Magnolias, Palms: ‘Tides’ Author Meets Hollywood

Writer Pat Conroy is getting a Hollywood education.

He’s also getting--after going 4-for-4 in seeing his novels sold to movie producers--his first screenwriting credit in the Columbia-Barbra Streisand film version of his 1986 bestseller “The Prince of Tides,” a story about a South Carolina shrimper’s tangled family.

Conroy, who talks as he writes with great bursts of rich, colorful, imaginative language, tells you right off that even though he got the film credit, he didn’t write the shooting script for the movie. Nor has he yet met Becky Johnston, who shares the movie’s writing credit with him, nor any of the other writers he heard about who had tried to turn the novel into a film. He was paid twice for “Prince,” but prefers sticking with linear literature and leaving the pictures to someone else.

Hollywood may have provided a post-graduate education of sorts, but Southern schooling shaped his life.

“My (Buford, S.C.) high school English teacher Gene Norris--that’s Eugene Norris--when I was 15 gave me a copy of ‘Look Homeward, Angel’ for my birthday,” Conroy says. ‘I think you’re ready for the pleasures of Thomas Wolfe,’ he said. I read it and did that Southern cliche thing. I simply went nuts over the writing. So that summer when school was out and after I’d gone crazy over ‘Look Homeward, Angel,’ Eugene took me to Asheville and the house where Wolfe was born.

“And it was during that trip that I realized there is a relationship between art and life.”

Like Wolfe, Conroy writes in longhand on yellow legal pads (Wolfe wrote on bookkeeping ledgers) and revels in long, descriptive passages and words of many colors, letting sentences flow and engulf. Conroy, too, writes about the madness of family relationships in the Southern environment of his childhood.

Big Hollywood money is OK, but he has no intention of trying again to write a script. Hollywood is 400 miles to the south of his San Francisco home and that’s close enough.

What follows is Pat Conroy on his Hollywood experiences and the influences of the South on his work:

Question: Your book, “Prince of Tides,” came out five years ago. Did it sell immediately to a Hollywood studio?

Answer: It sold the same year, 1986, to CBS. The network had a movie division then, but it went under. Then United Artists bought it and it went the same way. Then after other producers showed interest in it, and this is mysterious to me, it was acquired by Robert Redford. And this is also mysterious to me--then it went to Barbra Streisand. But I was out of the loop after 1986 when the movie rights first sold.

Q: Who represented you?

A: I had no Hollywood agent at that time. I brilliantly brought about my own disaster. My New York literary agent is Julian Bach, who has been with me from the beginning.

Q: So it ends up mysteriously with Streisand.

A: I had heard rumors that Barbra Streisand got into it, but I did not know that for sure. I started getting telephone messages to call her, but I thought that was a joke. Friends had played similar tricks on me. So I just didn’t return her calls and finally she caught up to me at a hotel in Los Angeles and asked why I hadn’t called. It did seem rude on my part. And so after that I agreed to go to New York to work with her for a two-week polish on the script.

Q: Did you write the movie’s shooting script?

A: Well, that’s very nice of you to call it that. I wrote a first draft of what you might call a script and turned it in and got paid. The script wasn’t very good. I had heard rumors that six or seven other people had written scripts or drafts. When I was working with Barbra, however, I noticed that she wrote a lot of the stuff, a ton of stuff.

Q: How did you and Streisand work?

A: We talked a great deal. There would be differences and whenever we had one of those differences or an argument Barbra usually won.

Q: Are you talking about fights over storylines, characterizations . . .?

A: It would go like this: I’d say, “I like the way this line sounds.” She’d say she liked the way that line sounds. And we’d go through it like that. It was never with raised voices. She was a complete pleasure to work with.

Q: Just discussions?

A: Just discussions. But she won most of those. I now know my place in Hollywood. I’m a writer--the scum of the Earth.

Q: But the pay must be good.

A: It’s terrific. I’ve never complained about Hollywood because whatever pain you may feel, they throw zillions of dollars at you to assuage that pain.

Q: Are you working on another book?

A: There is another book, one I’ve been working on for about three years.

Q: Will it involve the same types of people you have written about, the domineering father and the various family characters?

A: The one thing God gave me is a completely grotesque family that helps me produce stories.

Q: When your earlier books, “The Great Santini,” “The Lords of Discipline,” “The Water Is Wide” (“Conrack”),” were sold to Hollywood, did you try to write their scripts?

