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International Best-Selling Author
David Morrell
(photo courtesy of David Morrell) |
Last month I had the chance to
talk with best-selling author David Morrell.
After discussing his latest book Murder
as a Fine Art and its forthcoming sequel Inspector of the Dead, our conversation turned to his early
influences. (Be sure to read part one if
you haven’t already.)
Television, Hollywood, and art of Turning Novels into Movies
Read any book of David Morrell’s and you’ll likely come
across a foreword, afterword or author bibliography that begins with the story
of Morrell’s early inspiration found in the television show Route 66 and one of its creators and
head writer, Stirling Silliphant. The
series was about two young men in a Corvette convertible as they traveled
across the country in search of America and themselves.
“I was 17 and aimless when Route 66 premiered,” he admitted. “I had a troubled childhood. My widowed
mother was forced to put me in an orphanage for a while because she couldn’t
work in a factory and take care of me at the same time. When she remarried, my
stepfather turned out not to like children. He and my mother argued a lot. Afraid, I used to sleep under my bed. As I
grew up, I spent most of my time watching television—sometimes 10 hours of it a
day. My high-school principal told me that I’d never amount to anything. Then I
happened to watch the first episode of Route
66, and it showed me what life could be like if you wanted to bust out (to
use a favorite expression from the series) and make life your own instead of
surrendering to it.”
Morrell was not just drawn in to
watching a television show. He was drawn
to the writing, and the man who did the writing—Silliphant.
“It had an amazing mix of action
and ideas. I sent a hand-written letter to him (thanks to a librarian who found
the address for Screen Gems, the series’ distributor), telling him that I
wanted to be him. He sent me a two-page
typed letter in return, encouraging me, and I was on my way.”
Out of that initial
correspondence, they eventually became friends.
“We exchanged more letters over
the years. I sent him congratulations when he received a 1968 Oscar for
adapting John Ball’s novel, In the Heat
of the Night. When my debut novel, First
Blood, was published in 1972, he phoned me to tell me how thrilled he was.
But we didn’t meet until 1985, during the height of the Rambo phenomenon. He
was working on the miniseries for James Michener’s Space at the time. I happened to see a TV piece about the
historical highway Route 66. It featured a clip from the series. On impulse, I
phoned the Writers Guild and asked them to contact Silliphant and gave them my
phone number. He called me a half hour later and suggested that I spend the
Fourth of July weekend with him. So I flew to Los Angeles, and he introduced me
to his family. He showed me the places where he used to live. At one point, we
went to Malibu and had a photograph taken by his wife, Tiana.”
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David Morrell with Stirling Silliphant in Malibu
(photo courtesy of David Morrell) |
This was only a few years before
they would collaborate on the mini-series Brotherhood
of the Rose.
“My espionage novel, The
Brotherhood of the Rose, was published the year earlier. It was the first novel to combine the British
and American espionage-novel traditions. Stirling took the book to NBC, who
bought it as a miniseries. I did four drafts
of the script. Stirling did one. Someone else finally got the credit. (That’s
how television works.) It was the only
miniseries to be broadcast after a Super Bowl, and Stirling was the executive
producer. Working with him was the highlight of my writing life.”
In his short story collection Nightscape, Morrell based a character in the short story “Front
Man” on Silliphant. Morrell explained:
“When Stirling was in his 60s, he didn’t get as much work as
he once had, because TV networks thought he was out of touch with the culture
because of his age. When he went to pitch an idea to a network executive, his
agents warned him not to bring a list of his hundred credits, because no one
would believe his amazing productivity.
Anyway, I used the anecdotes he told me about his meetings with
executives. I combined them within my own weird meetings (a barefoot
twenty-something executive swinging a golf club in a tiny putting green in his
office), and “Front Man” was the result, about an aging screenwriter who hires
a young writer to front for him, with disastrous consequences. It’s a primer
about the negative aspects of the business.”
Weird meetings?
“I went to the office of a woman who was the head of
production at a major studio. She was just under five feet tall. She sat on the edge of her desk and indicated
that I should sit on a nearby sofa. As I
sat, I realized that the sofa had no springs. I sank until my backside was
literally on the floor. In that fashion, she was able to tower over me for the
meeting.”
