Film Maker Takes Novel Approach to Miniseries

The first entry in Hall Bartlett’s journal is dated Sept. 15, 1985. It reads: “I have really painted myself into a corner now. The idea for the novel, a monkey on my back for more than a year now, has gotten very demanding.”

The last entry may not be written until his miniseries, adapted from his novel, is finished and Bartlett becomes consumed with Novel No. 2 . . . and Adapted Miniseries No. 2 . . . and Novel No. 3 . . . and . . . .

“I have the next book in my mind, but I haven’t had time to start writing it yet,” Bartlett said on the eve of publication of “The Rest of Our Lives,” the book Random House hopes will nudge the name Hall Bartlett into publishing’s Golden Circle of pop-novel bylines with Sidney Sheldon, Judith Krantz, Jackie Collins, Danielle Steele and Barbara Taylor Bradford. “But I will definitely write it.”

Bartlett, a writer-director-producer with 16 movies to his credit, would prefer to be linked with someone like Norman Mailer. But when your publisher finds it useful to quote Priscilla Presley on the book’s jacket saying, “I couldn’t put it down!,” it appears they’re going after a different audience.

The novel, Bartlett said, has grown into something very meaningful to him, but in the beginning he had a clear sense of what he was after.

“I wanted to write a commercial book so I could turn it into a miniseries and make some money,” Bartlett said last fall when the book was in its final editing. “I used to drive by Hunter’s Books in Beverly Hills and see those novels in the window. . . . It was very frustrating. I was never in a position where I had the leverage or the money to buy a big book (for film or television adaptation).”

Book editors and other purists of the novel form may want to duck out of this story here. The 62-year-old Bartlett, a Phi Beta Kappa Yalie and the maker of such films as “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” and “The Children of Sanchez,” is a bright guy. But what he was able to do with “The Rest of Our Lives”--what he may yet do with it--will have such failed novelist-turned-screenwriters as F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner spinning in their graves.

Bartlett decided that because best sellers often make hot miniseries, he would figure out why the Golden Circle writers were successful, then write one of those fat puppies himself. The result is “The Rest of Our Lives,” 639 pages of sex, sizzle and Hollywood Angst , a partly autobiographical fable about a sincere director who pulls together four of the biggest stars in the world to make what may be the greatest movie ever made.

There is a movie within the book, and the lives and relationships of the five key characters carom off and around one another on and off the set. The inevitable guessing game over which real-life stars are being fictionalized began in Robert Osborne’s Hollywood Reporter column Oct. 20.

Osborne said “The Rest of Our Lives” would keep industry tongues wagging over the thinly veiled characterizations of one of “our never-married-but-very-womanizing movie stars, a studio head who once clashed with Bartlett in the 1970s and the now 40ish dancer-turned-award-winning actress who had her beginnings in a bordello.”

“This will start the town talking,” Bartlett noted in his journal the next day. “It’s the kind of (inside) story Hollywood likes.”

Bartlett, whose own Hollywood experiences includes a stormy and highly publicized affair with and marriage to Rhonda Fleming, talks about his book today as if it were a novel in the best sense, a richly detailed story that reveals something unique about the human condition. But when he began writing it, his concerns were much more basic. He wanted a published best seller from which he could adapt a miniseries.

“In breaks from the writing, I’m beginning to make notes about the miniseries . . . ,” Bartlett wrote in September, 1985, a week after beginning the novel. “Making cast lists of people who have a high ‘Q’ rating, and who are right, I think, for the five major characters. . . .”

Earlier, when Bartlett first decided to write a book, he said he took an armload of Golden Circle hits with him on a trip to Europe and carefully broke them down to their elemental common denominators. Then he sought the counsel of Jay Allen, a publicist with a major reputation in the publishing world, who simply reiterated what Bartlett’s own research had produced.

The four keys to a successful best seller: sex, money, power and love.

Allen told Bartlett that if he would write an outline of the book, plus the first 300 pages and the ending, he would help him get the material into the hands of a good agent.

