David Epstein: Screenwriter, Playwright
Writing, says David Epstein, "is the only thing I can do. It's not something you can choose, it's something that chooses you."
With stacks of screenplays for TV and film and stories for the stage behind him, one play staged recently in London, a revival of another in Washington, D.C., and the film "Palookaville" now showing across the United States and in Europe, Mr. Epstein has clearly answered the call.
"I was always interested in endless possibilities," he said one recent afternoon in his East Hampton Village office, a writing retreat just down the street from his home. "I didn't want to do something that would be the same from year to year."
Screenplays By The Stack
Over the years, Mr. Epstein has written numerous movies for TV, including an adaptation of "Murders in the Rue Morgue" that starred Rebecca De Mornay, Val Kilmer, and George C. Scott. He has also written a stack of screenplays, for studios like Warner Brothers, Columbia, 20th Century Fox, and Disney, that remain - so far - on paper.
His recent rewrite of the script for a movie called "Home Fries" is in production, though, being filmed in Texas with Drew Barrymore and Shelley Duvall. He has an East Coast agent who promotes his plays, and a Hollywood agent, too.
Writing for the theater is the most gratifying, he said. While movies are a "director's medium, in the theater the playwright is still the big banana."
Three Desperate Guys
Mr. Epstein's "Exact Change" was staged at London's Lyric Hammersmith theater in 1995. A comedy "about three guys who've known each other their whole lives, and what happens when they get desperate to pay their bills," it was all set to move to a West End theater when a cast member left.
Producers wanted to recast the part with an American star, Mr. Epstein said, but the ensuing delay caused plans to fall through. A New York production company's option on the play has expired, and now Mr. Epstein is hoping a recent reading of the play by the actors Harvey Keitel, John Shea, and James Naughton (a Tony Award-winning friend from Yale) will interest investors.
"There's nothing, to me, that equals sitting in the theater when a play of mine is being rehearsed," he mused.
"Exact Change"
He recalled a visit to London with his family: his wife, Kate, to whom he's been married for 20 years, daughters Lilly, 17, and Grace, 15, and his son, Rafey, 13.
He took the kids to London to see "Exact Change" because, he said, "if your father is a writer, the way I'm a writer, your kids frequently don't have a real connection to what you do."
"Exact Change" interested Uberto Passolini, an Italian producer who suggested Mr. Epstein write a screenplay based on it. Not keen on the idea, the playwright made an alternate suggestion.
"It was the relationship between the three main characters he was responding to," Mr. Epstein felt, and proposed writing a screenplay with that at its heart.
Men's Friendships
The writer himself has nurtured close friendships since the days when, as a lifeguard on Fire Island and a high school and college basketball player, he learned about "loyalty, respect, and friendship."
He feels "very comfortable," he said, "working with relationships among men who've known each other for years." The dynamics of such masculine friendships is a theme that runs throughout much of his work.
Mr. Passolini, "remarkably," took a chance on the screenplay idea. The result was "Palookaville," which focuses on three longtime male friends, and their wives and girlfriends.
"My long-term, good, solid relationship with my wife, Kate, has given me the female side," Mr. Epstein said.
"Palookaville"
"Palookaville" features the actors Vincent Gallo, William Forsythe, and Adam Trese. It turns on their misguided attempt to rob a Brink's truck.
"I can't stand writing anything that's without humor - I can't relate to that," Mr. Epstein said, adding quickly that "that's not to say I don't write about serious things."
"All of the best stuff" is funny, he explained. "I mean, Chekhov is funny." Even a new play he is writing on the theme of racism - which he called "a malignancy on American society" - is "sort of funny," he said, "strange as it might sound."
Growing up in Manhattan with a father, Benjamin Epstein, who was the national director of the Anti-Defamation League for 30 years, Mr. Epstein said he gained "an acute sense" of racism as it exists in this country. His developing play, called "Ways of Men," will require a producer who "is going to take chances," he said.
"I think the play does - it's confrontational."
"Palookaville" was released by Orion/Goldwyn in October, after showings at the Venice Film Festival in 1995, where it won an award; the Philadelphia Film Festival, which it opened in May 1996, and the Sundance Film Festival last winter.
At Sundance, Mr. Epstein said, several hundred people were turned away from the film's second showing. "The reviews started off terrific and got better."
Calvino's Credit
Some accounts of the film say it is "based on" stories by the Italian writer Italo Calvino, but that is a misunderstanding, said Mr. Epstein.
He explained that Mr. Passolini, after reviewing an early draft of the script, had given him a book of Calvino stories, three of which "impacted [the rewriting of] three scenes."
Mr. Passolini, having talked to Mr. Calvino's widow about the movie, felt her husband's work should be acknowledged. A credit follows the movie: "With thanks and apologies to Italo Calvino" - leading, said the screenwriter, to some erroneous conclusions. "I was surprised to see it there," Mr. Epstein said of the credit.
An article in The Nation this fall about Mr. Calvino, said Mr. Epstein, even directed readers to see "Palookaville" for an introduction to the work of the noted author.
Between Projects
The movie is now playing in theaters from Boston to San Francisco, as well as in Italy and Germany. It can be seen by Long Islanders beginning on Friday, Jan. 31, at the Cinema Arts Center in Huntington.
Except for one play, a musical written with Al Carmines, a composer and the minister of Judson Church in Greenwich Village, where the Epsteins lived when first married, Mr. Epstein works alone. Inspiration can come from anything, he said, though it often comes from newspaper articles: "I look at reading as part of my job."
Between projects, he spends his time "reading and fussing, playing as much tennis as I can," and doing household chores such as painting the porch. He takes frequent trips to New York City to "recharge batteries," though he also loves the quiet of East Hampton.
Family Feedback
The Epsteins have owned their rambling village house for 17 years, and family life, with three teenagers and a golden retriever named Jambo, holds a central part in the rhythm of Mr. Epstein's days.
His first feedback often comes from his wife, he said. A friend, Jacques Levy ("merciless and very sharp"), also provides reaction to early drafts. Mr. Epstein hopes Mr. Levy, a director who mounted two early versions of "Exact Change," will do the New York version as well.
Though paid work in his field is often unpredictable, "the opportunity for excitement is always there. When I'm working, I'm intimately involved with this secret treasure. When it's time to expose it, I hope other people will be excited by it. For now, it's enough that I'm excited by it."
"Every time I start a new project, it's with interesting people," he added. "How many people can do that?"
Career Satisfaction
Besides his new play, Mr. Epstein is developing a movie idea with two friends, Barnet Kellman, a director, and Paul Witt, a producer. They plan to pitch it to a few Hollywood studios next month. "I think we have a good shot," he said.
Though his parents wanted him to go to law school - his mother graduated at the top of her law school class in the 1930s - Mr. Epstein majored in English and theater at Brandeis University, then earned a master's in playwrighting and dramatic literature at Yale.
"If I hadn't been a writer, I'd probably have had a more secure existence, but I wouldn't have gotten the same satisfaction," he reflected, adding, though, that the satisfaction is not always there.
"There's no cap on hope," he said. "All I know was, what I wanted to do had to be connected to who I really was."