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Billy Wilder: The Art of Screenwriting (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Billy Wilder

Writing Lesson: Before every form and genre, be humble.

Interviewer: Why have so many novelists and playwrights from the East, people like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Dorothy Parker, had such a terrible time out here [in Hollywood]?

Wilder:  Well, because they were hired for very big amounts of money.  I remember those days in New York when one writer would say to the other, I'm broke.  I'm going to go to Hollywood and steal another fifty thousand.  Moreover, they didn't know what movie writing entailed.  You have to know the rules before you break them, and they simply didn't school themselves.  I'm not just talking about essayists or newspapermen; it was even the novelists.   None of them took it seriously, and when they would be confronted by their superior, the producer or the director, who had a louder voice and the weight of the studio behind them, they were not particularly interested in taking advice.  Their idea was, Well, crap, everybody in America has got a screenplay inside them--the policeman around the corner here, the waiter in Denver.  Everybody.  And his sister!  I've seen ten movies.  Now, if they would only let me do it my way . . . But it's not that easy.  To begin to make even a mediocre film you have to learn the rules.  You have to know about timing, about creating characters, a little about camera position, just enough to know if what you're suggesting is possible.  They pooh-poohed it.

I remember Fitzgerald when he was working at Paramount and I was there working with Brackett.  Brackett, who was from the East, had written novels and plays, and had been at Paramount for years.  Brackett and I used to take breaks and go to the little coffee joint across the street from the studio.  Oblaths! we used to say.  The only place in the world you can get a greasy Tom Collins.  Whenever we saw Scott Fitzgerald there, we'd talk with him, but he never once asked us anything about writing screenplays.

Pictures are something like plays.  They share an architecture and a spirit.  A good picture writer is a kind of poet, but a poet who plans his structure like a craftsman and is able to tell what's wrong with the third act.  What a veteran screenwriter produces might not be good, but it would be technically correct; if he has a problem in the third act he certainly knows to look for the seed of the problem in the first act.  Scott just didn't seem particularly interested in any of these matters.

For Dorothy Parker's very different take on Hollywood (also from a Paris Review interview), I send you here.

Billy Wilder was an Austrian-American film director, screenwriter, and producer.  Just a few of his Academy Award-nominated films include: Ninotchka (1939), The Lost Weekend (1945, won), Sunset Boulevard (1950, won), Sabrina (1954), and The Apartment (1966, won).

The Paris Review interview with Billy Wilder took place in 1996.

Richard Price: Keeping you honest

In preparation for his novel Clockers, Price followed and hung out with cops and drug dealers month after month.  He accumulated a stack of notebooks "two feet high of overheard things, sights, descriptions, sounds."  He sold his book; his editor patiently listened as the anecdotes kept multiplying.  Then John Sterling, his editor, took him to lunch and asked: What's the first sentence?

Richard Price: I was simply afraid.  Actual writing is no fun for me.  Going out and hanging out and getting impressions out there on the streets, that's fun.  I was running with everybody.  I was like one of those guys who jumps off the stage into the audience and gets passed around.  I got myself passed around for three years.  So you've got all these good lines in a notebook, but then what?  I think it was Norman Mailer who said that the fact that something really happened is the defense of the bad novelist.  At some point I got so hooked on research that after a while it seemed out of the question to make things up.  Ultimately, everything in Clockers was pure fiction, but in the beginning I had to learn enough about the texture of truth out there in order to have the confidence to make up lies, responsible lies.

From The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1.

Richard Price (Damon Winter/The New York Times)

On Teaching (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Richard Price, Clockers

Picking up the thread begun with T.S. Eliot on teaching, I give two stories on the subject by Richard Price. Both demonstrate the value of teaching as part of the writer's life.

In the first, Price discusses teaching writing at a rehab center.  This experience bore directly on the creation of Clockers (the arduous revision of which has been discussed here):

