William Monahan gets chummy with a New York City locksmith for an HBO TV series

Just a few chapters into Joel Kostman's memoir Keys to the City, it was clear to me that his memoir was a giant-assed metaphor about discovering New York City one keyhole at a time. Through his trade as a Professional Locksmith, Mr. Kostman encounters all sorts of characters. Ever since Keys to the City was published back in 1997, there have been enthusiasms about bringing it to the screen. Dennis Duggan reported in his 1997 Newsday article that Mr. Kostman was "at work on a novel" and taking calls "from a talent agency in Hollywood that wants to turn [Keys to the City] into a television series."¹ Well, recently it was announced on Deadline.com that Keys to the City is set to be produced as an HBO TV series with writer-director William Monahan adapting. "Finally!", you heave, but what vexes me is that Keys to the City is really not that dramatic of a work. What Mr. Kostman has done really well in his memoir is to capture what it is like to be a locksmith in New York City, but you'd be hard pressed to get a single episode out of it. That's probably why memoirist-locksmith Joel Kostman has been signed on as a consultant for the show. Mr. Kostman has written his own screenplays, albeit unproduced and probably unsold, so he will be eager to collaborate with Mr. Monahan who, I will note, is about ten years younger than him. Together, these two men have the opportunity—and excuse me for setting some goals for them—to create one of the greatest dramas in modern history.

At that they will surely fail, having long ago passed the age in which one can summon their inner-genius, but the opportunity is there, nonetheless. Mr. Kostman, in a way, has already succeeded merrily with his memoir. There's nothing wrong with it. It's an intriguing little thing, coming in at 136 pages in my edition. He's been writing a sequel to his memoir ever since, in the form of additional stories, and hopefully HBO does some kind of marketing campaign that puts some of his unpublished locksmith-writing onto the web. Assuming Mr. Kostman has continued working as a New York City locksmith all these years, he has now got about 32 years of locksmith-experience to draw upon. And then there is Mr. Monahan, who does not like high concept fare, having been quoted in The Boston Globe, "I generally hate high-concept stuff," who is unlikely to turn Keys to the City into a TV series about a locksmith who goes to work for the mafia, CIA, or other type of exciting organization. We can rejoice in the great probability that every attempt will be made by Mr. Monahan and Mr. Kostman to tell the actual story of a professional New York City locksmith, without much in the way of exaggerations. Jeepers, what fantasticness! Yippee.

I've been wondering in what year the HBO TV series will be set, because locks have changed since the memoir was published in 1997. Having worked as a writer at New York Press during the period 1994-2001, Mr. Monahan knows New York City pretty well, but he may be more comfortable with the New York City of the 1990s, rather than the New York City of today. Details. But it is such details that interest me, such as did a New York Press writer ever review Keys to the City when it was published in the 90s, and which studio executive is it that's been hoarding a secret love for this memoir for the past decade and a bit? Maybe the producer behind the project, John Lesher, should be asked such questions? Mr. Monahan probably read Keys to the City back when it was first published, though. I've imagined Mr. Monahan with a subscription to Publishers Weekly back in the 1990s, scrutinizing every single book that was being published at the time, while trying to get his own novel, Light House: A Trifle, published. His friend Bruno Maddox has said of him, "He's read everything and seems to approach writing as sort of filling in the gaps in the Western canon."  Well, if Mr. Monahan has been hoarding a secret love for Keys to the City all these years, good on him for bringing it to fruition.

So what ever happened to that other TV series whose pilot was reportedly being written by Mr. Monahan for a CBS time slot backed by Robert DeNiro's Tribeca Productions? It was also set in New York City. That would normally be my take-away question, but I'm actually more interested in Mr. Kostman by the end of the writing of this blog entry, so the focus to him!

Take-away question:  Is Joel Kostman still working as a locksmith in New York City?

Sources:

1) Dennis Duggan (1997-11-02) "A Way With Words and Wayward Locks", Newsday.

The early scripts of William Monahan

Since I discussed, a couple of days ago, writer-director William Monahan's mockery of a few scripts by aspiring screenwriters that he had once been asked to read, I thought I would discuss his own work as an aspiring screenwriter in the 1990s. He has said that he wrote his first screenplay at age 12. While I can't speak for this first screenplay of his, I can say a few things about two spec scripts that Mr. Monahan was hawking in the 1990s, as well as the adaptation of his novel Light House: A Trifle that he was commissioned to do. One of these two spec scripts was titled "Tripoli" and lead to a commission for a screenplay about the Crusades that would become his first produced screenplay, the Ridley Scott film Kingdom of Heaven.

I will refer to these two spec scripts from the 1990s as "Tripoli" and "The Essex", although it's possible that Mr. Monahan has used many different working titles for these scripts over the years. "Tripoli" is about an American soldier named William Eaton who led a campaign in the 1800s to return the exiled heir Hamet Karamanli to the throne of the Barbary Coast nation of Tripoli. As Mr. Monahan tells it, there are two versions of his "Tripoli" script, which came, respectively, before and after he was inspired by a 1994 TV broadcast of Ridley Scott's The Duellists (Kingdom of Heaven Q&A session, audio recording part 2: 18:35 minute mark):

"Well, Ridley inspired me. Tripoli: I was writing it as a screenplay, and I knew enough of the industry to know that it'd be very hard to get it made and if it was made it wouldn't be made right. This is long before anything. So I turned around and started to write it as a novel. So I was rewriting Tripoli as a novel and I got kind of frustrated because I knew it should be a movie, and I just gave up, got a coffee, went into the other room, flipped on the TV and The Duellists was on, which I hadn't seen since it was in the theaters. And then I thought, "Ahh, yeah, that's how you do it."

So I went back, chucked the pages of the novel away, and redid it as a screenplay. And about seven years later, lightning struck. [Ridley Scott and I] ended up talking at a breakfast table, during a meeting in which I was so nervous I managed to get my corn muffin into my hair, because there I am, and the guy across the table appears in every respect to be Ridley Scott and he's not only said he wants to direct Tripoli, he's asked me if I know anything about knights for another film. So, yeah, my answer is Ridley."

So there's a clear before and after version of his "Tripoli" script, that is, before and after Mr. Monahan's TV viewing of Ridley Scott's The Duellists. In between there was Mr. Monahan's attempted rewrite of the "Tripoli" script as a novel, the results of which can be read in a Massachusetts literary journal called Old Crow Review. You will find Mr. Monahan's adaptation of the "Tripoli" script as a historical fiction piece titled "Romantic" in issue 8 (December 1997) of Old Crow Review with a note at the beginning warning, "William Eaton was real, and nothing so attractive. This is an adaptation of an original screenplay." At the end of this 16-page long historical fiction piece, Mr. Monahan includes the following copyright information: "Copyright 1993, 1997 William Monahan."¹ This indicates that by 1993 he had copyrighted the original "Tripoli" script. No clues on when the second "Tripoli" script was copyrighted. It was reported to have been sold in 2001, but has yet to be produced.

Okay, enough about Mr. Monahan's "Tripoli" script. Anyone following the travails of Mr. Monahan's "Tripoli" script has long ago concluded that it won't be happening as a film at any point in the foreseeable future. Of his early scripts, the one that seems to have the best chance of becoming a film, at the moment, is "The Essex". It has been reported that GK Films' Graham King and Mr. Monahan will be producing "The Essex". "The Essex" is about Captain David S. Porter and his sea battles against the British during the War of 1812. Mr. Monahan has been captivating his readers with glimpses into his "The Essex" script since 1994 (that's misleading, sorry: I couldn't resist the flourish; he only ever mentioned "The Essex" in one essay from 1994 titled "Whale's Jaw"):²

When Captain David Porter, cruising in the South Atlantic during the War of 1812, unexpectedly hooked a right and took the Essex frigate around Cape Horn, he entered history as the captain of the first United States warship to enter the Pacific. There have been many since, so Porter's rounding of the Horn was an important historical matter, and even more important was the fact that, when he got into the Pacific, he smashed the living bejesus out of the English whale fleet, the vessels of which, as armed privateers, had been preying on American vessels who had no knowledge of the war.