He continued to talk about the movie-making process, and I
would have to say that while it was fascinating to me, it was both funny and
discouraging. A case in point was his
sotry about the efforts to make a film version of his book The Fifth Profession.
“It’s funny in retrospect. I should add that more than half
my novels have been optioned by studios or sold outright, but it takes a
miracle to get a picture made. Too many
people need to share the same goal, but directors and actors come in and out of
favor, and packages of talent keep falling apart. About The Fifth Profession, there were numerous screenplays, none of
which I wrote. One of them depicted black-clad ninja warriors descending ropes
into an extinct volcano that had been turned into a rocket-launching site. This nonsense wasn’t in my novel. I warned the producers that they risked a
possible lawsuit from the producers of the James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, which used the same
ending. The producers had no familiarity with that film. As they told me,
‘That’s a Sean Connery Bond movie. We’ve never seen the Connery films. We’ve
only ever seen the Roger Moore ones.’ In the end, the picture was never made,
but the screenwriter stole the central plot element and used it in another
film. It wasn’t blatant enough for me to sue him, but he definitely stole.”
I was even more intrigued when he told me Pierce Brosnan was
scheduled to be in the adaptation of his novel Burnt Sienna.
“When Pierce was James Bond (odd how the character shows up
here), MGM optioned that novel for him, partly because the novel is a thriller
about a painter and Pierce is a painter who wanted to feature some of his work
in the film. But then the screenwriter
turned it into a horror movie about a painter whose work predicted the future
(which isn’t in my novel). Then Pierce stopped being James Bond, and MGM lost
interest in the project.”
“Does this drive you crazy?” I asked him.
“It’s show business. By its nature, it’s unpredictable. But
I had a great relationship with Carolco, the company that made First Blood and the first two Rambo
sequels. And I had a great relationship
with NBC’s miniseries department. Also I loved working with Laurel
Entertainment when I did a script for their Monsters
series. One of the projects that I
really regretted not reaching the screen was an adaptation I did of Michael
Palmer’s The Sisterhood that Laurel
Entertainment was going to produce. When
my schedule got weird, the producers actually flew to Iowa City where I then
lived rather than asking me to come to a story conference in New York.
Unfortunately the novel became lost in a rights issue, with another studio
claiming involvement and the film never got made. But the experience of working on it was
wonderful. Currently I have three books
in development, Creepers, The Brotherhood of the Rose (for a
feature), and Murder as a Fine Art
(for a TV series). There are so many variables in getting a picture made that
I’ve learned not to have expectations. And then, of course, there’s the risk
that the finished films will be poorly made. In the end, I can control what
goes into my novels, whereas the movies are in the hands of Fate.”
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David Morrell and Sylvester Stallone
(photo courtesy of David Morrell) |
Donald E. Westlake, Sinatra, and Irons in the Fire
I had once read that Morrell knew
Donald E. Westlake. I’m a big fan of
Westlake’s work, which includes his hard-boiled detective novels as well as his
hilarious crime-caper novels featuring John Dortmunder, the hapless New York
thief. I asked him how they’d met.
“In 1968, I was a graduate
student at Penn State. My fiction-writing teacher was Phillip Klass (pen
name—William Tenn), who had an agent named Henry Morrison. Morrison also represented Westlake. Klass had bought a house near Penn State, and
Morrison and Westlake drove out from New York City for a house-warming party.
At the party, Klass introduced me to them, told them that I was working on a
novel (First Blood), and then
suggested that they let me tell them about it. So in the middle of this
housewarming, party, the first pitch I ever did, I had to sit down on the
stairs with people going up and down to the only bathroom and I described First Blood. Morrison asked Westlake,
‘What do you think?’ Westlake answered, ‘I think it’s a helluva idea.’ Morrison
said ‘I think it is too. David, you have an agent.’”
Westlake ended up reading the
first draft of First Blood and passed
along some advice.
“At that time, I was still
learning about structure. I began the novel, wrongly, with a chase scene in the
middle of the plot. I figured that I ought to start with action, but as
Westlake pointed out, the reader didn’t know anything about the characters and
hence couldn’t feel involved. I restructured the novel and began with the first
time that Rambo and the police chief meet.”
Did they ever meet again?