Richard Price:  Let me tell you how Clockers got me back into fiction.  First, I had had my own painful experience with cocaine, although I had been clean for about eight years by the time I started on the novel.  In 1986 to 1987, crack hit the newspapers.  You couldn't pick up a newspaper and not find the word crack in every article, including the weather report and the sports page.  It seemed crack was the new nihilistic monster that was going to destroy us, the ultimate thing that was going to lead to the undoing of civilization.  My own drug experience was such that I fell apart on your typical middle-class sniffing cocaine.  But after I straightened out, this demon, this crack came along, ten times more potent, addictive and debilitating.  It seized my imagination because, although I was clean,  I was still having nightmares.  This new thing seemed like kryptonite and to make amends for being a coke-jerk all those years, I began teaching in a rehab center in the Bronx.  My students were adolescent crack addicts or crack dealers -- many of them from broken homes, homes in which some of the parents had criminal histories, homes in which there were intravenous drug problems, sexual abuse, physical abuse, suicide attempts.  Some of these kids going home to a house where, if the father was there and not in Rikers, he was chopping up lines on the table.  And there I was, educated, mainstream, in my early thirties, financially solvent, professionally established, having almost fallen through the earth on pedestrian coke-sniffing, looking out at a room full of adolescents with nightmare backgrounds who had fallen prey to the same drug that almost killed me, but who were taking it in a form ten times more pernicious, and they were saying to me that they smoked crack in order to cope?  That made me crazy.  So Clockers came about through the teaching experience, the crack epidemic, my not too ancient memories of drugs, and (last but not least) returning to the world of housing projects from which I came.

In the second story, he's teaching at an unnamed school and then at prestigious Yale.  The subject is if writing can be taught.

Tip: Take up the stories you have, not the story you are expected to have:

Price: You can't teach talent anymore than you can teach somebody to be an athlete.  But maybe you help the writer find their story, and that's ninety-nine percent of it.  Oftentimes, it's a matter of lining up the archer with the target.  I had a student in one of my classes.  He was writing all this stuff about these black guys in the South Bronx who were on angel dust . . . the most amoral thrill-killers.  They were evil, evil.  But it was so over-the-top to the point of being silly.  He didn't know what he was talking about.  I didn't know this stuff either, but I knew enough to know that this wasn't it.

I said to the kid, Why are you writing this?  Are you from the Bronx?

He says, No.  From New Jersey.

Are you a former angel-dust sniffer?  Do you run with a gang?

He says, No.  My father's a fireman out in Toms River.

Oh, so he's a black fireman in suburban New Jersey?  Christ!  Why don't you write about that?  I mean, nobody writes about black guys in the suburbs.  I said, Why are you writing this other stuff?

He said to me, Well, I figure people are expecting me to write this stuff.

What if they do?  First all, they don't.  Second, even if they did, which is stupid, why should I read you?  What do you know that I don't know?

He turned out to be one of these kids in the early eighties who was bombing trains with graffiti -- one of these guys who was part of the whole train-signing subculture, you know, Turk 182.  He wrote a story, over a hundred pages long, about what it was like to be one of these guys -- fifteen pages alone on how to steal aerosol cans from hardware stores.  He could describe the smell of spray paint mixing with that rush of tunnel air when someone jerked open the connecting door on a moving train that you were "decorating."  He wrote about the Atlantic Avenue station in Brooklyn where all the graffiti-signers would hang out, their informal clubhouse, how they all kept scrapbooks of each other's tags.  Who would know that stuff except somebody who really knew?  And it was great.  The guy was bringing in the news.  Now, whether it's art or not depends on how good he is.  But he went from this painful chicken scratch of five-page bullshit about angel-dust killers to writing stuff that smacked of authenticity and intimacy.

That is the job of the writing teacher: what do you think you should be writing about?  At Yale I had the same problem.  They'd write ten pages of well-worded this or that, but where's the story?  I finally came up with an assignment.  I hate giving assignments.  I hated getting them and I hate giving them.  But -- the last of the good assignments -- I made them all find a photograph of their family taken at least one year before the writer was born.  I said, All right.  Write me a story that starts the minute these people break this pose.  Where did they go?  What did they do?  We all have stories about our family, most of them are apocryphal, but whether you love or hate your family, they're yours and these are your stories.  On the other hand, Tom MGuane once said, I've done a lot of horrible things in my life but I never taught creative writing.

Jack Gilbert: The Art of Poetry (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Jack Gilbert

Poetry and the adult dream:

Jack Gilbert: A couple of decades ago, I finished going all the way around the world.  And after that I suddenly realized I had lived all of my dreams.  I had lots of them and I've fulfilled them all.  Now it's time to live the adult dreams, if I can find them.  The others were dreams from childhood -- first love and such, which is wonderful.  It's interesting to discover that we don't have adult dreams -- pleasure and pride, but not really adult dreams.

Let me try to explain.  I have a poem, "Trying to Have Something Left Over," in which I've been unfaithful to my wife and she knows it and she's mad.  It's the last night and I'm going to say good-bye to Anna, the other woman.  She's had a baby -- not by me -- and her husband has left her because he couldn't take all that muck of a baby being born.  This is the last night I'll ever see her and I feel incredibly tender and grateful and loving toward her.  And we're not in bed -- previously we had a wild relationship.  Anyway, here's the last night to say good-bye.  She's cleaning house quietly and sadly, and I'm entertaining her boy, her baby, throwing him up in the air and catching him.  It's a poem about that.  Sad and tender.  A truly adult dream.  Profound tenderness.