...

The British Admiralty freaked and sent a special squadron to cruise for the Essex—the Bismarck of her day—and Porter, in a tired ship that could not possibly fight its way back to the Atlantic, did his third remarkable and historical thing. Apprised of the squadron, he made sail for the Marquesas, to hide from the British and refit his ship. While he was ashore on Nuku Hiva, he not only fought a bloody high-cinema war with the warlike Typees, he annexed the island, and committed the first act of extraterritorial American imperialism. Don't even think of writing the screenplay. I've got it registered.

So, obviously, early 19th century naval history is one of Mr. Monahan's pet subjects. Let's hope "The Essex" doesn't go the way of "Tripoli". We need more early 19th century naval battles to titillate us on the big screen.

On top of having written these two spec scripts in the 1990s, Mr. Monahan had at least a few experiences with the film industry prior to his big break with Ridley Scott in 2001. There was script coverage he was supposed to do for a film company, which I have blogged about previously, and then there was also a screenplay that he mentions that he had been expected to deliver, and hadn't, in a 1994 New York Press essay titled "The Agony & the Excrement":³

"I can't work. I've been vaguely trying to finish this screenplay I was supposed to deliver last March or six years ago or something. I don't like it anymore and nobody understands me anyway."

What is this screenplay, you ask? I don't know. It may have been a rewrite of one of the scripts that he was supposed to do script coverage of, considering the film company apparently gave him the option of rewriting these scripts and earning industry scale (see this blog entry). Or maybe this screenplay that he was supposed to deliver was one of his two spec scripts, "Tripoli" or "The Essex". Or maybe it was an entirely different screenplay. I don't know. Really, I don't. It's just interesting and related to the subject of this blog entry. You think I'm wasting your time with trivia, don't you? So what, it's my blog and you're still reading for some reason.

Eventually things started to come together for Mr. Monahan. In 1998, Variety reported that Mr. Monahan had been hired to write a screen adaptation of his novel Light House: A Trifle. Interestingly, at the time of the reporting, his novel was on submission to publishers. Only after he was hired to adapt his novel, did the novel sell to Riverhead Books. In the following year, a little cocky and probably buzzed by his recent successes, he had this to say about the film industry and writing:⁴

"What do you do? I don't fucking know. You wouldn't know if I told you. Some stuff. You don't want to say I'm a novelist before your novel is out. You certainly don't want to say you're a screenwriter, because then you're off into a gauntlet of naive civilian questions you can't answer, because nothing's real about the film business except the money. No one lets you off the hook when you're a writer of any sort: Everyone thinks they might like to have a crack at it themselves. And you can't say It's as hard to do what I do as to be a master cathedral architect, you shithead, no you can't have my agent's number, no you can't pitch anything to the newspaper, and furthermore in the sacred name of humanity shut up about your poetry about your ex-wife."

The "put-down" is Mr. Monahan's forte. He will summon hypothetical persons and then proceed to tear them a new one.

What followed after the sale of his novel Light House: A Trifle to Riverhead Books seems to have been agony for Mr. Monahan. He has said in a Collider.com interview that he "really hated the experience of publishing a novel". In the same interview, he also said that "The only positive benefit from publishing 'Light House' was that [he] got hired to write the screenplay and then shifted [his] attention to screenwriting exclusively." Light House: A Trifle has yet to be made into a film.

Since his career in the film industry took off in 2001 with the sale of his "Tripoli" script, he's been working pretty steadily as a screenwriter and, most recently, as a director. I feel like I should offer him congratulations at this point, but instead I'll conclude with an unattributed quote on the subject of originality that I'm going to try to attribute to Mr. Monahan (a known Simpsons fan). The unattributed quote is cited by a former NYPress colleague and friend of Mr. Monahan's named Jim Knipfel who writes a column called "Slackjaw":

I’ve since learned over and over again that any claims of “originality” should be considered with more than a little suspicion.

Maybe a friend of mine had the proper attitude. A while back he sent me a copy of a screenplay he’d written. It was a good screenplay, I thought, but the final scene seemed awfully similar to something I’d seen on The Simpsons several years back.

When I mentioned this to him, he shrugged it off. “There’s nothing new anymore,” he said. “I gave up that notion a long time ago . . . and besides, how many people apart from you do you think will even notice, or care?”

I'm pretty sure Mr. Knipfel is citing his friend Mr. Monahan. It's just a guess, but I believe a rather good one. Rather good one. I'm not British, but those rathers slip in fairly easy, don't they? At any rate, I rather like this take on originality. It just really feels to me like it comes from the mind of William Monahan.

Take-away question: What were Mr. Monahan's experiences in the film industry in the 1990s?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Romantic", Old Crow Review, no. 8, FkB Press, December 1997, 16 pages.

2) William Monahan. "Whale's Jaw: Thar They Blow", New York Press, vol. 7, no. 45 (November 9–15, 1994), pp. 1, 18, 20–21.

3) William Monahan. "The Agony & the Excrement: A Scary Home Companion", New York Press, vol. 7, no. 39 (September 28–October 4, 1994), p. 14.

4) William Monahan.  "Cymru: A Week in Llareggub", New York Press, vol. 12, no. 27 (July 7–13, 1999), pp. 1, 18.

An Evening In Which William Monahan Tried Doing Script Coverage

Writer-director William Monahan tried doing script coverage? Apparently. Doesn't sound like the gig lasted long though. From his own account, maybe an evening. Doing script coverage ranks high up there among the most agonizing summer jobs he has had, in my opinion, second to his time as editor of Hamptons magazine.¹ While his position as editor of Hamptons magazine lasted several issues, his time doing script coverage, as he tells it in his New York Press essay "Driving the Miasma," seems to have lasted no more than one evening:²

I was out of school. A woman I knew started working for a film company and got me a gig where I was supposed to review and rewrite scripts. I thought I might make some money or ordinary reputation—the sensation was like being on the verge of suicide—and got a cottage off by myself in Massachusetts for that summer.

My landlady liked the Miasma. The cottage was a small, raftered place—mismatched cups and spoons, a kitchen table with yellow oilcloth on it—and I settled in to be by myself and get serious. About the third day the FedEx guy came, mentioned that he liked the Miasma. He left off a parcel of screenplays with yellow stick-ums plastered all over them and memos paperclipped to the logoed title cards. I sat on the couch, flipped open script one. The first lines went like this:

FADE UP ON:

A PAIR OF EYES. They are blue eyes, with crow's feet at the corners. Something tells you that these eyes have seen a lot. The man who owns these eyes is a man to be reckoned with.

PULL BACK TO REVEAL:

"SKIP" BURTON.

I'm dead serious. I read the script dutifully. It was about someone going to the Midwest to get revenge on a pack of townies. No one spoke English. It was based on other films and television shows. I opened another one, and it was worse. By the end of the evening there was a pile of smashed screenplays against the wall. One of them had contained the line, "The car he drives says a lot about him."

Each one of those screenplays was worth $600 to me if I merely wrote a two-page analysis. If I rewrote any of them, I'd get scale, which isn't bad. I burned the fucking things in the stove, and went out for a walk.

This evening spent smashing screenplays against the wall probably took place sometime in the early 1990s or late 1980s. I've heard of how exasperated script readers in Hollywood can get, but this is ridiculous. I wonder who these aspiring screenwriters were? To whom does the "SKIP" BURTON character belong? That's not my take-away question for this blog entry, though.

