Most writers’ lives are skull-numbingly solitary affairs consisting of variations on staring at a blank screen, drinking gallons of coffee, writing half a page, footling around on Facebook, scoffing entire packets of biscuits, erasing the half-page and rewriting it, and so on.
None of which makes for thrilling cinema, though Percy Adlon manages to make Proust’s bedridden routine seem pretty mesmerising in Celeste.
On the whole, though, cinema prefers its writers flamboyantly self-destructive, with suicide (The Hours, Sylvia), sex romps (Henry & June) or alcoholism (Barfly, Factotum, anything else with Charles Bukowski) taking precedence over an occasional montage of frantic scribbling. This intimates that writers’ lives and deaths are more interesting than their work, even though the work is the reason the film is being made about them in the first place.
In the absence of suicide or murder (Prick Up Your Ears) to jiff up the drama, screenwriters can resort to the formative experience option, dropping hints of the oeuvre to come through in-jokes such as that pre-inspiration draft of Romeo and Ethel in Shakespeare in Love, or Jane Austen not getting married in Becoming Jane. In extreme cases the writer’s creations come to life, a tactic that backfires when Renee Zellweger starts talking to imaginary rabbits in Miss Potter, because it makes her look mentally ill.
But if filmmakers are primarily interested in the events of an author’s life, you wonder why no one has ever made Joseph Conrad at Sea, or Jack London: The Klondike Years, both of which would lend themselves to action aplenty. And we have yet to see the definitive Edgar Allan Poe movie; Sylvester Stallone and Michael Jackson both toyed with Poe projects, though it’s one of my big regrets that no one thought to cast Bill Murray in the role 20 years ago, when he was a dead ringer.
If the mystery of Poe’s final days has never been properly explored on film, the disappearance of Ambrose Bierce (whose An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge invented an entire subgenre of horror movies culminating in the omigod-they’ve-been-dead-all-along twist) has inspired a few fill-in-the-blanks imaginings. The upmarket version is Old Gringo, which provided Gregory Peck with his last great role. Or there’s Dusk Till Dawn 3: The Hangman’s Daughter, in which the alcoholic scribe gets embroiled in a three-way brawl between Mexican soldiers, outlaws and vampires.
The films that come closest to conveying the mind-set of the writer are the ones that go a little bonkers, like Naked Lunch, in which the William Burroughs surrogate becomes a character in his own drug-induced delirium, complete with talking-sphincter typewriter. No one has yet made a biopic about Stephen King, though any such venture would probably be redundant because King himself has already recast his career in horror-movie terms with novels such as Misery, The Dark Half and The Shining.
The Shining, in fact, is a reminder that trying — and failing — to write is as much a part of the creative process as the frenzied scribbling. Perhaps the most telling films about authors are not the reverent biopics, but fantasies exploring the terrors of writer’s block and the vampiric aspect of appropriating other people’s experiences for fiction.
Anyone who has ever faced a looming deadline can sympathise with John Turturro as the Clifford Odets-like Barton Fink. His bogus attempts at emotional truth are comprehensively trumped by John Goodman as the salesman-cum-serial killer next door, who points out: “You’re just a tourist with a typewriter, Barton. I live here.” —