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.