As the overplayed teen horror genre wheezes away in its own death throes, the
timing couldn’t be better for a flat-out parody of the form (“Screams” I and II
packed plenty of wit, but were surprisingly scary as well). So the idea of a TV-addicted stoner
whose epic inertia makes him an ideal host for a demonic takeover isn’t an inherently terrible
one. Here, it turns out that idle hands really are the devil’s playground,
and it’s recess time in the body of Anton Tobias (Devon Sawa). By the time he
realizes he’s got an uninvited guest (the calls are coming from, like,
inside you, man!) he’s already done unspeakable things to a growing number
of his town’s population, including his own parents. When his equally low-wattage friends
Mick (Seth Green) and Pnub (Elden Henson) catch on to the
fact that Anton has a pile of body parts decomposing on his rug, all they
get for their one moment of illumination is cruel death and subsequent
zombiefication.

As stupefyng as “Idle Hands” is while the title appendage is still attached
to Anton, it goes into a whole other realm of godawfulness when the demon
digits take off on their own. Part of the problem is that it’s not even a
very threatening-looking hand, with its delicate fingers and graceful
knuckles and all. Even after filing its digits into razor sharp talons, the
Thing still looks more like it belongs on a bank teller than in the middle
of a vigorous killing spree. That’s not to say that, despite the film’s
visual ludicrousness, it doesn’t still manage to be completely distasteful
in a thoroughly gross-out way. The hell-critter fondles a girl’s breasts
before strangling her, crawls up a man’s leg before yanking off his penis,
and plops itself on a scalp before ripping it off. Bad hand! No lotion!

The three leads in “Idle Hands” are all amply talented young actors with a collective history of memorable
scene-stealing. But here Henson and Green, two of the slyest deadpanners among their
peers, are reduced to an endless series of “Whoas” and “Dudes” as
they fire up the bong and adjust to being undead. (The alleged joke is that
it’s not much different from their existence when they were alive, only
with somewhat less rot.) They sit around Anton’s house watching music
videos and lobbing junk food at each other, too indolent to make that long
march into the light. They’re like a zombie Cheech and Chong, which is a scary enough
concept, though maybe not in the way the filmmakers intended.

Sawa, meanwhile, doing a mix of Jim Carrey in “Liar, Liar” and Steve Martin
in “All of Me,” has the dubious burden of convincing the audience that his
hand has an evil mind of its own. He pounds his fist, he smothers his own
mouth, he crams himself into a bagel slicer. It’s difficult to imagine any
actor conveying a modicum of comic credibility with such juvenile material,
so it’d be unfair to judge Sawa’s talents based on his work here (and in href="http://www.salon.com/ent/movies/review/1999/04/16/punk/print.h
tml">“SLC Punk,” incredibly, he plays an even-bigger burnout). One can
only imagine his relief when he gets to extract his evil paw before the big
puppet scene at the end.

It may come as no surprise that director Rodman Flender cut his teeth at the WB, helming the cable
network’s teen angstfest href="http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/1998/03/cov_16tv.html">“Dawson’s
Creek.” Perhaps he’s working out his more aggressive side here. Flender
seems to be having fun, especially when the hand is flying through glass
doors or scuttling down the street like a overgrown demi-tarantula. The
best thing one can say about him is that he may not be the film’s worst
perpetrator. That’s a distinction reserved for writers Terri Hughes and Ron
Milbauer, whose idea of cleverness is having a pretty girl shredded and
then letting another character blithely comment on “getting a piece.”

Black humor can be a wonderful thing, but it’s hard to pull off even with
good dialogue and clever plot twists — neither of which this movie
possesses. Instead, “Idle Hands” presents an unappetizing collection of lowlife
losers (only Vivica A. Fox, as a druid priestess, is even remotely
appealing) too busy getting baked to pay much concern to the mounting body
count, and too unengaged in this life to even notice when they’ve entered the
next. And as manifestations of the prince of the underworld go, a dainty
set of digits is about as lame as you can get. (Indeed, you know you’re watching a putrid movie
when you’re thinking that >“Carrie 2″ did this so much better.)

