Joy & Luck in Hollywood

by Jeff Schwager | Published January 8, 1994

"Unfortunately," he says now, "I lost confidence in it and burned the only copy. I decided that being a writer, since it was the most wonderful thing in the world to be and was done by the people I admired the most, was obviously something that I wouldn't be good enough to do. It's like being center fielder for the Yankees or a rock star-it was just beyond the grasp of an average person like me."

But the writing bug, unlike his mysterious childhood malady, wouldn't go away. Years later after graduating from Harvard Law School and establishing a successful career as an entertainment lawyer, he decided to take another shot at his old novel. He began rising every morning between two and three a.m. to write, and two years later he published The Perfect Thief. Two more novels followed, and when the screen rights to his third novel were purchased, he convinced the producers to hire him as the screenwriter. While that script was never produced, it led to enough writing assignments that he finally quit practicing law. His big break came on Rainman, the Dustin Hoffman-Tom Cruise-Barry Levinson film for which he won a Best Screenplay Oscar.

Now one of Hollywood's most respected and sought-after screenwriters, Bass has gone on to write such hits as Sleeping With the Enemy and Black Widow. Nevertheless, he still gets up between two and three every morning to write, and after taking a break for breakfast with his wife Christine and their two daughters (Jennifer, 13, and Sasha, 9) he works straight through until dinner.

It's no wonder, then, that Bass sounds just a bit tired as he sits down to discuss The Joy Luck Club, the acclaimed film version of Amy Tan's novel about the relationships between three generations of Chinese and Chinese-American women, and Significant Other, a drama about alcoholism that stars Meg Ryan and Andy Garcia. Still, he's anxious to talk, for The Joy Luck Club is a film near and dear to his heart, particularly since he has become close friends with Tan (who co-wrote the screenplay and co-produced the film) and director Wayne Wang. Indeed, the film has become such a success that the threesome has already announced that they will reteam for an adaptation of Tan's second novel, The Kitchen God's Wife.

MM: According to your publicist, you get up between two and three very morning to write. Don't you sleep?

RB: I try to. I like sleeping, but I don't get as much sleep as I should, or want to. But there's just a lot to do. And the early morning is a very good time for me. Everybody else is sleeping, the world is really quiet. It's a great time to get up and start the work and get a tremendous amount accomplished before six or six-thirty, when my kids get up. My work day starts then, and I usually work straight through until I have dinner with my family, at around six-thirty.

MM: Is it true that you're booked as a screenwriter three years in advance?

RB: No, not anymore. I used to be, but it upset people. Now I try to keep it down to a year, or eighteen months, which is much more manageable.

MM: Doesn't that make it hard if a great project comes along?

RB: I've never been someone who has to be available for the next hot thing. If there's something like that out there, I'm glad to let some other wonderful writer do that. I like having a gestation period, I like having a year or a-year-and-a-half to think about things, and to use that time to do research and think about the characters and live in the story. Then, when it's time to start writing I've got a notebook full of ideas and I'm really bursting to get started. That way I never really face a blank page.

MM: Amy Tan said that in that first meeting you told her that in adapting The Joy Luck Club you were going to show her "the poetry of the scene." What did you mean by that?

RB: Well, I would never fault Amy on her memory, but I hope I didn't say it quite as grandiosely as that. I probably said, or would like to remember that I said, that writing a screenplay would enable her to discover the poetry of the scene, which would be useful to her fiction writing. I don't mean to suggest that novelists think their material through less thoroughly than screenwriters. I don't think that's true. But there is something challenging about my saying to Amy: I want to start the scene on this shot, I want to cover this amount of emotional material, and I want to go out on this shot, this image, this thought, this line, and I want to name that tune in about two-and-a-half minutes. When you say that, you then start to look for the emotional core of what that scene has really got to be about. You can't just walk around in it and depict that scene in the way it naturally presents itself to you. You have to decide why the scene is in the movie, and exactly what you want. There is poetry in something that has to make a much greater distillation of image and a much more powerful concentration of expressed intent, because of its very limitations of structure and length.

MM: Was it ever intimidating for you to work with the author of the novel you were trying to adapt?

RB: No, it wasn't intimidating in any way. Amy is truly one of the kindest, smartest, most generous, most ego-free, delightful people I've ever met in any walk of life. She has become a dear friend. Even though she is a literary giant-her books are required reading in high schools across the country; it's like working with Faulkner or Fitzgerald - she always cast herself as the student, because I had written more for the screen. It was two friends writing together, we always had fun.

MM: Significant Other is about a marriage that nearly disintegrates when one of the partners undergoes treatment for alcoholism. Where did the interest in that subject come from?

RB: Every marriage, every relationship really , is an unspoken series of contracts that we don't even know we have. You do this for me, and I do that for you. I handle this and you handle that. You lean on me and I'll lean on you. That's how we fit together and complement each other. That's how marriages really work. Even in a marriage where two people are completely independent of each other, then that's their contract. But most of us don't ever really examine the way our relationships work, particularly when things are going well.

But when things break down, it makes you re-examine what your marriage is actually based on. And that's what happens in this story. Once she goes into rehab and starts to get counseling and face up to herself - and face up to what it was in her that let her become an alcoholic - she has to re-examine everything. And he doesn't want to look at these things. He thinks it's all a lot of psychobabble and a lot of baloney. The point of this movie is that to really love another person, and to be there for him or her when the going gets rough, is the toughest thing in the world. And that's what this couple has to go through so that they can be together.