Take-away question: Which film company was it that William Monahan was supposed to review and rewrite scripts for?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "The Burning Deck: My Brilliant Career at 'Hamptons'", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 29 (July 17–23, 1996), pp. 1, 28–29.
2) William Monahan. "Driving the Miasma: A Generational Automotive Report", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 5 (February 1–7, 1995), pp. 1, 16–17.

The Gallery magazine articles by Alan Cabal

Although periodical writer Alan Cabal is best known as a New York Press writer, he has written for other publications like High Times and CounterPunch. Then there is Gallery magazine. He wrote two articles for the publication back in 2000. When I mentioned to Mr. Cabal that I had read his Gallery magazine articles, his response was: "It might amuse you to know that they tried to stiff me on the money for that. Of course I got it, but the inherent absurdity of trying to stiff a guy on an article about the collections business resonates with the times, no?" Gallery magazine went bankrupt in 2008, according to Wikipedia. Also, according to Wikipedia, they left "many photographers and models empty handed; some were owed as much as $100,000."

Of Mr. Cabal's two articles for Gallery, one was about his three years in the collections industry and the other was about the Slovenian avant-garde music group Laibach. In "When A Stranger Calls" he gives a personal account of the collections industry followed by advice on how to protect yourself from a collector; and in "They Might Be Nazis?" he gives a short history of the music group Laibach's origins. You can read them both below.

Here are scans of page 46-50 of his Gallery article "When A Stranger Calls: The Ins And Outs Of The Collection Trade"  from the April 2000 issue (republished below with permission from writer Alan Cabal; the illustrations are by Tony Millionaire):

Page 46:

Page 47:

Page 48:

Page 49:

Page 50:

And here is a scan of page 143 of Mr. Cabal's Gallery article "They Might Be Nazis?" from the March 2000 issue (republished below with permission from writer Alan Cabal):

Although Gallery's management were apparently assholes who often wouldn't, or couldn't, pay their employees, the end result seems to have been a decent magazine, with softcore nudity that you can share with your girlfriend to her enjoyment too. You might even be able to get her to recreate some of the photography for you. I did.

The missing Maxim article(s) by William Monahan

Bibliographic research is rewarding, though time-consuming, work. Recently, I brainstormed the idea of doing distributed bibliographic research, for which I will require your help! Despite my extensive research efforts, I am still searching for the Maxim article(s) that filmmaker William Monahan supposedly wrote for the men's magazine back in the late 1990s. I've narrowed down the span of years for which Mr. Monahan could possibly have written for Maxim to 1997 and 1998 (in the following years, Mr. Monahan is neither listed on the masthead, nor given a byline in any article). If you own an issue of Maxim that is anywhere in the range of issues 1 (May/June 1997) through to 14 (December 1998), then please help me out with my bibliographic research by letting me know whether or not there are any articles in your issue that are written by Mr. Monahan. If you do find a Maxim article written by Mr. Monahan, then you are a winner! For your diligent work of flipping through your Maxim issue, page by page, and successfully finding a "William Monahan" byline, you will win a lifetime subscription to Maxim magazine, which will even remain with your estate long after you die, so your children and grandchildren will enjoy this guilty pleasure too. Well, no, I can't really offer you such a prize, sorry. I can, however, give you credit for finding the missing William Monahan Maxim articles. Is that something you might be interested in?

Pick a Maxim issue from the list below and help me find the missing William Monahan article(s):

1. May/June 1997
2. July/August 1997
3. September/October 1997
4. November/December 1997
5. January/February 1998
6. March 1998
7. April 1998
8. May 1998
9. June 1998
10. July/August 1998
11. September 1998
12. October 1998
13. November 1998
14. December 1998

Report your findings in the comments section below:

First known interview with Alan Cabal materializes on the web!

Alan Cabal, February 2010

Jeepers, blogger Mesikämmen has posted an excellent interview with Alan Cabal! It's funny and unpredictable, and as far as I know, the first known interview with Alan Cabal, ever. Here's a sampling of some of the exchanges between Mesikämmen and Alan Cabal:

Q: Who are the most dangerous men on Earth? Why?

A: Darth Cheney has no pulse. Do the math. Does the name “George Romero” ring a bell anywhere? HE’S A GODDAMNED ZOMBIE, they are fucking RARE now, but the fucking things will be galloping over YOUR GODDAMNED WELL-MANICURED EUROPEAN HEDGES shrieking about their RIGHTS to bite into your BRAINS and SPINAL CORDS turning you into their feces or worse.

...

Q: What makes you American? I feel you are in your own peculiar way very American – what is the essence of your American soul?

A: I was born here. I could not possibly be anything but an American. I have no discernible or traceable biological origin. It is sealed.

Alan Cabal, February 2010

For your benefit, I will elucidate upon why, I think, Mr. Cabal's biological origin is "sealed": his biological mother was seriously troubled, and so Mr. Cabal ended up in the hands of an adoption agency that probably seals their records from the prying eyes of their clients' progeny.¹ He probably has little idea about who she was, and even less idea about who his father was. Mr. Cabal  has written that his biological mother claimed to have been raped and that the adoption agency had declared her "borderline psychotic." Here's the rundown about his biological mother from his NYPress essay about his adoptive mother:¹

I was born on Dec. 1, 1953, to a weird little girl from Bridgeton named Helene who was 15 years old. Her mother was a certified schoolteacher who for some reason was working as a bus dispatcher at the time. Her mother has been described to me as "abrasive and domineering." Helene played the piano and had an interest in mathematics. She had a tendency to break out in hives when she got nervous, which was fairly often by most accounts. She had been raped, or so she said. Spring fever, perhaps. The adoption agency’s psychiatrist declared her "borderline psychotic," but psychiatry is at best an inexact science, kind of like voodoo or dowsing. They bury their mistakes, like the rest of the medical profession.

Mr. Cabal's mention of Operation Paperclip in the interview piqued my curiosity, and maybe it did the same for you, too? If you want to read more about some of the ideas that Mr. Cabal has, then check out his extensive bibliography which I put together in my spare time in my capacity as a NYPress scholar.

Take-away question: Why is Mr. Cabal's biological origin sealed?


Sources:

1) "Badlands: Burying Camden And My Mom", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 6 (February 9–15, 2000).

William Monahan once rang up writer Anthony Burgess in the middle of the night

As I wrote a few days ago, I'm apparently a big bother to writer and filmmaker William Monahan. Perhaps it's the far reach of my research into his works, which has brought me into contact with his friends, brief acquaintances, and even former colleagues. Or maybe it's the genealogical research I've been doing into his family tree. What writer wants someone poring through official documents left behind by the members of their family for the purposes of elucidating upon their written works.

You may have noticed that so far I have exclusively discussed writer William Monahan and his works in my blog entries without any mention of other New York Press writers, other than briefly mentioning C.J. Sullivan the other day. This is just the current kick I'm on. Before I started this blog I had just finished writing a biography of NYPress writer Alan Cabal. I've done some research into NYPress writer Jim Knipfel, but other than his memoirs and some of his journalism, I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Knipfel's works. I think Mr. Knipfel is a great character though, but on the whole he's a hack (he admitted as much in an interview, if I recollect properly).

As troubling as it may be to have someone examining your life's work with a magnifying glass, at least my efforts are not inane. As Mr. Monahan tells it, he and his friends once rang up writer Anthony Burgess in the middle of the night and did nothing more than ask one silly question after rousing him from bed. Here is the conversation that Mr. Monahan claims to have had, circa 1992, with writer Anthony Burgess (1917 – 1993):

Excerpted from Mr. Monahan's NYPress essay "Byrne"¹:

One night back in my party days we drank several bottles of Jagermeister, had a talk about the state of literature and decided to call writers. Someone who had just read John Cheever's letters tried to call Allan Gurganus' mother and ask how she thought he'd got into The New Yorker. We tried Julian Barnes. Amis was unlisted. Gore Vidal came to naught—you try to get a phone number in Italy at 3 a.m.

