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Slouching toward Hollywood

by Matt Zoller Seitz, September 7, 1995

Jimmy Caaaaaaan!

Luke Wilson was thrilled. It was November 1994, and the star of The Godfather, Thief, and Misery, icon to two generations of aspiring young actors and a walking template of life's rougher passages, was jogging beside him on train tracks near a downtown Dallas factory.

A film crew was gathered nearby. They were shooting a scene for the new movie Bottle Rocket. In it, Luke Wilson played a younger thief taken under the wing of an older heist expert--Mr. Henry--played by Caan.

The guy was a living legend. He'd been making films for three decades. He'd been directed by Howard Hawks and Francis Coppola. He'd acted opposite everybody from John Wayne to Al Pacino to Kathy Bates.

Hollywood had come calling in Dallas. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures, an arm of Sony, Luke and a small group of fellow Dallasites would get to make a feature-length, $6 million version of their short film "Bottle Rocket." Minimogul James L. Brooks--who gave the world "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "Taxi," and the Oscar-winning Terms of Endearment--was mentoring the project, protecting the young Texans from studio interference.

The feature would employ some of the same people who'd worked on the short--including Owen Wilson, Luke's brother, who cowrote and costarred in it; his friend Wes Anderson, the director; his other brother Andrew, who was both coproducing and acting in the picture; and actor Robert Musgrave, a dear friend.

Like his friends and brothers, Luke was under considerable pressure. As the movie's hero, he had to be strong, sensitive, righteous, and quiet, but not boring. That's tough when you're surrounded by supporting players in more colorful roles. He also had to act opposite James Caan in the actor's first screen appearance since going through a stint in drug and alcohol rehab. Most intimidating of all, Luke Wilson had acted on film only once before--in the low-budget short.

Fortunately, Luke and Caan were working well together.

Then the great James Caan blew a line. "Ahhh," he winced. "Cut it." "Cut what, Mr. Henry?" Luke shot back, still jogging, not missing a beat. Caan did a double-take. "I said cut, kid. I blew it! Let's take it over." "Do what over, Mr. Henry?" Luke stammered.

When the crew members realized what Luke was thinking, they had to laugh. On a low-budget short, if you screw up, you keep going--because film is expensive and you don't have much of it. He was instinctively ad-libbing, trying to save the take.

When Caan figured it out, he grinned. He walked over to Luke. Their noses were inches apart. "Fuckin' moron!" Caan chuckled, shaking his head. "Fuckin' MORON!" he repeated, grinning even wider.

Then he head-butted Luke.

As Luke stumbled back in surprise, the crew cracked up--because in Jimmy Caan's world, a head-butt is a sign of deep affection.

"I love this kid!" Caan bellowed to Owen. "I mean it! I love your brother. He's the greatest! You could throw a plate of shit in his face and he'd ad lib!"

Everybody laughed.

Then it was back to work. In the time it took for everybody to have their laugh, the studio's invisible money meter had ticked off enough loot to pay for the humble short film Bottle Rocket was based on.

Director Wes Anderson often thought about this predicament--about having so much money and so many people at his disposal, and being so young and inexperienced.

Looking back on the shoot last week, from the vantage point of six long months spent in a Los Angeles editing suite---obsessively cutting and re-cutting Bottle Rocket to please James L. Brooks, Columbia Pictures, and his own perfectionist notions--the rookie director still finds the experience a bit surreal.

"We had a couple of moments where we'd get together and look around and think about how weird it all seemed," he says. "We'd look at all the huge trucks and all the lights and equipment, the incredible number of tables and chairs set up for the cast and crew to eat, and all these experienced people all around us, working on our movie, and we'd go, 'Jesus Christ! Can you even believe this?' It almost felt like a con."

"It was a scary feeling," says Owen Wilson. "I'd think, 'Man, are we really gonna do this? Does something like this really come from when me and Wes used to sit around during college making up funny stuff? Is this what it was all leading up to?'"

Access to more film stock wasn't the only difference the Dallas wunderkinds encountered during the three years it took to bring Bottle Rocket to fruition. On every level, the experience illustrated the difference between independent and Hollywood filmmaking.

Independent filmmaking is a gut-wrenching crap shoot. Every now and then, a film hits; most of the time, it doesn't. According to respected New York-based independent producer John Pierson, whose finds include Spike Lee, Steven Soderbergh, and Jim Jarmusch, hundreds of features were produced independently last year in the United States alone. A handful became bona fide mainstream successes. Perhaps two dozen more went on to brief theatrical runs in major cities. A few dozen others played at film festivals and then went directly to video without passing "Go." The rest disappeared into the ether.

But even if an indie movie fails to break through to the mainstream, its makers can still carry their heads high, for one simple reason: they kept their freedom. If you are an independent filmmaker, and you decide to play offbeat games with characters, dialogue, or narrative, or indulge in a style of drama or humor most viewers might not get, nobody at the home office can tell you "No"--because the home office is you.

Hollywood studio filmmaking rarely affords such freedom. Because millions of corporate dollars are at stake, bean counters are forever peeking over your shoulder, second-guessing everything you do, urging you to avoid being strange or provocative and aim for as broad an audience as possible. Not even powerful filmmakers have absolute freedom; even Oliver Stone has to kiss somebody's ass.

Every filmmaker dreams of a situation that combines the best of both worlds--a situation that will allow him or her to use studio money to make a quirky, personal film. Some directors toil for decades and never once make a movie under such ideal conditions.

But every now and then, the impossible occurs. The stars line up just right. And a bunch of ambitious young greenhorns stumbles into Eden.

That's what happened with Bottle Rocket.

The project started in 1991 as a black-and-white 16mm short film about a bunch of bored rich kids who become thieves. Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson conceived it when they were living together in Austin.

They had met the previous year in a University of Texas playwriting class full of talkative people. They didn't speak the entire semester. They found the class dull, and most of their classmates duller. Wes sat in one remote corner of the room, rarely participating. Owen sat opposite him, usually reading The New York Times.

At the beginning of the next semester, Wes saw Owen standing in a hallway. For reasons he can't explain, Wes walked over to his fellow mute and asked him what creative writing courses he ought to take. "I talked to him like we'd been best friends," he says. "It was kind of weird, but it felt right."

They hit it off, meeting frequently to discuss their favorite authors and filmmakers, their love of Steve McQueen and Robert Altman and Sam Peckinpah and Martin Scorsese, of wide-screen Westerns from the 1960s and anti-establishment melodramas from the '70s. They sat up late at night spinning movie ideas, cracking each other up with off-center observations and strange stories. And they dreamed about what they'd like to do with their lives.

They had many things in common. Both were intense, somewhat solitary undergraduates with hifalutin' majors (Wilson's was creative writing, while Anderson's was philosophy). Both were middle children raised in well-heeled, artistically inclined families who sent their kids to private schools.

They eventually moved together into a small Austin duplex owned by a grandiloquent German landlord who had come to America via Colombia.

What followed was a strange period that kick-started their screenwriting. The students had been feuding with their landlord for months over some old window cranks that had got stuck, leaving some windows perpetually half-open, ensuring the place was freezing in winter, sweltering during the summer, and a tempting target to burglars.

Wes and Owen refused to pay rent until the landlord fixed them. He refused to fix the cranks until they paid their rent.

Finally, the students took drastic action: they busted into their own apartment, then called the cops to report a break-in, taking care to explain that this horrible event wouldn't have happened if their landlord had fixed the damned window cranks.

The landlord arrived, peered about the crime scene suspiciously, and announced, "This looks like an inside job."

The cops shrugged, told the squabblers to work out their own dispute, and split.

More months passed without resolution. The landlord arrived one morning to seize the students' belongings until they paid their rent. Wes got into a loud, violent, frenzied struggle with him over a vintage 8mm camera.

The altercation resulted in another visit from the cops, who again cautioned the warring factions to quit acting like idiots, and work out their differences. But Owen and Wes were angry and scared; they fled to a friend's apartment that night without giving notice. The landlord hired a private detective, who promptly tracked them down. Chastened, Wes and Owen apologized, explaining they didn't mean to skip out on their rent--they'd simply freaked out.

To get back on the landlord's good side, Wes made a video documentary of the old German telling stories about his life.

It was capped by a painfully emotional monologue. In it, the landlord told how he'd seized a pet python from a delinquent tenant who'd skipped town. The landlord kept the python in his apartment for a while, trying to decide what to do with it. To his astonishment, he grew to love it.

He decided to keep it. But he soon discovered the giant snake had a digestive illness. It would not eat. The landlord tried everything to get the snake to eat, including force-feeding it. Nothing worked. The python grew weaker and sicker. It stopped moving. And one day, it simply died in his arms.

As the landlord finished the story, he was crying. The death of that snake broke his heart. For the privilege of telling his story on video, the landlord paid Wes $600.

"That taught me that you always gotta keep your eye peeled," Wes said. "You never know where the next strange, colorful character is coming from."

A few months later, the roommates wrote a comedy script titled "Bottle Rocket." It was, Wes says, a kind of spiritual autobiography of that crazy time in their lives, capturing what it felt like to be young, naive, and stubborn, and determined to live in the moment.