Sure, a hand so overtaken by vileness
that it’s compelled to do horrible things is an amusingly far-fetched premise. But
I can’t imagine how else it came to be that “Idle Hands” was written in the first place.

A little one, that would be nice. A big one would be not. [He laughs. Note: Follett's laugh is a simple, straightforward, "Ha
ha ha."]

You’re pretty safe in New York. Apparently there are no earthquake fault
lines here.

Somebody told me that there’s a fault line that runs right through the
middle of Manhattan. I don’t believe it is true. We don’t have the edge of
a tectonic plate here, do we?

Did you spend a lot of time out west researching “Hammer of Eden”?

Not a lot of time. I spent probably in total three or four weeks.

Do you do a lot of research? Do you have a staff to assist you?

No. No. I use Dan Starr, a professional researcher here in New York who
does all the legwork, all that stuff which would take me days and weeks of
calling, waiting for people to call back. Dan does all that. Finds books.
Makes reading lists. Finds maps. I say to him, “I need a seismologist.” So
he’ll find one who is good at explaining their work, and is willing to read
the manuscript and catch errors.

I also wanted to spend some time with the FBI, so Dan called the San
Francisco FBI and got ahold of the agent in charge of media, and set up an
appointment. I have to do the actual interviewing myself — you can’t have
somebody else do that because you don’t know in advance all the questions
you’ll want.

Did people in San Francisco get nervous when you started talking to them
about man-made earthquakes?

Yes. I went to see Gov. Pete Wilson. I told him what my story was and said,
“Just try to imagine for a minute, if there was a terrorist threat of an
earthquake and something happened that made you believe they could really
do it, how would you deal with it?”

He gave the answer I anticipated. He said, “No mater what the threat, you
couldn’t give in because if you did, then next week there would be another
threat.”

How real is the idea of an earthquake bomb?

I hope it isn’t real. Some of the seismologists told me, “There’s no way
this could happen.” But others gave sad little shrugs and said, “It’s hard
to say. Who knows? Maybe. It’s within the realm of possibly.”

Is every book the same pattern — research, outline, write it?

Generally. That has been the pattern for several books. “Pillars of the
Earth” was different because it was so long. It took much longer to
write it. Over three years. Otherwise for a long time now I’ve been on
these two-year cycles — a year of preparation and a year of writing.

Do you have a lot of writer friends in London?

Probably my best friend among writers is Hanif Kureishi. He writes
novels about the experience of being Asian in London. [In London, "Asian"
means Indian and Pakistani rather than Japanese and Chinese.] A novel of
his was filmed and was quite successful, “My Beautiful Laundrette.”
He’s probably my closest friend among
writers. I know the thriller writers. I see Frederick Forsyth, Jack
Higgins. I see Jeffrey Archer. Who else? Ruth Rendell. I see some of the
feminists. Fay Weldon. In America, Erica Jong. She is probably my oldest
friend. I’ve known her for 20 years now. Known her through several
husbands.

You care about Bob Dylan?

Yeah. Very much.

Have you heard his new album? There’s an 18-minute song on it where Dylan
mentions to a Boston waitress that he’s read Erica Jong.

Oh really? I don’t know if she knows about it. The last album that I got of his was “Good as I’ve Been to You,”
which was really raw, but terrific folk songs. Just before I came to
America I was playing “Highway 61.” That album must be 30 years
old.

Where were you when Dylan went electric in the ’60s?

I was in university. From 1967 to ’70. I used to play guitar, and I used to
play Bob Dylan songs. I’d play “Blowin’ in the Wind.” And all those
numbers. “Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” “Bob Dylan’s Dream.” “The Times They Are
a-Changing.” I can still play all those songs.

And I’ve really been enjoying “Highway 61.” Those surreal lyrics.
“You can hear the penny whistles/You can hear them blow/If you lean
your head out far enough/From Desolation Row.” That’s terrific. God knows
what it means. But it’s just wonderful. They stay in your head, those words.

Is this the first time you’ve gone public as a Dylan freak?

No one has ever asked me.

When were you a crime reporter?

