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My grandfather and grandmother in 1950 at Sloppy Joes in Havana.

Wrote a screenplay. Liked it. Hollywood yawned. Rather than cry in my beer, I am hereby self publishing, because I can. A link to the screenplay is below. Here’s the back story:

My grandfather, MacKinlay Kantor, wrote 50 books in his lifetime. For one of them, Andersonville, he won the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for literature. But that wasn’t the novel of his I liked best. My favorite was an earlier novel, his first big success, published inn 1934. Long Remember was a fictional account of civilians caught in the  battle of Gettysburg. Gettysburg, often called the high point of the Confederacy. (the war was all downhill after Maj. General George Pickett’s uphill charge to the town cemetery was repulsed by stalwart Union troops.) The battle was fought over three days, July 1 to July 3, 1863. Next July is it’s 150th anniversary. The action of the novel, which won high praise for its historical realism, actually begins in late spring when the protagonist returns from the Western territories to attend to affairs after his grandfather’s death. He falls in lust with his neighbor’s wife — a big city girl marooned in a small town while her unhappy husband is away at the war (a captain). The lust is reciprocated, they guiltily consummate the affair, then, like the judgment of a terrible God, the war breaks right on top of them.

The novel, in my view, has a few structural and stylistic problems, eminently fixable. So I set out to do that, by turning it into a screenplay, which by its nature requires rethinking a novel in any case. I was hoping that the country would be caught up in 150th anniversary fever, and that Hollywood would be swept along. No go. The screenplay went out and got a consistent response: Nobody wants to make any more Civil War movies. Especially since Redford shoved The Conspirator down everyone’s throat and the result was a communal gag. Even Cold Mountain, which as a novel sold approximately a gazillion copies and had big stars in it, was disappointing box office. So Long Remember, the Screenplay is going nowhere. But I had a great time writing it: Screenwriting is like a cross between literature and puzzle making. Much more fun than, say, writing a nonfiction book. I also thought, and still think, despite Hollywood’s thunderous indifference, that it would make a great movie. Judge for yourself. Read the screenplay here:

Long Remember

The Harry Crews I remember

Harry Crews died yesterday. He was 76, dissipated by a lifetime of hard living, too many drugs, too much alcohol and an uncounted number of fists to the face. I couldn’t recognize the man in the obituary picture, the man described as a little-known but larger-than-life cult novelist, a writer of “dark fiction” filled with Southern grotesques and wild violence. The Harry Crews I remember was fixed in a thin slice of spacetime, a stretch of six months or so in Gainesville, Florida 40 years ago. He was in his short-lived “speed freak phase.” He’d given up drinking, at least temporarily, but he was definitely on something that turned up the wattage. He was running a lot, zero body fat, a Mr. Clean gleam, both on his shaved skull and in his eye.

Somehow I managed to get into one of his University of Florida creative writing seminars as a sophomore undergraduate. I don’t remember if I had to show a writing sample, but I imagine I must have. Crews was a writing God in 1972 Gainesville. Little-known he may be in terms of a New York Times Arts section obit in 2012, but then and there he was the most famous man in town, a swashbuckling Hemingway figure who made flesh the cliche of living legend – at least to an 18-year-old with dreams of literary fame and fortune. I do remember a one-on-one interview in which he studied me the way a hawk must study a chipmunk. He accepted maybe a dozen students that semester, a three-hour marathon one night a week which was less of a class than a performance. I have no idea why I was among them, but I have been forever grateful for that fluke of luck.

Crews spoke in great roiling torrents, extolling us like a revivalist doing his unlevel best to save a particularly sorry bunch of sinners. His gospel was the nakedness of truth, the necessity for a writer to peel away all ego, to abandon caution and conceit, and care only for revealing his inner world in all it’s sick and twisted glory. Crews, who made it quite clear he had no use for convention in life or literature, was the embodiment of Bob Dylan’s creed, “to live outside the law, you must be honest.”

There were periods in Crews’s pedagogic career when he was not the most attentive teacher. He’d show up late and half-baked to stumble and mumble around. Or fully baked, not show up at all. But in the brief moment of time when  I sat at the old-fashioned wooden writing desks in an antiquated second floor classroom, a heavy scent of  jasmine drifting in the open windows, he was an exemplar. Sometimes he read something he’d been working on, raw passages only ripped from his typewriter hours earlier. It was thrilling, terrifying, and disconcertingly intimate. It could have been embarrassing, but he read it with such fierce energy and conviction we were all swept up and carried away in the flood of prose, each and every one of us forever embedded with the desire to write as if we were dancing around a ring,  trying to deliver a knockout punch.

That was the downside of his charisma. We weren’t so much students as disciples, and to this day, his manic rhythms throb in some recess of my brain whenever I sit at a keyboard.

Here’s the upside: One night he walked into class with an onionskin manuscript in his hands and announced that he was going to read a student piece. He set to it with the same drama and passion he’d delivered for his own work. His reading was so riveting, it wasn’t until several sentences in that I realized that he was reading my story, the story I’d suffered and strained over, and had grown to hate each and every word of.

I’m sure it wasn’t all that bad. It wasn’t all that good, either. But as Crews read it, standing and pacing before us, flailing his free arm and belting out my words as if they were fists of fury, I could see my classmates leaning forward in their seats, rapt. And for the first time, I truly believed I could become a writer.