“Every couple of years, most memorably at a Mohonk mystery weekend that he organized in upstate New York. He invited several of his author friends, including me, Brian Garfield, and Justin Scott to be guest speakers. He was the funniest man I ever spoke to. No one ever spoke more amusingly or more wisely about writing than he did. In October, the University of Chicago Press will release a collection of his non-fiction, The Getaway Car, in which he talks about his approach to writing.”
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| A real treasure supplied by David Morrell for this interview: The Mohonk Mystery Weekend organized by Donald E. Westlake. From left to right: David Morrell, Donald E. Westlake, Justin Scott, Alice Turner, Christopher Newman, and Brian Garfield on the far right. Newman is the author of the Joe Dante police thrillere. Scott is a veteran writer who is now co-writing with Clive Cussler. Garfield, who got his start cranking out westerns, is best known for his novel "Death Wish", the book that started the film franchise of the same name. At the time this picture was taken, Turner was the fiction editor for Playboy magazine. |
Just as I was surprised to learn
that Morrell had written a Victorian murder mystery, I was also surprised to
find that he had written an eBook about Frank Sinatra. I asked him about Frank Sinatra; the Artist and His Music.
“Just before I discovered Route 66, I considered a career in
music. At an early age (16-17), I took lessons in musical theory, harmony,
counterpoint, and orchestration. I wanted to be a composer/arranger like Nelson
Riddle, who wrote charts for Sinatra and, ironically, later wrote the music for
Route 66. By studying Riddle, I came to realize what a
genius Sinatra was as a vocalist. I’ve been studying Sinatra for more than 50
years and finally wrote the e-book about him, just about his singing, about his
breath control and phrasing and how he copied the lyrics of the songs he sang,
writing them again and again on sheets of paper until he internalized
them. My hope was that anyone who reads
my analysis of Sinatra’s technique will think of singing in a new way. I wrote a companion e-book, Nelson Riddle: The Man behind the Music.
I once wrote a similar piece (for Absolute
Sound magazine) about Bobby Darin, another genius. I think that my interest
in arranging music helps me understand structure in storytelling.”
“And you’ve written similar
eBooks on John Wayne and Marilyn Monroe,” I added.
Morrell surprised me yet
again. “Those are more of the magazine
pieces I wrote. I have dozens of similar
essays—about Steve McQueen, Rod Serling, and Richard Matheson, for example. One day I’ll collect them in a book.”
I was amazed at how many irons
Morrell had in the fire. I brought up
his involvement with Marvel Comics. How
did he manage to do it all?
“Well, I learned from Stirling
Silliphant. He wrote 5 pages every day.
Sometimes he did TV scripts in a week.
In the 1960s, there was a joke, ‘How can Stirling Silliphant writes so
fast?’ The answer was, ‘He has an
electric typewriter.’ I have a lot of
stories to tell, and whenever I feel lazy, I ask myself what Stirling would do.
The answer is ‘Keep writing’.”
And he certainly does. Murder
as a Fine Art is a runaway hit (Publishers
Weekly called it “One of the ten best summer detective/thrillers of 2013), his
fans are eagerly awaiting the release of its sequel Inspector of the Dead next year, and he has a new Wolverine comic coming
soon. He’s been at it since the day he
had an idea to write about a Vietnam veteran who goes to war with a local
police chief. Since then he’s never
really taken a break. But despite the
odds in this shaky publishing business, he’s kept his writing career relevant
and vibrant for over forty years. And
like both characters in his famous debut novel—John Rambo and Chief Wilfred
Teasle—he obviously isn’t one to give up.
Even in the face of tragic events he’s found the inspiration to try new
things and provide his readers with something fresh and exciting, infused with
his never-dying passion for a great story.
Be sure to read Part One of this interview.
(David Morrell is a New York
Times bestselling writer who holds a Ph.D. in literature. He has been nominated
for numerous awards, including the Edgar, Macavity, and Anthony, and has
received 3 Bram Stoker awards. The
International Thriller Writers organization honored him its prestigious
career-achievement Thriller Master Award.
With eighteen million copies in print, his books have been translated
into 26 languages. I consider it an
extraordinary honor to have been able to interview Mr. Morrell.)
I highly recommend the following:
At the end of this month, Marvel is releasing a collection of Spider-Man stories, which will include David Morrell's Spider-Man: Frost series as well as an essay on writing comic books written by Morrell.