I was a newspaper reporter when I quit college in 1970 until late ’74. I
was never specifically a crime reporter, but I was often sent to court
because my shorthand was so good. I bet you don’t do shorthand.

No.

But I did do shorthand, which was necessary for court work because if you
report something wrong in court you lose your immunity from prosecution.
I guess I also spent some time at Scotland Yard — so yeah, I did a lot of
crime work.

You must get interviewed a lot. Anyone ever use shorthand?

Yes. Some people do. Definitely.

Did you do interviews when you were a reporter?

On my first newspaper job I had the pop music column. So I interviewed
Stevie Wonder. He was probably the best in terms of most famous and most
interesting. I interviewed Led Zeppelin.

Did they tear up the room with Samurai swords?

No, no. They were quite calm. They looked as if later that night they might
raise a little hell.

I meant to ask you this after you mentioned Erica Jong. I’ve always been
under the illusion that I really understand women, even though my wife
tells me, “You don’t understand women at all.”

Ha ha ha.

But you have this reputation of really understanding women.

I don’t really think that way. When I’m writing a woman character, I don’t
think, “What would a woman do?” I just think, “What would this character do
in this situation?” I’ve never made a big distinction between the way that
women react and the way that men react. It’s often more interesting
artistically to have a female character in a situation of physical danger.
Two men in a fight is fairly tame, but put a woman in that situation and
you haven’t got all that history of male confrontation to get in your way.
You can do anything you want.

I don’t think there’s any great mystery about writing female characters, so
long as you talk to them — I mean if you lived in a monastery and never met
any women maybe it would be difficult, but somebody who’s led a normal
life, and fallen in love, and been married, had sisters and daughters,
mother and aunts — what’s the mystery? You know women as well as you know
men.

But it is said you have this great insight into female characters.

It is true that an awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly.
So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.

Thrillers have been traditionally very masculine books, the women
characters often rather decorative. Like the James Bond books, which are
really my literary influence. Now the women in those stories are very
peripheral. They’re in the story to either create a problem for James Bond
or be the romantic interest. Whereas in my books the women often solve the
problem. Even if the woman is not the hero, she’s a strong character. She
does change the plot. She’ll often rescue the male character from some
situation. When I started writing, this was mildly unusual. Now it’s
commonplace.

For the past year I’ve had this crazy impulse to read a James Bond novel.
They aren’t as silly as the movies, are they?

They’ve never had the humor that the movies had. Sean Connery really
slightly subverted James Bond when he played the part because he had this
slightly ironic self-mocking air all the way through. But in the books
themselves there’s no self-mockery about James Bond. He’s quite serious
about his drinks and clothing and cigarettes and food and all that sort of
thing. There is nothing wry or amused about James Bond.

There are a lot of nonfiction books in this room. You yourself wrote one nonfiction book, about Iran.

“On Wings of Eagles.” It was about two employees of Ross Perot who
were arrested during the revolution in Tehran, and they escaped. Perot sent
in a rescue team. And they all got out.

The book was really a collaborate effort of all the people who’d been in
the story. I interviewed all of them. And spent a long time with Perot
himself. And showed my draft to all the principals in the story to correct.

Were you surprised when Perot ran for president?

I wasn’t that surprised. People were always saying to him in those days,
“You should run for office.” That was in ’82. He used to say, “If you could
run for king I might.”

What made you choose to do this book?

I was looking for something different to do. I had written three novels in quick succession. Then one of Perot’s
people called my agent and explained that Perot had decided that sooner or
later someone was going to do a book about the rescue. If they didn’t
cooperate it would be an inaccurate book. So they wanted a good book
written that would be accurate, and they would pick someone to collaborate
and take charge of it. I was selected as the writer.

So since I was looking for something different, this sounded great. I
took it. The drama was already there. Here were these data processors from
Texas, and they were in this ancient and rather primitive kingdom, Iran.
The culture clash is terrific drama. Then there’s the drama of the
businessman who finds himself in the middle of a revolution. Then there was
the ultimate drama of the boss who says, “I sent these people in there.
They’re my responsibility. I’m going to get them out, no matter what it
takes.” That was a great story.

