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Thomas E. Kennedy, Interviewee 
Duff Brenna, Interviewee
David Applefield, Interviewer
Brenna: Can we talk about how film has impacted literature? I´ve been wondering if Tom ever writes with the movies in mind? It seems like one of the best ways to break out from the pack these days is to get a movie made of your story.
Kennedy: Right in the heart! I would be a big fat liar if I denied I would love to have a movie made out of something I´ve written. I kind of thought that my third novel, The Book of Angels, might make a good movie, but I never wrote it with that in mind. I´ve had several option queries on it, but so far no takers. The whole idea of waiting to get picked by Hollywood, or even by a noble independent, appealing as it maybe, is I think something of a sucker´s game. Sure most of us want it, I guess, but what does it really entail? I know people who´ve gone through years of options finally to have the movie made--and maybe the movie is even good, like Gordon Weaver´s Count a Lonely Cadence filmed as Cadence by Martin Sheen--but in some way or another they get railed out of the project, end up with a small handful of dollars and nothing much else because the thing is not released in theaters, but as a video with some unsatisfactory and unrecognizable title--they did that to Carolyn Chute when they filmed her The Beans of Egypt, Maine, a fine novel and a fine and faithful film, too, but the video people gave it the goddamned title of Forbidden Desires, to try to play up on the incest implications. Or you get a famous director and lead actors but are denied the right to make use of it with a tie-in publication. So what really comes of it other than a demonstration of what an insignificant shit a writer really is in the bean-counting world of the silver screen? Of course, these are problems most of us probably wouldn´t mind having, but my point is that it can too easily come down to an expense of spirit in a waste of unfulfilled greed.
Brenna: Chute´s experience reminds me of Irish director David Keating´s movie called The Last of High Kings, which was re-titled Summer Fling when it came to the States. Or what about the film adaptation Stanley Kubrick did of Stephen King´s The Shining? Do you know that story, Tom?
Kennedy: Actually, yes. Kubrick took large liberties with King´s book, turned it into a kind of horror burlesque. Real camp. Most of the humanity that was in the novel disappears. King´s book was about child abuse and the child abuser as victim of his own past.
Brenna: I´ve heard that King made his own version and it wasn´t very good.
Frank: But remember Stephen King is not a filmmaker! Duff, you brought up the film thing; this must be bothering you. When Too Cool is released as celluloid you can be sure more people will see it than will have read it. How does that make you feel? Are writers in competition with the visual world, and if so, isn´t the online world, electronic books, and the Internet a greater threat to--or potential replacement of--literature as we have known it for the last two centuries?
Brenna: IF it comes out, it will increase the likelihood that the sales of Too Cool will increase and that my other novels will get into paperback and more people will read them and maybe I´ll even be able to turn to full-time writing one of these days. Yes, writers are in competition with the visual world and the Internet is a threat to literature as we know it. But the reality today is just what Tom said it is, and sometimes a movie can give a writer the break he or she needs. Publishers may publish you, but unless you´ve got a big name, they are not going to advertise you, they are not going to push your books, they are going to wait around like Wilkins Micawber and see if something turns up. Word of mouth is one of their favorite phrases for how a book becomes popular. They wait around to see if word of mouth does it.
Kennedy: I´m not worried. Yes, the Internet is changing things about writing just as papyrus, the printing press, the typewriter, and the word processor have. Television and film are important media, and I do notice that some workshop pieces I see in my writing classes in recent years read like film scripts, but trying to write like that is based on a misunderstanding you see often; young writers responding not to poetry or fiction but to film. I had a manuscript a while back that started something like, "Boston. I can´t believe I´m back in fucking Boston." The writer explained it was a play on the opening lines of Coppola´s Apocalypse Now--a great film, but you can´t write a great fiction just by trying to call up images from a film. Film is not fiction. In The ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound points out that literature is made of words while drama is made of people speaking words and what is lacking in the words they speak can be made up for in the movement of bodies. Some people think they can see a film in their head and just write the dialogue down, but it doesn´t work that way, not for me anyway. In a film script when you write "He walks across the room" it works because you´ve got a Harvey Keitel or a Robert Duvall or a James Earl Jones waiting to put the power of flesh to those words. If you write in fiction "He walks across the room" it is dead wood, pulls no weight, does nothing for the most part. Alec Guiness told about how he did not understand the character he was to portray in a film until he could literally walk as the character would. Sometimes he would go to the zoo and watch how the animals moved for a clue to human nature or walk down the street and study the movements of people. External movement for him was a channel to the inner life. The way fiction walks is based on 26 beats, each one symbolized by a letter of the alphabet.
Brenna: Yes, some of the hardest scenes to write in fiction are transition scenes from one room to another or from a chair to the kitchen, from a car to a porch. But as far as literature goes, what will happen to the language if it defaults to the movie screen, if people quit reading and make movies their literature? Wouldn´t that be the true death of the language, not to mention the novel?
Kennedy: To my mind, language is the supreme medium, always was and always will be. I´ve been trying to read Finnegan´s Wake again of late--a story as you know of a sleeping man dreaming the history of mankind. There is an interesting statement by Seamus Dean about it: he says that one of the book´s implications is that the myth of the Fall can be understood as a fall into language, that language is secondary and not primary. We experience this whenever we try to "tell" a dream--the very act of casting the images, or whatever they are, into language changes them; nuances drop away by the scores with every word we select. The world and the word are two different things. As Dean puts it, "the priority of the dream over the language in which it is narrated cannot be established linguistically." Because language is secondary. But if language--which forms from the simple natural act of raising the words of thought on our breath--is secondary, then what is film? Film is made by groups of people and a complex of machines in an impossible and rarely spontaneous interaction; it is not even tertiary--it is reduced by a thousand-fold. Of course, if you take a shitty writer, you don´t get the power of language either.
Frank: Hold on fellas, this film-bashing, whether rooted in truth or not, I think misses the mark. There are far more dangerous tendencies in contemporary life than our dependency on cinema as entertainment. Consider again the way the digital revolution is changing the way we access and distribute information and culture, let alone our reading habits, and look at how the roles of the writer and the publisher in society are being redefined. Do either of you feel threatened by this invasion of traditional relationships? Or do you feel challenged to participate, find your readers, and gain impact as writers? On a personal front, what we hope we are doing with this interview on both paper and on our web site reveals at least our thinking...and belief in concrete gains for literature and writers with a big L and W.
Brenna: First things first. Am I bashing film? Maybe so. Let me qualify what I think about film. I think I´m bashing the trite and the trivial in film, the lack of respect that some filmmakers have for their audience. But film can also be an enlightening experience. Film at its best, like literature at its best, might enlarge a person´s perspective about life. I want film to understand and care about its power over us. I talked about good literature being a holistic experience and that´s what I want film to be as well. Less special effects and more substance, please. As for being threatened by the electronic and digital explosion, I´m not particularly worried. I can only write the books I write and I don´t have time or energy to devote to feeling challenged by the Internet or the technological revolution taking place. I have a feeling that the next generation of writers will find their way through the maze of cyberspace and set a precedent for those to come, and only the older writers will fret about it. The younger writers will wonder what all the fuss is about and they´ll do just fine. In fact, they might end up with more readers than anyone ever imagined.
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