The Life He Once Knew

Aspiring filmmakers spending time in front of the mirror practicing Oscar speeches and dreaming of fame and creative freedom could learn a thing or two from Roger Avary.

The 37-year-old writer-director won an Academy Award in 1995 for co-writing the wildly influential “Pulp Fiction” with Quentin Tarantino. Although Avary can claim the distinction of stealing the spotlight from the usually garrulous Tarantino that night (he ended their acceptance speech by announcing, “I’m gonna go now ‘cause I really have to take a pee”), it’s Tarantino who went on to fame and fortune. Only dedicated “Pulp” fans recognize Avary’s name.

Having a low profile, however, suits Avary just fine. “I prefer to wander out to the movies and not be recognized,” he says in the office behind his Manhattan Beach home. “There’s greater liberty in that path in life. I’ve got to wonder, can you be normal and exist among people and continue to relate to the real world in your work if you are a media celebrity?”

He speaks from experience. After his Oscar win, his brief flirtation with fame gave him a taste of the bizarre--porn stars have suggested creative uses of his Oscar statuette--and the discomfort of unbearable pressure.

He used to leave the award on his desk by the computer. “I’d sit down to start writing,” he explains. “I’d look at it and it would just suck the life out of everything I was doing. It was like, all of a sudden, whatever I was working on, it had to stand up next to the Academy Award. I couldn’t just write for fun.”

The little golden man now rests inside a tool drawer in Avary’s house.

Rejecting fame may have bought him a more normal personal life, but it hasn’t helped his filmmaking ambitions. His directorial debut, 1994’s “Killing Zoe,” was made with the help of Tarantino as executive producer, but the film was lost in the flood “Pulp Fiction’s” pre-release hype.

Avary’s follow-up, 1996’s “Mr. Stitch,” received its premiere on cable’s Sci-Fi Channel. It’s with the Oct. 11 release of this fall’s “The Rules of Attraction” that Avary finally stands a chance of reminding Hollywood who he is.

The film, an adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ 1987 novel, follows the lives of three undergraduates involved in a love triangle at a small East Coast liberal arts college, and their classmates’ excessive experiences with sex, drugs and alcohol. Toying with narrative and cinematic conventions, Avary has attempted his most ambitious and stylized film, and he’s cast a roster of Hollywood’s Next Big Things, including James Van Der Beek, Shannyn Sossamon, Jessica Biel, Kip Pardue, Ian Somerhalder and Kate Bosworth.

It was while Avary was himself a college undergraduate at Menlo College in the San Francisco Bay Area during the late ‘80s that he first read “Rules of Attraction.”

Having been a big Ellis fan since the novelist’s debut, “Less Than Zero,” Avary grabbed “The Rules of Attraction” immediately upon its publication. “It was the first time I’d read something that was vivid and absolutely true to what I was seeing around me at the time,” Avary says. “I’m reading it and I’m thinking to myself, I have to make this.”

Both Ellis and Avary are familiar with controversy. Ellis received a critical and public lashing with the release of his 1991 Wall Street serial-killer novel, “American Psycho.” Avary’s work, with “Pulp Fiction’s” hired killers and depraved hillbillies, has been a flashpoint for those seeking to pin blame on the popularizing and glorifying of violent crime dramas in the mid-to late ‘90s. Joe Brown described “Killing Zoe” in The Washington Post as “a toxic, repulsive film.”

“My point of view tends to be so intense that people either really vibe to it or they don’t.” Avary says. “If they don’t, then they’re strongly negative about it. There’s very little ambivalence in between.”

He’s heard the criticisms of Ellis’ work and expects his film adaptation to get more of the same. “When you’re doing social criticism the way [Ellis] does it--nihilistic social criticism--people tend to turn off to you a little bit.”

Despite his enthusiasm for the material, Avary could not figure out a way of turning the essentially plotless novel into a film. (Ellis himself made an unsuccessful attempt at a screenplay and has no involvement with Avary’s adaptation.) He would finally figure it out a decade later, but at the time, the temptations of real-life debauchery were too great. Even after establishing himself in Hollywood, lucrative writing assignments on still unproduced scripts kept him distracted from personal projects. Avary’s lifestyle in college wasn’t much different from that of the hard-partying students in the film. He’s proud to show off photos of himself vomiting into a metal bucket.