Who had “final cut”?

In the end that wasn’t an issue. At first I was worried that it would be an
issue between me and Perot before I got to know him. So we made a deal
whereby it would cost him $1 million, but he would have the right to
kill the project.

You’d get the million either way?

Yes. That would be my compensation for not publishing the book. So that
was the deal we made. We never came close to quarreling because my worry
had been that he would want to promote himself egotistically. That wasn’t a
problem. His worry would be that I would take against the character of
Col. Simons. He was afraid that I, as a cynical Brit, would deflate this
character. None of that turned up to be an issue. Col. Simons was a
gung-ho hero. And I actually managed to get a little underneath his skin.

There was no danger of fatwa on you, was there?

I don’t think I would have done the book if the project came after
Salman Rushdie’s fatwa. I think I would have been too scared. But at the
time I wasn’t scared of the Ayatollah. I wasn’t afraid of anybody. I
probably should have been.

Do you know Salman Rushdie?

Yeah. I think he’s a terrific writer. And he’s been through a terrible
experience. He’s a very strong character. And that’s really helped. He has
the most enormous self-confidence. He’s got quite a big ego actually. Too
big for some people. Some people don’t like Salman; I like him. That ego
and that self-confidence have really helped him through this.

When he was really in hiding, I used to see him at the home of a mutual
friend. In those days Salman would be having dinner with you, and three
bodyguards would be having take-away (food) in the next room. But then he started to come to regular parties and show up at book parties and so on.

How different is publishing in London from New York?

Not that much different. The British watch the
American bestseller list and vice versa. A lot of companies are owned by
international conglomerates.

Martin Amis aside, do we Yanks seem more money-obsessed?

No. All publishers all over the world are having to pay attention to the
bottom line. I want publishers to be strong, not subsidized by other
businesses.

But you’re a member of the small percentage of writers who make money. No
one will lose money publishing a Ken Follett novel.

I wouldn’t say it was a small percentage. Most writers make money.
Occasionally, at the beginning of a writer’s career, when the
publisher is trying to establish the writer, they will spend more than
they’re making to try to bring this writer to the public’s attention. But
by and large publishers expect every book to make a profit.

Did the Jackal [the nom de guerre of famously aggressive New York literary agent Andrew Wylie] try to sign you?

Ha ha ha. No.

Would you have been tempted?

No. I mean, Al Zuckerman, who has been my U.S. agent for 25 years, is a
very good editor. And that’s his great value to me. He’s almost a
collaborator.

Is there any book that you’ve written that just never came together.

I abandoned a book after working on it for a year. I was writing a story
called “Country Risk,” which was about a KGB plot to take over a bank
and then subsequently cause a financial crisis. Not a bad story idea. I
must have been working on this through 1983. At the end of that year I had
an outline that all my publishers liked. My agent liked it. At first I
thought it was great, but then I stepped back. I thought about how people
talk about “Eye of the Needle.” They were so on the edge of their seat
reading this book. They couldn’t bear to put it down because they were
afraid of what was going to happen next. I realized that nobody was ever
going to feel that way about this story about bankers. And so I dropped it.

It was heartbreaking because it was a year’s work, but it was the right
decision. Then the book I wrote was “Lie Down With Lions.”

Did that one come easy?

Yes. That was very much an adventure story. Outdoor adventure story. Two
people escaping across the Himalayas. And the KGB team chasing them.

I don’t know anything about your personal life. Do you have more than one wife?

Yes. Funny way to put the question. I’m now married for the second time. I
have two children and three stepchildren.

Who were you married to when you abandoned your manuscript?

Oh, I see. “Country Risk.” I was married to my first wife.

I’m married. I can’t imagine coming in and telling my wife, “I’m going to
drop this book.”

Well, that. My publishers were a bit dismayed, because I was going back to
square one, which meant I wouldn’t be delivering the book as soon as they
hoped. But no one argued with me about it. I’m trying to remember
conversations with my then wife about it. And I can’t remember what she
said about it.

It was risky writing about Russia in the ’80s anyway. The scene kept
changing. I have no desire to read John le Carré books from that decade.