A: I didn’t know I could. This has something to do (with) coming out of the South. No one asked me to write the scripts. And I thought it would be rude to ask. I learned about politeness from my mother. Also I didn’t know how to write a script. You know, there is a myth in our land that a screenplay is easy to do, that it’s far easier to do than a novel. But a screenplay is harder.

I’ve had screenwriters come up to me in Hollywood and tell me that I’m a real writer. I don’t know where they get this sense of depression and ego deflation and self-abnegation. Writing scripts is simply one of the most difficult things a human being can do. There’s something so naked about screenwriting. I can fake you out with a paragraph in a book. I can throw verbiage and I can throw narratives where they make a weak scene look better. You can’t do that with movie writing. It’s got to be visual. It’s like they hand you musical notes and then give you a haiku and say put this together. What I like to do is get a page and fill it up with 10,000 words.

Q: How much of your time now is dedicated to promoting “Prince” and doing interviews?

A: What happens is your life changes when you join the Hollywood gods of Olympus. I don’t know if it’s connected with Barbra Streisand even peripherally, but your life changes when you work with her. I’ve just never seen anything like this. This is like working with the goddess of Athena. I guess what I’m saying is that I’ve never worked with somebody with this kind of star power. And so because of that, because I’m just involved in this in a slight way, it has affected my life. I don’t have to do publicity for the movie; I want to do it to help. I’m very grateful to Barbra.

Q: What about her portrayal of Lowenstein, the psychologist in the book and the movie? Was it close to what you were thinking of?

A: When I first met Barbra she asked me if she looked like the doctor and I said no. So she said does this look like Lowenstein and she flipped this button and this huge image of her comes up on her screen. She had not tested for the part, of course, but she dressed for it and she was in character in the scene. I told her, yeah, that’s Lowenstein. Barbra had shot the scene for herself.

Q: Is Lowenstein based on a real character or several?

A: I went crazy during the ‘70s and I had a woman shrink.

Q: Were you involved in any of the movie’s casting?

A: Only once. Barbra showed me this kid that she had cast for the role of her son, a very handsome blond kid. Of course everyone looks wonderful in Hollywood, but I said that ain’t the kid. So she said I already hired him. I said that still ain’t him. And she said, look, he’s a good athlete. I said this kid is not a good athlete; that’s the point. So she sort of flipped me through other kids she’d auditioned. She finally came to this one kid. I didn’t know it was her son. But he showed a snarling, wonderful teen-age quality. I said that’s the kid right there. She said, ‘But he can’t play football.’ And she had pictures of this kid trying to throw the ball. He certainly wasn’t good. He’d never thrown a football. So I said, ‘Well, that’s what you want because then you can coach him; you can train him.’

Q: You said you’re 500 pages into a book. Do you have a strict schedule of work?

A: It’s not fanatical, but I shoot for five pages a day. Handwritten. My father wouldn’t let me take typing in high school because he said it’s for girls.

Q: Your father was a Marine pilot and you were a service brat.

A: We moved every year from one base to another. I learned about not one Southern town, but 15.

Q: Were you able to make friends as you moved?

A: Loneliness and solitude were a great part of my childhood.

Q: But you were part of a large family.

A: There were seven children and I was the oldest. I was very good friends with my sister, who is a poet in New York.

Q: So that’s Savannah, the poet-sister in “Prince of Tides”?

A: That’s Savannah. Her name is Carol Conroy. Her book, “The Beauty Wars,” was published by Norton last year.

Q: What has been the reaction of the rest of your family toward their portrayals in your books?

A: They probably disliked the books, but they always like it when a Hollywood star portrays them. My father loathed “The Great Santini.” But I remember him roaring through the door of my apartment in Atlanta saying, “Son, you and I were nominated for Academy Awards last night. Your mother didn’t get crap.”

Q: How is your relationship with him?

A: Not too great. In a magazine article he denied ever hitting my mother or any of his children. This is irritating.

Q: In the book and to a large extent in the movie there seems to be a secondary theme about male brutality.

A: This has been a part of my life. This is one of the things I felt compelled to write about. I lived with it when I was a kid. What I could not do was protect my mother and I could not protect my brothers and sisters. And violence is a central theme in my life.

Q: Do you have children?

A: I’ve been married twice; I married women with children and I have my own and there are six altogether. I would never hit my children or my wife. That was one thing I promised myself. And I have not done it. But one thing I’ve learned is that because I was raised by a violent man that I am a violent man, and violence exudes from me, and that I have made my children afraid many times during their childhood because what I got from my father was this terrifying power that comes from that potential for violence.