After graduating from college, Avary moved back to his hometown of Manhattan Beach and attempted to break into the film industry. His early experience as a production assistant on the TV show “Cops” left him disillusioned. It was advice from his friend and boss, “Cops” producer John Langley, that helped Avary get his career back on track.

“He said, ‘If I were you, I would start at the job you want to end up at. If you want to be a director, be a director right from the start. If you do anything else, people are going to pigeonhole you.’ So I said, ‘OK, I quit,’ and I walked out right then,” Avary says.

He spent the next few years telling everyone he encountered that he was a director, even while working behind the counter at a local video store, Video Archives. There he met and befriended Tarantino, at that time another aspiring filmmaker with a day job.

The two began collaborating on screenplays that eventually became “Pulp Fiction,” “True Romance” and “Natural Born Killers.” “Reservoir Dogs,” Tarantino’s 1992 directorial debut, was written without Avary’s help, although he contributed background dialogue for radio broadcasts heard during the film. It was soon after “Pulp’s” smash success that Avary and Tarantino’s partnership dissolved and they began sniping at each other in interviews.

Avary still appears to have conflicted feelings about his friend. “I love Quentin like a brother,” he explains. “If I’m upset at anything about any of the projects that I worked with Quentin on, it’s that I’m upset that he wouldn’t do for me what I would do for him or anybody else. That extends into normal life. Everybody thinks that I am of the opinion that Quentin changed when he became a filmmaker. He didn’t change at all; he just became more intense.

“I wrote a scene for ‘Natural Born Killers,’ and everybody kept saying, ‘It’s the best scene in the movie.’ Do you think Quentin ever once told them, ‘Oh, that was written by Roger?’ That was in the days when I could have used the work and I could have used a little bit of the recognition.” (Tarantino and Avary’s script was heavily rewritten by Oliver Stone and his writers, and Avary’s scene no longer appears in the film.)

Avary stops himself, perhaps feeling guilty about venting his frustrations about his former friend. He begins to recount the aspects of Tarantino that he loved. “He’s funny and fun to be around and clever and a brilliant, brilliant mind who certainly doesn’t need to be working with me.”

Tarantino is in China, directing his next film, “Kill Bill,” and representatives couldn’t reach him for comment, though they report that he is eager to see “The Rules of Attraction.” It seems the only thing working against Avary now is his age. The 15 years it’s taken to bring the novel to the screen has seen him transformed from the hard-partying college student to a married father of two preschool-aged children. He put out a request on his Web site for invitations to college parties so he could see what they look like now.

Van Der Beek had no reservations about having someone so removed from the college scene directing his performance. “He was the one saying, ‘Why not?’ ” the actor says. “He was the one encouraging us all to go for it. Instigator would be an appropriate term for it.”

Glimpses of Avary the partyer can still be seen. He cheerfully offers to expose himself to a photographer and uses rough language in expressing his displeasure about his current troubles with the MPAA ratings board.

Although he made the film with an eye on releasing it unrated, Lion’s Gate, the film’s distributor, has concerns about releasing it unrated and asked him to submit it to the MPAA.

A homosexual masturbatory fantasy scene involving Somerhalder and Van Der Beek’s characters is the subject of the ratings board’s objections.

“In 2002, we view it as virtually impossible to take a picture out on a wide-release basis either NC-17 or unrated,” explains Tom Ortenberg, president of Lions Gate Films Releasing. “Too many theaters won’t play [them]. Until that climate changes, then we’re not even in the position to take an art-house picture out unrated.”

“They’re homophobes at the MPAA is what I think,” Avary says more bluntly. Still, he desires the kind of mainstream success as a director that Tarantino has already achieved and will do what is necessary to get the R rating, even if it means trimming down the scene.

He bristles at the suggestion that “The Rules of Attraction” be released in art houses. “I plan on opening at a real theater,” he says flatly. “I want to have a real release for this film.”

It’s possible that Avary may be getting more comfortable in his role as a responsible adult. His plans for future projects include a kids’ film, and he acknowledges the irony. “I’m one of the parents in America the MPAA is trying to protect me from.”

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Patrick Day is a Times staff writer.