others all sang louder, even more thrillingly, so that I felt liftedon wings of unnatural energy, pouring my miserly old scribbler’s heart into that lavender lens at two in the morning.
Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.
Being on TV—II
I N THIS MEDIA-MAD AGE , one of the few questions that people still ask an old-fashioned word writer is how he feels about film adaptations of his work. My answer is, “Embarrassed.” I feel embarrassed, watching the gifted and comely actors writhing and grimacing within my plot, heaving away at lines of dialogue I put down in a few minutes’ daze years before, and straining to bring to life some tricky moral or social issue that once bemused me. I feel I have put them (along with the director and cameramen and set designers) in a glass box; like wide-eyed fish in an aquarium they bump their noses on the other side of the screen and ogle me helplessly. I yearn to break the glass, to set them free to do their own thing—juggle, jog, take off their clothes, put
on
some clothes, tell us what bemuses
them
these days, cook up their
own
story.
For me, it is an act sufficiently aggressive to take pencil and paper in hand (or to switch on the word processor with its mind-curdling hum) and to forge sentences and paragraphs out of my flitting fancies and dimming memories. That these words are then turned, by a large and highly paid crew, into photogenic, three-dimensional,
real
furniture, bodies, and conversational tussles strikes me as rather horrible, in the way that an elephant tusk patiently carved and filed into many tiny interlocking figures, pagodas, and ginkgo trees is horrible.
In the late Sixties two youngish men full of energy and flattery approached me about making a motion picture of my novel
Rabbit, Run
, and a deal was arranged. After some time, in 1970, I was invited to attend a showing of the result. My wife and I went to the appointed theatre in Boston and found ourselves the only audience in all the rows and rows of seats; an author, it suddenly dawned on me, was expected to organize a viewing party of agents, editors, and well-wishers. In lonely splendor, then, after a nervous consultation with the projectionist, we watched a giant flickering that began with my title and ended with theconcluding sentence of my text flashed onto the screen, over the figure of a man running. In between, everything was mine yet not mine, and intensely embarrassing.
Not that the film lacked good qualities or surface fidelity to the novel. There were admirable performances by James Caan and Carrie Snodgress and stunning views of Reading, Pennsylvania, whose steep streets of row houses had been in my mind as I wrote. But the voice of the novel, and the cogency of its implied argument, had vanished in a hash of visual images and coarse simplifications. The movie often failed, it seemed to me, to make sense. For instance, in a central early episode, my hero impulsively gets into a car and drives away from his wife and his life; within twelve hours he gets lost somewhere in West Virginia and realizes he has nowhere to go but back to Pennsylvania. The basic movement, out and back in, was rendered in the movie by an unintelligible montage of speeding automobiles and highway signs; when I mentioned this muddle in a telephone conversation with the director, he admitted that, when they returned from Pennsylvania to Hollywood, they discovered they had no “night footage.” You make a film, of course, out of footage, and if in some sequences you have nothing but, in another phrase of his, “deplorable footage,” you use that, or else leave holes that only the author, let’s hope, will notice.
Since 1970, as of 1986, only television movies have been made of my stubbornly verbal works: two short stories, “The Music School” and “The Christian Roommates,” were produced for public television, and a two-hour film, given the title
Too Far to Go
, was fashioned from a set of linked short
Being on TV is like being alive, only more so.
Being on TV—II
I N THIS MEDIA-MAD AGE , one of the few questions that people still ask an old-fashioned word writer is how he feels about film adaptations of his work. My answer is, “Embarrassed.” I feel embarrassed, watching the gifted and comely actors writhing and grimacing within my plot, heaving away at lines of dialogue I put down in a few minutes’ daze years before, and straining to bring to life some tricky moral or social issue that once bemused me. I feel I have put them (along with the director and cameramen and set designers) in a glass box; like wide-eyed fish in an aquarium they bump their noses on the other side of the screen and ogle me helplessly. I yearn to break the glass, to set them free to do their own thing—juggle, jog, take off their clothes, put
on
some clothes, tell us what bemuses
them
these days, cook up their
own
story.
For me, it is an act sufficiently aggressive to take pencil and paper in hand (or to switch on the word processor with its mind-curdling hum) and to forge sentences and paragraphs out of my flitting fancies and dimming memories. That these words are then turned, by a large and highly paid crew, into photogenic, three-dimensional,
real
furniture, bodies, and conversational tussles strikes me as rather horrible, in the way that an elephant tusk patiently carved and filed into many tiny interlocking figures, pagodas, and ginkgo trees is horrible.
In the late Sixties two youngish men full of energy and flattery approached me about making a motion picture of my novel
Rabbit, Run
, and a deal was arranged. After some time, in 1970, I was invited to attend a showing of the result. My wife and I went to the appointed theatre in Boston and found ourselves the only audience in all the rows and rows of seats; an author, it suddenly dawned on me, was expected to organize a viewing party of agents, editors, and well-wishers. In lonely splendor, then, after a nervous consultation with the projectionist, we watched a giant flickering that began with my title and ended with theconcluding sentence of my text flashed onto the screen, over the figure of a man running. In between, everything was mine yet not mine, and intensely embarrassing.
Not that the film lacked good qualities or surface fidelity to the novel. There were admirable performances by James Caan and Carrie Snodgress and stunning views of Reading, Pennsylvania, whose steep streets of row houses had been in my mind as I wrote. But the voice of the novel, and the cogency of its implied argument, had vanished in a hash of visual images and coarse simplifications. The movie often failed, it seemed to me, to make sense. For instance, in a central early episode, my hero impulsively gets into a car and drives away from his wife and his life; within twelve hours he gets lost somewhere in West Virginia and realizes he has nowhere to go but back to Pennsylvania. The basic movement, out and back in, was rendered in the movie by an unintelligible montage of speeding automobiles and highway signs; when I mentioned this muddle in a telephone conversation with the director, he admitted that, when they returned from Pennsylvania to Hollywood, they discovered they had no “night footage.” You make a film, of course, out of footage, and if in some sequences you have nothing but, in another phrase of his, “deplorable footage,” you use that, or else leave holes that only the author, let’s hope, will notice.
Since 1970, as of 1986, only television movies have been made of my stubbornly verbal works: two short stories, “The Music School” and “The Christian Roommates,” were produced for public television, and a two-hour film, given the title
Too Far to Go
, was fashioned from a set of linked short
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