TOO MUCH LIKE THE BOOK
My third novel, Bones of Coral, got good reviews, sold moderately well, and was optioned by MGM. Once again I was hired to write the screenplay, but this time I invited my friend Les Standiford to be co-writer. Les had a lot more experience with screenplays, so I was trying to be careful this time and not blow it as I had with Under Cover. (Oh, yes, Tropical Freeze, the second Thorn novel was also optioned for film but languished after a few years…which means there were no interesting stories.)
First, it’s important to know that Bones of Coral had three interwoven narrative strands.
One thread was about the unusually high incidence of multiple sclerosis that occurs in Key West, Florida. A strange but true fact. At the time I wrote the book, MS appeared 17 times more frequently on that small island than in any other similar sized town in the U.S.
The second strand came from the research I did on MS and Key West. In the bowels of the university library, I discovered in the footnotes of some congressional sub-committee a detail about the U.S. military’s actions in Key West that were very creepy and very damning and definitely seemed connected to the high occurrence of MS in that piece of paradise.
That creepy thing had to do with aerial spraying.
The third main storyline had to do with a young man, Shaw Chandler, (the protagonist), whose father had abandoned him when Shaw was a kid, and now many years later Shaw learns a great deal about his absent father, and winds up forgiving him. Sort of.
And as usual in my books, there was a pretty outrageous bad guy. His name was Dougie Barnes. These days we might consider him to be somewhere on the spectrum. He can function in the world, but he’s got some missing parts that keep him from truly understanding the human condition. Mainly, because Dougie has an extremely high pain threshold, he’s not very empathetic towards other peoples’ pain. In fact, he can be downright sadist. And he likes to make rhymes. Creepy-peepie is one of his favorites.
Well, Les and I went to Hollywood and met a group of folks from MGM to discuss the book. These folks made all kinds of suggestions about shaping the script. When the meeting was finished, all the Hollywood guys (and one woman) were raving about what a great meeting it was. Les and I got outside and looked at each other: What the hell was that about? We had no idea what all that babble added up to. These people who made movies for a living didn’t seem to know much about storytelling.
So we went back to Miami worked hard on the script and sent it to MGM. We were happy with it. It had all the stuff from the book and would’ve made a pretty cool movie. They rejected it. Their main comment was: ‘It’s too much like the book.’ Wow.
I never thought they’d actually come out and say it so directly. They liked the book enough to option it for film, but apparently they wanted us to write a new story for the film. Very weird.
Anyway, they hired another screenwriter. He was thoughtful enough to get in touch with me and pick my brains as he worked on the script. They added a director, Hugh Hudson, who had directed “Chariots of Fire.” An Academy Award winner. So we were flying high.
A few months later came the next message from movieland. Alan Ladd, Jr. who was then the boss at MGM had decided not to green light the project. His reason: This isn’t the story you guys pitched me.
It took a while to figure out what had happened. These very smart people had invested a great deal of money in the project and they had a major director attached and a script by a topnotch screenwriter. Later on the writer told me something that made it all snap into place.
Alan Ladd, Jr. had loved the story about the son coming to peace with the father who’d abandoned him. Because that was Alan Ladd, Jr.’s story, a father who’d deserted him, but had reconciled late in life. Hugh Hudson, a cynical Brit, had liked the story about the military deceiving the American public and doing something very bad to unsuspecting Key West citizens. And the producer who’d bought the book in the first place and sold it to MGM had a sister with MS and the producer wanted to tell a story which featured his sister’s illness.
Everybody wanted to tell their own stories. Three very different men joined together in a project for very different reasons.
Amazingly, the one thread the scriptwriter left out of the screenplay was Alan Ladd’s father/son story. It just made things too complicated the writer said, so they cut that part out. And when Mr. Ladd, the boss, realized this movie wasn’t going to tell his story after all, he rejected the project.
You’d think the producer and writer and director would’ve had enough sense to ask Alan, “Hey, Alan, what part of this novel do you really really like?” But they didn’t. And the whole thing went kaput at the very last step.
My guess is that none of the three principals actually consciously understood what it was that attracted them to the project. They were simply drawn to a narrative that was in some way a reflection of their own background or beliefs or secret desires.
At least the checks cleared.
IN PART THREE I’LL MOVE ON TO TV LAND
