Carver Country, Part 2

I sent Raymond Carver a VHS copy of the film but didn’t hear back from him. Maybe he was just busy. I didn’t want to contact him again and be further disappointed with no response. I also didn’t want to hear that he hated my film or was in some way offended by it. I decided not to agonize over what the silence represented.

During the winter of ‘88 I went to work in Manhattan on a low budget feature film called On The Make. I was a second assistant film editor and, later, assistant sound editor. There were a few interns working on the editing of On The Make. One of the interns was a film student working on his senior thesis film. It turned out that he had based his film on a Raymond Carver story. Not only that, he had also chosen "Why Don’t You Dance." It was beyond coincidence that two guys working together on some random B-movie editing in the dank bowels of Ross-Gaffney Editorial on 46th Street would choose the same short story to adapt. I had to ignore any higher implications beyond serving to remind me that my own finished film sat languishing in a film can in my bedroom closet.

We compared notes. He was shooting on video; I had shot mine with an Arriflex 16BL film camera. His rough cut clocked in at 20 minutes; my finished film time was 6 and a half. I had received permission from the author to adapt it, he hadn’t. I had cast my sister and her future husband; he had cast Eszter Balint, the actress best known for starring in the Jim Jarmusch film Stranger than Paradise.

But I had a finished film. And with other students nipping at my heels, I needed to take action. My next step was to find out who represented Raymond Carver to try to obtain commercial film rights to this story. It didn’t take much digging: she was a maverick agent representing many of the younger, exciting authors of the eighties: Donna Tartt, Bret Easton Ellis, Mona Simpson, and Jay McInerney, as well as Richard Ford, Toni Morrison, and Cormac McCarthy. Her name was Amanda Urban. Nickname: Binky. She was often mentioned when one of her authors was written about.

She worked at ICM, one of the largest and most powerful agencies in the country. I called her New York office on a weekday morning from the On The Make edit suite. An assistant answered, asking who I was and what this was in regards to. I gave my info and was told that Amanda Binky Urban was not in and that I should call back that afternoon. I called back later that day and I left my information again.

“I’ll give her the message,” the assistant told me.

I was beginning to be the fly in Binky’s appointment book. She would eventually have to talk to me. I called again the next day and left a message. That afternoon, after I returned from lunch, the assistant film editor told me Amanda Urban had called. I immediately called her office back. After being on hold for a minute, Binky came on the line.

“Hello?” she said.

“Hello, is this Amanda Urban?” I said.

“Yes. What is it?”

It took me a couple seconds to register that I was talking to the woman I’d been trying to contact for the past few days. I shook it off and said, “I’ve been trying to reach you regarding the film rights to a Raymond Carver story. I’m a film student and he gave me permission to adapt 'Why Don’t You Dance.'"

“He did.”

“Yes.”

“But not commercially.”

“Right. That’s why I’m calling—” I should have just laid it out in black and white: I’m calling because I need your blessing so I can sell this puppy to cable or some late-night special on NBC. To be honest, I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do with it. It was my calling card, but I wanted it to have a life beyond an erstwhile film student’s reel.

“Oh no. No. All those stories are sold.”

“So nothing can be done commercially with…”

“Correct. Is that all?” She was not interested in helping me with the rest of my problems that day, but only in ending this non money-making conversation.

I said no, and hung up.

That’s an approximation of our conversation. I had my answer: Raymond Carver, or rather his agent, had sold the rights to his stories. At least to "Why Don’t You Dance." I wondered who else wanted to make this into a film. How many filmmakers had the same idea? And why weren’t we just writing our own stories?

I continued work on On The Make through July of 1988. My last week of work was the first week of August. I was living in Fairfield, Connecticut and commuting into Grand Central on the Metro-North commuter rail. Each morning while waiting for the train I bought a medium regular coffee and a glazed donut at the Dunkin’ Donuts kiosk on the platform. Occasionally I bought the New York Times.

One morning after boarding the train I sat sipping my coffee, reading the paper, and about half-way into the city (probably around Cos Cob) I came across an obituary for Raymond Carver. He had died of cancer on August 2nd. He was 50.

Urban had sold many of his stories to filmmaker Robert Altman, who went on to direct Short Cuts. It was a long and difficult film to watch. Nothing joyful about it. The characters were unlikable, ditsy, and in many ways, mean. Carver wrote about hard-working people. Smart people with problems making stupid choices. In Short Cuts, Altman chose to connect these stories, letting his actors traipse around Los Angeles (anti Carver country), acting like shrieking morons in perpetual arrested development. Would Carver have wanted this?