The plot is simple: a bored young rich kid named Anthony falls in with another bored young rich kid, a live-wire petty crook named Dignan. They break into houses together--including Anthony's mother's house. Deciding that the real money is in armed robbery, they acquire a charming but panicky wheel man named Hanson; together, the trio becomes a dedicated but hapless gang of thieves.

A botched bookstore heist sends them on the run, but they soon return to the city. They are taken in by a dapper and mysterious older thief named Mr. Henry.

Mr. Henry introduces the boys to his colorful crew, wows them with glitzy, Rat Pack-style parties and anecdotes about his exploits, and promises them a life of wealth and danger. He is a raconteur and philosopher who makes pronouncements like, "The world needs dreamers--to ease the pain of consciousness."

He invites his young charges to take part in the elaborately planned robbery of a cold storage factory. The boys are in way over their heads but don't yet know it. As TV Guide would say, complications ensue.

But the screenplay's strengths did not lie in its razor-thin plot. What made it special was its droll sense of humor and peculiar mood--warm, wistful, childlike, enchanted.

Anthony, Dignan, and Hanson inhabit a universe Wes Anderson says is located "about five degrees removed from reality." There are few adults around, and fewer adult consequences; the story's world is as huge and sketchy and eerily quiet as the world of Charles Schulz's "Peanuts," a comic strip Wes and Owen loved reading when they were kids.

The petty crooks' criminal activities rarely draw police attention and never draw blood; in fact, their misadventures have no palpable effect on anyone except themselves. They rob houses and bookstores for the same reason Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid robbed trains--to express their loyalty and affection for each other.

Anthony, Dignan, and Hanson coast through life on sweet sensation, hoping to find in action the identities they lack in repose.

Owen Wilson knew some people who could help. His family had been friendly with L.M. "Kit" Carson, a maverick independent writer-director who wrote and starred in the late-'60s cult favorite David Holzman's Diary, and scripted the 1983 remake of Breathless and the 1984 Wim Wenders-Sam Shepard art house favorite Paris, Texas. Carson and his wife, producer Cynthia Hargrave, lived in Dallas.

"I'd first met Owen and his brothers at the Wilson house," Carson recalls. "They were movie maniacs. Their father had asked me over for dinner for the express purpose of talking them out of a career in movies. I figured out pretty quick that there was no way anybody could talk them out of it."

So instead, Carson invited the Wilsons to accompany him and Hargrave to the 1992 Sundance Film Festival. The trip energized the young would-be moviemakers. Over the next few months, they planned out the shooting of "Bottle Rocket."

Luke Wilson would play the soulful, reticent Anthony. Owen, with his wild head of maize-colored hair and his charmingly crooked smile, would play the mischievous Dignan. Owen and Luke's older brother, Andrew, who had experience producing corporate videos, would produce the movie.

Wes Anderson had worked under Andrew Wilson on his producing job; during that time, he'd met film industry professionals willing to donate their time and talent to an interesting shoestring project. The group courted investors, then kicked in their own money. They borrowed most of the necessary equipment. For film, they used 16mm black-and-white stock Andrew had been accumulating in a refrigerator over the past couple of years.

Every piece fit.

So in May 1992, the filmmakers shot the first eight minutes of "Bottle Rocket" at various Dallas locations, including the Greenway Parks homes and the storefronts of Deep Ellum.

A few weeks later, they showed the results to Carson and Hargrave. "It was basically a first act," Carson says. "As a feature script, structurally, it had some problems."

But Carson loved its uncensored, immediate quality. It was an innocent film made by innocent sensibilities. "Reading it for the first time was like reading The Catcher in the Rye as written by Holden Caulfield," he says.

Carson and Hargrave told the filmmakers to shoot a few more scenes, edit it down to a compact short, and accompany them on their yearly trip to Sundance, which was coming up in January, 1993. They hoped they would meet someone willing to bankroll a feature version.

Sometime in the late summer or early fall of 1992, Wes and Owen had to shoot the next few scenes from "Bottle Rocket"--the scenes introducing Hanson, the crew's lovably flaky wheel man.

The knew just the guy. He was a 28-year-old blues guitarist, a transplanted West Virginian with brown hair, hound dog eyes, and a drawl thicker than molasses. His name was Robert Musgrave. His friends called him Bob.

Bob had known the Wilsons for about a year. He met Owen at the Stoneleigh P., shot pool with him, and lost $40. He cajoled Owen into jump-starting the battery on his car, then invited him to Blue Cat Blues to watch him sit in with the band that night. They liked each other immediately.

Later, Owen introduced Bob to the others, who liked him right off. They auditioned him for the part of Hanson, then cast him. The character had originally been conceived as a much larger, tougher, harder-edged character, but the filmmakers eventually ended up tailoring the role to suit the actor playing him. They even changed the character's name to Bob.

Bob's friendship with Wes and the Wilsons meant a lot to him. He was at a crossroads in his life. He was always a creative guy, but he hadn't had much luck building a career doing creative things. He'd tried stand-up comedy and sketch writing, but neither panned out. He'd built a promising career as a Dallas blues guitarist in the 1980s, even touring. But he was rootless and confused, unsure who he was or where his life was headed.

Then he found himself doing cocaine. Lots of it. "Most of my money was going straight up my nose," he says. "I ended up screwing myself. That was a four- or five-month period in my life, but it took me a year to dig myself out from under the wreckage."

With emotional support from friends and family, Bob went through rehab, got clean, and settled down into a considerably less chaotic life. When Wes Anderson and the Wilsons arrived, befriended him, and got him involved with "Bottle Rocket," Bob finally figured out exactly who he was.

He was an actor.

"I didn't know if the things I was trying to do in the short were gonna come off for sure," he says. "But I had good people behind me. I always felt like Wes was picking up on the things I was trying to do. I always trusted him to hone it at the right places."

The result was an indelible character; if Dignan was the brains of the crew and Anthony was the soul, Bob was the heart. And the actor playing him inhabited Bob's loyal, drolly funny, hapless psyche with such unfussy confidence that everything he said and did was hilarious. And his baleful eyes were so expressive that what he didn't say and do was even funnier.

No matter what path he eventually takes as an actor, Bob wants to work with Wes and Owen every chance he gets.

By January of 1993, the short film "Bottle Rocket" was ready for Sundance. It ran a compact 13 minutes. Every lyrical image and comic exchange was timed to exquisite perfection.

Best of all, it was scored with Wes and Owen's ideal music--the music the late jazz composer Vince Guaraldi had provided for the beloved 1965 animated TV special "A Charlie Brown Christmas." The familiar score fit into the narrative like a missing puzzle piece, coaxing a striking mix of moods from Anderson's images. Wes decided that whether "Bottle Rocket" got made as a poverty-row indie feature or a big-budget Hollywood project, the Charlie Brown music had to be a part of it.

"Bottle Rocket" got a good response at Sundance, but no solid offers from money men.

So Carson and Hargrave embarked on the next leg of their plan--sending the feature-length script and a dub of the film to a couple of established producer pals in Los Angeles, Barbara Boyle, and Michael Taylor.

Boyle and Taylor loved "Bottle Rocket" and passed it on to their friend, legendary producer Polly Platt, ex-wife of failed '70s genius Peter Bogdanovich. Platt, who had been in semiretirement for years, produced Bogdanovich's early, acclaimed films, including The Last Picture Show and Paper Moon. She had a keen eye for identifying and befriending young talent; in certain circles, it was rumored that what critics and audiences enjoyed in Bogdanovich's first few films--their simplicity and emotional directness--could actually be credited to Platt.

Platt loved "Bottle Rocket." Reading it conjured a nostalgic excitement she hadn't felt in a long time. Everything about it felt right: the storyline, the tone, the humor, the unknown filmmakers and actors attached to it--and especially the script's Texas roots. She even told Premiere magazine she thought "Bottle Rocket" was another Last Picture Show.

In March 1993, Platt visited the set of James L. Brooks' latest movie as a writer-director and showed him "Bottle Rocket" over lunch. "Jim sat there and watched," Platt said, "and when it was over, he was quiet for a minute. Then he looked up at me and said, 'We have to make a deal with these guys.'"

On May 1st, 1993--Wes Anderson's 24th birthday--Brooks and Platt came to Dallas.

They made a deal: Platt would produce Bottle Rocket, overseeing the day-to-day minutiae of the shoot. Brooks would executive-produce the movie, helping them hone their screenplay, assemble a cast and crew, and run interference between them and Columbia Pictures.

Brooks hoped the studio would kick in a $4-$6 million budget. The money was pocket change in Hollywood terms. But by the standards of guys trained to keep rolling when somebody flubbed a line, it sounded like a king's ransom.

Then came the amazing part: Brooks and Platt wanted most of the major players involved in the short to work on the feature.

Wes would direct, and cowrite with his old buddy Owen Wilson, who would play Dignan. Luke Wilson would play Anthony. Bob would play Bob, of course. Andrew Wilson would get an associate producer's credit, and would also play Bob's pumped-up, buzz-cut older brother, a post-adolescent bully who makes the meek wheel man's life a living hell.

They would cast a big-name actor as Mr. Henry--an old pro with grace and charisma and high style. They'd hire a bunch of first-rate professionals to design, shoot, edit, and score the picture.

Wes would be given a budget of several hundred thousand dollars just to buy the rights to his favorite pop songs for the soundtrack. And yes, the boys could film Bottle Rocket in their hometown; Brooks wouldn't want it any other way.

