But Enough About You: Essays by Christopher Buckley Read Free Book Online Page B

younger gen caught them wincing and puckering when they drank.
    Then, always too soon for me, it was time to go. These partings wrenched, for a full year might pass before I saw my cousins again. The good-byes in the crepuscular gloom of late November afternoons were, I now understand, rehearsals for later, more final, partings.
    — Boston , October 2002

HOW TO BREAK INTO THE MOVIES IN ONLY TWELVE YEARS
    The Wall Street Journal reported a while back that Tom Clancy went as ballistic as a Red October submarine because—brace yourself—the director filming one of Mr. Clancy’s novels placed a reef in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay, for reasons of plot.
    My first reaction was that this was surely so much Sturm und Drang in a teacup. But then I realized I was only being churlish. And worse, jealous. I had just recently gotten word that one of my novels had run aground—yet again—on a reef somewhere in Hollywood. It had been languishing nearly a decade in what is euphemistically called “development hell.”
    The novel was called Thank You for Smoking . Mel Gibson had optioned the rights to it in 1993, before it was published. It would be more accurate to say—as we Hollywood types do—that “Mel’s people” had optioned it.
    Mel’s people couldn’t have been nicer. In our first phone call, they could barely contain their enthusiasm. “This will be Mel’s next movie. Absolutely.” This was an assertion I would hear many times over the coming decade. Eventually the thrill somewhat wore off.
    The problem, see, was that Mel and his people got themselves hopelessly sidetracked with two absurd and inconsequential projects. One was called Braveheart —I’m told that it sank without a trace at the box office. What was the name of the other? . . . The Passion of the Christ . Another commercial stinkeroo. Crater City.
    I felt sorry for Mel, but at the same time couldn’t help thinking, You have only yourself to blame, my friend. We never actually met, but as an honorary Mel person, I feel justified calling him “friend.” The real tragedy, of course, is that if we actually had become friends, I might have been able to stop him getting into the car that night and getting arrested for driving while anti-Semitic.
    So on reconsideration, I now feel Mr. Clancy’s pain over thatreef-mad director. Really, the gall of these so-called auteurs. Philistines. Let’s hope he never gets to direct Proust’s Remembrance of Time Past . He’d probably put a reef in the Seine next to the Ile de la Cité.
    The Wall Street Journal article used the occasion of this artistic outrage to examine other books that were turned into movies. Remember Louis L’Amour, the great western novelist? L’Amour was the real deal, one of the most successful writers of his day. The Journal noted that he wrote more than one hundred books, of which nearly fifty—fifty!—were sold to the movies. One of the first was a western titled The Broken Gun . When it arrived on the big screen it was called Cancel My Reservation and starred Bob Hope.
    Unlike Mr. Clancy, Mr. L’Amour was philosophical about it all. He just shrugged. He likened the process to selling a house to a new owner. The new owner, he said, had every right to redecorate. Take the money and let it go.
    Ernest Hemingway, a writer of no small ego, was so embittered by his experiences with Hollywood that he formulated what could be called Hemingway’s Rule for Dealing with those Celluloid SOBs. It goes like this: You drive your car up to the California state line. Take your manuscript out of the car. Make them throw the money across first. Toss them the manuscript, get back in the car, and drive back east as fast as you can.
    I had pretty much given up all hope of Smoking ever being made. Mel and his people seemed hell-bent on their economically suicidal obsession to make a movie about some minor fracas in Palestine two thousand years ago.
    And then one day I got a call from a