That's what I like to write as poems.  Not because it's sad, but because it matters.  So much poetry that's written today doesn't need to be written.  I don't understand the need for trickery or some new way of arranging words on a page.  You're allowed to do that.  You're allowed to write all kinds of poetry, but there's a whole world out there.

Jack Gilbert's volumes of poetry include Views of Jeopardy (1962), Monolithos (1984), Kochan (1984), Tough Heaven: Poems of Pittsburg (2006), and The Dance Most of All (2009).  He is also the author of My Mother Taught Me, an erotic novel.

The Paris Review interview took place in 2005.

Richard Price: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Richard Price (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

On the arduous task of writing and rewriting.  And then rewriting some more:

Interviewer: How much revising did you do for Clockers?

Richard Price:  About a year and a half's worth.  I had an endless, interminable draft, well over one thousand pages, with no ending in sight.  I gave it to John Sterling, my editor, and with him I went back and started on page one and attacked the manuscript for a number of things: consistency of tone, a narrowed point of view, filling in all the holes in the plot.  I tried to weed out excessive writing and cut down on the personality of the narrative voice.  We wound up going back to page one three times and working our way through to page one thousand-plus -- eighteen months of rewriting.  Sterling would say, You have too many speakers, too many points of view, and your narrative voice is too florid.  There are still some big-time problems with consistency of tone.  Let's start on page one again.  It was like wrestling a zeppelin.

Interviewer: That must have been time-consuming for an editor.

Price: Very.  Earlier, writing the first draft, I went through a process with him in which every day for a solid year I read to him over the phone everything I wrote.  It seems I needed to do that . . . to hear "good dog."  His goal in humoring me like this was to get me to the end so he could have a manuscript to work with.  For him it must have been like talking to a head-job or a child, coaxing and comforting, saying, Ooh, that's good.  Wow.  Oh, you're such a good writer.  Very good.  What page are we on?  How many pages do you think you have left?  What time is it?  March?

Interviewer: No criticisms?

Price: Every once in a while he couldn't help it.  He'd see I was taking a dogleg somewhere into the woods.  But basically he understood that his role on the phone was almost that of a psychiatric nurse.

Lesson: Writing and rewriting are just as hard for the big boys.

Richard Price is the author of several novels, including Bloodbrothers (1976), Clockers (1992; nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and made into a movie directed by Spike Lee in 1995), Freedomland (1998), and Lush Life (2008).  He has written numerous screenplays, including The Color of Money (1986), Sea of Love (1989), and Ransom (1996).

The Paris Review interview took place in 1996.

Robert Stone: The Art of Fiction (The Paris Review Interviews, Vol. 1)

Robert Stone

The question of realism:

Robert Stone:  I began A Hall of Mirrors as a realistic novel, but my life changed and the world changed and when I thought about it I realized that "realism" was a fallacy.  It's simply not tenable.  You have to write a poem about what you're describing.  You can't render, can't dissect.  Zola was deluded.

Interviewer: Those remarks suggest an affinity with writers like John Barth and William Gass and Donald Barthelme.  But I don't really see you in that camp.

Robert Stone: My difference with those writers is that they take realism too seriously and so haveo react against it.  I don't feel the necessity of reacting against it.  I don't believe in it to start with.  Realism as a theory of literature is meaningless.  I can start with it as a mode precisely because I don't believe in it.  I know it's all a world of words -- what else could it be?  I had the curious luck to be raised by a schizophrenic, which gives one a tremendous advantage in  understanding the relationship of language to reality.  I had to develop a model of reality in the face of being conditioned to a schizophrenic world.  I had to sort out causality for myself.  My mother's world was pure magic.  And because I had no father I eventually went into a sort of orphanage when my mother could no longer cope.  So at the age of six I went into an institution, which taught me to be a listener.  I had to deal with all the ways people were coming on to me, had to listen to all their trips and sort them out.  Realism wasn't an issue because there wasn't any.  I always had a vaguely dreamlike sense of things.  There was no strong distinction for me between  objective and imaginative worlds.

Interviewer: Life was failing to provide you with coherent narrative.

Stone: That's right.  Life wasn't providing narrative so I had to.  I had very little personal mythology of my own.

Robert Stone is the author of numerous novels, two short story collections, and a memoir about the Sixties counterculture.  These include:  A Hall of Mirrors (1967), Dog Soldiers (1974), Children of Light (1986), Damascus Gate (1998), and Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties (2007).

The Paris Review interview took place in 1985.