It was a miracle. James L. Brooks wanted to make their dreams come true. But first, Brooks told them, they had to make a few changes in the script. What was needed, he explained, was more warmth, more human interest, and more explication. The characters in a low-budget independent film could be oddball ciphers, but the characters in a Hollywood feature had to be oddball people--otherwise the average moviegoer wouldn't get their jokes, and wouldn't care what happened to them.

Following a staged reading, Brooks suggested very specific changes. The first entailed reworking a key subplot--a sweet affair between Anthony and a beautiful Cuban housekeeper that blossoms after a botched heist, when the crew is holed up at a tiny motel in the country. Brooks wanted the romance beefed up, presumably so audiences that didn't get the humor would at least have a love story to latch onto.

The next order of business was for Wes and Owen to create clearly defined backgrounds for Dignan, Bob, and Anthony--anecdotes clearly explaining what they want from life and why they are friends. Anthony, for example, now had a kid sister on whom he doted. It was hoped this would elicit audience sympathy.

On one hand, the filmmakers figured Brooks knew what he was talking about. His tube track record, which stretched from "Mary Tyler Moore" and "The Bob Newhart Show" up through "The Simpsons," proved he understood how to make smart entertainment for a wide audience. His work as a writer-director--Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News--garnered enough Oscar nominations to anchor a zeppelin, and made money, too.

But the filmmakers harbored some doubts. To them, what made Bottle Rocket special was its air of innocent mystery. Brooks was asking them to trade some of that mystery for warmth and accessibility. He was asking them to transform an art-house film into a crowd-pleaser with art-house qualities.

During the last half of 1993, through the spring of 1994, Wes and Owen rewrote and rewrote and rewrote their screenplay. Digressions were whittled down or excised. The love story was expanded, and the nationality of the motel housekeeper, Inez, was changed to Mexican because Lumi Cavazos, the delicately beautiful star of Like Water for Chocolate, had been cast for the part.

Bottle Rocket had been tentatively set to film in Dallas in spring 1994. But Brooks had run into trouble with his latest movie as writer-director, I'll Do Anything.

Produced for somewhere around $40 million, the picture was a musical about the personal frustrations and career conundrums of a group of film industry professionals. For reasons understood only by Brooks himself, it had been cast with people who could not sing or dance, including Nick Nolte, Julie Kavner, Natasha Richardson, and Albert Brooks. Following disastrous previews, the director was faced with an ugly predicament: he had to cut out all the expensive musical numbers he had spent so many months filming, and turn the movie into a straightforward comedy.

Meanwhile, Polly Platt and assorted studio executives busied themselves with preproduction work on Bottle Rocket--assembling a cast and crew. Brooks pitched in as often as he could--quite often, considering the career nightmare that had unexpectedly entangled him.

The process was slow, but everything was falling into place.

Only one obvious piece was missing: Mr. Henry. It was a small part, but crucial. They had to find just the right guy.

The great James Caan expressed interest. He set up a meeting to talk about the movie and the part with Brooks, Wes, and Owen.

"He was dressed like a big kid," Owen remembers: an oversized surf T-shirt, faded jeans, and cowboy boots. "When he came in the office, everybody was trying to put him at ease and make him feel comfortable. It turned out the thing he felt most comfortable talking about was karate and kicking people's asses."

Caan had been studying martial arts for some time with a smallish middle-aged Asian man named Tak, who accompanies Caan all over the country to film shoots. Tak is a martial-arts expert who acted as technical advisor on a number of chopsocky movies; he carried around a wallet full of pictures of himself posed beside various second-rung action celebrities, including Christopher Lambert. He was Caan's physical trainer, spiritual advisor, and close personal friend. "Jimmy calls Tak his master," Wes explains.

Caan decided to strut his stuff. "Some of the moves Tak taught Jimmy were pretty amazing," Owen says. "The rest seemed kind of strange. I wasn't sure why he was so proud of them."

First Caan demonstrated one of the amazing ones--something he called a "submission hold." He grasped one of Owen's arms, then jerked it in an odd direction. To everyone's shock, Owen's arm popped right out of its socket. "Everybody freaked out," Owen says. "Then my shoulder popped right back in, and I told everybody, 'I'm okay! It's all right! I'm okay, see?'"

Then Caan demonstrated a technique he claimed would immobilize any opponent with just one touch. He stood before Owen and poked him in the chest with one knobby index finger. "It kind of hurt, I guess," Owen says. "But I wanted Jimmy to feel good, so I pretended it really, really hurt."

"Ow! That hurt!" Owen cried. Then, perhaps hoping to deflect Caan's attention, he said, "Show Jim!"

James L. Brooks stood up from the couch he'd been sitting on. As Caan walked over to him, he kept repeating, in the melodramatically panicked tones of a victim in a teen slasher film, "No. No. No. No. No."

Caan poked Brooks in the chest. Brooks hurled himself backward onto the couch, crying out in exaggerated agony.

"Holy shit!" Brooks yelled, touching his chest in mock astonishment. "Holy shit! You gotta teach me that, Jimmy!"

Caan smiled. He was very happy.

Enter Mr. Henry.

In the spring of 1994, I'll Do Anything flopped.

Suddenly, Bottle Rocket wasn't a side project to Brooks anymore. It was his chance to rebound from disaster--to prove to Hollywood he still had the magic touch.

Wes and Owen showed him their various drafts. To their relief, Brooks seemed to like what he saw.

Sometimes, though, Wes wondered if the rewritten scripts explained too much. But he didn't obsess over it. The shoot was drawing near. Come November of 1994, Bottle Rocket would finally take off.

But first there was the matter of the Mentor Wars.

L.M. "Kit" Carson and Cynthia Hargrave were embroiled in a minor power struggle with Brooks and Platt. Carson and Hargrave, whose sensibilities were grittier, were urging Owen and Wes to fight any attempts to turn Bottle Rocket into a more obviously commercial project.

"What drew me to the story was the combination of innocence and irony," Carson says. "If I'd been involved, the irony would have been a lot stronger."

He had many other suggestions as well, involving everything from characterization to pacing. "Cynthia and I were like parents," he says.

But things had obviously changed. Carson realized that as the rewrite process dragged on, Wes and Owen were increasingly inclined to side with Platt and Brooks when disagreements arose.

Finally, just a couple of weeks before Bottle Rocket began shooting in Dallas, Carson got a phone call from Wes. He asked Carson not to come to the set.

Carson was taken aback. He explained, somewhat peevishly, that he'd visited the sets of a lot of very influential filmmakers. But if Wes Anderson wanted him to stay away, he'd do so. "He had two more parent figures now than when this whole thing started--Jim and Polly," Carson says. "He felt like it was time to cut the other ones loose."

Platt and Brooks supported Wes' decision completely. Carson and Hargrave collected the money Columbia had agreed to pay them up front in exchange for their involvement with the movie. Since that day, they've had no formal input in Bottle Rocket.

If Carson is bitter, he won't admit it publicly. The Bottle Rocket group is similarly circumspect.

"One thing was pretty clear to everybody after that episode," says Bob Musgrave. "Wes might be a real quiet guy, but he's also tough. A lot of people underestimate him at first. But when he makes up his mind what he wants to do, it doesn't matter whether you're Jim Brooks or Kit Carson. The guy is gonna stand his ground."

Cut to a chilly weekend in November 1994. The Bottle Rocket crew was shooting scenes with James Caan at the Brookhaven Country Club in Farmers Branch. In the parking lot was a row of trailers where the filmmakers and actors retreated to grab a little privacy.

The largest--a behemoth that looked like a metal silverfish--belonged to Caan. He was standing in front of it, talking to Polly Platt, a small, slender, sixtyish woman with close-cropped grey hair.

Platt left. Caan stood alone in front of his trailer. He squinted up into the sky as if looking for UFOs.

Suddenly he whirled around. He slapped the trailer with the flats of his hands. WHUM! WHUM! WHUM! WHUM! WHUM! WHUM! Then he dropped to the pavement and did 10 push-ups in rapid succession. He sprang to his feet, swung his arms down into a pincer shape, and flexed his torso muscles. "HNNnnggh!" he grunted, with the mortal agony of someone passing a kidney stone.

Caan dropped his arms. He rolled his head on his neck, popping cartilage. Then he shut his eyes and took a series of deep, slow breaths. For a moment, his distinctive face, deeply lined from age and drink, looked serene. Then he climbed up into his trailer and shut the door.

"I can see how people might think Jimmy is a little strange," Owen Wilson said later that day. "But he's a great guy when you get to know him."

Caan was in town for two short weeks. During that time, he would be treated like the legend he was. People were present to ensure that his personal space was disturbed only when absolutely necessary.

When Caan wasn't on the set with the other actors, he was ensconced in his trailer, working through his lines, practicing martial-arts routines with Tak, or just taking it easy.

The rehab seemed to have stuck. Sometimes at night Caan went out with Polly Platt and the Bottle Rocket boys and spun long, colorful, sometimes raunchy yarns about his film career, talking about work with Pacino, Duvall, and Brando on The Godfather. On the set, Caan usually looked chipper and relaxed--when he wasn't doing surreal calisthenics, anyway.

But he was under just as much pressure as Wes Anderson, the Wilsons, and Bob Musgrave--pressure of a different kind.

