The latest on William Monahan's "Tripoli" and "The Essex" scripts

Collider.com really knows how to get a good interview out of scribe William Monahan. This is what they got out of him most recently about his The Essex and Tripoli scripts (I've done my own reporting on these scripts):

Excerpted from "Exclusive: William Monahan Talks LONDON BOULEVARD, THE DEPARTED Sequel, SIN CITY 2, THE GAMBLER, MOJAVE, TRIPOLI, More":

If you could make a period piece in any period that’s not the 12^thcentury, when would you choose?

Monahan: The era I love most is the Federal period, just after the Revolution and the formation of the United States. The birth of America as a nation coincided with the Romantic era and I’ve always been thoroughly into the Romantics and I’ve always been thoroughly into America, particularly at the time when it was a brand new idea, when it was something brand new in the world. It was a very exciting time in the world because of the birth of America. It’s also an interesting period in which to look at the United States because it’s a period in which the United States was an underdog. An underdog nation with no Navy, and of course that’s what Tripoli is about. Tripoli is set in 1804. The Essex, which would be a mammoth production, is set in the War of 1812.  Tripoli isn’t really an epic. Tripoli is a tragic drama enacted in the open air on the coast of North Africa. I don’t think there’s ever more than 100 people on screen at one time throughout the entire picture. It’s not quite the titanic picture one thinks. It could be done for 30. You can get epic effects without epic expenses. I think in Tripoli, the only possible CG thing would be the Constitution opening fire on Tripoli.

Who owns the rights right now?

Monahan: For one reason or another, Tripoli never officially went into turn-around at Fox because of some paperwork snafu. So we’re in a situation where the underlying rights,  which means the original script, reverted to me. Fox owns what are referred to as “sterile drafts,” which means they own these further development drafts but they’re not able to do anything with them. Sooner or later, it’s going to be an issue and we have to come to some sort of arrangement.

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.