(Stephen Elliott, Jennifer Gilmore, Jenny Halper, Eleanor Henderson, Cheryl Strayed) For many writers, having a novel or memoir optioned for film is a dream come true. But a book's adaptation to the screen is often as complicated as a writer's adaptation to the movie business. The authors on this panel, all of whom have had a book translated into film in the recent past, explore the losses and gifts of adaptation, offering insight about how best to stay involved throughout the experience, while also reflecting on the nature of narrative, art, and ownership.

Published Date: August 17, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:03):

Welcome to the A W P Podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2016 A W P Conference in Los Angeles. The recording features Stephen Elliot, Jennifer Gilmore, Jenny Halper, Eleanor Henderson, and Cheryl Stray. You will now hear Eleanor Henderson provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

Hello. Hi there everybody. Welcome to Adapting to Adaptation. Thank you so much for coming here and for choosing our panel to spend a little bit of time with. I'm Eleanor Henderson, and I'll be your moderator as well as a member of this panel. And in a few minutes I'll ask our other panelists to introduce themselves and their work in relation to the adaptations that they've been involved with. And because this is a panel about movies, I thought that it would be worthwhile to share a little bit of multimedia with you so that you can at least see the trailers of the movies based on the books by these authors to give you a little bit of context in case you're not familiar with 'em. So I wanted to do this panel in part for selfish reasons because while the author's experience of adaptation is a privileged one, it's also a very, very strange one and sometimes an alienating one.

Speaker 2 (00:01:29):

And I wanted to connect with other writers who've gone through that same initiation at the same time, it's no longer an entirely rare experience. More and more writers, at least it seems to me, are seeing their work adapted into, or at least optioned for film and increasingly also television. And it occurred to me that it might be useful to help create a kind of common guidebook for adaptation. The kind of advice and insight that I wish I had gotten at the beginning of this process. This might be a confusing or even contradictory panel because as far as I can tell, no two paths to adaptation are the same. And we on this panel represent a really dramatic range of experiences where novelists and memoirists satisfied customers and unsatisfied customers who have been involved with the production of our movies to varying degrees and who have felt both enriched and at times diminished by adaptation, sometimes both at once. But I hope that for all of its contradictions, this panel will give you greater insight into both how an adaptation gets made or not made and how to make the most of the experience as an author. So after we introduce ourselves, we'll talk about those questions and then we'll spend at least 15 minutes at the end on your questions. Okay. So Cheryl Stray probably does not need a lot of introduction, but I'll ask her to introduce herself.

Speaker 3 (00:02:45):

Oh, I'm on. Hi, I'm Cheryl Strad and my book Wild was Adapted for Film. So Wild was published in March of 2012, and it was completely done, copy edited, ready to go for more than a year before that. And so I had a lot of time to sort of sit around waiting for my book to come out. And a few months before it was published, I just had this idea like, well, I wonder if anyone in Hollywood would be interested in it. And very quickly, my literary agent put me in touch with a film agent, Sherry Smiley and Sherry Smiley said, Reese Witherspoon has just formed, she's come together with this producer, Bruno Pop, Andrea, and they are forming a production company with the explicit goal of finding books and stories that feature in Hollywood. They call them complex women.

Speaker 3 (00:03:37):

In my life, I call them women because I actually don't know one woman who is not complex, right? Nor do I know one man who isn't complex. But in Hollywood, those are still complicated women. And so I thought, well, I'm complex. And so here's my book. It was literally like a Friday and she was given an advanced reading copy of my book and she read it over the weekend. Monday morning, I was sitting in Portland, Pam Houston, my friend, the writer, Pam Houston was visiting me at the time and my cell phone rang and it was my agent and she said, Reese really wants to talk to you because she really wants to option the book for film. So we got on the phone soon after that and it was just me and Reese in an hour long conversation. I wanted to hear from her what she made of the book, what she understood about the book, and what a translation to film might look like.

Speaker 3 (00:04:35):

And we really just connected from the very beginning on a very personal level. And she promised me that she would honor the story. And I also from that very first conversation said, I want you to honor the story. I also want you to make. I understood that the film had to stand on its own two legs, that my book was my creation and the film would not be a performance of my book, but rather its own piece of art. And so the director and the actors and all the people who make a movie had to invest in it in that way. And that's what happened. So from there forward, we proceeded and I can later in the hour that we have, talk more about how then that went from that first idea, that first conversation to how the film actually got made. But I think I'll leave it at that for now.

Speaker 2 (00:05:26):

Okay, great. So I'm just going to play the short trailer of Wild so you guys have it fresh in your heads.

