The other day I learned “The Counselor,” a movie I had no velleity to go see, was written by Cormac McCarthy. Not adapted from a work by McCarthy, the way “No Country for Old Men” was to great gravitas, or as some hope to do with “Blood Meridian.” This was an original screenplay, McCarthy’s first apparently.
I was surprised to see McCarthy’s name attributed to what looked like an otherwise nondescript feature. I know his books are a bit of a hot item, in between all the successful movie adaptations as well his general literary prestige. Nonetheless, I wondered what possessed him to write a screenplay.
I am not a movie guy, insofar as I never think to watch movies in my spare time. I have books. And when I do watch movies, they’re not usually new features. Instead, I play catch up. I watched “Moonrise Kingdom” for the first time this weekend, despite the fact that I would watch paint dry if Wes Anderson directed it. I would also buy the soundtrack. But you get my point—I don’t watch movies automatically.
And yet, sometimes, I’ve found myself imagining what a book would look like if it were adapted into a film. Likely, this is a byproduct of imaginative reading, but I’ve begun to find it is a real, concerted effort on my part. For instance: I think Saul Bellow’s “The Victim” would make for a great film. The plot of the book is concentrated on two characters, and the action is stretched over six terse weeks—with some flashbacks and a post story coda that takes place a few years after most of the text.
I kept reading “The Victim” as a black-and-white movie, full of naturalistic noise, with the lead played by Ezra Koenig—a byproduct, no doubt, of listening to Modern Vampires of the City on repeat while reading it. At any rate, it could work.
I feel the same way reading Haruki Murakami’s books. Would they make great movies? For most of them you’d have to really stretch both the medium and the expectations of a film, but it could be done.
It must be acknowledged: I’m not talking about books at the movies. I’m talking about writers at the movies. Adapting books to the screen is another argument, although I’ve used it as an example.
It’s not a novelty to see writers at the movies. John Steinbeck wrote the story for Alfred Hitchcock’s film “Lifeboat,” which garnered him a nomination for Best Original Story. Thornton Wilder wrote the script for—you’ll see a pattern here—Hitchcock’s classic psychological thriller “Shadow of a Doubt,” which has remained one of Hitchcock’s most well regarded films.
Whereas those writers had one-off encounters with screenwriting, so far as we know, some authors have had far longer careers in Hollywood. William Faulkner was a screenwriter, on and off, for over a decade, working on adaptations of Ernest Hemingway’s “To Have and Have Not” (1944) and Raymond Chandler’s “The Big Sleep” (1946). F. Scott Fitzgerald worked as a screenwriter, although I haven’t been able to find any attributable titles, and his last written fiction concerned itself with Hollywood, including his Pat Hobby sketches and his unfinished novel, “The Last Tycoon.” Nathanael West was both a screenwriter and one of the great writers about Hollywood, as seen in “The Day of the Locust.”
I know I have omitted plenty of others, but we need to get back to McCarthy, who has been left dangling with “The Counselor” since the beginning of this piece.
The more I thought about this movie, the more I realized how normal it is that McCarthy would have decided to pursue screenwriting. It offers a challenge, certainly, to the author, whose only real tool is words. Everything else—light, sound, vision—is ancillary and usually tasked to the reader to provide/handle. Films have all of those things—and more, as every screenwriter who has dashed themselves against the rocks of ambition learns.
Do you know of any novelists who might make super screenplay writers? Discuss it with Sean at sreichard@wisc.edu.
