prospective client’s work. For me, the thrill of reading now is to find something that is not on the big screen yet or between book covers yet and get that piece to where it belongs. Maybe five years ago, my daughter insisted on our trip to Antigua that I take only one book with me, which she brought me and it was Love in the Time of Cholera (by García Márquez). I did spend the five days in Antigua just reading that book and I loved it, but that’s unusual. I read thousands of books just to read when I was younger, and I figure I can do that again when I retire. I always have Don Quixote next to my bed, thinking I’ve just got to read a few pages of that, but I don’t always do it. Hypothetically, I’d like to do that.
McDonald: I’ve read you have several screenplays of your own under option. Are they of a particular genre?
Atchity: Most of them are romantic thrillers, which seems to be one of my favorite things, or just plain thrillers. I’m working on one right now that is an adaptation of a book that I’ve wanted to do for years. Hopefully I will have that in the market by January or February. It’s not a thriller, but rather a contemporary Frankenstein story .
McDonald: Much of A Writer’s Time is devoted to time management. You have a wonderful phrase in A Writer’s Time, something to the effect that life is short, but wide." Your life seems extremely crowded — do you still find the time to write regularly?
Atchity: I force myself to write an hour a day, even on the weekends — especially on the weekends. When I’m in the middle of a project, I’m thinking about the project all the time, even when I’m doing other things, so my hour of writing can be extremely efficient, but I have to carve that time out. Usually I’ll get up at 4:30 a.m. and write from 5 to 6, then go work out before the day starts. If I don’t do that hour in the morning, the chances of getting to it later diminish as the day goes on, because we’re managing maybe 200 projects at this point. You have to steal the time for yourself, first.
McDonald: Do you still write poetry?
Atchity: I do when I’m in New York. I’m in New York now, and I have moved everything to do with poetry to New York.
McDonald: Why just in New York?
Atchity: Just because New York is much more of a literary place than L.A. is. Poets mean something in New York and are understood. In L.A., poets are all brawlers — they all think they have to break a beer bottle over another poet’s head. Whether it was Ferlinghetti, or Bukowski — I knew them all — I didn’t understand that whole thing. I’m not into being a fulltime poet, or a fulltime anything. I’m doing what I’m doing in the moment. These guys feel not only do they write poetry, but they have to be a Poet with a capital "P."
McDonald: Performance art…
Atchity: All the time. In A Writer’s Time, I say "writer’s write." I’ve never understood that capital "W" and attitude, "I am a Writer." In the book, I share an anecdote about going to a party and having a friend introduce me as "Ken Atchity, the writer." The other person said, "Oh, you’re a writer…say something in writing."
You shouldn’t think of yourself as a Writer or Poet. Other people should define you that way.
McDonald: What’s your take regarding on-line publishing? I’ve spoken with a few people who have gone that route. Also, with established writers who have seen their older books go out of print and been offered the chance to get them back out through electronic publishing. Some of these have shared some real horror stories about the implications of the contracts involved, finding them to be incredibly draconian.
Atchity: I don’t see any benefit to it at all. We’ve explored it thoroughly, and, as of today, there is no real business there. All that happens is a writer has given away some of his most important rights and they will never be recoverable. These companies will all tell you they don’t affect your publication rights — all we want is electronic rights. Well, guess what? You sell your book to Random House and the first thing they want is electronic rights and you’ve already given them away. "Well," you reply, "it’s just a little on-line company…" Guess what? Random House is not going to take them on and risk having them sue Random House. You’ve compromised yourself if you sold any rights to an on-line company that has given you money for them. There is a difference — Steve Alten has always asked me if he could publish a small piece on-line, a sample chapter as a tease and that’s fine, but never long pieces. Publishing short stories or poems — I have no problem with people doing that on the Internet because there isn’t a commercial world there anymore. When I see someone publish a novel on the Internet I know they couldn’t publish it elsewhere.
McDonald: Sort of like a vanity press with legal entanglements?
Atchity: It’s telling you they weren’t read for primetime, either because they chose not to be ready, or they tried it and nobody published them. That said, the Internet is wonderful. Writers have at their fingertips the whole world, now. If they have something they believe in and they think their talent can reach the commercial world then they need to do everything they can to get it there. The keys are right at their fingertips. There is no excuse for having what I call "artistic syndrome" where you don’t take risks and get it out there — don’t risk getting pummeled a little bit. No risk — no reward. You’ve got to believe in yourself and invest in yourself. Invest time, money, energy, emotion — everything required to get it out there the way the great writers of the past did.
• Learn more about Kenneth Atchity HERE.
• View the Georgetown University Kenneth Atchity Collection HERE.
