Richard Price: Novelist And Screenwriter
Richard Price, a writer of tough, graphic, inner-city novels and screenplays, sports an impressive list of literary credits. The author of "Bloodbrothers" and "Clockers," and the screenwriter of "The Color of Money" and "Sea of Love," to name but a few, he knows his turf from the asphalt up.
Born and bred in a racially mixed Bronx housing project, he aspired at first not so much to write as to be a writer. "I was more interested in the wrapping than the gift," he said.
As he dabbled in styles ranging from Dickens to Mad magazine, however, there were moments of recognition between the writer and his subject. "Suddenly, the writing became deadly serious."
Finding A Voice
In the mid-'60s Mr. Price read Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Last Exit to Brooklyn," a scathing novel about union thugs, transvestites, and dope, and "something in the language and cement of his world rang a bell. It seemed not exotic but familiar, like looking in a mirror."
"I realized that when one starts to think about oneself as a writer one's first question should be, what do I have to tell you that you don't already know? The second question: What is closest to my heart?"
"Last Exit to Brooklyn" triggered an epiphany. He would write about the dicey world of his youth and its increasingly dark take on the American dream.
Reading transcripts of Lenny Bruce's comedy routines helped center his style and rhythm. "That's what I want to sound like," he thought.
"The Wanderers"
After attending the Bronx High School of Science, Cornell, the Fiction Collective in Boulder, Colo., and Stanford University as a Mirillees Fellow in Fiction, Mr. Price, with thoughts of teaching, embarked on a six-year quest for a master's degree at Columbia. By the time he got it - the foreign language credit was the sticking point - he had already published two novels.
"The Wanderers," his first, a streetwise coming-of-age memoir, appeared in 1974 when he was 24. He'd sent Mr. Selby a copy of the galleys and, thrillingly, his role model honored the gritty, poignant story of teenage gang warfare with a blurb calling it "an outstanding work of art."
"I felt like a Little League kid getting a letter from Mickey Mantle," recalled Mr. Price. The novel won him a Macdowell Fellowship and a Mary Roberts Rinehart Foundation grant.
"Bloodbrothers"
"Bloodbrothers," about a kid in an abusive working-class family who declines to join a construction union, followed; both novels were later made into films. Mr. Price had acting parts in "The Wanderers" and in "Life Lessons," his segment of "New York Stories," the 1989 trilogy of short films directed by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Woody Allen.
Next came "Ladies' Man," a raunchy and unexpectedly moving novel about a "lost weekend of sex instead of booze," followed by "The Breaks," which almost broke its author.
"It was a long Bildungsroman about a kid who wants to become a teacher, so long I can't even bring myself to describe it," he said. "It weighed about three pounds."
Feeling "kind of sick of myself" after these literary efforts, Mr. Price took off the next 10 years to write screenplays. Mr. Scorsese, who had a script he didn't like for "The Color of Money," agreed, following a three-hour meeting, to "let one more guy take a shot."
"The Color Of Money"
After much trial and error, "The Color of Money" got made. A sequel to "The Hustler" starring Tom Cruise and the original lead, Paul Newman, 30 years older, it received an Academy Award nomination in 1986.
"I feel the worst thing an artist can do is read a book on how to do something," said Mr. Price of his screenwriting debut. "You can't use your mind creatively if half of it is trying to remember Rule No. 4. I just went to a lot of movies and pretended I was the writer."
"At first I did too much; you can't believe how little is too much. Some of my most dazzling dialogue sounded totally artificial when spoken by actors. Smart lines are okay for a book, where the world exists on paper, but they tend to sound like creative writing in the realm of the flesh."
Screenwriting is a craft, not an art, unless you're also the director and control the final product, according to Mr. Price. "You are making a blueprint a whole bunch of people will work off; you are not the master architect."
"Keep it short," is what he learned. "It's about momentum, not language. Just write what happened next with no more prose than you'd put in a telegram. A screenplay is a telegram Scotch Taped to dialogue Scotch Taped to a telegram."
The making of his next movie, "Sea of Love," illustrates the moral of the story of his screenwriting career, he said.
Basking in the glow of the Academy Award nomination, he was approached by Dustin Hoffman for scripts and floated an idea about a detective who falls in love with a crime suspect. It was snatched up by the actor's development company, with much fanfare.
"Sea Of Love"
When the star's attention got sidetracked onto "Rainman," however, Mr. Price's script fell from favor. So he walked it over to Al Pacino, who also loved it, and the future box-office hit was on again.
"When Dustin was involved with 'Sea of Love' everybody loved it," Mr. Price said. "When he cooled, so did everybody. Then when Al Pacino took it up, everybody loved it again."
"It's got nothing to do with the writing. It's like, who's attached to this? If there's a gorilla attached to it, I love it. Things happen when you attract a gorilla."
"Life Lessons"
"Life Lessons" came out that same year, a film about a painter that takes a sharp look at the art world.
Why a painter, and not a writer or an actor?
"I know a lot of artists through my wife, [the painter] Judith Hudson, and painting is a visually dramatic activity. A close-up of a guy typing? A guy acting? No."
Based on the diaries of one of Dostoyevsky's mistresses who delighted in tormenting him - "D. is at the door again, I hate when he cries" - "Life Lessons" dramatizes Mr. Price's response to the "I can't work unless I'm in pain" school of creativity.
"Mad Dog Glory," about a serial killer, came next, followed by remakes of Jules Dassin's "Night and the City" and "Kiss of Death," Richard Widmark's chilling first film.
"Clockers"
"Ransom" appeared last year, a thriller directed by Ron Howard, whom Mr. Price describes as "a solid pro," unlike Mr. Scorsese, "a jagged artist."
Meanwhile he published "Clockers," a riveting inner-city crime story described by Scott Turow as a brave book "which refuses to declare the imagination out of bounds when it wanders into terrain that others might wish to call forbidden."
Mr. Price has recently finished a novel set in the same troubled world as "Clockers" but with another emphasis and different characters. It will be published next year.
Parallel Careers
Leaning back at his desk in the workroom attached to the big, old remodeled barn in East Hampton he shares with his wife and daughters, Annie, 12, and Gen, 10, he reminisced about his parallel careers.
"You always feel wistful about what you're not doing - a novel, a screenplay - because what you are doing is always anxiety provoking," he said. But while he romanticizes whatever's on hold, he prefers being the author of a book to being the writer of a screenplay.
"I got sucked into the screenplay world because of the money. It's very social, and kind of heady. You're name-dropping and going to parties and meetings and spending half your life at the Carlyle, and occasionally you write something that pays in spades."
Someone Else's Movie
"But when the final product comes out, you always feel sort of stunned, because it's never exactly what you meant. Even though the film is faithful to your script, there was a movie playing inside your head while you were writing it, a movie you were directing, now obscured by the imprint of many other sensibilities."
As for the books, looking back, he often feels embarrassed. "The more you know, the more you respect what you don't know. I wince at some of my earlier stuff. I keep doing things and disavowing them and then moving on."
Summing it all up, "If you're a studio, I can describe a movie to you in two minutes, and make you see it, so you'll give me the green light," he said.
"Books are much harder. Finding something to write about can take years. If you're a publisher, I can never really describe a book to you. It's an exploration of a character in a moral dilemma or crisis I have to figure out as I'm writing it. But at least, with a book, there's no middleman. In the end, everything is mine."