At conference, writers talk film

CAMDEN – The film industry is undergoing a “seismic change,” according to Oscar-nominated film director Robert Benton, who spoke at the Sunday session of the Maine Author Series at the Camden Opera House.

Benton wrote the script for “Bonnie and Clyde” before moving on to direct films including “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Places in the Heart.” Nominated for seven Oscars, Benton collaborated with fellow panelist Richard Russo of Camden on movie adaptations of Russo’s novels “Nobody’s Fool” and “Empire Falls.”

The current large studio system of film production is “morphing” into a landscape inhabited by more and more independent filmmakers because “blockbuster” movies are simply too expensive to produce and present too much of a gamble for investors, Benton said.

Moderator David Kippen noted Benton’s little-known accomplishments including the invention of the Dubious Achievement Awards in Esquire magazine.

In choosing a screenplay or novel for film adaptation, Benton focuses “on the neck down” for visceral reactions, such as the divorce in “Kramer vs. Kramer.” He wanted his friend Francois Truffaut to direct the project, but stepped in at the last moment.

It was the “brilliant relationship” of Sully and a married woman in “Nobody’s Fool” which brought the director to Russo’s novel, he said.

The charge of a director is not to religiously interpret the novel or screenplay, but to “preserve the spirit and character of the work while making a good movie.” The longer a director works, the easier the process becomes, but the danger of bad habits rises, Benton said.

Watching a beloved novel become a movie can be a painful process, said Russo, a Pulitzer Prize winner for “Empire Falls.” He admitted he was “absolutely lost” when hired to write a screenplay from his own novel. The process of rehearsing the project is a test on dialogue, he said. “The actors never look like my characters. I was astonished to discover how good-looking Sully really was.” Sully was played by the ageless Paul Newman.

Screenwriters used to move to Hollywood to get close to studio production. With today’s technology, writers like Russo can choose to live in a town like Camden and send the latest work “as an attachment in an e-mail,” he said.

The pleasure and pain of adapting a novel to the screen is new to Cathie Pelletier, an Allagash Village native now living in Quebec. Her novel “Candles on Bay Street” has been optioned by Hallmark Productions.

“Get out the hankies,” she said.

The finished product can be far different from the novel, she said. She reminded the audience of a New Yorker cartoon where a married couple is watching a passionate kiss between a male and female actor on the screen. “In the book, he killed her,” the wife tells the husband.

Pelletier has become so fascinated with screenplay writing that she plans to drop novels – as soon as she finishes her latest book.

When she submitted the first draft of the screenplay based on her own novel, her producer found it unrecognizable and asked her “have you read the book?”

“I have a lot to learn and I am still learning,” she confessed.

In his Friday night keynote address titled “The Gravestone and the Commode,” Russo said to become a writer, one must first become a reader and thanked his mother, in the audience, for exposing the family to literature.

In his early days of writing he was shuffled off to a windowless basement room for his work. It wasn’t until “Nobody’s Fool” became a movie that the family allowed him to move upstairs with a room with a window.

A writer’s job is to slow the reader down, to make observation and classification possible. The writer’s task is “to get other people to see things our way,” Russo said.

While humor writing can look easy, it cannot be taught, he said. But often the need to make up a funny place or situation is overtaken by life. Like the time in a Waffle House where he watched a customer and waitress compare false teeth, he said.

The inability to laugh at life’s Waffle House adventures is a form of mental illness, Russo said. “Humor is what distinguishes us from the animals,” he said. “It is far more complex than tears and the best hedge against self-importance and piety.”

Russo confessed to laughing out loud at his father’s funeral. When his father had donated his body to science and a memorial service was held, an old friend wandered in and checked all of the viewing rooms before he announced loudly, “Where the hell is Jimmy?”