It was 1979, my first year at the Yale School of Drama. A friend — the producer who had given me my first paying job as a screenwriter and paid my initiation into the Writer's Guild — was trying to get the rights to Under the Volcano. For months he had been taunting me with [...]
How losing one argument about my screenplay led to a major change in the film of Under the Volcano.
Twenty five years after the release of Under the Volcano and I still get a knot in my stomach when I think about some of the dynamics involved in its making, the personal and professional mis-steps and conflicts. I was very fortunate that my screenplay for Under the Volcano met with John Huston's approval; that [...]
For my first job after Under the Volcano I was hired to adapt Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Having succeeded with an adaptation that had defeated many previous writers, I was approached to manage another near impossible adaptation: bring Twain's novel to the screen with a fresh slant, avoid the pitfalls [...]