Speaker 4 (00:05:36):

If you're nerve deny, you go above your nerve. Emily Dickinson and Sheryl Strait.

Speaker 5 (00:05:48):

Oh my God, what have I done?

Speaker 6 (00:05:53):

I'm sorry. You have to walk a thousand miles just to

Speaker 4 (00:05:57):

Finish that sentence. Why do I have to walk a thousand miles

Speaker 7 (00:06:02):

Happy trail, Cheryl, turn away from the sun. You get lonely.

Speaker 4 (00:06:16):

I'm lonelier in my real life than I am out here.

Speaker 7 (00:06:18):

Fall off the

Speaker 4 (00:06:19):

Evelyn.

Speaker 8 (00:06:20):

Must've been some breakup,

Speaker 4 (00:06:21):

Huh? Breakup is sort of a shorthand. How much do I love you?

Speaker 7 (00:06:28):

I you God, I miss you.

Speaker 4 (00:06:31):

My mother was the love of my life.

Speaker 9 (00:06:37):

You are using heroin and you're having sex with anyone who asks

Speaker 7 (00:06:53):

What

Speaker 10 (00:06:53):

Did ever think about quitting?

Speaker 4 (00:06:54):

Only once every two minutes or so,

Speaker 10 (00:06:57):

I've quit a bunch of stuff, quit jobs, quit marriages.

Speaker 4 (00:07:01):

You regret any of them?

Speaker 10 (00:07:02):

I didn't have a choice. There's never been a time when there was a fork in my road.

Speaker 4 (00:07:08):

Here's some questions I've been asking myself. What if I forgive myself? What if I was sorry? What if I could go back in time? I wouldn't do a single thing differently. What if all those things I did were the things that got me here? Okay, Steven,

Speaker 8 (00:07:43):

I always get so I still get choked up when I see that

Speaker 4 (00:07:47):

You ever get it

Speaker 8 (00:07:48):

Choke you off. No. Yeah, yeah, always when I see that. And then also the first chapter of the book also always with the mom. Yeah. So I had what I came to realize later, it was actually a really unusual experience of having my movie made because I'm also in a weird position of knowing a lot of memoirs to have had their memoirs made into movies and Anthony Swafford, you, Nick Flynn, Tobias Wolf, Susan or all these people. So James Franco bought or optioned the rights to the Adderall Diaries when it first came out for $2,500. So not a lot of money for 18 months. It took a long time. It was his first book that he optioned. I made two movies before he finally made it basically to show him that it could be done quicker and the experience, it should have been really negative in a way because unlike all the authors I know who have had these movies made, I wasn't consulted at all.

Speaker 8 (00:08:47):

I mean completely shut out of the process. They were shooting the movie in my neighborhood and I was not allowed on set. Not just not invited, but not allowed, told I couldn't come on set. And I was like, okay, whatever your process is, whatever makes the actors comfortable. When they'd done shooting the movie, they were having test screenings or getting calls from people like, oh, I just saw your movie and a test screening. So I asked if they would like me to watch it and give them feedback. They're like, no, no, we don't think so. And then the movie itself was actually fairly, I mean it was not accurate to the book and in ways that I think actually took from the movie. But I mean I was just seeing this part the other day where James Franco was giving a reading from my book and it's like he's not even reading from my book.

Speaker 8 (00:09:35):

They rewrote the book that he's reading from, which is not necessary to the plot in any way. And it's so bad this book that he's reading from and people think he's reading from my book, my book's all about this weird relationship with my father and how we both had our own truth and the movie's all about one person's telling the truth and one person's a liar. And that's just how it is. Everything's real cut and dry. It should be this terrible experience. But actually it's been a great experience. I bought a house with the money that they gave me to make the movie. I've sold a lot of books and also it inspired me to write and direct a third movie, my own movie about James Franco making a movie about me. And it's not a mean movie. I mean I'm really not mad. I mean I can't even describe it, but inspiration is a huge gift. I mean, nothing has come out of the movie that hasn't been positive, even though I felt it was a very negative representation of myself. The experience has been only positive. Nothing bad has come from it, even in this weird, unusual way. So yeah, that's been my experience with having a movie made.

Speaker 2 (00:10:47):

So we'll show the trailer for the movie that Steven made at the end of our segment. But now I want to show the trailer for Adderall diaries, which is coming out next month. Is that right?

Speaker 8 (00:10:56):

It's out on video on demand already. Okay. You can find, but it's coming out in theaters next month. Okay.