This shoot was very important to him, Platt explained, because it represented his first paid gig since finishing drug and alcohol rehab.

"Everybody's watching to see what happens," Platt said. "Jimmy says he's changed, and everybody out here believes he's changed. But there are a lot of people out there who think he hasn't changed. What Jimmy has done is accept a very small part in a small movie to prove he's a professional who can get through a shoot without getting into trouble."

Owen talked about a night when he ate with Caan in his trailer. "Jimmy looked around it and said to me, 'See this, kid? This represents 30 years of work.' And he meant it. He was proud to have been in movies that long."

But the hard living had taken its toll. Caan looked older than his 55 years. Now that he was finally sober, he had plenty of quiet time to reflect on the bad old days. The situation sometimes made him melancholy.

"He said that when he looks back at the movies he's done, some of them are difficult to watch because of his condition in them," Owen said. "Sometimes he got kind of sad talking about that."

There were only a few days left in the shoot. The cast and crew had been all over Dallas, filming scenes on location at Taylors Bookstore at NorthPark, Goff's Hamburgers, and the Hinckley Cold Storage building in Deep Ellum.

And now, in a West End warehouse serving as Mr. Henry's headquarters, about 40 flashily dressed extras were milling around in specifically marked areas of a party set and talking without making any noise; their murmuring voices would be dubbed in during postproduction.

Luke Wilson was playing a scene in which Anthony takes time out from one of Mr. Henry's parties to phone the Hillsboro motel and talk to the great love of his life, Inez, played by Lumi Cavazos.

In the background of the shot, James Caan made inaudible small talk with another character, then exited the frame. Caan's getup for this scene looked like something Siegfried or Roy might reject as too flashy: a kimono, Birkenstocks with white athletic socks, and on his shoulder, a stuffed ocelot with bared fangs.

Between takes, Caan kept the great cat perched on his shoulder. He carried on conversations with it. Sometimes he demanded that anybody who talked to him also address the ocelot.

It was time to change camera positions, which would take half an hour. Onscreen, the scene lasted perhaps five minutes. It would require about 10 hours to shoot.

"I'm feeling pretty exhausted," Luke said. He looked it. He was in almost every scene of Bottle Rocket. The constant pressure was getting to him.

He shook the hand of a passing extra, smiling warmly. Then he stuffed his hands in his pants pockets and looked at his shoes.

"I hope this works," Luke said, to nobody in particular.

Standing over near a picture window, James Caan lit a Marlboro and talked about Bottle Rocket.

"Wanna hear my theory about the script?" he asked. "OK. Here goes. You ready? Follow me on this: everybody wants to be something they aren't. They all want something they don't have. Anthony wants true love. Bob wants to feel like he's part of something. Dignan wants to be a criminal. Mr. Henry wants to fleece these kids, but he also wants to be taken seriously as this big-shot master thief, even though when you sit down and actually look at the guy, he's completely full of bullshit.

"So what happens to them? Anthony gets a girlfriend, the maid, so he gets what he wanted. Bob gets to be part of a group of guys, which is what he wanted. Dignan ends up in prison, which is where he secretly wanted to be all along. Mr. Henry gets to have these kids around him who think he's really hot shit. So everybody gets what they want, but not in the way they expected.

"Think about the title. I first saw it--Bottle Rocket--and I thought, what kind of fuckin' title is this? And then I got it. It made sense. It was beautiful, man, just beautiful, like poetry. What's a bottle rocket? It's a firecracker that only goes so far. A bottle rocket ain't a stick of dynamite that's gonna blow everything to kingdom come and get a lot of attention, see what I'm saying? A bottle rocket is just a little fuckin' thing, right? You light it, and whoosh--it goes up maybe to the second or third floor, then it burns out and falls. It doesn't go up to the 17th floor or the 29th floor.

"But that's OK. See what I'm saying? Because that's what a bottle rocket is built to do. These guys, see, Anthony and Dignan and Bob, they're bottle rockets. They go a certain distance, then they stop. And that's OK, because they're happy."

It was March 1995, and Bob Musgrave was driving around Los Angeles with a journalist from Dallas.

"The women out here, man," he said, pointing out a slender woman in a sports bra and tights, jogging in place as she waited for a red light to change. "It's such a clich, I know. You always hear people say Los Angeles has the most beautiful women in the world. I kind of wondered if it was bullshit, too. But then you move out here, and you find out it's the truth."

He laughed self-consciously, realizing how that probably sounded.

Bob had officially moved out from Dallas a couple of weeks before. He was sharing a small house in Beverly Hills with Wes, Owen, and Andrew. He was hanging out with Polly Platt, who was considering casting Bob in the next movie she produced. He was going to auditions.

And at the request of Wes and the Wilson brothers, he was trying very hard to quit smoking. They had a bet: if Bob gave in and smoked one cigarette, he would strip completely naked and run through the streets of their neighborhood at night shrieking at the top of his lungs. It was tough. Bob was wearing several nicotine patches, but he still felt the craving.

"You can't smoke out here," he said. "This is Los Angeles. They're all health nuts out here. They'll hang you. It's been really tough, man."

Bob, Owen, and Andrew were still keeping tabs on Bottle Rocket now that it had finished shooting. But for the most part, they were out of the loop.

Wes, however, was still stuck inside it. He spent several hours a day in a West Los Angeles editing room, often working six days a week.

It was one of the more popular editing facilities in the city. Walking through its halls, you'd see placards emblazoned with the names of upcoming summer blockbusters affixed to doors with tape. The costliness of an upcoming movie seemed to have something to do with how many editing suites it got. Crimson Tide, for instance, had nine suites. Judge Dredd had 12.

Bottle Rocket had only one. It was a cramped, two-room setup packed with high-tech digital equipment. Wes was working with two experienced editors. All the raw footage collected during the filming had been digitally scanned, logged, and stored on laserdisc.

This was the least glamorous part of filmmaking. For a director, it amounted to the ultimate confrontation with the harsh truth. It's in the editing that you see each piece of film for what it is: a component that either works or doesn't.

So far, Wes thought the film was working. He called up the first two reels of Bottle Rocket and watched them again.

The timing of the gags was amazingly precise. And while the changes Brooks insisted on were obvious--more declarations of motivation, more explanations of what just happened in the movie and why--the film felt remarkably similar in tone to the black-and-white short that inspired it.

During a scene in which the young thieves buy handguns from a Bubbafied arms dealer and fire them off in a remote Texas field, Wes began smiling--not at the images, but at the music. It was the "Snowflake" theme from "A Charlie Brown Christmas Special." It still worked like a charm, turning a drolly funny sequence into something slightly dreamy.

A week earlier, Wes had shown a rough cut of Bottle Rocket to Brooks, Platt, and a few other people. They liked it a lot.

But did Wes like it? Was it what he envisioned? Was it good? Could he even tell anymore?

Wes said he thought so, but wasn't sure. He'd been living with Bottle Rocket so long that he'd lost a lot of his critical distance. He was staring at it very closely now, working on each scene, each cut, each music cue, each pause. After he finished this cut, there would be another screening, then he'd put together another cut.

Each time, the movie would emerge looking different. Some scenes that were cut would be put back in; other scenes that had been put back in would be excised.

At some point down the road, the movie would be shown to audiences at a test screening somewhere in the Los Angeles area. Viewers would fill out response cards. Studio people would read them. And there would be more changes.

Despite the general aura of flux, the studio seemed to be high on the picture. Originally, they'd talked of trying out Bottle Rocket at festivals, then letting the response it got there determine how they marketed and released it.

But now, some of Wes' bosses were considering a wide release during the height of summer; they hoped this strategy would create a surprise youth-culture hit.

This plan was a long shot. But thinking about it still got Wes excited.

"Whatever happens to it, I'm proud of it," he said. "I like it a lot. But I really don't know. It's kind of a weird little movie. I hope people get it."

It was mid-summer by now. Wes was very worried. He'd turned in a couple of different cuts of the movie to his bosses, and the response had been less encouraging than he hoped.

Some people at the studio seemed disappointed by Bottle Rocket. Or perhaps they weren't quite sure what to make of it.

There had been two test screenings of the film for audiences. The first was a disaster; the comment cards indicated viewers had no idea what they were watching or how they were supposed to respond to it. The second screening went a bit better, but not well enough to quell the studio's suspicions--that Bottle Rocket had severely limited commercial potential.

The film had structural problems that were obvious to everyone--especially the section at the Hillsboro motel, the love story subplot, which brought the film to a screeching halt. Wes wasn't too worried, though. He thought he could shape the sequence into something tighter and more interesting.

But other complaints were about things that, at this late date, really couldn't be fixed.

The studio feedback Wes got made him worry that the movie might get treated the way small, offbeat studio films often get treated: it would receive a very restricted release, then go to video.

This possibility made Wes very frustrated. Columbia, he believed, knew exactly what they were getting into when they gave $6 million to a bunch of first-timers from Texas.

The result was a more expensive version of the short film--a sweet, meandering, somewhat dreamy fable, with a brand of humor that can only appeal to a small group of people.

There was mounting pressure on Wes to drastically re-cut the picture again--to make it as short, as flashy, and as obvious as possible. There was talk of substantial reshooting and more test screenings.

In three days, Wes was supposed to meet with a roomful of bosses to discuss the fate of Bottle Rocket. He had to offer suggestions on how to promote it. He had to explain what sort of people might like it, and how those people could be reached.