Finally it occurred to us: Anthony Burgess. If anyone would talk to us—if there was anyone we wanted to talk to—it was Anthony Burgess.

He having published his addresses in his autobiography (either Little Wilson and Big God or the other one), we figured he wanted company and wouldn't mind a call. I got directory information in the Principality of Monaco (you have to call France for this) and asked for the number for Mr. John Wilson. The phone purred about 4000 times and then an old Englishman answered.

"Who in God's name is it?"

"Anthony Burgess?"

"Yes?"

"The writer Anthony Burgess?"

"Yes, yes, yes."

I braced myself and got to the clever part.

"Is your pen name John Wilson?"

At this moment, of course, I realized that I'd totally fucked up what I had intended to say. Burgess himself was floored by the inanity of the question. Three thousand miles of weirdness crackled on the line. Burgess recovered first.

"No," he said, smoothly, "I have nothing to do with him." There was another protracted silence. "Go to bed," said Burgess, not unkindly, and hung up.

About a year later, he died. From then till now I have never bothered another writer, and so it shall be, selah. All that's left is karma.

Anthony Burgess was the pen name of John Burgess Wilson, though every reader knows the man by his pen name rather than his real name. When I read Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange a few years back I loved it and even took to using, for a short time, and only with my close friends, the fictional argot called Nadsat that the characters in the novel talk to each other in. If Mr. Monahan's anecdote above is any indication, Anthony Burgess seems to have been a kind, gentle man, though I don't know what his temper was with journalists, interviewers, and his biographers. Everyone has their snapping point.

Take-away question: Who were Mr. Monahan's drinking buddies on the night they called up writer Anthony Burgess?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Byrne", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 32 (August 6–12, 1997), Books & Publishing Supplement, p. 14.

Update: The Long Play and William Monahan

The Long Play script that filmmaker William Monahan was hired to rewrite back in 2007 is no longer happening as a feature film. Deadline Hollywood Daily reports that the Mick Jagger/Martin Scorsese project about the rock music business, formerly intended to be a film titled The Long Play, will now be produced as an HBO period drama series. However, Mr. Monahan is not attached, anymore. I guess his rewrite of The Long Play is only of interest to scholars, such as myself, now. I know I've been abusing the term "scholar" a lot lately, but it's hard to stop when it's a major part of your identity.

The rest of my blog entry about Mr. Monahan's days as a musician still stands, though. Read it.

The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan

While imagining, as a thought experiment, what could be contained in a volume titled "The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan," I realized that I could be in it. I've had my share of correspondences with filmmaker William Monahan. At first probing with various fake email accounts, Mr. Monahan eventually began using an @mac.com email address ("wjmonahan@mac.com") to size me up. Ours has been a savage correspondence, with Mr. Monahan acting as a ruthless mentor through edit summaries on the English Wikipedia and as a paranoid celebrity through various email accounts. Originally, I antagonized Mr. Monahan by simply being a terrible writer who was working on his Wikipedia article. He'd correct my writing on Wiki. After he got a hold of my email address, silliness took over. Through perseverance I like to think that I've progressed from someone who had below average reading comprehension into a mediocre scholar. Certainly Mr. Monahan had legitimate issues to raise about some of my bad writing on the English Wikipedia. These days, I do my work at Squidoo.

I'm fascinated by the subject of collecting emails from authors. Are such collections of emails going to become the new Collected Letters? Any kind of electronic correspondence could possibly be collected. Facebook and Twitter are currently big with celebrities. The Library of Congress recently announced that it will be archiving all tweets, by everyone. Twitter is easy, since the information is public, but emails are private.

Although all these electronic correspondences need to be saved, it's hard to say exactly how the next generation of scholars will get a hold of all these Important Emails. An extreme method would be to hire your hackers Joe Wardriver, Sue Cracker, or Thomas Nation to break into the email accounts of authors for the purposes of dumping the lot onto the web. There have been instances when excerpts of Mr. Monahan's emails have been published, but this can hardly be relied upon. NYPress founder and former publisher Russ Smith has excerpted, in his Mugger column, some of his correspondences with Mr. Monahan regarding the possibility of a Hillary Clinton assignment. I believe, however, that a more practical method of acquiring Important Emails might be email donations from persons who have had lengthy exchanges with authors like Mr. Monahan. I, myself, happen to have been blessed with several emails from Mr. Monahan, from his MobileMe account, as well as from his various fake email accounts. To give this idea of making donations of Important Emails Exchanged With Authors some weight, I've decided to release a few of the more interesting emails that Mr. Monahan and I have exchanged.

Before I do that, however, I would just like to emphasize the importance of Mr. Monahan's electronic correspondences. In prose, Mr. Monahan is incredibly informative. His densely packed sentences are of equally high quality in both his journalism and his interviews. Mr. Monahan doesn't do conventional interviews, as Juan Morales wrote in his Los Angeles Times article. It seems his preferred format is the email interview and for good reason. Compare his recent Screen Daily interview with the 2008 video interview conducted by Evelyn Vaccaro below:




There's a stark difference in the quality of these two interviews, though both are equally informative. In the Screen Daily interview he's eloquent, but in the video interview above he comes off as a blubbering fool constantly wondering if, you know, we, you know, know what he's talking about. It's unlikely that Mr. Monahan will be submitting himself to much more of that. So when it comes to Mr. Monahan, we scholars will find the most interesting insights in his emails, forum posts, and so on.

There may be a wealth of forum posts out there by Mr. Monahan, somewhere in the deep Web. Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott remembers Mr. Monahan participating in discussions on an Internet chat board, which might have been Echo BBS since that's where TV critic Aaron Barnhart encountered Mr. Monahan in those days. I haven't yet probed the archives of Echo BBS. You have to register. There's research to be done there.

But to get back to the subject of Important Emails, it was on August 7th, 2009 that Mr. Monahan decided to switch from using various fake email accounts for his correspondences with me to using an @mac.com email address with his real name: "wjmonahan@mac.com". What is telling is that by 2009, you could no longer get yourself an @mac.com email address. The .Mac service was re-branded as MobileMe in 2008, so from then on Apple was handing out @me.com email addresses. It is highly unlikely that the "wjmonahan@mac.com" email address was created a year in advance for future use as a fake email account.

At any rate, it was a Friday night when I received my first email from Mr. Monahan's @mac.com email address. According to the email header of this first email, Mr. Monahan was in the City of London. He had been filming London Boulevard. It was a Saturday morning for him.

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])
by asmtp014.mac.com
From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 04:20:42 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

You're fucked. Have a nice day.

END OF EMAIL

My response was immediate:

To: WILLIAM MONAHAN
Subject: Re:
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 20:56:56 -0700 (PDT)

Sir, you have dreamed of having an antagonist like myself. Light House: A Trifle, Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, and even that BlackBook Magazine interview you did with Mr. Thewlis, indicate a deep obsession with the kind of character I have been.

How much do you know about me?

END OF EMAIL

Mr. Monahan's response was equally immediate:

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])

 by asmtp011.mac.com

From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Re:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:36:24 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

I know most recently, Moriarty, that you're the kind of fool who responds to a showdown by instantly cutting his own throat legally with a single English sentence. You're all done, William.

END OF EMAIL

My response was:

To: WILLIAM MONAHAN
Subject: Re: Re:
Date: Fri, 7 Aug 2009 21:42:51 -0700 (PDT)

You mean your email from an hour ago was the beginning of a showdown?

What could I have won if the "showdown" had gone better for me?