Speaker 11 (00:11:10):

What happens to us makes us who we are. Wave to daddy. It's in the past. It doesn't mean you need to bury it. Just had a meeting with your publisher. We love the pages. Alright, I want to write a new book, true Crime scene. Write your sample wave of spinning things the way they want to. I came to see my son. Why? You obviously hate me. I was doing my best. You were hiding with your replacement family. That's not true. Remember this total, this Mustang. It's just not how I remember it because you have a convenient way of remembering things. All the anger, all the hatred, a hell of a drug. I'm going to scare you away. See me seem scared to you. My son, ladies and gentlemen, the storyteller. What a joke. You people are all fierce. You deserve to be played falling for this nonsense. A father does what he has to do to protect his children. If you understand that, you understand everything, you want to kill me so bad, come on heaven. Whatcha looking for it's a truth.

Speaker 2 (00:12:55):

Is it painful for you to watch that? Does it make you cringe or it's kind of cool.

Speaker 8 (00:12:59):

It's a little weird. I mean, they quote me, but it's like the quotes are always off by a few words and not quite elegant. I'm like, I don't understand why. But no, that was cool. Did FaceTime

Speaker 11 (00:13:08):

With your publisher?

Speaker 8 (00:13:09):

Did I really what? Did you FaceTime with your publisher? No, I did not. Really? I don't FaceTime with anybody. I don't even know how to FaceTime. The book wasn't the bestseller actually either. So that little,

Speaker 2 (00:13:21):

Even the blurb wasn't accurate.

Speaker 11 (00:13:24):

Well, it'll be,

Speaker 3 (00:13:25):

Now I know this isn't the subject of our panel, but I'm always curious about this. Everything's like a bestselling book and I'm like, really? Was it, what's the

Speaker 2 (00:13:35):

So my novel is called 10,000 Saints. It came out in 2011 and for a year or two I was talking with several different filmmakers, two different filmmakers. And their interests waned when they couldn't attach a studio to the project. So there was a promising moment where I was talking with Harpo Studios and the director Catherine Hardwick, and it looked like they would be able to make the movie and then they didn't. So I'd had a couple of times where I'd already become disappointed and learned that movies are hard to make in Hollywood. And then in late 2012, the filmmakers, Sherry Springer Berman and Robert Pelini, who are the director's screenwriter couple who did American Splendor, they optioned the movie along with Maven Pictures, which came along a little bit later in the process with Jenny and Archer Gray. And so I learned not to get my hopes up too high, but I had a nice meeting with them and sort of chatted about who we would want to appear in the movie, including Ethan Hawke.

Speaker 2 (00:14:34):

And then I didn't hear anything sort of radio silence for a year. And then somebody tweeted something, Haley Steinfeld set to star in 10,000 Saints. And I was like, oh, this is interesting. And five seconds later my phone rang and my agent filled me in and said, yeah, they're going to start filming next month. So from that point it moved forward very quickly and they were casting the movie very quickly. It filmed early in 2014 during a very snowy month in New York City and I was able to be on set and experience what I could of the production and then took another year or so to make the film in post-production and then premiered at Sundance last year and appeared in theaters last year. So that's my short story. There's the movie version and here's the trailer.

Speaker 11 (00:15:25):

Hey, what are you doing here? Guy come to kidnap you, taking you to the big apple. Why would I go with you? I'm offering you Manhattan champ. Don't play hard to get,

Speaker 7 (00:15:45):

Hey,

Speaker 11 (00:15:47):

Hey, you got any New Year's resolutions? Stop dating my dealer. Why would you do that with me? You get the whole package XM drop. How do you like it so far? New York music's great. What kind of music do you listen? Do hardcore straight ash. What does it sound like? Have you ever heard of punk Dar? I'm from Hey Johnny, it's June. We made it out of her mom. Buddy. You still play, don't you buddy? Ready? It's just some lyrics, true song he did about it. Girl, you seem so different.

Speaker 7 (00:16:34):

You're

Speaker 11 (00:16:35):

Pregnant, you're, you're just going to play father. Now I'm not judging. I mean, I met your mom in an orgy.

Speaker 7 (00:16:50):

Do you have

Speaker 11 (00:16:51):

Any idea what I'm going through? I dunno what to say. Maybe you do too and you just won't. It's all part of my master plan. These are tips that you need to learn on your way to manhood. Understood. Understood. This is about as far as I'll go. It's too dangerous. Oh, thanks dad. No, don't worry. You'll be fine. Shoot, run, run.

Speaker 2 (00:17:44):

I do like watching that still. All right, Jennifer.