Wes had delivered more or less the film the studio always claimed they'd expected. So how could they act bewildered or disappointed? He decided to be absolutely straight with them. He would tell them, in no uncertain terms, that Bottle Rocket was what it was.

"This is the kind of movie where either you get it or you don't," Wes said. "If somebody doesn't get it, there's nothing any of us can do that will make them get it."

Wes went to Columbia and made his pitch. To his relief, the studio thought it made sense.

At press time, Bottle Rocket, originally scheduled for a nationwide fall release, had been pushed back to February 2, 1996. The plan now is the same as it had been two years ago. Columbia would premiere the film at Sundance in January 1996, see how viewers responded to it, and determine a release pattern from there.

What would probably happen, Wes speculated, was a stint on the festival circuit followed by a brief run in a few key cities. If it did well, the studio would open it wider.

Looking back, he says he has no regrets. Why should he? "We made the kind of film we wanted to make," Wes said. "We had the most supportive people we could ever meet--Jim and Polly. The time I spent on that set was the best time I've ever had in my life doing anything."

He has only one major regret: he was unable to get the Charlie Brown music for Bottle Rocket. Wes wrote a "big, huge" letter to Charles Schulz, but never actually made contact with the cartoonist. All his communication was with Lee Mendelssohn, the cartoon producer who'd overseen most of the Charlie Brown TV specials.

"I went to a lot of trouble to explain exactly why we wanted the music and what it would mean to the movie, how it would romanticize certain scenes and help explain to the audience exactly what the film was about, but Lee Mendelssohn pretty much blocked my letter from ever getting to Charles Schulz," Wes says.

"I confronted the issue in a series of faxes to him. They got quite heated. His job, obviously, is to protect Charles Schulz and protect the Peanuts characters, and he said that he absolutely did not want that music used in any movie that contained four-letter words. I questioned whether or not it was more noble for him to approve the use of Peanuts characters in Dolly Madison commercials and commercials for Met Life, as opposed to this little movie about these characters who really love the Charlie Brown music, a movie where that music actually means something personal. That made him pretty mad."

He and Owen are working on a couple of new scripts, but he'd rather not say what they're about till they're finished.

Owen, Bob, and Andrew are auditioning for roles in other people's movies, trying to build independent acting careers in Los Angeles. No matter what happens, they intend to continue working together.

Bob is thriving. He's auditioning for parts left and right. This is the most exciting time he's ever had. Bottle Rocket planted a seed in his head; he wants to win more parts, go to Hollywood, and build a brilliantly varied career like Robert DeNiro, or Harvey Keitel.

"I want to do everything," he says. "There's no kind of part I won't play. I want to be all over the place, a real chameleon--the kind of guy who digs down so deep that he sort of disappears, you know, and just becomes the character."

He's so loyal to his friends from Dallas that when he talks about his feelings toward them, he sometimes begins shaking his head incredulously, as if he can barely believe the depth of his affection. He feels his debt to them is more than professional.

"If I go on to have a really great, long, interesting life as an actor," Bob says, "I'll always remember that these guys believed in me and gave me my start. I'll owe my career to them. And I gotta tell the truth, man--in all honesty, I feel like I owe them a lot more than that."

Owen Wilson, now 26, feels the same way about his Bottle Rocket buddies. But while he still sees himself as pretty much the same guy, he realizes other people might not.

He thought about this a couple of weeks ago while attending a Wilson family reunion in New Hampshire. Some of his relatives kidded him about having gone Hollywood. Others asked his opinion on show business issues as if he were some kind of expert. The strangest question came from one of his cousins.

"He came up to me and asked me what I thought of Waterworld," Owen says. "He asked, 'What do you think about the cost?' He sounded like a Los Angeles agent. I thought, 'What an odd question for an eight-year-old to be asking!' I told him, 'I don't know. It's not really my position to think about the cost.'

"Then his dad came up. He said, 'Oh, you're just protecting the industry. You're just a home-teamer.' That seemed kind of unfair to me, because I saw Waterworld, and I kind of liked it."

Owen says he likes living in Los Angeles--something not even longtime residents of the city are willing to admit.

"You're made to feel embarrassed if you say it," he says. "I always hear people saying the city is superficial. But are you ever going to find a place that isn't superficial? I grew up loving movies, being impressed with seeing stars and stuff. This is a place where you can see a lot of great movies and there are stars walking around. It's really exciting right now."

He feels the same way about making movies, despite Bottle Rocket's uncertain future.

"It's difficult to watch yourself up there onscreen. There you are, and your brother is up there, and your other brother, and your friend, and they're all interacting with James Caan and all these other professionals," he says.

"It did seem strange. But you'd be shocked how fast you get used to it."

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itsjackgilbert · 3 years ago

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Joan Didion, The Art of Nonfiction No. 1

Interviewed by Hilton Als, Spring 2006

The last time this magazine spoke with Joan Didion, in August of 1977, she was living in California and had just published her third novel, A Book of Common Prayer. Didion was forty-two years old and well-known not only for her fiction but also for her work in magazines—reviews, reportage, and essays—some of which had been collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968). In addition, Didion and her husband, John Gregory Dunne (who was himself the subject of a Paris Review interview in 1996), had written a number of screenplays together, including The Panic in Needle Park (1971); an adaptation of her second novel, Play It As It Lays (1972); and A Star Is Born (1976). When Didion’s first interview appeared in these pages in 1978, she was intent on exploring her gift for fiction and nonfiction. Since then, her breadth and craft as a writer have only grown deeper with each project.

Joan Didion was born in Sacramento, and both her parents, too, were native Californians. She studied English at Berkeley, and in 1956, after graduating, she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue and moved to New York City to join the magazine’s editorial staff. While at Vogue, she wrote fashion copy, as well as book and movie reviews. She also became a frequent contributor to The National Review, among other publications. In 1963, Didion published her first novel, Run River. The next year she married Dunne, and soon afterwards, they moved to Los Angeles. There, in 1965, they adopted their only child, Quintana Roo.

In 1973, Didion began writing for The New York Review of Books, where she has remained a regular contributor. While she has continued to write novels in recent decades—Democracy (1984) and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996)—she has increasingly explored different forms of nonfiction: critical essay, political reportage, memoir. In 1979, she published a second collection of her magazine work, The White Album, which was followed by Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), and Where I Was From (2003). In the spring of 2005, Didion was awarded a Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In December of 2003, shortly before their fortieth anniversary, Didion’s husband died. Last fall, she published The Year of Magical Thinking, a book-length meditation on grief and memory. It became a best-seller, and won the National Book Award for nonfiction; Didion is now adapting the book for the stage as a monologue. Two months before the book’s publication, Didion’s thirty-nine-year-old daughter died after a long illness.

Our conversation took place over the course of two afternoons in the Manhattan apartment Didion shared with her husband. On the walls of the spacious flat, one could see many photographs of Didion, Dunne, and their daughter. Daylight flooded the book-filled parlor. “When we got the place, we assumed the sun went all through the apartment. It doesn’t,” Didion said, laughing. Her laughter was the additional punctuation to her precise speech.

INTERVIEWER

By now you’ve written at least as much nonfiction as you have fiction. How would you describe the difference between writing the one or the other?

JOAN DIDION

Writing fiction is for me a fraught business, an occasion of daily dread for at least the first half of the novel, and sometimes all the way through. The work process is totally different from writing nonfiction. You have to sit down every day and make it up. You have no notes—or sometimes you do, I made extensive notes for A Book of Common Prayer—but the notes give you only the background, not the novel itself. In nonfiction the notes give you the piece. Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.

INTERVIEWER

Do you do a lot of rewriting?

DIDION

When I’m working on a book, I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm. Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting. At the end of the day, I mark up the pages I’ve done—pages or page—all the way back to page one. I mark them up so that I can retype them in the morning. It gets me past that blank terror.

INTERVIEWER

Did you do that sort of retyping for The Year of Magical Thinking?

DIDION

I did. It was especially important with this book because so much of it depended on echo. I wrote it in three months, but I marked it up every night.

INTERVIEWER

The book moves quickly. Did you think about how your readers would read it?

DIDION

Of course, you always think about how it will be read. I always aim for a reading in one sitting.

INTERVIEWER

At what point did you know that the notes you were writing in response to John’s death would be a book for publication?

DIDION

John died December 30, 2003. Except for a few lines written a day or so after he died, I didn’t begin making the notes that became the book until the following October. After a few days of making notes, I realized that I was thinking about how to structure a book, which was the point at which I realized that I was writing one. This realization in no way changed what I was writing.

INTERVIEWER

Was it difficult to finish the book? Or were you happy to have your life back—to live with a lower level of self-scrutiny?

DIDION

Yes. It was difficult to finish the book. I didn’t want to let John go. I don’t really have my life back yet, since Quintana died only on August 26.

INTERVIEWER

Since you write about yourself, interviewers tend to ask about your personal life; I want to ask you about writing and books. In the past you’ve written pieces on V. S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Norman Mailer, and Ernest Hemingway—titanic, controversial iconoclasts whom you tend to defend. Were these the writers you grew up with and wanted to emulate?

DIDION

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple—or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren’t.

