Joyce Carol Oates, page 2






You do a lot of work with theater and playwriting, but how do you feel about your work being made into film? Would you like to see "Zombie" made into a film?


Many writers cringe at the thought of movies being made of their novels. Saul Bellow said so eloquently that the best situation is just to be optioned indefinitely. You get a certain degree of money, and it just sort of hangs in limbo, it's suspended, you never have to see the actual horror in front of you. And even Tom Wolfe, who wrote "Bonfire of the Vanities," might have had some reason to expect that that novel -- a bestseller, very satirical, kind of light and very entertaining -- he would be made into a good, entertaining movie, but evidently it was just a disaster. With all the money that they had. And I don't know that Tom was at all proud of it. I'm sure he was just sort of cringing.
So too with John Updike and "The Witches of Eastwick" --he went to see it, and he was kind of bemused and wondering what it was. 

So I'm not sure that many writers really feel comfortable with the prospect. There was one short story of mine, it was called "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," that was made into a movie called "Smooth Talk" some years ago with -- I always forget his name, it was either Treat Williams or Trick Williams. Treat or Trick -- Treat Williams, I think. And in the movie he seems to have had an almost tick-like imitation of Marlon Brando, but maybe he was imitating someone who'd been imitating Marlon Brando -- it was several times removed from Marlon Brando.  

But it was also the debut of a very good actress, Laura Dern, and she was only about 17 or 18 when she made the film, and she was playing a 14-year-old. She's really, really wonderful. 

I had nothing to do with that film, and the title "Smooth Talk" of course is not my title. My story had an ending one might call tragic, since the heroine surrenders to death. She in a sense is transcending her mortal self; she arises above her particularity and she's going to ascend to death. She looks out from the screen door, and she sees the organic world, which is the world from which we come, and we're composed of, and she's going to go to that world and she's going to die. A man has come for her, a rapist, and he's going to kill her. But in the movie, somehow she comes home from being with him and she and her sister get out a record and they dance together, and that was the end of the movie. 

I thought, well, it's Hollywood, it's a very different movie, but it's probably the only ending that they could film that would be visual. My story had a sort of Hawthornian and allegorical quality to it. I was suddenly thinking of Hawthorne and "The Scarlet Letter," which was another disaster of a film -- very good that Nathaniel didn't get to see that. I think he would have been deeply mortified.

So, I'm not sure that having something made into a film is really that wonderful. Writers tend to feel that they put all their heart's blood into a book, and then if it's made into a movie, it has to be an autonomous and really very separate work, whether a work of art, or just some sort of effort to make money, who knows.




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