Speaker 12 (00:17:48):

Hi. So for any of you writers out there who have had your books optioned, I'm like your usual experience, which is when I was supposed to be on this panel, we thought my movie would be made by now, but that has not happened. So I'll explain a little bit of the process. It's actually very unusual in a lot of ways. I'm a teacher and I had a student who kept showing up to one of my classes. She was a wonderful fiction writer and she looked like she rolled out of bed and would come to class late all the time. And it turns out she was this executive at Maven Pictures and she optioned my book before it came out. She said, I hear you have a book called The Mothers Coming Out about Adoption. We really want to do a movie about adoption. So that was kind of exciting and she worked tirelessly.

Speaker 12 (00:18:35):

And what's been unusual for me is that the players have been kind of the same from the beginning. Rachel Vice was signed on very early on and that was really exciting and wonderful. It's a novel that's a little bit autobiographical and I also write a lot of nonfiction about it that they're using. So it's a novel, but it's sort of interesting because it's a little bit about me as well. But in any case, and we had a screenwriter who came back with a script that was not necessarily the tone of the book and wasn't what I think Rachel Weiss had in mind. So she asked me to rewrite it and I rewrote it with Jenny. And that was really exciting and interesting and instructive. And so it's been going from there. And this was three years ago. And three years ago we had all the elements in place. We had a director, we had Rachel Vice, we had a script, and we had funding. And here we are. So I am confident that it will get made, but it hasn't happened yet. That said, it's been really interesting to be so involved with the process. I know that's kind of unusual in this. I think of it's not unusual.

Speaker 13 (00:19:44):

I think it's more unusual to not be involved.

Speaker 12 (00:19:47):

I don't know. I mean to be locked out of the set and not layers crazy. There are layers and it's been interesting to rewrite the script as well and be involved in that process. But yeah, more about what's going on with it than I do. So I'll turn it over to Jenny, who's also adapting her own stuff as

Speaker 13 (00:20:07):

Well. And it's actually interesting for me to hear all of your experiences and then to also hear that you didn't know about 10,000 Saints till it was till Haley Seinfeld a teen, which is interesting. So I work at a company called Maven Pictures. I've worked there for six years. I went to grad school actually for fiction writing, but I was also doing a lot of film journalism sort of at the point when film journalism was becoming more blogging. But I have always been super interested in adaptations. And the company that I work for is involved in projects both at the very end stage. So with Eleanor's book, there was a cast, there was a director, there was a script, and they needed some money. So we put in some money, we really liked the project. And then there are other projects where we come in very early on Jennifer's where I was a student of hers, and she had talked about the book a bit, and I thought that there hadn't been a movie about the adoption process that sounded the way Jennifer's did.

Speaker 13 (00:21:03):

And then I read her book, which was this really beautiful novel about this couple that are trying to adopt a baby and how the difficulties in that adoption process bring them closer together as a couple. And then also in addition to finding a child, really have their eyes open to race in class as they meet these different birth mothers. And I just thought that the idea of the adoption process as this terrain that is eye-opening and just very complicated, but also ultimately there's a lot of growth in this couple. And this main character was really fascinating. And so I am going to say it was about three years ago, I called Jennifer up and I think it was right before the book was published is the timeline. And I said that we were interested and then about six months later we got Rachel Vice attached, which was really exciting.

Speaker 13 (00:21:49):

And that essentially happened because I had sent the book to her English agent because I figured the Britts probably read faster and her agent had read it and loved it. And about a month after that, Rachel sat down with my boss and I was just so clearly passionate about the material and was very instrumental in kind of helping us decide what filmmakers we wanted to go out to, helping us decide which screenwriters. And it was kind of a great process and a learning process for me as well. But just really interesting to have somebody who's that talent and also just such a force in film really wanting to be involved in how do we take this book and make it into a movie. And then there's just a lot of twists and turns along the way. We had a filmmaker who was fantastic who ended up getting a studio movie.

Speaker 13 (00:22:33):

And so we were waiting for him and then we decided do we look at other directors? And then Rachel got another movie. And so she's very, very eager to do it. So we're waiting for her schedule to open up. So there's just a lot of things that can go and go wrong and go right and go wrong. And the process is a long one. I mean, I've always sort of likened it to having come from the world of prose, a perfect page of writing. You need every word. And to get a perfect movie, you need those many things to go, except there's usually a hundred decision makers. And so the chances are a little bit slimmer. So I mean, I guess that's essentially the road that we've taken. And we had a screenwriter who from her pitch had a great tone and she did a great job with the structure of the screenplay, but we just weren't getting it to the point where we wanted it to be.

