Writing Life

I’ve always been envious of writers who have partners. Lennon and McCartney, Kauffman and Hart, Julius and Philip Epstein (who co-wrote Casablanca and other classic movie scripts), Richard Levinson and William Link (who co-created Columbo, Mannix, and other TV shows), Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (who co-wrote Inherit the Wind and dozens of other successful plays) – the list goes on and on. My idea of a great writing gig was nurtured in my youth by The Dick Van Dyke Show, a situation comedy in which a trio of impossibly witty people gathered every weekday in a small room to play darts and write skits for a TV variety show. To me, that appeared to be the ideal job – cranking out creative work in collaboration with a friend or two. Alas, I have never had a writing partner. I have been fated to do all my writing alone. Still I can’t help fantasizing about what it would be like to have a collaborator.

As I see it, every successful partnership needs a Big Picture Guy and a Small Details Guy. I aspire to be the Big Picture Guy. I want to spend an hour or two every morning racking my imagination for an idea that can be transformed, with a lot of hard work, into a great short story, novel, essay, screenplay, or poem. Then I want to hand off this idea to my collaborator – let’s call her Amy – and tell her, “Here you go. Bring me back a completed manuscript as soon as possible.” At that point, I envision myself going off to play tennis while Amy holes up in a small room somewhere and doesn’t reemerge until she has produced some sort of literary masterpiece upon which we can affix both of our names. Who couldn’t use an Amy like that?

Stephen King frequently writes stories about writers who are driven to madness by the isolation and solitude of their profession. The films The Shining, The Dark Half, Secret Window, and 1408 all more or less fit that description, and they are all based on King’s work. But what does Stephen King know about isolation and solitude? Sure, his work – like nearly every other writer’s work – is born in solitude, but it never stays in isolation for long. My work, on the other hand, spends pretty much its entire life in isolation. I’m the one who should be writing about homicidal authors. If I had a literary collaborator, I might not be any more successful than I am now, but at least I’d have a companion in failure.

Because I don’t have a real collaborator, I have decided to create a fictional one. The late Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko created a fictional companion named Slats Grobnik, with whom he frequently collaborated on columns. Royko spent so much time with Grobnik that their conversations were eventually collected in a book. With all due respect to Royko, if I were going to spend a lot of time collaborating with a fictional character it wouldn’t be a Chicago lowlife named Slats Grobnik. If you’re going to create a fictional collaborator, why not make her young and charming and cute and witty? And since I’ve already named her Amy, why not give her an uncanny resemblance to Amy Adams, one of my favorite actresses? I’m not talking about the fairy-tale Amy of Enchanted or the pathetic hick of Junebug. I envision my partner as a combination of the super-efficient workaholic Amy played in Charlie Wilson’s War and the compulsive writer she played in Julie & Julia. That’s exactly the kind of collaborator a Big Picture Guy like me needs.

Around this time last year, it appeared that I might soon have a real life collaborator. In the summer of 2007 I wrote an essay about my marriage that the New York Times published in its Modern Love column. A year ago I began seeing trailers for a film called It’s Complicated in which Meryl Streep portrays a sixtyish woman whose first husband (played by Alec Baldwin) still wants her back, even though they have been divorced for many years and even though she is now involved with a new man (played by Steve Martin). That, in essence, was the gist of the personal essay I wrote for Modern Love. It appeared that writer/director Nancy Meyers had used my life story as the basis for her new movie. I was the Big Picture Guy who had come up with the general premise and she was the Small Details Guy who had fleshed it into a completed manuscript with a lot of commercial potential. I bided my time through most of last year, waiting for the film’s Christmas Day release. I was certain that the movie’s plot would be an obvious rip-off of my own story. If that turned out to be true, I would hire a lawyer and file a lawsuit against Nancy Meyers. I wouldn’t ask for financial compensation, just a promise on her part to collaborate with me on another joint project, one for which I would share both the credit and the compensation.

A few months before Christmas I picked up an issue of Creative Screenwriting magazine that contained an interview with Meyers. In it, I learned that “After finishing her 2006 film, The Holiday, Meyers decided to take a year off. ‘I didn’t have an idea in my head,’ she says.” But at some point “a new character began slowly evolving in the back of her mind, and a few different story ideas to develop as well. By early 2008 she was actively working on a new script and honing in on the story.” Hmm, I thought, there wasn’t an idea in her head at the end of 2006 but by early 2008 she was working on a script that apparently bears a strong resemblance to an essay I published in mid-2007. Curious. I was certain that this was all the evidence I would need to legally force Nancy Meyers to become my Small Details Guy (or Gal, as the case may be).