Something I was looking up the other day, that’s been in the back of my mind, is a study done several years ago about young women’s writing skills and the incidence of Alzheimer’s. As it happens, the subjects were all nuns, because all of these women had been trained in a certain convent. They found that those who wrote simple sentences as young women later had a higher incidence of Alzheimer’s, while those who wrote complicated sentences with several clauses had a lower incidence of Alzheimer’s. The assumption—which I thought was probably erroneous—was that those who tended to write simple sentences as young women did not have strong memory skills.

INTERVIEWER

Though you wouldn’t classify Hemingway’s sentences as simple.

DIDION

No, they’re deceptively simple because he always brings a change in.

INTERVIEWER

Did you think you could write that kind of sentence? Did you want to try?

DIDION

I didn’t think that I could do them, but I thought that I could learn—because they felt so natural. I could see how they worked once I started typing them out. That was when I was about fifteen. I would just type those stories. It’s a great way to get rhythms into your head.

INTERVIEWER

Did you read anyone else before Hemingway?

DIDION

No one who attracted me in that way. I had been reading a lot of plays. I had a misguided idea that I wanted to act. The form this took was not acting, however, but reading plays. Sacramento was not a place where you saw a lot of plays. I think the first play I ever saw was the Lunts in the touring company of O Mistress Mine. I don’t think that that’s what inspired me. The Theater Guild used to do plays on the radio, and I remember being very excited about listening to them. I remember memorizing speeches from Death of a Salesman and Member of the Wedding in the period right after the war.

INTERVIEWER

Which playwrights did you read?

DIDION

I remember at one point going through everything of Eugene O’Neill’s. I was struck by the sheer theatricality of his plays. You could see how they worked. I read them all one summer. I had nosebleeds, and for some reason it took all summer to get the appointment to get my nose cauterized. So I just lay still on the porch all day and read Eugene O’Neill. That was all I did. And dab at my face with an ice cube.

INTERVIEWER

What you really seem to have responded to in these early influences was style—voice and form.

DIDION

Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn’t put it down—I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.

And one book I totally missed when I first read it was Moby-Dick. I reread it when Quintana was assigned it in high school. It was clear that she wasn’t going to get through it unless we did little talks about it at dinner. I had not gotten it at all when I read it at her age. I had missed that wild control of language. What I had thought discursive were really these great leaps. The book had just seemed a jumble; I didn’t get the control in it.

INTERVIEWER

After high school you wanted to go to Stanford. Why?

DIDION

It’s pretty straightforward—all my friends were going to Stanford.

INTERVIEWER

But you went to Berkeley and majored in literature. What were you reading there?

DIDION

The people I did the most work on were Henry James and D. H. Lawrence, who I was not high on. He irritated me on almost every level.

INTERVIEWER

He didn’t know anything about women at all.

DIDION

No, nothing. And the writing was so clotted and sentimental. It didn’t work for me on any level.

INTERVIEWER

Was he writing too quickly, do you think?

DIDION

I don’t know, I think he just had a clotted and sentimental mind.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned reading Moby-Dick. Do you do much rereading?

DIDION

I often reread Victory, which is maybe my favorite book in the world.

INTERVIEWER

Conrad? Really? Why?

DIDION

The story is told thirdhand. It’s not a story the narrator even heard from someone who experienced it. The narrator seems to have heard it from people he runs into around the Malacca Strait. So there’s this fantastic distancing of the narrative, except that when you’re in the middle of it, it remains very immediate. It’s incredibly skillful. I have never started a novel—I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel—I’ve never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing. In the same way, John and I always prepared for writing a movie by watching The Third Man. It’s perfectly told.

INTERVIEWER

Conrad was also a huge inspiration for Naipaul, whose work you admire. What drew you to Naipaul?

DIDION

I read the nonfiction first. But the novel that really attracted me—and I still read the beginning of it now and then—is Guerillas. It has that bauxite factory in the opening pages, which just gives you the whole feel of that part of the world. That was a thrilling book to me. The nonfiction had the same effect on me as reading Elizabeth Hardwick—you get the sense that it’s possible simply to go through life noticing things and writing them down and that this is OK, it’s worth doing. That the seemingly insignificant things that most of us spend our days noticing are really significant, have meaning, and tell us something. Naipaul is a great person to read before you have to do a piece. And Edmund Wilson, his essays for The American Earthquake. They have that everyday-traveler-in-the-world aspect, which is the opposite of an authoritative tone.

INTERVIEWER

Was it as a student at Berkeley that you began to feel that you were a writer?

DIDION

No, it began to feel almost impossible at Berkeley because we were constantly being impressed with the fact that everybody else had done it already and better. It was very daunting to me. I didn’t think I could write. It took me a couple of years after I got out of Berkeley before I dared to start writing. That academic mind-set—which was kind of shallow in my case anyway—had begun to fade. Then I did write a novel over a long period of time, Run River. And after that it seemed feasible that maybe I could write another one.

INTERVIEWER

You had come to New York by then and were working at Vogue, while writing at night. Did you see writing that novel as a way of being back in California?

DIDION

Yes, it was a way of not being homesick. But I had a really hard time getting the next book going. I couldn’t get past a few notes. It was Play It As It Lays, but it wasn’t called that—I mean it didn’t have a name and it wasn’t what it is. For one, it was set in New York. Then, in June of 1964, John and I went to California and I started doing pieces for The Saturday Evening Post. We needed the money because neither one of us was working. And during the course of doing these pieces I was out in the world enough that an actual story for this so-called second novel presented itself, and then I started writing it.

INTERVIEWER

What had you been missing about California? What were you not getting in New York?

DIDION

Rivers. I was living on the East Side, and on the weekend I’d walk over to the Hudson and then I’d walk back to the East River. I kept thinking, All right, they are rivers, but they aren’t California rivers. I really missed California rivers. Also the sun going down in the West. That’s one of the big advantages to Columbia-Presbyterian hospital—you can see the sunset. There’s always something missing about late afternoon to me on the East Coast. Late afternoon on the West Coast ends with the sky doing all its brilliant stuff. Here it just gets dark.

The other thing I missed was horizons. I missed that on the West Coast, too, if we weren’t living at the beach, but I noticed at some point that practically every painting or lithograph I bought had a horizon in it. Because it’s very soothing.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you decide to come back east in 1988?

DIDION

Part of it was that Quintana was in college here, at Barnard, and part of it was that John was between books and having a hard time getting started on a new one. He felt that it was making him stale to be in one place for a long time. We had been living in Brentwood for ten years, which was longer than we had ever lived in any one place. And I think he just thought it was time to move. I didn’t particularly, but we left. Even before moving, we had a little apartment in New York. To justify having it, John felt that we had to spend some periods of time there, which was extremely inconvenient for me. The apartment in New York was not very comfortable, and on arrival you would always have to arrange to get the windows washed and get food in . . . It was cheaper when we stayed at the Carlyle.

INTERVIEWER

But when you finally moved to New York, was it a bad move?

DIDION

No, it was fine. It just took me about a year, maybe two years all told. The time spent looking for an apartment, selling the house in California, the actual move, having work done, remembering where I put things when I unpacked—it probably took two years out of my effective working life. Though I feel that it’s been the right place to be after John died. I would not have wanted to be in a house in Brentwood Park after he died.

INTERVIEWER

Why not?

DIDION

For entirely logistical reasons. In New York I didn’t need to drive to dinner. There wasn’t likely to be a brush fire. I wasn’t going to see a snake in the pool.

INTERVIEWER

You said that you started writing for The Saturday Evening Post because you and John were broke. Is that where the idea of working for movies came from—the need for cash?

DIDION

Yes it was. One of the things that had made us go to Los Angeles was we had a nutty idea that we could write for television. We had a bunch of meetings with television executives, and they would explain to us, for example, the principle of Bonanza. The principle of Bonanza was: break a leg at the Ponderosa. I looked blankly at the executive and he said, Somebody rides into town, and to make the story work, he’s got to break a leg so he’s around for two weeks. So we never wrote for Bonanza. We did, however, have one story idea picked up by Chrysler Theatre. We were paid a thousand dollars for it.

That was also why we started to write for the movies. We thought of it as a way to buy time. But nobody was asking us to write movies. John and his brother Nick and I took an option on The Panic in Needle Park and put it together ourselves. I had read the book by James Mills and it just immediately said movie to me. I think that the three of us each put in a thousand dollars, which was enormous at the time.

INTERVIEWER

How did you make it work as a collaboration? What were the mechanics?

DIDION

On that one, my memory is that I wrote the treatment, which was just voices. Though whenever I say I did something, or vice versa, the other person would go over it, run it through the typewriter. It was always a back-and-forth thing.

INTERVIEWER

Did you learn anything about writing from the movie work?

DIDION

Yes. I learned a lot of fictional technique. Before I’d written movies, I never could do big set-piece scenes with a lot of different speakers—when you’ve got twelve people around a dinner table talking at cross purposes. I had always been impressed by other people’s ability to do that. Anthony Powell comes to mind. I think the first book I did those big scenes in was A Book of Common Prayer.

INTERVIEWER

But screenwriting is very different from prose narrative.

DIDION

It’s not writing. You’re making notes for the director—for the director more than the actors. Sidney Pollack once told us that every screenwriter should go to the Actor’s Studio because there was no better way to learn what an actor needed. I’m guilty of not thinking enough about what actors need. I think instead about what the director needs.