If this were a movie, we would cut to a close-up of nubby fingers dancing across typewriter keys. But Bartlett doesn’t know how to type, so he talked his book into a tape recorder, and six weeks later delivered the 300 pages and final chapter. Two weeks after the material was sent to Scott Meredith, Norman Mailer’s agent, Meredith wrote back suggesting changes in the story and offering a two-year contract to represent the book.

Bartlett steeled himself against depression and writer’s block by watching Chicago Bear running back Walter Payton’s “Winning” videotape and by reading Winston Churchill’s blunt motto “Never Quit!”

The hatchling novelist also surrounded himself with photographs of the real-life people--known only to him and his family--who served as models for the fictional maverick film director Steve Wayland, demanding studio head Jack Gregson, mysterious European star Magdalena Alba, rugged artist-actor Robert Montango, blue-collar rock ‘n’ roll star Rayme Monterey and “La Tigressa” Stephanie Columbo, the beautiful star with the tarnished past.

Bartlett delivered his first manuscript six months after he had begun writing, and Meredith sold it to Random House the following month. An editor was assigned, rewrites began and, well, for $19.95, you can check the results.

In his Sunset Strip office, Bartlett keeps a bulletin board with the names of the characters from “The Rest of Our Lives,” followed by the names of actors and actresses he thinks could play them. Elizabeth Taylor’s name is there. So are the names of Ann-Margret, Joan Collins, Catherine Deneuve and Priscilla Presley, who made her film debut three years ago in Bartlett’s “Love Is Forever.”

Since he finished the book, Bartlett has been concentrating on selling the miniseries. He sought the counsel of Sidney Sheldon and Judith Krantz, and was given tips on selling himself and prodding his publisher. He hired a producers’ rep to engage the gears on a miniseries.

Last fall, Bartlett signed with packaging specialist Triad Artists, whose client list included such high-profile TV stars as Joan Collins and Victoria Principal.

In his journal, Bartlett relished the notion of having Collins as the tragic Magdalena, and Principal as the vulnerable Tigressa: “Victoria Principal’s always been Tigressa for me. I wrote the part with her in mind because she is so close in personality and looks to the real woman.”

Collins was more problematical. Would she work hard enough? “Would she dig, grow, explore? My instinct is that she can play a far deeper part than she usually does. As an actor’s director, I could get the capping performance of her life to date.”

To his knowledge, Bartlett said Collins has not read the book, which he said he finds strange for someone with a career on a downhill grade. He doesn’t think the agents at Triad have read the book, either. That’s bothersome.

“I find it a little uncomfortable to sit in a room with agents talking about characters that their clients may be interested in and they have to pretend that they’ve read the book,” he said. “But they smell a hot property . . . I don’t care. All I want from them is the chance to meet one-on-one with the people I want.”

Producer David Foster, who has expressed an interest in executive producing Bartlett’s miniseries, and Priscilla Presley, who has been campaigning for the role of Tigressa, threw a book party for Bartlett last week on the eve of publication of “The Rest of Our Lives.” The final lap of his miniseries run has begun.

Bartlett said he is taking Sidney Sheldon’s advice and “hitting the road” to publicize his book.

“I’m going to work the West Coast, six cities and all the hamlets in between,” Bartlett said. “Then I’m going to hit 18 other cities around the country.”

If all goes well, “The Rest of Our Lives” will sell out its 55,000 first print order and Bartlett will be finished with his second book about the time the miniseries based on the first one airs on TV. The author-film maker wants to plug into that biennial publishing cycle that gilds the Golden Circle, and make movies and miniseries in between.

After all those mostly well-reviewed “small” movies, he said he is nervous about being reviewed in a different medium, at a different level, but his goals are still clear.

“Early in my career, I was working in this tiny Beverly Hills office reading scripts dropped off by agents covering minor film makers. Once I read this thing and I said, ‘I’ll do anything to get this property done.’ We were six hours late on the bid. Stanley Kramer bought it and it became ‘The Defiant Ones.’

“Since then, I tried to buy ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’ and couldn’t. I tried to buy the Billie Holiday story that became ‘Lady Sings the Blues,’ and couldn’t. If this book is successful and we have a miniseries, then we’ll have the additional leverage and power we need. Nobody will outbid us.”