A Manhattan Ghost Story Goes to Hollywood

by Kaa Byington and Clare Mann

When you hear the beginning of T.M. Wright’s saga of the fate of his novel, A Manhattan Ghost Story, and how it went to Hollywood, you think: this is every writer’s wildest dream come true. It even has the cliche opening that Hollywood favors. A Manhattan Ghost Story was first published in 1984. Six years later, in 1990, Robert Lawrence, a producer, was in London, at Heathrow Airport, and needed something to read on the flight home, so he picked up a book off the rack. It was AMGS and he liked it so much . . . yes, right, he optioned it the very next day. And in short order he had lined up a studio, a big time screenwriter and, for the lead, Sharon Stone. It was the lightning strike, the glass slipper, the brass ring. “I was on cloud twelve,” says Wright

CUT TO:

INT. HOLLYWOOD. EIGHT YEARS LATER.
The film has still not been made. A screenwriter has been paid $4 million to write and rewrite the screenplay, which has changed the race of one of the leads, as well as identities of the main characters, and altered the ending. Carolco, the original studio, has gone bankrupt, and Disney has bought the option on the screenplay at the auction of Carolco’s assets. Touchstone is now the Studio. Touchstone is vacillating between Julia Roberts and Sharon Stone. The new director is “developing” the screenplay, because he doesn’t like it. The new release date is, ironically perhaps, the millennium, 2000. And Wright? What has he been doing all these years? Writing books and being ignored. “I’m on terra firma now,” Wright says.

T.M. Wright was already an established, critically praised mid-list author when A Manhattan Ghost Story was published. He has written twenty-two books, all but one in the horror genre. But if the word “horror” conjures up Jason or Freddy, forget it. “I’d characterize my work as unplotted, character-centered -- disturbing. I hope. I think that I try to peek around the corners of our lives at what really moves us. Sometimes what I see I find off-key, out of balance with the way we would like to see ourselves. In 1983 I was eating in a West Village restaurant with my agent. I overheard two guys at a neighboring table say, 'How do we know the people are still alive?’ That was the inspiration for AMGS.”

In it, Wright shows his protagonist, Abner Cray, moving into a borrowed New York apartment and falling in love with its other inhabitant, the tempting Phyllis, who slowly pulls him into another parallel Manhattan, the land of the dead, her territory. It is certainly a disturbing (and surreal) book and Wright is an elegant writer. “Abner is on a quest for something he can never have: perfect love. He’s a sort of Don Quixote type, I suppose. Poor schmuck. That’s really what AMGS is about -- tilting at windmills. This time the windmill is perfect love. Sounds corny. I hope it doesn’t come across that way. It’s also about living in general, how it can become static, which is why the ghosts, as portrayed in the book, do the same thing over and over again. Shit, they’re us, they’re the living, but without functioning lungs.”

And what happened to AMGS when it went to the West Coast? How did screenwriter Ron Bass, (My Best Friend’s Wedding) alter it for Hollywood tastes? “He saw it as a vehicle to bring a new level of schmaltz to the world. He didn’t see it the way I saw it, the way I wrote it. He saw it as a love story wherein the characters end up together forever (literally!). At the end of his version Phyllis and Abner are seen having a nice Christmas dinner with Phyllis’s late parents in a mountain cabin on the ‘other side.’ Give me a break!”

After the bankruptcy sale of the option on the book to Disney and Touchstone, they hired a new director, Wayne Wang (Sense and Sensibility, The Joy Luck Club). Terry Gilliam (Smoke, Blue in the Face, several Monty Python movies) turned it down because he didn’t like what Ron Bass had done to the screenplay. “Wang and Touchstone wanted to bring the screenplay closer to the book. When I suggested, in all seriousness, that the person most able to do that was the author of the book, they stopped returning my phone calls. You know, of course, that writers are not screenwriters. They cannot possibly do what screenwriters do, meaning they can’t possibly screw up every book they’re given to translate to film.”

Not that Wright had a lot of time on his hands during the eight years since A Manhattan Ghost Story was optioned. He wrote two novels, both “ghost stories,” that were published only in England -- Sleepeasy and Erthmun -- and the fourth in his series of Ryerson Biergarten novels. Biergarten is a psychic detective. “He’s a great guy, part me, part lots of other people, part Sherlock Holmes. He can be a pain in the ass, but I think he’s likeable. At least he knows he’s not perfect. I started on a fifth Ryerson novel, but got waylaid by the book I’m working on now. It’s a mainstream novel about a guy who, for grim reasons, confuses food, sex and love and who seems to believe (not incorrectly) that some of the people in his life are real and some are “phantasms.” These are manufactured, he says, by some force within him that he neither controls nor understands. Trouble is, he tries to decipher who’s real and who’s the phantasm and he’s not always right. . .”

And the money? While Ron Bass was rendering AMGS into schmaltz for a cool $4 million, what did Wright get? “I got a paltry sum for the original option, for extensions of that option, and when the option was exercised, meaning when Carolco actually bought the movie rights. I’ll get more money when the movie actually goes into production. I’m promised 1½ percent of the net, and that and $1.40 will buy you a cup of coffee anywhere. And two agents, one in L.A. and one in New York, are involved with the book as it relates to the movie. They both get cuts on whatever I get. Ain’t life grand? And there are the spinoffs. The book has been reissued here and published in thirteen other languages because foreign publishers see that it is going to be made into a movie.” If he had it to do over, Wright would have held out for a better deal. “I’d go for ½ percent of the gross over three percent of the net. They never have a net profit.”

As for the rewards of what once had seemed like the brass ring, the writer’s dream come true, Wright says: “The money. I’ll get additional money when the movie is made. It was frustrating. They leave the novelist out of the whole process. It’s frustrating that this has been going on for eight years. The waiting is difficult and the ups and downs are hard. I made some money, but I’d like to see the movie made now.”

-- KB
-- CM
© 1998 Kaa Byington and Clare Mann