INTERVIEWER

John wrote that Robert De Niro asked you to write a scene in True Confessions without a single word of dialogue—the opposite of your treatment for The Panic in Needle Park.

DIDION

Yeah, which is great. It’s something that every writer understands, but if you turn in a scene like that to a producer, he’s going to want to know where the words are.

INTERVIEWER

At the other end of the writing spectrum, there’s The New York Review of Books and your editor there, Robert Silvers. In the seventies you wrote for him about Hollywood, Woody Allen, Naipaul, and Patty Hearst. All of those essays were, broadly speaking, book reviews. How did you make the shift to pure reporting for the Review?

DIDION

In 1982, John and I were going to San Salvador, and Bob expressed interest in having one or both of us write something about it. After we’d been there a few days, it became clear that I was going to do it rather than John, because John was working on a novel. Then when I started writing it, it got very long. I gave it to Bob, in its full length, and my idea was that he would figure out something to take from it. I didn’t hear from him for a long time. So I wasn’t expecting much, but then he called and said he was going to run the whole thing, in three parts.

INTERVIEWER

So he was able to find the through-line of the piece?

DIDION

The through-line in “Salvador” was always pretty clear: I went somewhere, this is what I saw. Very simple, like a travel piece. How Bob edited “Salvador” was by constantly nudging me toward updates on the situation and by pointing out weaker material. When I gave him the text, for example, it had a very weak ending, which was about meeting an American evangelical student on the flight home. In other words it was the travel piece carried to its logical and not very interesting conclusion. The way Bob led me away from this was to suggest not that I cut it (it’s still there), but that I follow it—and so ground it—with a return to the political situation.

INTERVIEWER

How did you decide to write about Miami in 1987?

DIDION

Ever since the Kennedy assassination, I had wanted to do something that took place in that part of the world. I thought it was really interesting that so much of the news in America, especially if you read through the assassination hearings, was coming out of our political relations with the Caribbean and Central and South America. So when we got the little apartment in New York, I thought, Well that’s something useful I can do out of New York: I can fly to Miami.

INTERVIEWER

Had you spent time down south before that?

DIDION

Yes, in 1970. I had been writing a column for Life, but neither Life nor I was happy with it. We weren’t on the same page. I had a contract, so if I turned something in, they had to pay me. But it was soul-searing to turn things in that didn’t run. So after about seven columns, I quit. It was agreed that I would do longer pieces. And I said that I was interested in driving around the Gulf Coast, and somehow that got translated into “The Mind of the White South.” I had a theory that if I could understand the South, I would understand something about California, because a lot of the California settlers came from the Border South. So I wanted to look into that. It turned out that what I was actually interested in was the South as a gateway to the Caribbean. I should have known that at the time because my original plan had been to drive all over the Gulf Coast.

We began that trip in New Orleans and spent a week there. New Orleans was fantastic. Then we drove around the Mississippi Coast, and that was fantastic too, but in New Orleans, you get a strong sense of the Caribbean. I used a lot of that week in New Orleans in Common Prayer. It was the most interesting place I had been in a long time. It was a week in which everything everybody said was astonishing to me.

INTERVIEWER

Three years later you started writing for The New York Review of Books. Was that daunting? In your essay “Why I Write” you express trepidation about intellectual, or ostensibly intellectual, matters. What freed you up enough to do that work for Bob?

DIDION

His trust. Nothing else. I couldn’t even have imagined it if he hadn’t responded. He recognized that it was a learning experience for me. Domestic politics, for example, was something I simply knew nothing about. And I had no interest. But Bob kept pushing me in that direction. He is really good at ascertaining what might interest you at any given moment and then just throwing a bunch of stuff at you that might or might not be related, and letting you go with it.

When I went to the political conventions in 1988—it was the first time I’d ever been to a convention—he would fax down to the hotel the front pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. Well, you know, if there’s anything you can get at a convention it’s a newspaper. But he just wanted to make sure.

And then he’s meticulous once you turn in a piece, in terms of making you plug in all relevant information so that everything gets covered and defended before the letters come. He spent a lot of time, for example, making sure that I acknowledged all the issues in the Terri Schiavo piece, which had the potential for eliciting strong reactions. He’s the person I trust more than anybody.

INTERVIEWER

Why do you think he pushed you to write about politics?

DIDION

I think he had a sense that I would be outside it enough.

INTERVIEWER

No insider reporting—you didn’t know anyone.

DIDION

I didn’t even know their names!

INTERVIEWER

But now your political writing has a very strong point of view—you take sides. Is that something that usually happens during the reporting process, or during the writing?

DIDION

If I am sufficiently interested in a political situation to write a piece about it, I generally have a point of view, although I don’t usually recognize it. Something about a situation will bother me, so I will write a piece to find out what it is that bothers me.

INTERVIEWER

When you moved into writing about politics, you moved away from the more personal writing you’d been doing. Was that a deliberate departure?

DIDION

Yes, I was bored. For one thing, that kind of writing is limiting. Another reason was that I was getting a very strong response from readers, which was depressing because there was no way for me to reach out and help them back. I didn’t want to become Miss Lonelyhearts.

INTERVIEWER

And the pieces on El Salvador were the first in which politics really drive the narrative.

DIDION

Actually it was a novel, Common Prayer. We had gone to a film festival in Cartagena and I got sick there, some kind of salmonella. We left Cartagena and went to Bogotà, and then we came back to Los Angeles and I was sick for about four months. I started doing a lot of reading about South America, where I’d never been. There’s a passage by Christopher Isherwood in a book of his called The Condor and the Cows, in which he describes arriving in Venezuela and being astonished to think that it had been down there every day of his life. That was the way that I felt about South America. Then later I started reading a lot about Central America because it was becoming clear to me that my novel had to take place in a rather small country. So that was when I started thinking more politically.

INTERVIEWER

But it still didn’t push you into an interest in domestic politics.

DIDION

I didn’t get the connection. I don’t know why I didn’t get the connection, since I wasn’t interested in the politics of these countries per se, but rather in how American foreign policy affected them. And the extent to which we are involved abroad is entirely driven by our own domestic politics. So I don’t know why I didn’t get that.

I started to get this in Salvador, but not fully until Miami. Our policy with Cuba and with exiles has been totally driven by domestic politics. It still is. But it was very hard for me to understand the process of domestic politics. I could get the overall picture, but the actual words people said were almost unintelligible to me.

INTERVIEWER

How did it become clearer?

DIDION

I realized that the words didn’t have any actual meaning, that they described a negotiation more than they described an idea. But then you begin to see that the lack of specificity is specific in itself, that it is an obscuring device.

INTERVIEWER

Did it help you when you were working on Salvador and Miami to talk to the political figures you were writing about?

DIDION

In those cases it did. Though I didn’t talk to a lot of American politicians. I remember talking to the then-president of El Salvador, who was astounding. We were talking about a new land reform law and I explained that I couldn’t quite understand what was being said about it. We were discussing a provision—Provision 207—that seemed to me to say that landowners could arrange their affairs so as to be unaffected by the reform.

He said, 207 always applied only to 1979. That is what no one understands. I asked, Did he mean that 207 applied only to 1979 because no landowner would work against his interests by allowing tenants on his land after 207 took effect? He said, Exactly, no one would rent out land under 207. They would have to be crazy to do that.

Well, that was forthright. There are very few politicians who would say exactly.

INTERVIEWER

Was it helpful to talk with John about your experiences there?

DIDION

It was useful to talk to him about politics because he viscerally understood politics. He grew up in an Irish Catholic family in Hartford, a town where politics was part of what you ate for breakfast. I mean, it didn’t take him a long time to understand that nobody was saying anything.

INTERVIEWER

After Salvador, you wrote your next novel, Democracy. It seems informed by the reporting you were doing about America’s relationship to the world.

DIDION

The fall of Saigon, though it takes place offstage, was the main thing on my mind. Saigon fell while I was teaching at Berkeley in 1975. I couldn’t get those images out of my head, and that was the strongest impulse behind Democracy. When the book came out, some people wondered why it began with the bomb tests in the Pacific, but I think those bomb tests formed a straight line to pushing the helicopters off the aircraft carriers when we were abandoning Saigon. It was a very clear progression in my mind. Mainly, I wanted to show that you could write a romance and still have the fall of Saigon, or the Iran-Contra affair. It would be hard for me to stay with a novel if I didn’t see a very strong personal story at the center of it.

Democracy is really a much more complete version of Common Prayer, with basically the same structure. There is a narrator who tries to understand the character who’s being talked about and reconstruct the story. I had a very clear picture in my mind of both those women, but I couldn’t tell the story without standing way far away. Charlotte, in Common Prayer, was somebody who had a very expensive dress with a seam that was coming out. There was a kind of fevered carelessness to her. Democracy started out as a comedy, a comic novel. And I think that there is a more even view of life in it. I had a terrible time with it. I don’t know why, but it never got easy.

In Brentwood we had a big safe-deposit box to put manuscripts in if we left town during fire season. It was such a big box that we never bothered to clean it out. When we were moving, in 1988, and I had to go through the box, I found I don’t know how many different versions of the first ninety pages of Democracy, with different dates on them, written over several years. I would write ninety pages and not be able to go any further. I couldn’t make the switch. I don’t know how that was solved. Many of those drafts began with Billy Dillon coming to Amagansett to tell Inez that her father had shot her sister. It was very hard to get from there to any place. It didn’t work. It was too conventional a narrative. I never hit the spot where I could sail through. I never got to that point, even at the very end.

