Patrick McGilligan (ed),
Backstory 4: Interviews with screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0 520 21518 0
424pp
US$24.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

This latest of McGilligan’s useful and distinguished series of screenwriter interview collections is loosely themed around writers of a certain period of American studio cinema history, as its predecessors have been: Backstory: Interviews with screenwriters of the Golden Age; Backstory 2: Interviews with screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s; Backstory 3: Interviews with screenwriters of the 1960s). The 1970s and 80s were a particularly dynamic period in Hollywood for filmmakers in general and screenwriters in particular. The first decade began by expanding on the opportunities generated by significant 1960s events: the major studios, no longer stand-alone film factories, became service providers instead, and the services they provided were production facilities, experienced personnel, upfront production money, and distribution guarantees. Their clients for these services were the plethora of independent film companies filling the film supply vacuum created by this shift in studio business strategy. A new generation of filmmakers found the latitude and the backing to expand the boundaries of (post-) Hollywood filmmaking. And as screenwriters were no longer salaried employees but freelance entrepreneurs, their world changed fundamentally: in this period, the possibility of the screenwriter as star emerged, which – one way or another – is part of the story each interviewee in this book tells.

As the second decade drew to a close, another tectonic industry shift had taken place, a conservative one which considerably narrowed the freedoms enjoyed in the 1970s and resulted in the Hollywood filmmaking policies that persist today. This is also a part of each interviewee’s account. While the first Backstory refers to screenwriters of the Golden Age, that golden age was one of studios, not writers; Backstory 4 is about the golden age of the screenwriter.

McGilligan conducted five of the interviews (probably the best of the lot – he’s a very skilled and responsive interviewer); the others fell to various experienced hands. The interview subjects are: Robert Benton; Larry Cohen; Blake Edwards; Walter Hill; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Lawrence Kasdan; Elmore Leonard; Paul Mazursky; Nancy Meyers; John Milius; Frederic Raphael; Alvin Sargent; and Donald E. Westlake (in his introduction, McGilligan notes that not all the screenwriters approached for the book agreed to be interviewed, which should at least slow down carping about why isn’t Paul Schrader or Robert Towne or whoever else included). Of these thirteen interviews, nine had been previously published elsewhere; two are noted in the “Permissions” section as having been updated. Dates for the actual interviews are not provided; some may be roughly deduced from original publication dates (earliest: 1990; latest: 2004), others from internal textual evidence (that is, what is the date of the last of the subject’s films discussed in the interview?). An advantage of this fifteen year spread is that readers can speculatively correlate the date of the interview with the particular state of the industry at that time. The book concludes with a “Bibliographic Notes” section which selectively lists other significant interviews, profiles, etc. of the thirteen screenwriters.

Interviews (as I discovered managing a large oral history project for the American Film Institute 1969-1971) are slippery, subjective – to be sure – and often self-serving. These are rarely problems in this collection. This is partly because McGilligan edits interviews very well, and partly because writers are particularly articulate people who have had to think about their situation in the industry and its changes, and partly because they either have always had or have come to have with age a generous understanding of the complexity of motives, career imperatives, public image, and other needs of those they work with (see Larry Cohen on working with Bette Davis at the end of her career). Most of these writers went to university, but not to film school (they were mainly lit majors), two or three began as actors (Edwards; Mazursky), a few established themselves as either literary or popular writers before writing for the screen (Jhabvala; Leonard; Raphael; Westlake), and a common element of each interview is how they came to be screenwriters.

This is a book for readers interested in screenwriting and/or Hollywood filmmaking during the stipulated period. A bonus is that of the thirteen writers interviewed, over half of them (eight) became what were called at the time “hyphenates”: writer-directors, a phenomenon not new to the 1970s/1980s, but one which increased significantly in the period. In these interviews, the writers not only talk about working with directors, but about becoming directors themselves and how they negotiated both roles. Particularly good on this are Robert Benton (informative about New York film culture and the arrival of art film theatres and auteurist culture), Larry Cohen, Blake Edwards, and Lawrence Kasdan.

For me, there is an epiphanic moment toward the end of the last interview. Donald Westlake, prolific crime fiction book writer whose work in that area has frequently been bought for film and who has done some screen adaptation work as a consequence, is talking about working on Stephen Frears’ adaptation of Jim Thompson’s novel, The Grifters, and begins discussing the importance of sharp, effective, and economical dialogue. Westlake (380) illustrates with an example, not from a film, but from one of his Parker series of ”novels of violence” (as they were marketed for awhile), Butcher’s moon (the series began with The hunter, which became the film Point blank (US 1967); the series was written under one of his pseudonyms, “Richard Stark”). Westlake says:

I have to tell you my favorite Richard Stark line. In one of the books, Parker [the career criminal hero of the series] is being bedevilled by somebody. A message is brought to him [by an ambitious junior executive of the local mafia who have stolen Parker’s money and won’t give it back to him – that’s the message]. Parker gets annoyed. The guy who brought it to him says, ‘I’m only the messenger.’ Parker shoots him and says, ‘Now you’re the message.’

This has been my absolute favorite Donald Westlake passage, and now it turns out that it’s his too. For all those years, I’ve been using it as a crude but useful example of basic semiotics and their problems. See what else can be found in McGilligan’s collection of rich conversations.

Rick Thompson
LaTrobe University, Australia.