Between 1975 and 1987 I was a film producer in Hollywood. My initial focus, and eventually my specialty, was developing screenplays. I worked with writers whose work grabbed viewers viscerally, not with explosions but with multi-dimensional characters that would draw you into a deeply moving story. I spent countless hours working out the stories and shaping the people in them. I worked with the following screenwriters, with some of their most famous works noted in parentheses: Frederick Raphael (Two for the Road), Alvin Sargent (Ordinary People, Julia), Andy Lewis (Klute), Joe Esterhas (Basic Instinct), Ron Bass (Rain Man), Stewart Stern (Rebel Without a Cause), William Wittliff (Lonesome Dove, Raggedy Man), Larry D. Cohen (Carrie, Ghost Story), etc. These writer’s film credits are for identification purposes with the exception of Raggedy Man and Ghost Story, as I did not work on these films.
I’ve just finished my sixth novel. All of them are character-driven thrillers. I love to write well drawn, complicated people who eventually are able to do unexpected things. I learned to do this from working on screenplays and studying movies. I’d like to describe one movie and screenplay that profoundly impacted me:
Klute — screenplay by Andy and Dave Lewis, directed by Alan Pakula, starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland, Andy and Dave were nominated for best original screenplay, Jane Fonda won for best actress.
People still argue about whether Klute is a thriller or a love story. The answer, I believe, is both, and it makes my point about character driven stories. In Klute, Jane Fonda (Bree) is a conflicted call girl trying to change her life. Donald Sutherland (Klute) plays a small-town police detective who is trying to find a missing man, a friend, from his town who was one of her clients. Eventually, the detective learns that his friend was killed, and discovers that the killer is stalking Bree. That’s the entire plot. What grabs you, makes you care viscerally in the outcome, and is finally deeply moving, is the growing, often ambivalent relationship between these two people. The director, Alan Pakula, is also very psychologically minded and between him and the writers, they manage to keep the tension, the frustration between them, even the angry clashes, grounded in their respective emotional realities.
Their evolving relationship is multi-faceted and at one point she fights with him and goes back to her pimp. By then, you’re routing for her getting together with this small town, soft-spoken, very smart and sensitive detective. By then, you’ve understood that she’s also very smart and becoming more and more self-aware as she struggles to get out of the call girl life. In the end, he saves her life when the killer attacks her. The final scene is her in her apartment, packing up to go with him back to his small town. There’s no certainty that they’ll succeed together, but the audience is hoping mightily that they will. The reason you feel that they have a chance is the way they’ve grown, learned, separately and together about each other and what they both know that they could have together. This self-knowledge is earned the hard way, and this hard-earned character development gives us hope for their life together. I did not work on the screenplay for Klute, but I worked with Andy Lewis on four other screenplays and in every single one he pays the same careful attention to the people.
Working with screen writers was a great experience. As a producer developing a screenplay, you learn to look for stories with strong, complex characters and a “rich stew” — that is to say a situation with conflict, emotional intensity, and the potential to evolve in unexpected ways. That is exactly how I approach the books that I write. I learned how to do that as a producer working on screenplays.