END OF EMAIL

Mr. Monahan's response was:

Received: from Unknown-00-23-6c-94-2f-4b.home ([81.154.188.105])
by asmtp019.mac.com
From: WILLIAM MONAHAN
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Re: Re:
Date: Sat, 08 Aug 2009 05:47:00 +0100
X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.935.3)

No, it was the end of one. You crapped it at first fire and admitted that you were an insane stalker, you retard.

END OF EMAIL

Yet, off-and-on we went for months. I tried to steer the conversations toward questions I had about his works, but I was never even remotely successful. We simply had a very weird back-and-forth, which maybe said everything. For the record, I consider myself to be a Monahan scholar rather than his "insane stalker." The character that I had mentioned having been was that of an amateur desperately seeking recognition, an appreciative clapping sound for my efforts. 

At some point, Mr. Monahan decided to try to convince me that he actually wasn't "William Monahan," but I am someone who can penetrate background, so while he was trying to convince me that he actually wasn't who he had presented himself as, he gave himself away, ironically, using a single English sentence:

Received: from [10.103.27.56] (166-205-007-042.mobile.mymmode.com [166.205.7.42])
by asmtp011.mac.com
From: William Monahan
To: [my email address]
Subject: Re: Build now
Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:25:42 -0700
X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (7C144)

Hey, Maggot, what's shaking. It's probably past time to tell you that im not William Monahan, so whatever rocks you're getting off with the doofy subnormal autodidact antichrist shit, sorry. 

END OF EMAIL

In that last English sentence he uses the idiom "get your rocks off" and the term "autodidact", all the while using a persona that reminded me of some sort of "Rock 'n Roll" guy. Your clues are "get your rocks off" and "autodidact". Back in 1997, when he and NYPress colleague C.J. Sullivan had a tiff in the letters column of NYPress, he made a similar remark to C.J. Sullivan.¹ It's a long letter, which I only excerpt below, but worth reading in its entirety, particularly if you're doing criticism of The Departed:

Boston or the boroughs, I know Sullivan like a species of bird: a shamrocks-and-vomit shovel leaner of the type who gets his rocks off by being "connected." These guys like to hang out with cops and ward bosses and so forth. They tend to use phrases like "fallen fireman" without irony; they start to sound like Barry Fitzgerald when they get drunk; and they like to hang around bars getting off on how superior they are to guys who actually do anything or, say, go home and fuck their wives. You know what had me on the floor about Sullivan's letter? When he mentioned knowing the cop.

So while C.J. Sullivan is the type who gets his rocks off by being "connected," I am apparently the type who gets his rocks off with my "doofy subnormal autodidact antichrist shit." I would have described myself as the type who gets his rocks off by doing literary biography, piecemeal, all the while chronicling my efforts in my blog. As for the term "autodidact", it shows up, in comedic form, in his novel Light House: A Trifle, but more so, it's one of the main themes of his journalism.

It's ironic that while attempting to deny who he was to his unofficial biographer (me), he in fact gave himself away. But then again, I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Mr. Monahan's works, and if anyone was going to pick up on these clues it was going to be me.

After the @mac.com email address ceased to be responsive, other fake email accounts continued our correspondence, with one lady named "Manda Trothero" writing to inform me that the "wjmonahan@mac.com" email address had been previously used by an assistant in her office:

You recently wrote to a defunct email previously used by an assistant in this office. William Monahan does not use email. However, he does answer questions! If you would like to ask questions, please direct them to this address. If you are a journalist please identify the publication for which you work. If you are a scholar, please identify the institution at which you study or teach. Thank you! 

Our conversations abound with silliness. Mr. Monahan is a writer who writes weird characters, such as Claude La Badarian. If I've become a part of Mr. Monahan's creative process, so be it. I enjoy our emails.

As the fictional character Claude La Badarian said of Mr. Monahan:

An obscenity has come to my attention. William Monahan's Light House: A Trifle has gone into trade paperback. After all the work I did--all the letters I wrote, telling Riverhead Books what an unreliable, ridiculous clown and megalomaniac viper they had taken to their multinational breast--after all the lack-of-character-demonstrating e-mails many mediums have received from various "hotmail" addresses, as well as the mindspring account Monahan claimed dubiously was password-hacked a few years ago (Monahan, usually indisposed in other states, as well as rather various, personality-wise, is unusually open to calumny)--I cannot believe that this book has again been put into print.

The part above about Mr. Monahan being "rather various, personality-wise" has been my experience, too. In the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, Mr. Monahan's fictional character Claude La Badarian mentions how the fictional William Monahan's Mindspring account had apparently once been password-hacked, throwing all suspicion on Claude La Badarian, of course; but this is fiction, fiction set in 2001. In the year 2010, I know of only one person who still has a Mindspring account and uses it regularly for email; other than that, it's a relic. The fictional character Claude La Badarian had a Mindspring email address too: LaBadarian@mindspring.com. If Mr. Monahan truly had a Mindspring account in real life, I hope we will one day get to read the email correspondences that took place in his Mindspring account, perhaps in a volume titled "The Collected Electronic Correspondences of William Monahan"?

Take-away question: Is there anyone else out there willing to make donations to the web of their email correspondences with William Monahan?

Sources:

1) William Monahan responds to C.J. Sullivan's letter "The Troubles" to the paper, in his own letter "They're a Touchy People, And Like to Fight", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 4 (January 22–28, 1997), p. 46. Note: Both William Monahan and C.J. Sullivan were NYPress writers at the time.

Who disinherited William Monahan?

Now, for some of you who are following my blog religiously, as much as that is possible given my infrequent posts, the idea that writer and filmmaker William Monahan modeled the personal history of his fictional character Claude La Badarian after his own personal history, may be a self-evident truth at this point. Yet, I am still not satisfied with the evidence that I have discovered and I believe that there remain nuances that could be better understood with further research. Knowing which family member it was that, at some point in time, disinherited Mr. Monahan, could potentially have a huge impact on the body of knowledge concerning the fiction serial Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, particularly if it was Mr. Monahan's maternal grandmother who disinherited him under similar circumstances to which Claude La Badarian was disinherited by his own grandmother. Already I have provided supporting evidence that Mr. Monahan's maternal grandfather is a match for Claude La Badarian's grandfather, so to be able to say as much about both of Mr. Monahan's maternal grandparents would be earth shattering to the insular world inhabited by Monahan scholars such as myself.

It is in Mr. Monahan's 2000 essay "Stoned in Amherst," that he mentions that he was disinherited, a commonality he points out that he shares with the fictional character Ivanhoe:¹

"I suppose it's a sketchbook, technically, perennially associated with undergraduate poets and ex-Seven Sisters Young Moms with a few minutes to spare to pour forth from their collective anima their Mistreatment Diaries and the latest version of I Stand here Ironing, Tillie Olsen's much-anthologized masterpiece about standing there ironing and feeling Vaguely Dispossessed and au fait, as opposed to, say, Disinherited, like Ivanhoe and me."

That phrase, "Disinherited, like Ivanhoe and me," could just as easily have been said by Mr. Monahan's fictional character Claude La Badarian in the La Badarian letters (aka Dining Late with Claude La Badarian) since Claude La Badarian happens to have been disinherited as well, by his grandmother no less, the result of a conspiracy on the part of the Medford La Badarians. Claude La Badarian writes in letter 7, "Claude and the Little People":

"When I explained to my grandmother that I had been disinherited, she wrote me a check for five dollars, the sum she put in my Christmas cards until I was 40. It bounced. If I am going to get a summerhouse of the sort to which I am accustomed, Henry, I am going to have to do it myself–a daunting prospect."

