Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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i8o Cinematically, there is the requirement of action, although that may be more of an American idea of film. That was the only way I could interpret what he was getting at each time, because if he just said the word story, then I would disagree with much of what he was saying he felt was missing. You have to have the character moving through each scene and getting more involved in whatever it is. You have to have the pressure building against the character. Which it certainly is for these girls, but not in such a calculatedly active way. The novel is more elliptical. JAMES BOSLEY The girl who is the narrator of the book, that's her role, to be the narrator of the events, but what they're feeling is you can't have a character in a film who is just the narrator. Yes, she's affected by events in the story, but she doesn't have a story of her own. What is her dilemma from the beginning that carries her through the plot to the climax? She doesn't have that one through line—that's another word they use—she doesn't have that one through line where the audience is wondering, "What is going to happen to her next?" There's not that major dramatic question the audience is asking throughout the film. And the obvious solution they came up with is, "The prisoner escapes and hides in a barn." LISA SHEA It certainly would be fun, financially and otherwise, to sell the rights to the book and treatment and have a movie made. So the question becomes, is there a way that you—or you and I—could come up with an idea that doesn't lose the integrity of what we started with? There might be a way of doing it, for the purposes of translating the story onto film. I don't really like to make it seem as though there are deficiencies in the book that need to be addressed. It's more the problem of translation from one medium to another. It may be satisfying in a novelistic form but it may not be satisfying in a filmic form. I think it also depends on the sensibility of the director as well. JAMES BOSLEY We could probably find an independent, low-budget director to do the story as we envision it. But we're not going to get the hundreds of thousands of dollars that we would get from . . . LISA SHEA (To the audience.) I've got to get my son through private schools! It has to happen. JAMES BOSLEY There's also the question of point of view. How much of the story don't we see in the book, because it's all from the little girl's point of view. We don't see anything of the parents' lives, other than what the little girl sees, and I made a commitment to keep it that way. Still she's the narrator, she's in every scene. LISA SHEA This is a treatment, but in my understanding of things, the treatment then gets fleshed out further in a script. JAMES BOSLEY With some adjustments, but this is basically the step by step, scene by scene, description of what the movie is going to look like. You brought up in our last conversation Sophie's Choice, that narrator who is that writer living downstairs from this amazing couple. That was a sort of hardly involved narrator, talking about these other people. One thing that carries the story is his love for Sophie. He's in love with her. LISA SHEA Did I bring that up? I don't remember. But I remember saying that all those roles that Jessica Lange has had where she wakes up, she puts on make-up, she walks out the door of a kind of busted-up apartment in a tiny little town, she walks to the end of the block to get something to eat, you see her in the diner, she knows there's a guy who kind of has a crush on her and she finishes her meal, maybe stops in the drugstore on the way back
home and then she puts the laundry out on the line and the whole movie will go along like that and then she wins an Academy Award. And I thought, well, they are saturating you with the essence of who she is more than what she does, so it is possible to make a movie like that. JAMES BOSLEY Well, if Jessica Lange is the producer of the movie, certainly it's a lot easier to do. In our position, we have to sell the idea of the movie. We have to do something to make people go "Wow." LISA SHEA That's how you have to pitch books too, I'm afraid. Publishers don't want to hear all of this languorous stuff. When I had to tell people what my book was about without their eyes glazing over, I said, "Hula is the story of two young girls growing up in the Sixties, and some of the more criminal aspects of their family life." Before that, my publicist was taking me to parties and saying this is Lisa Shea and her book is coming out and she'd go on for five minutes, blah, blah. And I finally took her aside and said, "This is what you have to say," and I wrote it out. Publishers don't want to have to hear too much. JAMES BOSLEY And filmmakers want to hear even less. LISA SHEA In the meantime, your agent has the treatment, my agent has a treatment, and there is a treatment circulating, so it will be 182 interesting to see what happens. What was that you said to me about someone from the office saying that J is more interested now in making European type films? What does that mean? JAMES BOSLEY I don't know. I don't know. I mean, after she just made I feel like if I could just get into her office and show her the book and show her the treatment, she'd love us. Blackout. End of ACT I. Adapted from an interview by KEN FOSTER and SAM SLOVES.
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Page 57 and 58: KAY RYAN Weakness and Doubt Failure
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Issue 27 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

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