Speaker 13 (00:23:23):

And so Jennifer and I worked together and I'm very proud of the script that we have and are talking to a couple of extremely interested filmmakers and hopefully shooting early next year. So that's my process on Jens. And then there's a short story that I've also been working on by an amazing writer named Laura Vandenberg that I had just loved forever and optioned it about two years ago and have a script that we've got an amazing Australian director attached to you and are looking to shoot that next April. And that was a different process and that I kind of just did it on my own and wrote the script. And so there weren't a lot of players involved until the script was done. It was going at it from a different angle. But I'm still horrified that you didn't know about 10,000 Saints. Well,

Speaker 2 (00:24:07):

I sort of didn't want to ask you just don't. For me, it was like after being disappointed a couple times, it was like, okay, nobody touch anything. Nobody don't pick up my phone. But I felt okay about it. I sort of felt like I was holding my breath and that knowing I am not quite sure if maybe knowing a little bit more might've been reassuring. And Sherry did tell me that Ethan was attached during that window, but still what did that mean? And I

Speaker 13 (00:24:31):

Think he had loved the book is what I heard that I think before the script came in, his wife was reading the book, his

Speaker 2 (00:24:37):

Wife had read the book, his wife had read the book. So I knew that there were some rumblings, but I didn't know that it was going to be a real thing. I didn't know the green light had happened. So I wanted to share a couple of quotes from other writers who have gone through this process as a way as sort of springboard for our conversation. And one of them is from Annie Pru who wrote Brokeback Mountain, the Short Story, which was adapted into a beautiful film. And she says it's an eerie sensation to see events you have imagined in the privacy of your mind and tried hopelessly to transmit to others through little black marks on a page loom up before you in an overwhelming visual experience. I realized that I as a writer was having the rarest film trip. My story was not mangled but enlarged here. It was the point that writers do not like to admit in our time film can be more powerful than the written word. So I'm wondering if you guys can relate to that idea of feeling your book enlarged?

Speaker 3 (00:25:35):

Yes and no. I think that the thing that literature does best is interiority. You get to be inside the mind of the character and you get to know things that only, I mean really, it's such a portal into another person's mind in life and in film. One of the challenges, I think, so I sort of skipped over, I didn't describe what happened to wild on the way to production, but Nick Hornby came on board to be the script writer. Reese and Bruna felt pretty passionately that they didn't believe that a writer should adapt her own memoir. They were really adamant that I was too busy to write the script anyway, but they even said, we wouldn't have hired you because they feel like you need some distance. So Nick Hornby came on and wrote the script, but I was really involved. I was given draft by draft and weighed in mightily along the way.

Speaker 3 (00:26:31):

And then once we had done the shoot, the director has sent me cut by cut of the film and we would have these long Skype sessions, not FaceTime, Skype, and talk about, I would tell him what I thought of the film. And that was one of the challenges is that because so much of wild is me telling you what I was thinking as I was walking along a trail, the challenge was how to convey that on the screen without it being diminished. And so I think the movie is in some ways larger. I think there's a way that you can see the natural landscape that I describe. It's hard to beat the film. You see those vast mountains and deserts and so forth. But on the other hand, when it comes to the emotional life, I think that while the film is deeply emotional, and I think it achieved a lot, and one of the most interesting things to me has been getting so much email from people who've only seen the film and not read the book, and that they have the same emotional response to the film as they do the book. They say the same things to me about the film as they do the book. So that's an achievement. But I do think that there's more to the story. I think if you want the whole story, you have to read the book. And so in some ways it was enlarged in other ways diminished by the film.

Speaker 8 (00:27:50):

I was asked to come into a meeting with James Franco about this movie, and I showed up and it was like these two students and he was calling in on a speakerphone and the speaker freak phone rang and said, okay, these people are going to make your movie. They're going to write and direct. I was like, students is a student film. I don't think the Adderall Diaries is as good as the book at all, but I do think that it's not uncommon. I mean, the Godfather is better, the movie is a lot better than the book and actually has a lot more. I mean, the Godfather is a terrible book, but then there's movies like the English patient where it's a great book and it's a great movie and they're entirely different. There's no relationship almost between the two. But also, I've written and directed two movies and I always had this idea that a script or a piece of writing was like a hundred, and then when you make it, it becomes a best case scenario. It's an 80 or an 85. It's always diminished. But once I started working with actors and you have the experience of an actor reading your line back to you and making it better than it was when it was written, and I just felt like my heart swell on my chest. I was like, oh, that's what love is. There's the most incredible experience. And you realize a movie can actually be significantly better than the writing that it's based on.