I admit, this is one of the weakest comparisons I have made between the personal history of Mr. Monahan and his fictional character Claude La Badarian. But seen within a larger context, it is further damning evidence. Perhaps you are not familiar with some of the supporting evidence I have previously proffered, indicating that Mr. Monahan was lifting passages from his own published works while writing the La Badarian letters? I will be drudging up new supporting evidence below, so feel free to ignore my previous blog entries while reading this one, until after you are done.

I have previously postulated that in using his own autobiography to create Claude La Badarian, Mr. Monahan is making some sort of point about autobiographical writing. But, then again, there is always the possibility that I am afflicted with a mild form of Asperger's syndrome (based on my understanding of that disorder from David Mamet's book Bambi vs. Godzilla) and am simply connecting everything to the point of uselessness. It's not like a writer becomes an entirely new person each time he starts an essay, novel, or script. But as you will see below Mr. Monahan very clearly copied from his works, practically verbatim. As I have delved deeper into Mr. Monahan's personal history through his works (and genealogical research with regards to his maternal grandfather Harold L. Armstrong), I have come to realize just how much of Mr. Monahan's autobiography has been passed down to his character Claude La Badarian.

From letter 1, "The Last Supper": Claude La Badarian writes:

There comes a time in every writer’s life when he realizes that he has a biography rather than a life. Some of us can delay this disastrous cognition until the Pulitzer, or the Lethe of senility; but I’ve been worried since the age of sixteen about unborn people wondering about what "lay behind" my poems, and where I was living, and whose purse I was taking pills out of, and so forth. Paranoids, Henry, have real biographers–especially when, like me, Claude La Badarian, they’re massive polymathic geniuses.

In his 2000 essay "Coney-Catching,"² Mr. Monahan wrote the exact same thing, which was later copied verbatim to the La Badarian letter excerpted above:

"We wander around Cunt Island, feeling the same. Still hazy. A day to become disoriented in the sky. A day to slam your plane into the water to stop whatever this fucking shit is that is different from life, the shit that happens when you have, and know you have, a biography instead of a life.

And yet another comparison! From letter 4, "Silence, Exile, and Claude La Badarian": Claude La Badarian writes:

Claude La Badarian, from earliest youth (photograph exists of the young Claude in a badged blazer, emerging from a basilica with his palms pressed together and his eyes turned skyward), has been besieged by gratuitous integrity. Anti-success training is the specialty of the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church.

In his 1995 essay "The Angel Factory",³ Mr. Monahan wrote of having had the exact same experience:

"The last time I took Communion and believed it meant anything was when I was in the second grade, wearing a blue school blazer with a badge on it, coming out of a counterfeit basilica with my palms pressed together, in a sexist double-crocodile of embarrassed Irish and Italian kids. I never got confirmed."

Pretty amazing stuff. The prose speaks for itself.

So, no concluding thoughts this time, simply a promise to discuss the importance of Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Cask of Amontillado" as it appears in the La Badarian letters for my next blog entry about Dining Late with Claude La Badarian.

Oh wait, I almost forgot, here is a quote from Mr. Monahan's essay "A Night on the Tiles," in which he states that the only person he ever satirizes is himself:⁴

"It's ordained […] that I can never write satire of other people: I can start to do it, but God has ordained that I am smart enough to turn the burning glass around on myself: the only person I ever satirize, thank Christ, is myself. I have a built-in, possibly Catholic, ethical alarm system."

That says it all, doesn't it?

Take-away question: Whom was it that disinherited William Monahan?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Stoned in Amherst", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 2 (January 12–18, 2000), pp. 1 (Sec 1), 8–9 (Sec 2).
2) William Monahan. "Mermaid Parade: Coney-Catching", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 26 (June 28–July 4, 2000), pp. 14–15.
3) William Monahan. "The Angel Factory: Making Martyrs & Monsters", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 3 (January 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 16–17.
4) William Monahan. "A Night on the Tiles: The Big Bad Bollocks & the Mirror of England", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 27 (July 5–11, 2000), pp. 1, 27–29.

The father of William Monahan

If William Monahan's father could perceive that the web now has a blog entry dedicated to the subject of him (you are reading said blog entry right now), he'd probably consider its author to be a true donkey, perhaps the primary donkey (I'd be fine with this distinction, I've earned it). Writer-director William J. Monahan's father was William Joseph Monahan, so both father and son carry the same initials: W. J. M (to avoid confusion I will refer to the writer and filmmaker as Mr. Monahan, and his father by his full name). Born January 21, 1934 in Boston, Massachusetts, William Joseph Monahan was the fifth child of Mary Regina McGee and Alphonsus George Monahan.¹ He had eight siblings, whose names, from oldest to youngest, were: Rose, John, Edward, George, Mary, Regina, James, and Ruth.¹ When William Joseph Monahan was seven years old, his father died. Mr. Monahan recalls in a New York Press essay:⁴

"My dad, whose own father had died when my grandmother's ninth child was unborn, had been shining shoes in Maverick Square in East Boston when he was 12."⁴

As a young man William Joseph Monahan served in the Korean War. His record with US Veteran's Affairs indicates that he eventually achieved the rank of 1st Lieutenant in the US Army Air Corps.⁹ Mr. Monahan writes in another New York Press essay:³

"My dad was a combat infantryman and platoon sergeant at a shockingly young age in the Korean War, but if you heard about the war, it was never from him."³

Shortly before turning 30 years old, William Joseph Monahan married Constance Armstrong. Their wedding took place on February 20, 1960 at St. Ann's Church in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Constance Armstrong must have very recently become pregnant, or was shortly going to become pregnant, with Mr. Monahan who would be born less than nine months later on November 3, 1960. They would have one other child, a daughter named Susan. About six years later, William Joseph Monahan and Constance Armstrong divorced.

Although William Joseph Monahan was an engineer,⁵ he was apparently not an ambitious man which would be the primary reason that his marriage would fail.⁴ His father Alphonsus George Monahan had also been an engineer, a civil engineer for the Bay State Railroad.¹ Mr. Monahan writes:

"My father had an IQ in the 180 range and wanted (though he ended up with more than that by default) no more from life than the enough of the Irish ghetto. Had my mother not left my father owing to his lack of ambition (that is, his ambitions were to be an Irishman), I might have been a very different person. Maybe I'd be dead. And maybe my mother, on the whole, made the right decision on behalf of the child, as women with children will. It used to occasionally occur to me, on the evidence presented by my father, that being very clever and handsome and verbally brilliant wasn't enough--or otherwise he would have lived with us, instead of the more prosperous asshole who did. Perhaps it was for the best. But it was hard to take. It was hard to take at Christmas."⁴

Of his paternal family, Mr. Monahan has written that they were "deeply Irish, deeply Catholic and rigorously structured ('working class' to the bone, as some Irish families can be even when they've got a hell of a lot of money: translate 'working class' as 'ascetic Catholics' and you're more on the ball than a Marxist would be)."⁴ He has described his ancestors from the 1880s as also being deeply Catholic, if not more so than his aunts and uncles:

"While I know some Hispanics who are as Catholic as my paternal family was in Boston in the 1880s, there's not a single Irish or Italian or Pole of my acquaintance under the age of 50 whose Catholicism isn't totally lapsed into a condition of nostalgia."²

At least two of Mr. Monahan's aunts on his father's side were are nuns [see comment below]. After the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church took hold in the 1960s, his aunts the nuns were allowed to take off their medieval robes and veils and put on ordinary clothes, as well as leave the convents and live independently. While growing up, Mr. Monahan recalls having nuns around the house. His "eldest nun-aunt", Rose Elizabeth Monahan, "used to cram [he and his sister] into some wrecked convent school desks in the attic and teach [them] about God." He goes on to write:

