A Novel Success Story : Hollywood Pays Big Bucks for Former Lawyer’s Tales of Suspense

How’s this for a Hollywood success story?

You’re 37 years old. You live in Oxford, Miss. You coach Little League. Eight years ago, while working as a small-town criminal defense attorney, you became so bored that you took out a yellow legal pad and began scribbling a novel as a hobby. You never studied writing and your first two books were written in longhand. You don’t care for action movies like “Under Siege” and you wouldn’t pay $2 to rent “The Terminator” or “Rambo.”

Yet, right now, you are the hottest writer in the movie industry.

Meet John Grisham.

In the past 18 months, Grisham has accomplished the unthinkable: He has sold movie rights to three of his novels for nearly $4.4 million. Tom Cruise is set to star in one of the films. Sydney Pollock is set to direct. Julia Roberts is in line for another. And yet, none of the films has even gone before a camera.

“I don’t think anything Hollywood does surprises me,” said Grisham in a telephone interview from his farm an hour’s drive from Memphis. “It’s such an unpredictable world out there.”

Last week, Hollywood was abuzz after the movie rights to Grisham’s yet-to-be published novel, “The Client,” were auctioned for $2.5 million to producer Arnon Milchan’s New Regency Productions. The price tag was believed to be one of the highest ever for the film rights to a book.

Grisham’s novel “The Pelican Brief” had already been sold to Warner Bros. for $1.27 million and “The Firm”--which Paramount Pictures will begin shooting next month with Cruise in the lead role--went for $600,000.

And, if that isn’t enough, eight offers have been made by film and television producers for Grisham’s first novel, “A Time to Kill,” but his agent has put off any negotiations until January.

But that’s only movies. Grisham’s books have hit the bestseller charts from the British Isles to Japan. “I’m making more money selling book rights than movie rights,” said Jay Garon, Grisham’s New York-based literary agent with Jay Garon-Brook Associates.

Why is Hollywood suddenly so fascinated by this one-time Mississippi state legislator?

“I think when an author really comes out of nowhere with a huge bestseller like Tom Clancy did with ‘The Hunt for Red October,’ there’s a feeding frenzy,” said Beverly Hills entertainment attorney Thomas M. Hansen.

In Grisham’s case, Hansen said, “the stars were aligned.” Grisham’s stock was boosted just by the fact that Pollock and Cruise were preparing to make “The Firm” at Paramount.

“There is such heat just sitting there for this guy,” Hansen said. “Sometimes you’re the hottest before your movie comes out.”

Grisham’s books are summer-on-the-beach reads. In “The Firm,” he writes about a young lawyer who joins an obscure Memphis law firm only to discover that it really is a front set up by the Chicago Mafia to evade taxes and launder money through the Cayman Islands.

“The Client,” which will be published by Doubleday on March 3, revolves around an 11-year-old boy who witnesses the suicide of a lawyer. Just before the lawyer dies, he tells the boy about the murder of a U.S. senator, information that puts the boy’s life in peril.

There is nothing Dostoyevskian about these novels, as Grisham readily concedes.

“They are stories that are simply told,” he said. “There is nothing fancy about the style. I start at point A and go to point B and C and D and when I finish I better be at Z or I’m in trouble. There is one fairly quick scene after another. The books are very visual. That is why they have the attraction they do in Hollywood.”

Filmmakers agree. “He writes straightforward,” said Stephen D. Reuther, president of New Regency Films. “He writes plots that are easily translatable to the screen. . . . The internal machinations of the characters don’t override the drive of the narrative. That just happens to be good for movies.”

For Grisham, the months ahead are like enjoying the calm before the storm. “Next year is gonna be wild,” he said.

“The Firm” is tentatively scheduled to hit movie theaters next summer, he said, and “The Pelican Brief” may be released by Christmas, 1993.

There was a time when the thought of Hollywood intruding on his life would have seemed the unlikeliest of fantasies.

It was 1984 and Grisham was working out of a one-man office in Southaven, Miss., (population 25,000) defending people charged with armed robbery, burglary, assault and drugs. He even had a couple of murder cases come his way, but despite all that, he said, “My practice was very boring.”

At some point, he started writing a novel as a hobby. “I never had a desire to write, never studied writing, never wrote in college or in law school. But I became inspired by the idea for a courtroom drama. I thought I could tell it as my personal experience.”

He began writing in longhand on a legal pad. “My goal was simply to finish it.” It took three years to write.

At the time, Grisham was also serving in the lower house of the Mississippi state legislature, a job he said was as boring as being a small-town lawyer.

“There was an enormous amount of wasted time,” Grisham recalled, so he would sneak off into a room and write. He always carried a legal pad with him and, soon, the legal pads mounted up.

When he had completed “A Time to Kill,” the unknown author sent off typed versions to “a bunch of agents” and, in typical fashion, they sent them back. All, that is, but Jay Garon.

The book was sold in 1988, while Grisham was already hard at work on “The Firm,” which he also wrote in longhand.

Grisham’s timing was impeccable. In 1987, another lawyer-turned-novelist named Scott Turow had come out with “Presumed Innocent,” a legal suspense thriller that soared to the top of the bestseller charts.

“He showed that there is a huge appetite for good books written by lawyers,” Grisham said. “Our country has always had an insatiable appetite for lawyers and courtroom dramas.”

Grisham said his plots come solely from his imagination, but he has drawn upon ideas he has seen or heard about in legal cases. “I spend a lot of time just thinking about stories--all related to the law, of course.

“I don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on courtroom stuff,” he added. “I take a character like a lawyer or a law student and get them caught up in some horrible conspiracy unwittingly. That’s the secret of suspense.”

With the enormous success of “The Firm,” Grisham moved his family to a 70-acre farm near the quaint college town of Oxford, Miss., the land of William Faulkner and still a draw for many Southern writers. Grisham had studied law at the University of Mississippi with plans to become a tax attorney. His 31-year-old wife, Renee, is now an English major at “Ol’ Miss.” They have two children: a 9-year-old son, Ty, and a 6-year-old daughter, Shea.

Grisham no long relies on legal pads. He traded them in for a personal computer. He said the secret to writing is to do it every day, and that’s what he does from 6 to 11 a.m. in an office above his garage. His wife is his editor.

Although he said he leaves dealing with Hollywood up to his agent, Grisham said he has had the opportunity to meet with a couple of filmmakers, including producer Alan J. Pakula, who will make “The Pelican Brief.”

Grisham said he has no interest in exerting control over the movies that are made of his books, but he was concerned when the first drafts of a screenplay for “The Firm” came back that deviated greatly from his novel.

“This was before the book was published,” he said. “They wanted something different from the story. But once it was published and became a popular novel, I think they backed off and looked at it and said, ‘This thing works.’ To their credit, they said, ‘Let’s stick to the story.’ ”

For “The Client,” Grisham said: “I would like to talk to the producer when it comes to selecting a director.”

Grisham said he realizes that he can’t control the making of a film. “Nobody forces me to sell to Hollywood,” he said. “I know when I sell a book, it’s not going to be exactly what I wrote.”

For now, he’s content to put the finishing touches on “The Client” and go out to the movies with his family. He loved “The Prince of Tides” and “Patriot Games,” although the ending of that film, he said, was a little disappointing. But action films usually leave him cold.

“Those are not my kind of movies,” he said. “I get tired of bombs going off, 147 people getting shot and Schwarzenegger blowing up half the world.”