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.