A search of Raymond Carver on the online Hollywood database IMDb reveals that, in 1988, a short film called …They Haven’t Seen This was directed by the screenwriter of The Elephant Man and Frances. It was based on "Why Don’t You Dance." 1988 was a big year for that story. Many of Carver’s stories have been adapted, some in other countries (Nos veremos mañana and C'était le chien d'Eddy anyone?), and many after Carver’s death, including "So Much Water So Close to Home" and "Cathedral."

I had wanted to use Carver’s story because it was visual, short, a little weird, and, to me at the time, straightforward. He was just being nice when he gave me his permission. He was probably flattered that someone out there, especially a student, liked his story enough to commit time and money to adapt it. I’ll never know if he ever saw it. At six and a half minutes I tried to achieve the story’s simplicity. Carver may not have agreed. But, at three hours, I don’t think Short Cuts was what he had in mind either. Upon rereading I see how rich his stories were.

In the end, my film’s biggest achievement was that it was finished. If Carver did see it, along with the other short films based on his work made before his death, I hope he appreciated mine if only for its brevity and economy.

Carver Country, Part 1

I attended film school in the 1980s. Months before I was to graduate, I still hadn’t completed a script for my senior thesis film. Under pressure, I started writing a script about a dead woman’s friends, family, and ex-boyfriends gathering at her funeral. At the end of it one of her boyfriends hangs himself in the funeral’s viewing room. Nice dramatic tension, right? But I didn’t know what happened in the middle. Why did the guy hang himself? Was the woman an angel? A whore? Or just misunderstood? Who wants to watch a film where people stand around a funeral home talking about a dead woman? I realized how severe and self important the story was. Chalk it up to too much Bergman on an impressionable film student’s brain. What I thought was plump with drama and full of yummy Bergmanesque symbolism was entirely over-the-top and would play poorly on film. I put the script in a drawer and forgot about it. That left me with no script.

I was behind on credits and didn’t graduate that spring. I had to attend school for an extra semester to rack up enough credits to graduate. The pressure of having to make a film was pushed until the fall. Meanwhile, I tried to think of an existing short story on which I could base a film. I kept coming back to a film I made during my first year of film school. It was based on a Raymond Carver story "Why Don’t You Dance?", about a young couple that stops at a yard sale. At first nobody is around so they browse the items set out in the yard. Finally, a man comes out of the house and offers them a drink. Turns out this older man is going through a divorce, and decides to sell off all his stuff. The man plays a record and says, “You can dance if you want to,” then ends up dancing with the young woman.


I always loved that this guy put all his stuff for sale in his yard, trekking it out and setting everything up just like it had been in his house. The double bed with his and hers matching end tables. The TV in front of the sofa. I always liked that Carver’s stories were easy to read, about working class couples in relationship trouble; people that I could vividly picture. Although I didn’t always understand his stories because I hadn’t yet been in a serious relationship, and the world of adults was still a mystery.

But my film adaptation was not meant to be an Ingmar Bergman riff. Fellini had not been inspired by the spare prose of Carver. Godard, Wenders, and Antonioni had certainly not spent late nights getting soused to What We Talk About When We Talk About Love. Carver was purely American, steeped in the ideals and places and experiences that a European filmmaker like Bergman couldn’t touch.

For my earlier, silent black and white version of "Why Don’t You Dance" I had cast my sister, her friend (both were actors), and my father. I shot it when I went home for a long weekend. I was camera operator, director, grip, and best boy: a true auteur. I did it all with a Bolex 16mm camera. No dialogue, so I included an atmospheric Brian Eno song on the soundtrack. It was well-received by my instructor.

So when I couldn’t come up with an idea for my senior thesis film, I turned again to Raymond Carver and "Why Don’t You Dance." I felt I hadn’t done the story justice the first time around. If I had a budget and a crew and a dolly shot or two and color film and synced sound, I could make a better film. Senior thesis films were a film student’s business card, resume, and portfolio. To legally exploit the film after it was completed I needed the author’s permission.

I browsed reference material in the university library and found Raymond Carver’s address in Port Angeles, Washington. I sent him a letter in the spring of 1986 typed on my manual Smith-Corona asking him if I could adapt "Why Don’t You Dance" into a film. I had no idea if the address was current and, if he received it, whether he would reply.

A month later I received a letter from him in my school mailbox. I kept the letter:


I was so shocked, I got a friend to open it and read it to me. Carver wrote that I could adapt his story and he wished me luck. He also said that if I ever wanted to do anything commercially with the film I was to contact his agent. He didn’t give his agent’s name. I wrote him back and thanked him, asking if he would be interested in seeing a finished copy of the film. He replied a month or two later on an index card. He said yes, he would be very interested and pleased to see the finished film.

