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Paul put Clive's apartment on the first floor. I said he's got to be in the basement, and the casino has got to be in the basement, so you never see any natural lights at all. Even when he's typing in front of the window, and it's raining, you never see the sky. And when you see him watching the guests play a tennis match at his publisher's country house, it's at night. So at the end, when he takes the grills off his basement windows I want you to think that no matter where he's ended up, he was emotionally in jail and now he's freed. Even in this devastating final spectacle of him officiating over people losing at the casino -- it's devastating, but he's laughing at it. The interesting thing about watching "Croupier" with audiences was that when I saw it with an American audience, they loved the idea of someone enjoying watching people lose. They found it terribly funny.

The production of "Croupier" was both quick and complicated -- some of its funding came from Germany, so Hodges built the casino outside Düsseldorf, and shot the film out of sequence there and in England. He also tried, as much as possible, to link the script's precise, intricate voice-over to the dialogue without stretching or shortening scenes to make everything fit -- a feat he pulled off thanks largely to Clive Owen's crack timing. The irony is that through this close collaboration with Mayersberg and Owen and a trio of amazing actresses (Gina McKee, Alex Kingston and Kate Hardie), Hodges was able to make his most effortlessly personal film.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

"As I get older," says the director, now 67, "I've begun to appreciate the later films of John Huston, like 'Fat City' and 'The Dead.' There's such an amazing liquid quality about them that came from his experience as a director. He did what we all should be trying to do, which is find the best and thus the simplest way to express what we have to say."

"Joe Gould's Secret" screenwriter Rodman had the kind of relationship that Mayersberg had with Hodges -- unfortunately, not with Tucci but with Steven Soderbergh. Rodman worked with Soderbergh on two episodes of the neo-noir cable series, "Fallen Angels," and on an unproduced adaptation of the Charlie Chan novels. Rodman says, "Here's the way it is with Soderbergh: We talk and talk and talk and talk. And I go off and write something and I show it to him. And he'll say, 'This is good, this is good, this is good,' or -- rather than say, 'This is crap' -- invariably give some variation of the speech, 'Howard, you constructed a very nice watch here. On somebody else's wrist it would look perfect, but not on mine.' Working with him I've been in meetings where we talked about casting, I've attended rehearsals and been on the set, and spent time in the editing room. That's one version of how the writer-director collaboration works. A different model is the collaboration I had with Stanley Tucci, where I did my work, he thanked me for it, he did his work and shot the movie. And that may be far more 'standard.'"

In the indie world, says Rodman, "where the spirit, on a good day, is, 'Hey, let's build a treehouse' -- and nobody on 'Joe Gould's Secret' made any money -- you assume there will be this infectious collaboration among all the participants. That wasn't the case here."

The on-screen credit does read "Screenplay by Howard A. Rodman." And in Rodman's final draft (which I've read), he sets the arc of the action and homes in on the most revelatory passages of Mitchell's encounters with Gould. A writer writing about writers, Rodman also has a surer take than Tucci's on Mitchell's fascination with Joe Gould. So it's odd that Tucci would blithely tell reporters that the bulk of the script is his. But Rodman's attitude is less angry than graciously perplexed:

I can't impute motives to anybody else. But I do think a lot of what filmmaking comes down to is battling people who are in essence bean-counters for control. If you've butted heads in that way for a long enough time what you want is your vision as opposed to a diluted version of that vision. You have the ugly stupid studio saying, "It's mine," and your response is to say, "No, it's mine." Anything that would make the filmmaking seem more inclusive or collaborative can be seen to weaken your position. It's an easy thing to fall into, and it can come from the best motives. All of us can become a little thuggish when trying to protect our own material. I'll go a step further: Sometimes it's a failure not to be bit thuggish in protecting your own material -- a failure I know intimately!

In "Joe Gould's Secret," Joseph Mitchell, a superb journalist with ambitions toward high art, gets shaken by the enigma of Gould, who may be a great unpublished writer -- or not a writer at all. (Gould insists that his magnum opus is hidden on a duck farm in Long Island.) After writing his final words on Joe Gould in 1964, Mitchell never appeared in the pages of the New Yorker again, though for 32 more years he kept going to the office. (He died in 1996.) Both Gould and Mitchell are the sort of characters who hit working screenwriters in the solar plexus -- after all, they too learn that dream projects are hard to write, let alone publish, and that much of their work will never see the light of day.

Says Rodman:

Your description of Joe Gould as either a great unpublished writer or not a writer at all -- that description could apply to myself and to just about every screenwriter I know. It's the fear we live with: the black lung of our profession. Part of it is both the arrogance of "I do great work and no one knows it," and then, right underneath that is the fear of, "Maybe it's not great work -- maybe it's not even writing at all." I think what happens with screenwriters is there's this really thin membrane between self-pity and self-congratulation. You start out by saying, "Look what they did to me," and it ends up coming out "Look what they did to me."

Among screenwriters I know, you do trade war stories. And you do that to ward off your own terror that what you're doing doesn't mean enough or won't be made or won't be seen or will be seen only in diluted form. In the same way that directors assert ownership of material which is more collaborative than they are sometimes aware of, I think writers get reflexively aggrieved in ways that are far more clichéd than they are aware of. Because frankly, if you want your words to appear exactly as you wrote them, you shouldn't be writing screenplays.

One way Rodman has kept his sanity is to write other stuff on the side. His 1990 novel "Destiny Express" fictionalized the lives of Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou:

When I was going through the process of editing that novel, I got a note from my publisher, Lee Goerner. He said, "Dear Howard, I was looking over the manuscript again, and I noticed on Page 37 that a child refers to his father as Dad. Given the time, the place and the mood you're trying to create, don't you think Father or Papa might be more appropriate? Why don't you think about it? Of course if I don't hear from you what you wrote stands." A sweet note, written not on business paper but on notepaper, in handwriting. I took that note and folded it in four and put it in my wallet. Whenever I would find myself in a room full of screenwriters I would, without introduction and utterly deadpan, pull this note out of my wallet and read it. And everyone in the room would be rolling on the floor and pounding the carpet. Not because the note was so extraordinary on its own terms, as a note from a publisher to a novelist. But because it was so unlike the notes that every screenwriter gets from every studio.

Next page | Rodman meets Mitchell: "An event I will never forget"