Speaker 13 (00:29:09):

I guess the one thing that I'll add is I think that the best adaptations are companion pieces to the book, and you want them to kind of exist together and be different. I think Wild is an incredible adaptation and feels like it captures the heart of your story, but it has differences and English patient too. And I think Room this past year did that really, really well. I think there are so many amazing adaptations that you're kind of richer from reading and seeing. And then just thinking about the differences in how they can coexist.

Speaker 3 (00:29:37):

I think that companion pieces, that's the way I think of, I mean, I love the movie and I think it honors the book, but I think that you're going to get a slightly different experience in age, for

Speaker 12 (00:29:46):

Sure. Well, I mean, I just want to say the thing about writing novels or memoirs, it's like all we have as prose writers is inner lives. That's what we can offer that the movie can't. And something like The Godfather, which is episodic of course, works better on film. So when you have something that's episodic and has an internal life, those can meet really well cinematically. But yeah, I think Red together is the perfect idea. But of course that doesn't always happen.

Speaker 2 (00:30:15):

There are a lot about package them, like cell cellophane package. You can buy both together,

Speaker 12 (00:30:21):

So then you can open up the package and throw out the book

Speaker 2 (00:30:23):

And watch. That's right, maybe. So this is from Column to Bean who just had his book Brooklyn Adapted for film. I loved this quotation. He says, writing is so tentative and slow. It begins as not there at all and then gradually appears. You always remember how close to disappearing it was, how frail watching performers making it solid has a strange and almost inspiring power. It seems to have survived.

Speaker 12 (00:30:51):

Lovely,

Speaker 2 (00:30:52):

And I really can relate to this quote as a fiction writer. And then I am wondering if the memoirs in the panel feel the same way because you have survived your people. But the idea that somehow film is a more enduring artifact of experience is interesting. I think that it must be eerie, different kind of eerie or surreal as a memoirist. There are two layers. There's a movie made about your book and there's a movie Made about Your Life, right? So does this still resonate for you?

Speaker 3 (00:31:22):

Yeah, I was interested in Annie Peru says how strange it is that you write these things and then there it is. It's in a whole different stratosphere of strange when it's not just based on your book, but it's your life. So Reese is walking around saying that she's Cheryl Strait and she's also, I was on the side and I'm standing five feet from this woman who's reenacting the biggest, hardest things of my life. She's actually reenacting the scene where Reese shows up at the hospital and her mom's dead, or my mom, or I don't know who anymore. We're like her. And it always makes me cry. It's really actually replicates my memory, my real memory of it. That's how I wrote it. That's how they played it. It's very direct and it's beautiful and unbearable and the most surreal experience of my life. And so there is a way too that by the time the Wild came out, because Wild Did Well as a book, and I was like, well, nobody's left to buy my book. But it turns out a lot more people see movies than read books. I'm sad to tell you. And it delivered me. It delivered this book, this story to a whole new audience of an international audience that is many times larger than the book already had. And so that was interesting and that's what I'm thinking about here. It's like that in some ways, a book survives endures throughout time, but there's a way in which a movie plants itself into your psyche. When people experience Reese as me, which is really interesting and strange,

Speaker 8 (00:33:02):

I think the thing about movies is you can't control them. It's like pushing water. Most of them are not any good at all. And you know what I mean when a movie like Brooklyn or Wild or Room, but you mentioned there are a thousand points where a movie can go wrong, A movie can be shot perfectly, acted perfectly, it's a great script. And then just be destroyed by the Sound editor and be a completely worthless artifact, and that will do nothing. And so just the opportunity for a movie to go wrong and be bad, it's amazing. And I think that's really just the majority of movies, not just memoirs made in the movies.

Speaker 2 (00:33:43):

Just one more, this is from Nick Flynn who Steven mentioned, and this reminds me of what you were just talking about here, Cheryl, about the surreal moment where you were watching Reese Witherspoon enact your own mother's death. So he's seeing something similar here. He's at a table read for the movie being Flynn based on his memoir, another Bullshit Night in Suk City and Robert De Niro and Julian Moore and Paul Dano are there, and they're also sort of reenacting this death. He says, day of the dead, dawn of the Dead. I sit off to one side pretending to watch myself pretending I'm here, but I'm not really my disembodied family risen from the grave sitting around a table laughing, fucking tower of babble. I'm nearly erased. I can really relate to this myself as a fiction writer to the experience of sitting in a room while other people are reenacting words that you've written, even though it was an entirely invented story.