MM: In addition to dramatic films like Significant Other and The Joy Luck Club, you've written some films that are more strictly genre entertainments, such as Sleeping with the Enemy and Black Widow. What are your feelings about the role of film as art versus its role as entertainment?

RB: Well, BlackWidow and Sleeping with the Enemy were films that, however successful you may think they are, turned out quite different from the scripts-that I wrote. Black Widow was written originally as quite an intelligent psychodrama about two women who were more intelligent than any men around, and how they became sisters and really loved each other while they were becoming mortal enemies because they were the only two people who could understand each other. It was about something that I thought was really quite fascinating, which didn't end up being expressed in the movie.

Sleeping with the Enemy was based on a wonderful book by Nancy Price, and if you read the original script I wrote it didn't end up looking much like the movie. The script that I wrote didn't focus on the abusive husband, it was really about the relationship between the Julia Roberts character and the boy that she meets, who was originally supposed to be played by Aidan Quinn. There were 11 or 12 scenes of her coming out of her fear and unfolding like a flower and falling in love with this very patient and terrific and normal guy. The movie was about how hard it is for women to trust men, told through the metaphor of a monster, an abusive husband who is the ultimate example of why women shouldn't trust men. But using that metaphor written large, it was really about the kind of attentiveness and attention and ability to listen and ability to observe that it takes for a man to prove himself worthy of a woman's trust. So it was about something that I thought was very important and very interesting. But Joe Rubin, who is a terrific filmmaker, came on, and he just had a different conception of the movie. He wanted it to be more of a classic thriller, so the Aidan Quinn scenes started to come out one by one, and new scenes were ordered for the husband, and finally Aidan actually pulled out of the movie because he had only four scenes left. That's how it became the movie you saw, which was an extremely effective thriller and very popular commercially, but not really about the things that I wanted the movie to be about.

What I'm really saying is you judge a writer's work by what the final film looks like, but there are a lot of other people whose decisions came into how that film is going to be presented, and ultimately of course the author of every film is the director. He's the guy that makes the final decisions. In terms of my feelings about art versus entertainment, I think they're generally a lot closer than most of Hollywood gives them credit for being. If you're shooting a subject matter of interest, then usually the decision that makes it the most commercial has a lot to do with what makes the most sense. I don't think it's commercial for every film to have a happy ending. I think what's the most commercial is what works the best: it's a better ending for Romeo and Juliet that they died than that they find each other. I don't think it's like: Here's the artistic movie, here's the crass, commercial movie; now do we sell out our art for commercial reasons? The best ending for a movie, the most commercial ending, is the one that makes sense. I think that Hollywood can make a lot of money not underestimating the intelligence of the American people.

MM: Is there such a thing as a Ron Bass film? Do you have a specific vision of the world that you see in all your films? A common thread?

RB: I certainly have a lot of strong opinions about a lot of various themes that do recur from piece to piece. I think there's more than one common thread. My basic view of film is that, literature is about what happens within people, while film is more about what happens between people. So the basic tool for me is the two shot, a scene between two people interacting in a way that illuminates for them and for us who they are, what they want and where they're going. So the themes that I have are basically themes of how hard human connection is to achieve, and yet how absolutely essential it is that we do whatever it takes, go through whatever brick wall there is to make that connection, because that's the stuff that makes life worthwhile. That is the point of view that I think film is most uniquely adapted to depict.

MM: A moment ago, you said that the director is the author of every film, and that is something that has often irked screenwriters. Is one of the reasons you made the jump to producing with The Joy Luck Club, to have more influence over the finished product?

RB: No, I think that somebody has to make the decisions as to everything in terms of the film's content, and that person has to be the director, it can't be the screenwriter. So, no, it wasn't like that, it wasn't in order to get more control. The title producer or executive producer is negotiated in the contract, and it has a lot to do with the clout or the visibility of the writer. What really counts, what's really substantive, is how much input you get. This is a project that Wayne and Amy and I went into together, and we really had a basically equal decision-making authority, at Wayne's generous insistence. He was still always as far as Amy and I were concerned the final arbiter. While it happens that I'm a producer on this film, the pleasure of it was that partnership. I would rather have pleasure of that partnership than the title producer. But the final say has to go to the director.

MM: Since you feel that way, do you have any plans to direct?

RB: I sure don't plan to direct for a while. My youngest child is nine, and I've seen the life of a director. I know that there are some guys who manage to be terrific fathers and directors at the same time, but I just think it would be very hard for me. The time that I spend with my children, and being there and being present in their lives, and being able to travel with them and make my own schedule and be there for the significant moments in their lives, is critical to me and my wife. There are only so many years of that, and then they're gone, never to come back. So, for that one reason, I wouldn't be interested in directing until they're grown.

The other thing is, I write on so many things sometimes six or seven pictures a year. And I love that diversity. I love being in the middle of many stories that are moving forward at different stages at the same time. It's creatively much more exciting for me than I think it would be to be locked into one story for a year and a half. It's also a good insulation from the ups and downs of this business. You put all your heart and soul into one project, and a lot of things can go wrong. When you're a writer, and tragedy strikes a project, you can turn around in the morning and say, 'Well I gotta get up and write on this one.' Life feels less subject to instant destruction. MM

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