INTERVIEWER

Was that a first for you?

DIDION

It was a first for a novel. I really did not think I was going to finish it two nights before I finished it. And when I did finish it, I had a sense that I was just abandoning it, that I was just calling it. It was sort of like Vietnam itself—why don’t we say just we’ve won and leave? I didn’t have a real sense of completion about it.

INTERVIEWER

Your novels are greatly informed by the travel and reporting you do for your nonfiction. Do you ever do research specifically for the fiction?

DIDION

Common Prayer was researched. We had someone working for us, Tina Moore, who was a fantastic researcher. She would go to the UCLA library, and I would say, Bring me back anything on plantation life in Central America. And she would come back and say, This is really what you’re looking for—you’ll love this. And it would not be plantation life in Central America. It would be Ceylon, but it would be fantastic. She had an instinct for what was the same story, and what I was looking for. What I was looking for were rules for living in the tropics. I didn’t know that, but that’s what I found. In Democracy I was more familiar with all the places.

INTERVIEWER

The last novel you wrote was The Last Thing He Wanted. That came out in 1996. Had you been working on it for a long time?

DIDION

No. I started it in the early fall or late summer of 1995, and I finished it at Christmas. It was a novel I had been thinking about writing for a while. I wanted to write a novel about the Iran-Contra affair, and get in all that stuff that was being lost. Basically it’s a novel about Miami. I wanted it to be very densely plotted. I noticed that conspiracy was central to understanding that part of the world; everybody was always being set up in some way. The plot was going to be so complicated that I was going to have to write it fast or I wouldn’t be able to keep it all in my head. If I forgot one little detail it wouldn’t work, and half the readers didn’t understand what happened in the end. Many people thought that Elena tried to kill Treat Morrison. Why did she want to kill him? they would ask me. But she didn’t. Someone else did, and set her up. Apparently I didn’t make that clear.

I had begun to lose patience with the conventions of writing. Descriptions went first; in both fiction and nonfiction, I just got impatient with those long paragraphs of description. By which I do not mean—obviously—the single detail that gives you the scene. I’m talking about description as a substitute for thinking. I think you can see me losing my patience as early as Democracy. That was why that book was so hard to write.

INTERVIEWER

After Democracy and Miami, and before The Last Thing He Wanted, there was the nonfiction collection After Henry, which strikes me as a way of coming back to New York and trying to understand what the city was.

DIDION

It has that long piece “Sentimental Journeys,” about the Central Park jogger, which began with that impulse. We had been in New York a year or two, and I realized that I was living here without engaging the city at all. I might as well have been living in another city, because I didn’t understand it, I didn’t get it. So I realized that I needed to do some reporting on it. Bob and I decided I would do a series of short reporting pieces on New York, and the first one would be about the jogger. But it wasn’t really reporting. It was coming at a situation from a lot of angles. I got so involved in it that, by the time I finished the piece, it was too long. I turned it in and Bob had some comments—many, many comments, which caused it to be even longer because he thought it needed so much additional material, which he was right about. By the time I’d plugged it all in, I’d added another six to eight thousand words. When I finally had finished it, I thought, That’s all I have to do about New York.

INTERVIEWER

Although it is about the city, “Sentimental Journeys” is really about race and class and money.

DIDION

It seemed to me that the case was treated with a lot of contempt by the people who were handling it.

INTERVIEWER

How so?

DIDION

The prosecution thought they had the press and popular sentiment on their side. The case became a way of expressing the city’s rage at being broke and being in another recession and not having a general comfort level, the sense that there were people sleeping on the streets—which there were. We moved here six months after the ’87 stock market crash. Over the next couple of years, its effect on Madison Avenue was staggering. You could not walk down Madison Avenue at eight in the evening without having to avoid stepping on people sleeping in every doorway. There was a German television crew here doing a piece on the jogger, and they wanted to shoot in Harlem, but it was late in the day and they were losing the light. They kept asking me what the closest place was where they could shoot and see poverty. I said, Try Seventy-second and Madison. You know where Polo is now? That building was empty and the padlocks were broken and you could see rats scuttling around inside. The landlord had emptied it—I presume because he wanted to get higher rents—and then everything had crashed. There was nothing there. That entire block was a mess.

INTERVIEWER

So from California you had turned your attention to the third world, and now you were able to recognize New York because of the work you had done in the third world.

DIDION

A lot of what I had seen as New York’s sentimentality is derived from the stories the city tells itself to rationalize its class contradictions. I didn’t realize that until I started doing the jogger piece. Everything started falling into place on that piece. Bob would send me clips about the trial, but on this one I was on my own, because only I knew where it was going.

INTERVIEWER

In some of your early essays on California, your subject matter was as distinctively your own as your writing style. In recent decades, though, it’s not so much the story but your take on the story that makes your work distinctive.

DIDION

The shift came about as I became more confident that my own take was worth doing. In the beginning, I didn’t want to do any stories that anyone else was doing. As time went by, I got more comfortable with that. For example, on the Central Park jogger piece I could not get into the courtroom because I didn’t have a police pass. This forced me into another approach, which turned out to be a more interesting one. At least to me.

INTERVIEWER

Wasn’t it around the same time that you were also doing the “Letter from Los Angeles” for Robert Gottlieb at The New Yorker?

DIDION

Yes. Though I wasn’t doing more than two of those a year. I think they only ran six to eight thousand words, but the idea was to do several things in each letter. I had never done that before, where you just really discuss what people are talking about that week. It was easy to do. It was a totally different tone from the Review. I went over those New Yorker pieces when I collected them. I probably took out some of the New Yorker’s editing, which is just their way of making everything sound a certain way.

INTERVIEWER

Can you characterize your methods as a reporter?

DIDION

I can’t ask anything. Once in a while if I’m forced into it I will conduct an interview, but it’s usually pro forma, just to establish my credentials as somebody who’s allowed to hang around for a while. It doesn’t matter to me what people say to me in the interview because I don’t trust it. Sometimes you do interviews where you get a lot. But you don’t get them from public figures.

When I was conducting interviews for the piece on Lakewood, it was essential to do interviews because that was the whole point. But these were not public figures. On the one hand, we were discussing what I was ostensibly there doing a piece about, which was the Spur Posse, a group of local high school boys who had been arrested for various infractions. But on the other hand, we were talking, because it was the first thing on everyone’s mind, about the defense industry going downhill, which was what the town was about. That was a case in which I did interviewing and listened.

INTERVIEWER

Did the book about California, Where I Was From, grow out of that piece, or had you already been thinking about a book?

DIDION

I had actually started a book about California in the seventies. I had written some of that first part, which is about my family, but I could never go anywhere with it for two reasons. One was that I still hadn’t figured out California. The other was that I didn’t want to figure out California because whatever I figured out would be different from the California my mother and father had told me about. I didn’t want to engage that.

INTERVIEWER

You felt like you were still their child?

DIDION

I just didn’t see any point in engaging it. By the time I did the book they were dead.

INTERVIEWER

You said earlier that after The White Album you were tired of personal writing and didn’t want to become Miss Lonelyhearts. You must be getting a larger personal response from readers than ever with The Year of Magical Thinking. Is that difficult?

DIDION

I have been getting a very strong emotional response to Magical Thinking. But it’s not a crazy response; it’s not demanding. It’s people trying to make sense of a fairly universal experience that most people don’t talk about. So this is a case in which I have found myself able to deal with the response directly.

INTERVIEWER

Do you ever think you might go back to the idea of doing little pieces about New York?

DIDION

I don’t know. It is still a possibility, but my basic question about New York was answered for me: it’s criminal.

INTERVIEWER

That was your question?

DIDION

Yes, it’s criminal.

INTERVIEWER

Do you find it stimulating in some way to live here?

DIDION

I find it really comfortable. During the time we lived in California, which lasted twenty-four years, I didn’t miss New York after the first year. And after the second year I started to think of New York as sentimental. There were periods when I didn’t even come to New York at all. One time I realized that I had been to Hong Kong twice since I had last been to New York. Then we started spending more time in New York. Both John and I were really happy to have been here on 9/11. I can’t think of any place else I would have rather been on 9/11, and in the immediate aftermath.

INTERVIEWER

You could have stayed in Sacramento forever as a novelist, but you started to move out into the worlds of Hollywood and politics.

DIDION

I was never a big fan of people who don’t leave home. I don’t know why. It just seems part of your duty in life.

INTERVIEWER

I’m reminded of Charlotte in A Book of Common Prayer. She has no conception of the outside world but she wants to be in it.

DIDION

Although a novel takes place in the larger world, there’s always some drive in it that is entirely personal—even if you don’t know it while you’re doing it. I realized some years after A Book of Common Prayer was finished that it was about my anticipating Quintana’s growing up. I wrote it around 1975, so she would have been nine, but I was already anticipating separation and actually working through that ahead of time. So novels are also about things you’re afraid you can’t deal with.

INTERVIEWER

Are you working on one now?

DIDION

No. I haven’t felt that I wanted to bury myself for that intense a period.

INTERVIEWER

You want to be in the world a bit.

DIDION

Yeah. A little bit.

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