Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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gave me, which was "Never throw cold water on hot directors.
Let them be as interested as they are going to be with all the ideas
that they have and. . .you know you need the money."
There are degrees of faithfulness, and I think your treatment is
faithful in spirit.
JAMES BOSLEY
I didn't invent any new elements that are so drastic, but at the
same time, I understand where they are coming from with the
prisoner subplot. There's an old saying in the theater, "You never
introduce a loaded gun in act one if you're not going to fire it by
act three." And the prisoners are in a way a loaded gun.
It would be very tempting dramatically to move them into the
story, to move them into the garage. So we're fighting for more
subtlety. The producer's whole thing is "story," and it's the
challenge in such a book of perception. It's a story about growing
awareness of someone who's young and innocent but is surrounded
by corruption. Her whole family is corrupted and rotting at the
core, but it's about her perception of that. Perception is not a visual
thing, whereas film has to be very visual. Trying to make that
subjective story objective has been a challenge.
LISA SHEA
Typically, the director has not read the book and does not
want to read the book, but he's read the treatment—which he
adores—and in your realigning of events, the convicts appear in
the beginning and in the book they appear towards the end. In
the book, they move closer to the house throughout the chapter
in which they are contained, but in the script, they appear at the
beginning and they continue to advance closer and closer to the
house.
JAMES BOSLEY
In their opinion, this growing threat never pays off.
The climax of the book is when the father shoots the gun off
vaguely in the wife's direction and drives off, and the girls and
their mother gather their things and leave. In my version, they're
escaping in the car, and they are stopped by the chain gang,
because they are working on the road, and while they are waiting,
the father is in his car getting closer and closer, and he's wearing
his gorilla mask, which he wore in an earlier scene. Whenever he
gets too blown away, he puts this gorilla mask on. So he's in this
car right behind them and they've stopped at the chain gang. The
guard knows the mother, because she drives by this chain gang
every day. And the guard kind of flirts with her in this mild way.
Then he waves them on, but he stops the father's car and sort of
helps them escape. So they do play a role.
I had to condense the book down to a hundred pages, and I
think one of the reasons the director should read the book is to
get a sense of how the details tell so much of the story—what the
girls' totems are and the sort of amulets to ward off evil around
them, and how they put themselves in this bubble of play, even
though it is cruel play . . .
It's ritual play.
LISA SHEA
JAMES BOSLEY
And so much of their "amulets," the old dolls clothes and the
dog and these little bits of their lives—I mean you can't put every
bit of that into a treatment. You just have to tell the story as sparsely
as possible.
The WAITRESS appears, delivering food and refilling the water glasses.
She lingers silently over the table for a beat, then exits stage right.
LISA SHEA
When I spoke to the director and in talking to you too, this
word "story" has grown to the size of an elephant. We're all sort
of using it for our own purposes. When I spoke with the director,
my impression was that every time he said the word story, he was
talking about action. You can certainly tell a story in a novel
without there being a lot of action. You don't need action to tell
a story novelisitcally.