I’ve always found John le Carré after his first few books, which were
great, hard to read.

You ever put yourself in peril in the last 20 years doing research?

No. When I did “Lie Down With Lions,” I didn’t go to Afghanistan. I
used people who had been. I talked to TV reporters.

What if you had had the opportunity?

I would have said, “No.” And it could have been arranged. The war was on
and people were going there as reporters. But I didn’t go because it was
dangerous.

But you have a wife and kids, it wasn’t really an option. I would like to
think that I would have gone to Spain with Hemingway in the ’30s. Or
Nicaragua in the ’80s.

There’s a very short period in your life when those options are open to
you. You have to be 19 or 20 and single.

Do you ever regret that you never visited a battlefield?

No. I don’t think I would have found any battle or wartime situation
congenial. I’ve always been fond of creature comforts. Hot baths. I never
liked danger.

Viewed by Hollywood as a has-been at 43, Welles seized the chance to show what he was still capable of doing by rewriting a throwaway B-movie and dressing it up with distorted camera angles and Russell Metty’s stark and shadowy photography. The effect is both trashy and exhilarating. But it also elevates film noir’s grimy, worm’s-eye view of the world to the magisterial heights of an overlord.

What makes “Touch of Evil” a truly characteristic Welles movie, apart from its director’s singular style, is that the studio couldn’t leave it alone. Realizing that Welles had made something considerably more complex and perverse than the efficient little B-movie they’d hired him to make, Universal executives ordered that nearly 15 minutes be cut from the film and several explanatory scenes added. In the ’70s, the 96-minute studio cut was replaced by a then newly discovered 108-minute print that restored nearly all of Welles’ original footage. The story might have ended there if producer Rick Schmidlin hadn’t read an article by Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum about a 58-page memo written by Welles describing the changes he wanted made in the studio’s version of “Touch of Evil.” Schmidlin obtained not just the memo (detailing 50 specific changes) but also scripts, notes, cue sheets and continuity reports, as well as original negative footage and original soundtracks. Schmidlin enlisted Bob O’Neil, Universal’s director of restoration, to restore the picture; Bill Varney to restore the cacophonous mixture of source music and direct, overlapping sound that Welles envisioned; and one of the real technical wizards of the movies, editor and sound editor Walter Murch (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being,” “The Conversation”) to achieve the intercutting pattern that Welles had outlined.

Anybody who cares about Welles’ films and who knows how shabbily he was treated by the money men has to be heartened that one of his most distinctive pictures can now be seen in the manner he intended. (We’ll never see his greatest movie, “The Magnificent Ambersons,” as he envisioned, because RKO had the deleted footage destroyed.) This is a slightly different case, though, from the gorgeous restorations done on “The Leopard,” “Lawrence of Arabia,” “Spartacus,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg” and “Vertigo,” instances in which bad prints were cleaned up or cut footage was restored. What’s been done to “Touch of Evil” is less addition than rearrangement, and because of the way movies take root in our heads, any alteration to what we remember is bound to be at least a little jarring. The changes made by Schmidlin and his team are far from radical. The most obvious are the intercutting of scenes that ran sequentially in previous versions. And yet I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to being initially thrown. It’s not quite the same as going from, say, Julie Andrews’ “My Favorite Things” to John Coltrane’s, but it does require learning a familiar tune in a new rhythm. What’s most important, though, is that “Touch of Evil” still whirs by like a hallucination; this is a movie that operates less on narrative logic than on nightmare logic.

The movie’s legendary opening — an unbroken three-minute, 20-second tracking shot that begins with a man placing a bomb in a car — is Welles’ way of announcing that the climaxes and flourishes of his film may not necessarily correspond to the story. The camera glides ahead of the car, not waiting for it to catch up, picking up the vehicle only seconds before the bomb goes off, as if by chance. Welles is so anxious to dazzle us, he’s not about to be held back by the particulars of his two-bit story. It’s fascinating, then, how the story becomes a weird metaphor for Welles’ methods.