Making a film is a long, arduous, and expensive task. Finishing a film can be impossible. I shot the film using a full student crew. I cast my sister again, and her new boyfriend, who was also an actor. They played the young couple. I found a seasoned actor at a regional repertory theater to play the man who was going through a divorce. I shot the film in the fall of ’86. That December, when I should have been graduating, I was still editing the film. My university transcript for that semester included an incomplete grade.


Over the next year, when I had time and money, I edited the film. When I was finished with that, I booked a sound mix, had the negative cut, and the final print of the film was struck. As a finishing touch, I had the print transferred to 1 inch, ¾ inch, and ½ inch videotape. Some of the student films I had crewed on were never finished. Some got finished and went on to win awards. Mine was just done and in the fall of ’87 I finally had a passing grade.
To be continued...

A Writer’s Education, Part Deux: On Becoming a Novelist

So. How did I continue to produce pages without getting derailed by my perceived shortcomings as a writer? Advice from pro authors and from careful amateurs. I read published novels that had been edited and proofed by professionals. And I had trustworthy readers pore over my drafts and mark them up for me. The more I read and wrote, revised and corrected, the greater my confidence grew.

Soon after I started writing I picked up a book that would become invaluable to my early efforts: John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist. John Gardner, who died at age 49 in 1982, was a celebrated novelist and writing instructor. Raymond Carver, one of his former students, wrote the book’s forward. In the book, Gardner discusses, among many other topics, the education of young writers. I was relieved to read that it was okay to not go to college for writing. In fact, the way he made it sound, it was almost preferable that I was busy living my life and earning the experiences that I would eventually get busy writing about. His words were a validation of the way I was living as a writer.

I still have my original copy of On Becoming a Novelist. Instead of highlighting the pages of interest, I used scraps of paper as bookmarks. Many are still there. I marked a section about combating self-doubt and self-consciousness. Gardner served up a crash course in being true to the fictive dream and not just writing to sell. He introduced me to the idea that you can either write for publication (which, in his estimation, wasn’t a hard goal to achieve) or become a serious novelist. In other words, “…a dedicated, uncompromising artist, and not just someone who can publish a story now and then.”

As with any how-to book, some pieces of advice stuck, and some rolled away for someone else to pick up. But when Gardner wrote about a “quality of strangeness” in all great writing, this sounded like a clue to something I needed to strive for. “There come moments in every great novel when we are startled by some development that is at once perfectly fitting and completely unexpected—for instance, the late, surprising entrance of Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, Mr. Rochester’s disguise in Jane Eyre,…” I tapped into this advice as early as I could; the idea that a piece of writing could be great, could transcend. That image is what I keep out there in front of me, the reward that urges my writing, keeps me revising and fussing, worrying my drafts into what I someday want to realize as sublime versions of a specific truth.

Around the time I found On Becoming a Novelist, I had an opportunity to talk to a real author on the phone. It came about like this: My father was a used book dealer on Cape Cod. One of his summer customers was William Hanley, a published novelist from the late 60s/early 70s who had gone on to make a living in TV, winning an Emmy and such. My father was kind enough to ask Mr. Hanley if it wouldn’t be alright to have his aspiring-novelist son give him a call and seek some advice. Mr. Hanley was kind enough to agree.

I got through to him at his Long Island home. I imagined the Jaguar I knew he drove parked out front, next to the four-car garage and the servant’s quarters. Mr. Hanley was gracious over the phone, giving practical advice like when sending chapters to an agent, send consecutive chapters. He admitted he no longer had contacts in the publishing world and couldn’t help there. He conveyed that, from his experience, writing was a long, hard road. Not an easy way to make a living. Don’t expect to. He wistfully wished me good luck. I hung up and wondered if it was easier to dole out advice from the far end of Long Island than receive it in a three-family dump in greater Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Gardner said, “One has to be just a little crazy to write a great novel.” I’d add that to be an honest writer, or to be any good at all, you need to keep your id tapped and ready. Maybe your id is your adolescent self, a youthful yet world-wise doppelganger that doesn’t allow clichés to touch paper, constantly scanning your pages for vague language and passive voice, maybe she alerts you to crummy dialogue and overuse of the word Suddenly. Needless to say, I’ve continued writing. And while I have only a few publishing credits, I’ve chosen the middle ground: fighting to stay true as a creative writer while trying to get published.