Los Angeles Times bestselling author Stephen Jay Schwartz spent a number of years as the director of Development for filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, In the Line of Fire, The Perfect Storm, Air Force One), where he worked to develop screenplays for production. He also worked as a freelance screenwriter before writing his two novels, Boulevard and Beat. Stephenâs short fiction and essays have been published in collections such as the LA Fiction Anthology (Red Hen Press), and Jewish Noir (PM Press). He is a regular moderator at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and has judged and been the panel chair for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for three consecutive years, starting in 2015. His film work has been exhibited in the AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC. Stephen received his MFA in creative writing from UC Riverside and is currently on faculty at Emerson College Los Angeles.
An Interview with Jonathan Kellerman
I sat down with Jonathan Kellerman for lunch at an upscale Hollywood steakhouse where we dined on salads and proceeded to explore the lure of the film and television industry on an author whose work is grounded in fact.
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Stephen Jay Schwartz: Your first published novel, When the Bough Breaks, was purchased in 1985 and fast-tracked as a television movie of the week. How did that happen? Did you have contacts in the entertainment industry?
Jonathan Kellerman: So what happened was that Ted Danson wanted to do a dramatic project and after he read my book he and his business partner approached my literary agent. I didnât have a film agent at the time.
SJS: At this point your book was a best seller?
JK: It was a NY Times bestseller, to everyoneâs amazement, including my own. And it actually got made! I think it was one of the highest-rated NBC movies of the week ever made. Now, this was pre-cable, it was 1986. It had something like a thirty-three shareâit beat 60 Minutes. Ted was huge then, as you know, but he also did a movie at that time that didnât do so well. So I like to think that it was a combination of Tedâs star power and the quality of the product itself that made it so successful.
SJS: Did you have any influence on the teleplay?
JK: My attitude has always been that itâs like surrogate parentingâI birth it, I give it to you, and I walk away. I really didnât want to get involved. I told you, Stephen, I have an aversion to screenwriting. I like writing novels, itâs all I like writing. But what happened was they hired a writer from their panelâthey had a panel in those days, it was a list of writers they worked withâand he did a draft, then he went away to an ashramâ
SJS: To a what?
JK: An ashram, you know (laughs), like a mystical retreat like they had in those days. And they werenât happy with it when it came back. Ted said it wasnât what he wanted, and he was producing as well as acting, so it meant a lot to him. This was with Taft Entertainment, they used to have offices on Wilshire, and they begged me to do something, and I donât think they even paid meâ
SJS: You read that screenplay?
JK: Yes.
SJS: And you had the same feeling that Ted had? You didnât feel that it really represented your book?
JK: I mean I thought it was okay, but they wanted more. So hereâs what we did. We met in a windowless room at Taft and Ted and a secretary read the script line by line out loud, and if something wasnât good, I rewrote it. It took a couple days, and then they liked it. The irony is that the script won an Edgar Award, but my name wasnât on it (laughs).
SJS: It was kind of like a page-one rewriteâ
JK: Line by line. I gotta tell you, Ted was so serious about it, heâs so good at his craft. Heâs a great guy, I like working with him.
SJS: Was it mostly dialogue that needed changing? Was the draft structurally sound?
JK: Honestly, I forget. It was thirty years ago. But I remember that it was a fun experience, and I had no experience writing screenplays. Iâd only written one published novelâI think Iâd written two novels at that point. The funny thing is that Iâve written fifty booksâforty-four novelsâand thatâs the only thing thatâs ever been produced, ever. I always get the question, âWhy donât they do movies out of your booksâ and I really donât know. But I really donât care, either. Iâve had plenty of sales, Iâve made a lot of money off options and sales. I did another deal where I had to rewrite a scriptâI wonât mention names, but it was written by a very famous guy who was my friend and, because I rewrote his script, we are no longer friends. Itâs really kind of sad. I didnât want to do it, but my agent said, âYouâve really got to do it because itâs not going to happen otherwise.â
SJS: Was this one of your books?
JK: Yes, it was one of my books that Francis Ford Coppola bought. He had a deal with Hallmark, and he bought three of my books outright. So I rewrote that script to toughen it up a little. I lost a friend, and they didnât make it anyway because, well, you know Hollywoodâa new head of TV comes in and she decides she doesnât like it or you know, for some reason the new guy decides that he has to destroy whatever his predecessor has done. I donât like this business. The reason I like writing novels is because Iâm the producer and the writer and the actor. I sit in a room, I type, and I get minimally edited. Itâs my book. If you like it, you like it, if you hate it, I take the blame. I donât like collaboration. My son (NY Times bestselling author Jesse Kellerman) loves collaboration. He was an actor/director at Harvard and he loves playwriting. He enjoys the process. Heâs very good at it. I like collaborating with him because heâs such an ace, heâs such a talent. But otherwise, the joy to me of writing novels is that itâs a solitary endeavor.
SJS: Who do you go to for feedback on your novels, is it Faye (Kellerman, NY Times bestselling author and Jonathanâs wife) orâ
JK: Nobody.
SJS: Does anyone give you notes on a draft?
JK: No! Iâm so arrogant (laughs)! In the beginning, Faye and I started off together, I got published in â85 and she got published in â86. We were a couple of doctors, a couple of young kids getting published, so in the early days, every Friday, I would give her what I did, like a chapter, and she would give me what she did and I have to say, there were some cold nights (laughs). We had to learn how to do thisâsheâs real sensitive, Iâm sensitiveâŚitâs the closest thing to criticizing your own child. As we got more confident it would stretch out. I would give her like a monthâs worth, about a hundred pages. And now she writes her book, I write mine. I always respect editing. I think it was Fran Leibowitz, the humorist, who said, âWhatâs this about editing? You donât go up to a painter and tell...