As Capt. Hank Quinlan, Welles might be playing out Hollywood’s worst fantasy of himself: gross, broken-down, on his last legs. He trudges through the movie unshaven and sweating in a cheap, dirty suit (and fitted out with padding and a bulbous nose to balloon his already hefty frame). When the town’s gypsy madam, Tana (Marlene Dietrich looking — if it’s possible — even more ravishing than she did in the ’30s), sees her old customer, she says, “You should lay off the candy bars, honey … You’re a mess.” Welles seems to have done everything he could to make Quinlan repugnant, not only physically, but morally as well. A racist (seeing that Heston’s new bride is Janet Leigh, he says, “She doesn’t look Mexican”) and a brute (he roughs up suspects), Quinlan owes his extraordinary record of cracking cases to his predilection for planting evidence that will convict the people his gut instincts tell him are guilty.

“Touch of Evil” hinges on the conflict between Quinlan and Heston’s Mike Vargas after Vargas discovers Quinlan’s modus operandi. But Welles complicates what might have been a simple noir confrontation between justice and corruption by the inclusion of one detail. Quinlan’s hunches are almost always right, while Vargas, the clean, by-the-book cop, is the movie’s version of Bob Dylan’s Mr. Jones from “Ballad of a Thin Man”: the straight who knows something is happening here but doesn’t know what it is. (Though it should be said that Heston used his box-office clout to secure Welles the directing job, and for that he is owed a debt of gratitude.) Vargas spends much of the movie outraged about the sullying of his wife’s “good name,” but he’s so ready to give up his honeymoon and tag along on Quinlan’s case that his absence allows her to be terrorized by the drug kingpin “Uncle Joe” Grandi (Akim Tamiroff, greasy and mascaraed like an obscene, leering kewpie doll). The movie’s ambivalence toward Quinlan seems played out on the bone-weary face of his partner, Menzies (Joseph Calleia), as his loyalty turns to disgust at what Quinlan has done, and even greater disgust at himself for betraying him.

What lifts “Touch of Evil” above the level of a “Dirty Harry”-style celebration of ruthless bastards who get the job done is that the movie isn’t intended as a pulp prescription for society’s ills. Its true subject is moviemaking. The actual story of the movie is, for Welles, a Guignol jest, and the noir conventions are his playland. He plays up the public’s perception of him as a wreck, while behind the camera, his inventiveness unleashes one jolt after another. If his sympathy for Quinlan is genuine, that’s because he understands him as someone who, like himself, can’t operate by the book, and who doesn’t gain a damn thing by insisting on things his way, but who gets results that nobody else could. Any hack could have filmed “Touch of Evil” as the cheap, fast crime programmer Universal wanted. But who could have made a movie that feels like a sustained version of the fun house-mirror sequence that ends Welles’ “The Lady from Shanghai”? Who could have transformed the crumbling buildings of Venice, Calif., into a living ghost town of the night, so stark against the black sky they look unreal?

As Walter Murch wrote in last Sunday’s New York Times, it may be inaccurate to hear the fortune Tana predicts for Quinlan — “Your future is all used up” — as Welles’ own. Welles went on to make four more movies, one of them “Chimes at Midnight,” the greatest Shakespearean film ever. But he always had trouble getting financing, and four completed films in 27 years isn’t a lot for a director who was only in his early 40s when he made “Touch of Evil.” Hearing Tana’s line 40 years later sends a chill through you. You can’t help but think of how “Touch of Evil,” which was going to be Welles’ Hollywood comeback, was the last time he ever worked in Hollywood. Maybe the more prophetic line is the one Dietrich offers as Quinlan’s epitaph: “What does it matter what you say about people?” You can hear the parody of noir’s portentous, romanticized fatalism in the way the line is written and in the way Dietrich delivers it (she once said she never delivered a line better in her life — she was right). But now it also sounds like an uncanny defense against the conventional petty judgment of Welles as a former genius scrounging off the reputation he earned by debuting with one of the greatest and most influential films of all time, “Citizen Kane.” The proof of what Welles could do with a trash entertainment is right on the screen in “Touch of Evil,” just as what he could do with material of substance was right on the screen in “Ambersons,” “Othello” and “Chimes at Midnight.” What does it matter what was said about him?