Speaker 2 (00:34:44):

I have this memory of sitting in a kitchen on set, and there are all kinds of people running around him in this tiny room crammed with 30 people and catering and grips and assistants, and everyone is running around hairdressers and everyone is working so intently and the scene is being filmed again and again. It's like Asa Butterfield opening the door and Ethan Hawke answering the door. And they do that six or seven times. It's just this very simple scene. But I just had this crazy out of body moment where I thought, nobody can see me here. I don't need to be here, but no one in this room would be here if it weren't for me. And it was entirely inconsequential and also consequential to the process. So that was a very strange state to be in. It requires a lot of management of one's sense of self. So I can relate to that. I wonder if anyone else can that sense of erasure

Speaker 3 (00:35:42):

Or, it's interesting, I don't know if it's erasure or for me, it was like an amplification. So the adorable blonde little girl you saw in the trailer is my daughter. So she played me, she played the child, me and Witherspoon played the adult me. And so she got to play opposite Laura during my daughter, Bobby is named after my mother, Bobby. So Bobby was playing Cheryl and Laura was playing Bobby and Reese was playing Cheryl, and I am Cheryl, and it was very confusing. So my daughter was eight, and she wasn't just cast in this film, she didn't just get the role because she's related to me. She had to audition and she really wanted to do it. And I talked to her about it because I was like, there are going to be some scenes that you are having fun and happy with your mother, but there are going to be some scenes with my abusive father cursing at her and holding his fist up to her face and saying, do you want to knuckle sandwich?

Speaker 3 (00:36:41):

And I knew that there was both darkness and light obviously in my childhood, and she would have to act that out. And she was like, yes, I want to do it. But there we are on the set and we're in this freezing cold house and my daughter over and over again is having to sit at this breakfast table eating scrambled eggs. And this man is holding his fist up to her face and threatening her and saying, do you want a knuckle sandwich? And then he's chasing Laura Dern out into the night and she's gathering my daughter and this little boy who played my brother out, and they're running into the rain, and it really was absolutely freezing when we were shooting and they're running barefoot into the rain over and over again, and she's putting them into the car. And then my daughter is doctoring Laura's bloodied eye. And oh gosh, it was so hard to see that. And I was so worried about my daughter during these scenes. So every time the director would say, cut, my husband and I would swoop in and be like, okay, Bobby, this is just pretend. And the guy would be like, I'm really a nice guy.

Speaker 3 (00:37:46):

She also made an arrangement with it like, you fucking cunt, you fucking whore. And she's like, every time you say a swear word, you owe me a dollar. So at the end, he had to pay her all this money. So I kept saying to her, it's just pretend. And she finally was like, you guys I know know I'm an actress, it's pretend this isn't really happening. And she all but banned us from the set. But what was the beautiful moment is then when I knew my daughter was okay, suddenly it occurred to me in a really kind of bone shaking way that was my life that actually happened to me. That was not pretend and nobody yelled, cut. And that was really actually my life, and my daughter was showing it to me and I'd never seen it. So it was the truest thing. It was like the truest memory of my childhood. It was my daughter showing it to me. And what was strange about that truth is showing me that she didn't get to, she didn't have that life. Her life is different because of my life, and it was really a really unbelievably powerful thing.

Speaker 2 (00:39:03):

So I'm wondering, Jennifer, having had the experience now of working on your own screenplay, would you have made that choice from the beginning if you knew that you could ask for that privilege?

Speaker 12 (00:39:17):

I would like to say it's impossible to follow what Cheryl said with something remotely fascinating, but I'm going to try. Let's see, I think what Cheryl said before, or what Reese said to Cheryl about it, it's like organizing your own life is very hard to do in a book or organizing your story in a way. And then to do it with enough distance to say, this scene is what needs to be cut. This scene is what needs to go in. Because moments that I found I couldn't leave were the moments, of course you can leave no one caress about X, Y, and Z. So I found actually, and again, not as surreal at all, but sitting, we had a reading sitting around the table at Sting's house just as a side note, and all these people were reading the script that came in. And I was thinking, wow, that's like, and people were laughing at parts.

