Mapson Goes Hollywood With Novel

Costa Mesa author Jo-Ann Mapson received good news from Hollywood this week.

CBS and Warner Television have exercised their movie option on her 1994 novel, “Blue Rodeo,” a love story between two middle-age people in a small New Mexico town.

Pre-production is underway. Filming will begin Aug. 5 in Tucson, with Ann-Margret starring as Margaret Yearwood, a divorced mother struggling to overcome emotional estrangement from her teenage son, Peter. Kris Kristofferson co-stars as Owen Garrett, a cowboy on the run from the law who falls in love with her.

CBS will air the movie this fall.

“It’s exciting and terrifying,” Mapson, 44, says. “It’s exciting because it’s every writer’s dream to have a book go to film--and a film that will be seen by lots of people.”

And it’s terrifying, she continues, because, “Anything that tampers with one’s art is a little unnerving: It’s out there, and I don’t have any real control over it.”

Mapson, however, is happy with the “Blue Rodeo” script written by executive producer Paul Lussier.

A couple of subplots have been deleted, Mapson says, and the script is “more of a love story and focused more on Margaret and Owen than the book is. But I’m really pleased with the way they handled the deaf community issues and the Native American issues.”

Three characters in the novel are Native Americans, and one of them is deaf, Mapson says, “so those two communities overlap.” She praises the script for avoiding Hollywood caricatures. “I think they did a realistic job portraying these people.”

“Blue Rodeo,” which was published by HarperCollins, had been under option to CBS and Warner Television for two years. Mapson says the companies waited until the eleventh hour to exercise the latest one-year option: It was due to run out last Sunday.

Mapson’s Hollywood agent called her that evening to say he had her check from CBS and Warner Television for the film rights. Mapson says she doesn’t like to discuss money, “but it’s enough to make me tremble.”

“It’s a substantial amount, I must say,” she says, adding that she’s thinking of using a small part of it to buy a new sport utility vehicle.

But not just any sport utility vehicle--a blue Isuzu Rodeo.

Mapson says the movie executives are attempting to secure the rights to a song used in both the book and the movie script. The song was written by Laguna Beach author T. Jefferson Parker’s deceased wife, Catherine “Cat” Parker, an Orange County rock ‘n’ roll singer who died of brain cancer in 1992 at age 34. The song’s title: “Blue Rodeo.”

“Unfortunately,” Mapson says, “the first time I heard it was at her funeral. It was a powerful piece of music. I asked Jeff if I could use it as the title of the novel.”

Lussier, who served as executive producer of the Emmy-nominated TV movie “Doing Time on Maple Drive,” says he was attracted to “Blue Rodeo” because it offered “the opportunity to do a movie that is about people turning casualties of fate into gifts to enrich their lives--or turn a handicap into an asset.”

The casualty of fate in the “Blue Rodeo” script occurs when the teenage son, to be played by Corbin Allred, runs out of a hotel room while his parents are having a fight and, in an attempt to drown out his parents’ quarrel, dives into a shallow pool and hits his head, an injury that leads to deafness.

As the story unfolds, Lussier says, the mother and son, through the use of sign language, “engage in a more honest relationship than they ever had.”

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Mapson says she never gave up hope that “Blue Rodeo” would be made into a movie.

“I just had a feeling that this one was going to go,” she says.

“Hank and Chloe,” her 1993 first novel--an Orange County love story between a female horse trainer and a college professor--has been under option to an independent producer for three years.

Mapson’s latest novel, “Shadow Ranch,” is about three generations of the same Orange County family finding their way back to each other after a family tragedy. As for screen treatment of that one, Mapson says with a laugh, “it’s available.”

All of Mapson’s novels share the trademark themes of forgiveness, love and family--and reflect her passion for horses and the Southwest landscape.

The Pasadena-born writer grew up in Fullerton and earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Cal State Long Beach in 1977. She began writing short stories when she was 7, and in 1986 she won the California Short Story Award sponsored, in part, by the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. In 1989, Orange County-based Pacific Writers Press published “Fault Line,” a collection of her stories.

Mapson received a graduate degree in creative writing from Vermont College in 1992. She teaches English composition classes at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, where she has also taught creative writing. She’ll teach a fiction workshop at UC Irvine beginning in January.

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Mapson is about halfway through her fourth novel, “Another Man’s Medicine,” a sequel to “Hank and Chloe.”

The new novel has movie potential, she says, but seeing her work on screen has never been her aim.

“All I ever wanted to do was write books.”