A Playwright in Pottsylvania

Hollywood has wooed playwrights ever since the advent of sound.

Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur, Robert Sherwood, Moss Hart and Lillian Hellman were just a few of the Broadway babies who did time in Tinseltown.

In the last couple of decades, studios have grown a bit more ambivalent about these intruders from the East; they fear that playwrights may live in too rarefied a realm to write brainless blockbusters.

Yet writing talent is still in short supply, and some upstarts from the stage continue to be courted. Tom Stoppard won an Oscar for co-writing “Shakespeare in Love.” Wendy Wasserstein wrote “The Object of My Affection” and has doctored a number of other scripts as well.

One of the most talented of these transplants is Kenneth Lonergan, who boasts an impressively eclectic resume. His autobiographical play “The Waverly Gallery,” about the pressures on a family when the grandmother falls victim to Alzheimer’s, received excellent reviews during its off-Broadway run this spring. “You Can Count on Me,” the first film that he both wrote and directed, won two awards at Sundance this year; the probing drama about the troubled relationship of a brother and sister was honored for best screenplay and shared the festival’s top prize with “Girlfight.” It will be released by Paramount Classics this fall.

Lonergan also wrote the script for the $75-million production of “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle,” which opened Friday.

These ventures have earned him a growing cadre of admirers. Eileen Heckart, who won a special Tony Award for her work in “The Waverly Gallery,” says: “Kenny has such a feel for dialogue and sound. But more than that, he’s very unflinching. He took a subject that people are afraid of, and he looked at it fearlessly.”

Mark Ruffalo, who plays the shiftless brother in “You Can Count on Me,” adds: “He writes small stories that manage to have tremendous emotional resonance. That’s because he takes an honest, complex view of humanity.”

Lonergan’s career has not been without its upheavals, but he’s managed the rare feat of succeeding in theater and film. “Not every playwright can make the transition to film,” says Des McAnuff, the director of “Rocky and Bullwinkle” and himself no stranger to the theater. “Writing for the stage often means adhering to limits, but Kenny has a very wild, free imagination. He’s comfortable in moving from one arena to another.”

“I like both media,” Lonergan says, “and I find them both totally aggravating.”

In theater, writers struggle to eke out a living working on plays that often fail to draw an audience. “America hasn’t been kind to its playwrights,” Heckart observes. “That’s why most of them turn to Hollywood” to make a living. Lonergan admits that he was motivated by financial imperatives when he decided to dabble in movies, but he now seems to be emulating the example of David Mamet, who has written plays, taken big-budget screenwriting assignments like “The Untouchables” and “Ronin,” and directed his own low-budget movies like “The Spanish Prisoner” and “The Winslow Boy.”

Mamet, however, never wrote a live-action/animated movie like “Rocky and Bullwinkle.”

“I liked that show when I was little,” says Lonergan, 37. “I was looking for work, and they asked me to come in with a pitch for the movie.”

Jay Ward’s TV series, “Rocky and His Friends,” which ran from 1959 to 1964, dealt with a spunky squirrel and a dimwitted moose running afoul of pseudo-Soviet spies Boris and Natasha. But with the Cold War over, producer Jane Rosenthal needed a fresh approach, so Lonergan came up with what he calls “a very simple idea--a road movie of Rocky and Bullwinkle, characters from the ‘60s, traveling through the ‘90s.” Boris (Jason Alexander), Natasha (Rene Russo) and Fearless Leader (Robert De Niro) are now trying to take over the world by infiltrating the media.

Lonergan watched a lot of the original episodes before writing the script. And, he says, “my respect for the series grew. It moves so fast, and it changes gears so quickly, and it’s so imaginative. My goal is to be faithful to the tone and style of the show.”

“When I first heard about the project,” McAnuff says, “I was skeptical. A lot of revivals of old TV series have misfired. But when I read Kenny’s script, I was delighted. He’s a brilliant wordsmith. And we worked well together, probably because we both have a theater background.”

Lonergan was actually hooked on movies long before he discovered the theater. He grew up in Manhattan; his father was a doctor and his mother a psychiatrist, though his parents divorced when he was 5. “My father took me to movies every Sunday,” Lonergan recalls. “We would go to revival houses to see ‘Casablanca’ or ‘The Big Sleep’ or the Marx Brothers. My father would explain the plot to my brother and me while we were riding to the theater in the cab, so we would be a little bit ahead of the game.”

When he was at the Walden School, he was inspired by a theater teacher and began writing plays. His classmate Matthew Broderick starred in his first play when they were both in 11th grade. “That was my first lead,” Broderick recalls. “And then we did more plays together. We put a lot of energy into that part of school. Only that part.”

Over the next several years, Lonergan wrote several plays but was unable to get any produced. So he paid the rent by writing speeches for the Environmental Protection Agency and Weight Watchers, video presentations for Grace Chemicals and comedy vignettes for Fuji Film sales meetings. He turned to screenwriting to escape the drudgery of industrial writing.

His stepfather had once told him the true story of a Mafioso who sought therapy from a psychiatrist when he was feeling depressed. “This analyst said, ‘Forget it. I’m not interested,’ ” Lonergan says. “And I thought it might be interesting if the analyst didn’t say, ‘Forget it,’ but actually took him on.”

So he wrote the script for “Analyze This” and sold it to Warner Bros. “After you sign the contract, then they tell you what they really plan to do with the movie,” Lonergan says.

Eventually a dozen writers had a go at his screenplay, and it took eight years before the film was made. Although he still received a screen credit, the experience was so demoralizing that he has never seen the finished film.

Nevertheless, the success of “Analyze This” landed him many other screenwriting assignments, often to doctor other writers’ work.

Lonergan rails against the wastefulness of the Hollywood development process, during which a script can undergo seemingly end-less revisions by people eager to leave their fingerprints all over a project.

“The fallacy,” he says, “is to think writing can be done by a group. If executives took that approach with cinematography, there would be no movie. Of course, they realize they don’t know anything about cinematography, but everybody knows how to read and write, so they think they can improve a script.

“I would love to do an experiment where you tell the studios, ‘Half your movies will have no story consultation and no market research, and you have to advertise them as much as the others, which will have as much story consultation and as much market research as you want.’ I swear to God there would be absolutely no difference in the amount of money those two sets of movies make.

“But a lot of people would be out of work, especially all the marketing people and all the development people.”

He decided to direct “You Can Count on Me” to ensure that the script would be filmed as he wrote it. As added protection, he hired several actors who had worked for him before, including his high school buddy Broderick and Ruffalo, who had starred in his first produced play, “This Is Our Youth.”

“He was very assured,” Broderick says. “He’s had a lot of experience fighting for his point of view with people who want to tell him what to do. So he was very good at keeping control of things.”

Filmmaking was not an unalloyed pleasure for Lonergan. “When we were making the movie,” Ruffalo says, “Kenny kept saying to me, ‘I’ll never direct again. I hate people.’ He’s a solitary person. He’s not a recluse, but he steers clear of the herd. On a movie set you have to deal with people asking you questions every five minutes.”

“It was totally grueling,” Lonergan says. “The hours are brutal. The pressures are intense. I like working with the actors, but I’d rather be sitting in my apartment talking to my imaginary friends. What I’d like best would be to write on my own and give the script to someone who is just like me to direct and produce. I’d drop by and say hello to everyone and have it all turn out exactly the way I wanted. But since that’s not going to happen, I’m sure I will direct again.”