Speaker 12 (00:40:10):

I mean, the story is a little bit funny too, even as tragic as it is. And I was thinking, I didn't mean that to be funny. It was like there were so many good parts of the script, but it was like a rabbi and a priest say, I do. And it was things that you just didn't imagine. And I thought, okay, I'll just give myself over to it. I saw a Dr. O talk once and he said, just with Hollywood, take the money and run. And I was like, okay, not a ton of money yet, but I'll take it and run. But I'm here at this table at the same time. So I was very lucky to be invited into this profound conversation that went on for several hours that deepened things. And because of that conversation about the politics of adoption, about these issues of race and class, about my own personal experience and some of the horrible things that had happened to me, I think I was able to sort of layer what was already there. But I think from the beginning, I don't know if I would've ended up with as good of a script as we did really end up with.

Speaker 13 (00:41:05):

I think it's really good. I think the thing that is tricky about it is that it's this very complicated blend of comedy and drama, which is tough to get right. But also there's something that Jennifer's writing that has a very specific unique tone and it's hard to hit it. And at a certain point it was just kind of like, well, who's the person who can get that tone?

Speaker 12 (00:41:27):

It was funny, after this reading at Sting's house, I get this email from Rachel Vice and she's like, can I call you? And I'm thinking, sure. And then the phone rings and she's like, is it a bad time? I can call back? No, of course. So she was talking about the tone and she's like, when I read the book, that's not what I was feeling. So can we talk about tone? And it was really interesting. I teach writing and we talk about those things all the time, but tone matters so much to the experience of the viewer. I mean the experience of the reader, but also the experience of the viewer. I mean, seeing all these has been so moving in a lot of ways, but it's tonal. And so it's really important because, and the person who was acting as the director at that time, and this was also very illuminating, said at the end of this, I hope you don't kill me for saying this, but he said, I'm really seeing how bad this movie can be. So that was scary.

Speaker 13 (00:42:19):

But I do think it's building tone with images is so different than building tone with words. And I am curious too, Cheryl, actually, what your experience was working with Jean Mark Ballet because I think that the tone that he created was just magical. And I think mean, it's hard to know how one does that, but it's a feeling the way that the feeling of creating a tone on the page is, it's a different execution,

Speaker 12 (00:42:44):

But it's not saddle. I mean, just like your book, it can't be relentlessly sad anyway.

Speaker 3 (00:42:50):

Yeah, no. So Jean Mark Vale, right? I think he really got the tone. How many of you have seen the movie? Wild? So you see, wow. Okay, thank you. You should read the book too. But Jean Mark Vale, from the moment I met him, I knew we were kindred spirits. We have a very similar aesthetic, and he's very emotional and poetic. And did you notice how literary the film was? I mean, it was such a literary film. I mean, actually he's quoting all these writers and so forth. I love really, the trailer begins with Emily Dickinson. I love that. But also he was able to capture the emotional tenor of the book and use image. Not always just words, but really image and the way he did these Reese's Memory. My memories when I would remember being a child to remember the way he constructed those I thought was incredibly literary and tonally on point.

Speaker 2 (00:43:50):

I do think that adaptations tend to be somewhat funnier than books. I remember the screenwriter and directors telling me that they didn't want to make misery porn and that it would've been very easy for them to do that of my book. So yeah, I think that the tone does sometimes have to shift a little bit. Right, to accommodate a bit more. I'm wondering what choices writers have in this process. I mean, I'm hearing so many different kinds of experiences here, but because Rachel Weiss decided to call you up and say, Hey, do you want to write the screenplay? You were able to do that, right? Nobody called Steven and asked him to do that. Maybe he would've said, well, Steven's gotten

Speaker 12 (00:44:28):

A lot of other calls. I just want to say, yeah, I mean, you got to admit, I'm just saying it's not,

Speaker 2 (00:44:34):

But so do writers have choices in this process when someone calls you up and says, Hey, I want to make a film out of your movie. What can you say? But okay, are there choices? You can say No, that's the main

Speaker 8 (00:44:44):

Choice. You can say No. I mean, and people do. I think the authors that say no tend to be authors that have already made a fair amount of money,

Speaker 12 (00:44:53):

Or they're rich or

Speaker 8 (00:44:54):

They're rich. It's not really a seriously logical or reasonable thing to do. If you're making 20 grand a year or 30 grand a year, a little, just be kind of absurd. But I don't know. I was never going to be upset though with the movie that was made. I always understood that the movie is a different work of art. The author of the movie is the director and that they're making their own thing.

Speaker 2 (00:45:22):

You say in this piece that you wrote for Vulture, well, basically that you would do it again in a heartbeat, given the opportunity to do that again. Is there anything that anyone in the panel would've done differently given the opportunity?

Speaker 13 (00:45:39):

I mean, gosh, I don't know. It's hard to say because there are a couple of things that I think in kind of the development process with the original script, but at the same time, I think that we ended up with a real