"She nearly gave my sister a complex for life by dragging her out of a room full of uncles at the age of four and hissing at her, 'Those are men! Men!' forcing her to change, crying, aged four, out of a short yellow nightgown which only she had noticed."²

In "Growing Up Racist,"⁸ Mr. Monahan writes of his father's attitude toward African Americans:

"I come from a long line of Yankee racists, who never even saw any black people yet disliked them, and a long line of Irish Catholic urban racists, who saw black people every day and on the whole disliked them more. This was disturbingly contrary to popular wisdom (that is, opposed to Error, as both the Church of England and the Spanish Inquisition used to say) when I was growing up. It took me 20 years to get Dad to stop saying 'nigger,' and then when he did he said 'black chaps' instead."⁸

Among the Monahans, it was Mr. Monahan's paternal grandmother Mary Regina McGee who commanded authority over the family. Mr. Monahan describes her as "a matriarch of the Boston Irish variety (you don't mess with them, ever, take my word for it)".⁶ She lived a long life, but, unfortunately, had to bury four of her five sons before her own time came on April 27, 1997. It was on May 18, 1990 that William Joseph Monahan finally succumbed to the cancer that he had been diagnosed with several months earlier.⁵ He was buried at the Massachusetts National Cemetery in Bourne, Massachusetts, where his brother, a retired Master Sergeant of the US Air Force, had also been buried.^9-10 It was exactly a year to the day that his father died that Mr. Monahan completed "Light House", later to be published as Light House: A Trifle by Riverhead Books.⁷ A fine tribute to his father, as well as perhaps the beginning of Mr. Monahan's literary career.

Sources:

1) Cathy Kendrick. "Descendants of John McGee", FamilyTreeMaker.com, Retrieved 2010-06-24.
2) William Monahan. "Actual Modern Popery: Pope-Art Through the Ages", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 42 (October 18–24, 1995), pp. 1, 18, 20, 22, 24.

3) William Monahan. "M1: It Really Was Father's Day", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 23 (June 11–17, 1997), pp. 32, 34.

4) William Monahan. "Merry Crucifix", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 48 (November 27–December 3, 1996), pp. 6–8.
5) William Monahan. "The Irish question", Old Crow Review, no. 6, FkB Press, December 1995, 5 pages.
6) William Monahan. "The Barbecutioner's Song: On Smoke, Flame, Boredom and Filial Piety", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 22 (May 31–June 6, 1995), p. 19.
7) Darcy Cosper (2001-10-02). "Writer's 'trifle' Aims Higher", The Hartford Courant.
8) William Monahan. "Black Comedy: Growing Up Racist", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 40 (October 2–8, 1996), pp. 31–32.
9) Find A Grave, Inc. Find A Grave, database, "Record, William J. Monahan (1934-1990), Memorial No. 1004292"
10) Find A Grave, Inc. Find A Grave, database, "Record, George F. Monahan (1932-1990), Memorial No. 1004219"

William Monahan, High School Graduate?

Writer-director William Monahan attended Gloucester High School in Massachusetts, as memoirist David Lovelace (author of Scattershot: My Bipolar Family) passingly mentions in an interview with The Boston Globe. There's a history of members of Mr. Monahan's family on his mother's side having attended Gloucester High School, going as far back as his maternal grandfather, Harold L. Armstrong, who graduated there in the 1910s and was later a member of the Gloucester School Committee.¹ Although Mr. Monahan did go to Gloucester High School, it's difficult to determine if he graduated from there. Figuring out Mr. Monahan's educational background is a bit tricky. After his parents divorced he "lived all over the North Shore with his mother and sister," so there may have been several high schools that Mr. Monahan attended in his youth. He has, on one occasion, situated his high school in a "well-to-do country town north of Boston," which hardly describes Gloucester, Massachusetts well enough.² Whichever high school it was that Mr. Monahan attended in his final year, he has written that he was not allowed to graduate. He explains why in his New York Press essay "Joey Pinhead, College Graduate":²

That pinhead was a member of my high school class. Not in any functional sense, but he was graduated with all the rest of us, to wild sentimental applause. They didn't (not that he could have given a shit either way) give him a special diploma; he got a regular one. This seemed to be regarded in some fashion as socially progressive. But I thought that it was an atrocity—a barbarity, a bafflement, a lie. I thought it was the worst thing I've ever seen.

The pinhead didn't complete any of the courses of study—he was a whole galaxy away from being able to read—and they let him walk with a full diploma. For my part, I wasn't allowed to graduate because I had something like 12,000 unserved detentions, and hadn't been to gym class in seven months. I had no complaint against the pinhead. Each of us has his own row to hoe, that sort of thing, and I've never measured my existence against anyone else's. But it struck me as pretty damned typical about the pinhead.

Mr. Monahan's mockery of the pinhead is rife throughout the essay. Along the way, he subtlety groups himself in with the natural intellectuals of America who are hindered by the public education system's attempts to cater to the lowest common denominator. He uses the pinhead and his ilk ("hydrocephalics, stutterers, mongoloids, loonies and people who just couldn't read a cereal box in a million years if you took a bat to them"²) as a prime example of what is wrong with education in America and provides a proposal toward the end titled "This Is My Proposal for Improving the American Public Education System." The final recommendation succinctly describes Mr. Monahan's ideal public education system:

Enact the most savage classical standards in the history of mankind. Anyone failing to meet those standards for free public education shall be summarily expelled and have to go to a safety school, like Exeter.

For those of you who attended Gloucester High School yourselves, here is Mr. Monahan's full description of his high school— which is only maybe Gloucester High School— from his essay "Joey Pinhead, College Graduate":

My high school was supposedly a very good school. It was in a green and well-to-do country town north of Boston. Its test scores were the highest in the state, which meant that a lot of parents who in another town, would have been shucking out private school fees, simply sent their kids to the public high school. The general impression was that the school was just great.

Despite not graduating from high school in his final year (did he end up taking summer classes in order to graduate?), Mr. Monahan did attend university. In an essay titled "A Night on the Tiles," he briefly discusses his university years and indicates that he made good use of CLEP credits during the admissions process, perhaps to compensate for not having a high school diploma:³

John Allen plays a pennywhistle and isn't an Irishman and back in the old days in Northampton when I was a complete asshole (decompensating, as they say, after my father's death, and the auto-destruction of my almost-scary academic career: "If I don't do it now," I thought in horror, meaning, start to fuck off, having entered university as a functional CLEP-ed out junior, and having read everything in English already, my professors practically in line to blow me out of sheer gratitude, "I'll be a professor"), I held that against him. Young Irish-American men go through bad patches when they can't quite figure out what they are—what this "American" shit is.

In my opinion, Mr. Monahan actually started to fuck off in his final year in high school, but, as some might say, whatever... What is particularly interesting is this part about entering university as a "CLEP-ed out" junior. A junior can avoid a lot of the boring introductory college classes by passing CLEP exams that cover the same material. You can CLEP-out of some of the courses encountered in the first two years of college if you pass the related CLEP exams with a high enough grade. Since I have my high school diploma, I never had to turn to alternative avenues to get into university. Would a lot of CLEP credits be sufficient to enter university without a high school diploma, or did Mr. Monahan go another route, such as getting a General Equivalency Diploma (GED) instead?