Last Christmas Day, my wife and I sat in a movie theater and watched the film that I hoped would give birth to the lawsuit that would result in my becoming the writing partner of one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood. Sadly, the movie ruined all my hopes. Even if Meyers script had been inspired by my essay, she took the material off in a direction that was entirely original and bore no strong resemblance at all to my life. Our collaborative relationship was over before it ever began. I was right back where I had started: writing alone.

Lately, however, I’ve begun to wonder if I gave up on my partnership with Nancy Meyers a bit too hastily. In the last few weeks I have seen several movies that bear only a slight resemblance to their acknowledged source material. Writer-director Richard Kelly’s film The Box is based upon a 1970 short story called “Button, Button” by master fantasist Richard Matheson. Both the film and the short story begin with the same basic set-up: A man calling himself Mr. Steward delivers a package to the home of Arthur and Norma Lewis, a married couple, and tells them, “Press the button on top of the box and two things will happen: somewhere in the world a person you don’t know will die – and you will receive a million dollars [in the short story the sum is $50,000].” But whereas Kelly’s film spends a great deal of time developing the characters of Arthur (a NASA engineer who hopes to become an astronaut; a man approaching middle age and haunted by the fear that he is a failure) and Norma (a teacher of Literature at an elite private prep school; a beautiful woman with a secret disfigurement), establishing a sense of place (late 1970s professional-class East-Coast America) and the moral quandary they find themselves in, Matheson’s story employs complete ciphers as characters, places them in a totally nondescript setting, and uses the plot not to explore moral questions but to set up a punch line (Norma eventually presses the button only to learn that Arthur was killed at exactly that moment. When she telephones Steward and protests, “You said I wouldn’t know the one that died,” he responds with the story’s final line, “My dear lady, do you really think you knew your husband?”). The characters in Kelly’s film have a strong incentive for wanting to press the button: Norma has lost her job, they are anticipating some steep medical expenses, and their son is enrolled in an expensive prep school that they can no longer afford. The characters in Matheson’s story have no apparent financial needs. Norma wants to spend the $50,000 on travel and a vacation home.

Another film that apparently bears only a vague resemblance to its source is Jason Reitman’s Up In The Air, which was based on a novel of the same name by Walter Kirn. I haven’t read the novel but, according to some of the less flattering reader reviews of the book at Amazon.com, it pales in comparison with the Reitman film. Amazon’s naysayers point out that some of the best things about the movie are missing from the book. These apparently include the characters Natalie Keener and Alex Goran, both of whom are essential to the film. At the beginning of the film, Natalie (brilliantly portrayed by Anna Kendrick) is a soulless yuppie whose only goal is to make the process of terminating working people easier (for the employer, that is) and less personal (she wants to do it via long-range computer encounters). Her growth from corporate cretin to sadder-but-wiser-woman-of-conscience (though a bit farfetched) was the highlight of the film for me. Likewise, the plot development that reveals the seamy side of Alex Goran, an apparently unattached jetsetter played by Vera Farmiga, provides the film’s strongest narrative jolt. And in one of the film’s best comic conceits, George Clooney (playing corporate hatchet-man Ryan Bingham) is required to photograph a cardboard cutout of his younger sister and her fiancé in a variety of different locales in order to provide them with a virtual honeymoon. Just the sight of super-cool Ryan Bingham having to pack the ridiculous-looking cutout into his otherwise perfectly ordered suitcase is priceless. But according to the Amazonian naysayers, none of these things – Natalie, Alex, or the cutout – is in the book.

I suppose it could be argued, then, that my Modern Love essay bears at least as much resemblance to the film It’s Complicated as Matheson’s “Button, Button” bears to the film The Box or as Kirn’s Up In The Air does to Reitman’s Up In The Air. And if the point were argued well enough, it might even inspire Universal Pictures to retroactively buy the rights to my story in order to forestall a lawsuit.

Which brings us back to Amy. For our first project together I have scribbled down this 2000-word outline of an essay about my ruined dream of a partnership with Nancy Meyers. Now, Amy, it is your turn. I want you to take this undercooked idea and transform it into a brilliant 10,000-word essay that I can sell to the New Yorker or The Atlantic, something that will dazzle readers coast to coast, portray me as the victim of a heinous act of intellectual-property theft, and maybe even generate a payoff check from Universal. Are you ready, Amy?

Amy? Where are you, hon? Amy…