High school aside, he may have attended a middle school in Hamilton, Massachusetts. In an essay titled "M1: It Really Was Father's Day", he tells of how, at the age of 14, he discovered a Marlin bolt-action rifle in his great-aunt's house and would skip classes to fire it off in the woods.⁴ He recalls living nearby Bradley Palmer State Park, which is located in Hamilton, Massachusetts. At the age of 14 and given the seasons of the events of the essay, Mr. Monahan would have been in the 8th grade and the year would have been 1974 with Mr. Monahan preparing to enter high school toward the end of summer:

At that time we lived inland, in a horsy town, on property with plenty of woods. As for shooting the rifle, I could get away with it; my parents were divorced and my mother's job at that time involved spending half the week in Manhattan. At home with my grandmother watching me, I could get away with just about anything. On not a few mornings I doubled back from the bus stop, got in through the back door and dragged my motorcycle silently off into the woods, or spent the schoolday happy as a clam in the furnace room doing something I couldn't do in school—reading. I had no record of dereliction whatsoever (and was in fact a pretty good kid). It was no trouble to start shooting in the glades by the pond every afternoon and again. There was always firing from the Bradley Palmer State Park, which adjoined the property.

At any rate, after high school, as Sam Allis of The Boston Globe reports, Mr. Monahan "tossed boxes at Blanchards in West Roxbury" before attending UMass-Amherst as an undergraduate. How he fared there is another blog entry, a future one, that will reveal even greater mysteries. More to come. Stay tuned.

Take-away question: Did William Monahan ever achieve a high school diploma?

Sources:

1) Obituary: "Harold L. Armstrong, Magistrate in Gloucester for 45 Years; At 83", 1981-04-22, The Boston Globe.
2) William Monahan. "Joey Pinhead, College Graduate: Education in an Ignorant Society", New York Press, vol. 8, no. 15 (April 12–18, 1995), pp. 1, 27–28.
3) William Monahan. "A Night on the Tiles: The Big Bad Bollocks & the Mirror of England", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 27 (July 5–11, 2000), pp. 1, 27–29.

4) William Monahan. "M1: It Really Was Father's Day", New York Press, vol. 10, no. 23 (June 11–17, 1997), pp. 32, 34.

William Monahan the musician

There is melody in writer-director William Monahan's prose, so much so that you could easily sing-a-long while reading most of his works. It's not the same with textbooks, the reading of which is almost a daily grind for me. With a textbook, you're only processing the information laid out to you, but with Mr. Monahan's prose you could easily sing-a-long if you were so inclined. As Sam Allis of The Boston Globe said of The Departed: "At its best, [Mr. Monahan's] phrasing and structure rival the music of the late, great novelist George V. Higgins." That may be in part due to Mr. Monahan having been a performing musician in the early 90s. He used to play guitar for a band called the Slags and then later for another band called Foam.

Although the chronology isn't too clear, at a minimum Mr. Monahan played guitar for the Slags during the period 1990-1991, and perhaps even going as far back as the late 80s. By 1993 he was playing for another band called Foam, touring in San Francisco at one point, though his career as a musician came to an end around 1994.¹

One of his bandmates in the Slags was New York artist Antony Zito, an old friend of Mr. Monahan's from Massachusetts. Of his days in the Slags, Mr. Zito has said, in an email, "We played in Sheehan's cafe and a few other spots in and around Northampton Mass around 1990 or so." According to a contributors note in an issue of Perkins Press, Mr. Monahan was still a guitarist in the Slags toward the end of 1991.²

Then, shortly afterward, Mr. Monahan started playing in another band called Foam. David Cronin, whose online handle is BostonBeaneater, recalls getting to know Mr. Monahan when visiting a friend in San Francisco in February 1993 who was the bass guitarist in Foam. Mr. Cronin said to me in an email, "I saw Foam perform live at an empty club in San Fran sometime around February 1993. They were a decent band with some clever songs. I'm not sure if Bill wrote all the songs but I know he had his hands in the pot. I was out there visiting a high school friend who had moved out there and shared a house with Bill and played bass in the band."

Though rare, occasionally Mr. Monahan has written about his years as a musician. In an essay titled "Cymru: A Week in Llareggub," he writes "When I was a musician I felt like a vaudeville fraud dying of cancer whenever I said what I did. We just got a new booking agent. I was on the radio once. We're opening for another band you've never heard of at Uncle Nasty's House of Pie."³ The italics are his own. I figure it was probably Foam that played on the radio and had a booking agent, since they also put out a demo tape according to Mr. Cronin who had a copy, and maybe still does, but hasn't yet searched through his archives to see if it's still there. A sampling of Mr. Monahan's work as a song-writer would be extremely interesting. Right now, we can only imagine how scabrous the lyrics might have been, but perhaps something will leak out onto the Internet in the years ahead as Mr. Monahan's star in the film industry continues to rise.

Mr. Cronin also got to know Mr. Monahan a bit when he was a graduate student in Western Massachusetts. That is another area where little is known about Mr. Monahan: his education. Though, don't worry, I'm hard at work on a future blog entry that pulls together tidbits about his education that I've gleaned from here and there.

A lot of great, original bands came out of Northampton, Massachusetts, according to Mr. Monahan in his essay "A Night on the Tiles: The Big Bad Bollocks & the Mirror of England."⁴ One of the most amusing bands to come out of Northampton was The Unband. A few of Mr. Monahan's friends were in the band, such as bassist Mike Ruffino. These crazy bastards were actually banned from one of Mr. Monahan's favorite dives in Northampton, the former Bay State Hotel, where, also, one of the bands that Mr. Monahan played in performed once, twice, or more (yeah, I know: vague). At any rate, the members of The Unband were banned from the Bay State Hotel in the 90s for a "nudity-and-pepper-spray incident" that they had been involved in.⁴ Mr. Monahan's friendship with Mr. Ruffino goes way back, farther than I know. When Mr. Monahan was briefly editor at Hamptons magazine in 1996, he hired on Mr. Ruffino as his assistant.⁵ When Kurt Vonnegut moved to Northampton in 2001, The New York Post briefly joked (probably in Page Six) that Mr. Monahan and Mr. Ruffino were going to personally welcome Mr. Vonnegut to their neighborhood, or something to that effect. There are also a couple of humorous mentions of Mr. Monahan in Mr. Ruffino's memoir, Gentlemanly Repose.⁶

All this background will probably inform, in some way or another, the rewrite that Mr. Monahan has been hired to do of the script for The Long Play, a film project about the music business that originated at Mick Jagger's production company Jagged Films and that Martin Scorsese is intending on directing. Obviously, however, Mr. Monahan's musical background is evident in any of his scripts.

Take-away question: During which years did Mr. Monahan play for the bands the Slags and Foam?

Sources:

1) William Monahan. "Vanity Plates: Something's Got to Give", New York Press, vol. 11, no. 8 (February 25–March 3, 1998), p. 62. QUOTE: "Four years ago I was in a band and weighed 160 in any weather."
2) "Contributors Notes", Perkins Press, vol. 2, no. 4, Late-Summer 1991. QUOTE: "William Monohan [sic] 'writes fiction and plays guitar for the Slags.' A long (but it's worth it) short story eats up pages 12 and 13."
3) William Monahan. "Cymru: A Week in Llareggub", New York Press, vol. 12, no. 27 (July 7–13, 1999), pp. 1, 18.
4) William Monahan. "A Night on the Tiles: The Big Bad Bollocks & the Mirror of England", New York Press, vol. 13, no. 27 (July 5–11, 2000), pp. 1, 27–29.
5) William Monahan. "The Burning Deck: My Brilliant Career at 'Hamptons'", New York Press, vol. 9, no. 29 (July 17–23, 1996), pp. 1, 28–29.
6) Michael Ruffino (2004-11-01). Gentlemanly Repose: Confessions Of A Debauched Rock 'n' Roller. Citadel Press. ISBN 978-0806526263. NOTE: Monahan is mentioned thrice in Ruffino's memoir: in the Acknowledgments as the person without whom the "book would not have been possible", on page 37 at a computer monitor smashing party, and on page 157 at a concert where The Unband opened for Def Leppard at the Tweeter Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Monahan may be present on page 193 as one of the "guest-listed friends" for The Unband's final show at the Bowery Ballroom on July 29, 2001.