He’s a snappy dresser. His office above Water Street is beautifully appointed. He’s enormously successful, and unfailingly generous. Locally, his philanthropy extends to the Legal Aid Justice Center, Little League and other causes. Most recently he and his wife donated $5 million to kick-start a post-Katrina Mississippi rebuilding effort with their Rebuild the Coast fund. Though a St. Louis Cardinals fan (a large black-and-white print autographed by the great Stan Musial adorns a southeast wall of his office), he graciously acknowledges the superior playing this year of the Chicago White Sox. He says March of the Penguins is the best movie he’s seen in 2005. He has beautiful manners and looks you right in the eye during an interview. In other words, John Grisham is a likeable guy. A very, very likeable guy.
Later this week, he’ll lend some of his time and insight to the Virginia Film Festival, first at the pre-Festival showing of After Innocence, a documentary about life after prison for a half-dozen exonerees. The event is a fundraiser for Legal Aid and the Life After Exoneration Project (for more on the program, see page 29). Then, on Friday evening, Grisham will sit down with Hollywood Reporter critic Duane Byrge to discuss the 10 feature films adapted from his novels, and life and work among the Hollywood glitterati.
In advance of all that, he sat for an interview last week. It’s boiled down here.—Cathy Harding
C-VILLE: The New York Times reported that you have veto power over the casting in your movies. Is that true?
John Grisham: Yes. I didn’t always but for the last several movies I had veto power.
What are the qualities that you would just reject out of hand?
I’ve only said no twice. I’ll give you the perfect example of why it’s important to have veto power. We were filming A Time to Kill and we were getting close, we had a great cast, we had a director, we had a budget. It was time to sign somebody and the first suggestion to me was Val Kilmer, and I couldn’t see Val Kilmer playing the role of a lawyer in a small Southern town. I mean he’s great in Top Gun, you know he’s that kind of guy, he’s that kind of actor, but not a serious role with a coat and tie in a courtroom in a small town in the South. They came back with Woody Harrelson. I couldn’t see Woody Harrelson with a coat and tie on, either. So a long-winded answer is it just depends on what your actor does and what kind of role it is.
It sounds like in part you’re sensitive to the impression that these actors have already made.
Yeah, I think we always are. There are very few actors who can go from one very diverse role to another and pull it off.
Does this distinction hold up for you: There’s the actor who goes very deep into a character, portraying the inner life of the character over the course of a couple hours on screen. And then there’s the actor who can really respond on instinct to action, literally working with changing situations.
I think one way that the distinction applies is that you have to start with the story, you have to start with what I write and I’m not looking for real complicated character development. That’s not what I do. I write suspense and I write thrillers and I write books that are really plot driven. That’s one reason that Hollywood has always liked the books, because it’s a pretty simple plot, it’s not a complicated writing style and my goal when I write a legal thriller is to make the pages turn. Occasionally I’ll put an issue in there and wrap a novel around it. But the pages are always turning.
You’ve had a lot of these top shelf guys in your movies now. Gene Hackman, Denzel Washington, Danny DeVito, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts, Susan Sarandon. When you’re writing do you find that your mind wanders now to an actor, even if it happens involuntarily?
No, I don’t think of actors. It’s been 12, 13 years ago, when the movies first started coming out. I learned right off the bat that you never get who you think you’re going to get, you never get who you want. I’m writing a book right now, I couldn’t begin to imagine who would play this role.
I do know that when I write one a lot of people in Hollywood are going to read it and they’re going to make phone calls and this goes on for a while. It’s been that way since The Firm. So I mean, I know it’s going to be kicked around, but for me, the movie stuff—I’m kind of on the downhill side
of it. Maybe I’ve had my heyday in Hollywood.
I’ve read that John Steinbeck is one of your favorite authors. What do you think of the adaptations of his novels into movies?
Tough stuff to film, tough stuff to pull off. It’s easier to adapt one of my books because there’s so much more plot.
What do you make of this: People will watch Matt Damon take on a crooked insurance company in a fictional health care case but they don’t want to read about health care policy.
I guess it’s just a matter of entertainment; we love to be entertained. I tell people all the time I’m a famous writer in a country where nobody reads. People tell me all the time, “I don’t read your books but I love your movies.” It’s a TV society, that’s what we are.
But when you take an issue and you wrap the novel around it, you must feel a certain amount of responsibility.
It’s tricky, you can’t preach and you can’t stay on a soapbox. You can get by with some message-delivering, you know, if it’s a Bruce Springsteen song, great. But you really have to be careful about how much you do. And the best books are those that make people stop and think whether it’s breast cancer or homelessness or insurance fraud. And when you can pull that off, when you can make people think, it’s gratifying as a novelist to do that. I also never forget the fact that people buy these books to be entertained. They want to stay up at night and they want to skip work and all that and finish them in three days.
Now that your independent movie Mickey is out and on DVD, any thoughts on being on that side of the production?
Yeah. It’s the biggest financial disaster of my life.
Oh, come on, really?
I was advised by everybody to never put your own money into a movie, and I did and [director] Hugh Wilson did. You know, we’ll get the money back one of these years.
Your next book is nonfiction, about Ronald Keith Williamson, who was going to be killed for a murder he didn’t commit. Your thrillers tend to be inspired by real-life events, so why go nonfiction with this?
It was not something I had planned to do. Ronald Williamson died the first week of December last year at the age of 51. I had never heard of the guy. I had seen these exoneration stories, thought they were intriguing but had not been tempted to pursue them. I read his obituary in The New York Times. It so compelling that I said to myself: not on my best day could I create something this good. And I picked up the phone and called New York and said this is it.
He was drafted in the second round by the Oakland A’s in 1971, he was the first player drafted out of the state of Oklahoma. Mickey Mantle was his childhood idol. At some point he started showing signs of mental loss and the fact that he bombed as a player, most people can shrug that off and get on with their life, and he couldn’t. He was first diagnosed with bipolar and then it was depression and even schizophrenia.
Then he was framed for murder in the small town where he was a hero. He was on death row for seven years. Then they had to move him to this special unit to kill him and all this kind of stuff and he was sitting around just knowing he was completely innocent. He kept screaming, he would scream until he was hoarse. Finally the judge woke up, he got a good lawyer and so five years later—it took five years to get him out—he was exonerated by DNA evidence.
Why do you think this issue is creeping into the public awareness at this point?
It is absolutely more common now because of the DNA testing and there are about 35 Innocence Projects around the country—there’s one at UVA—where they take the cases, review them and do the DNA testing. The death penalty system is so screwed up; even if you believe in the death penalty you can’t be happy with the system. There are so many [Innocence Projects] now we’re finally starting to see these exonerations, and so the more you see the more it’s talked about.
How’s the work going with Rebuild the Coast? How much money have you raised so far?
We’re pushing, we’re somewhere between $8.5 million and $9 million.
The local people have been phenomenal. The Downtown merchants gave us a percentage the weekend before last. The golf tournament, we raised $30,000.
And then the fun parts are about to happen. This weekend on UVA campus Habitat for Humanity are going to build two houses and then we’re going to build four in November on the Downtown Mall. And so the people who are writing these checks here can see where the money’s going.
You’re so involved with the Katrina situation now, do you see that as being the context maybe for some future novel?
Who knows? The legal issues are fascinating. I know one lawyer down there who’s got 3,000 cases already.
You have said you wouldn’t want to see yourself writing novels when you get to be 80. Do you still feel that way?
My favorite writer today is John Le Carré. He British, he’s 75, he comes out about every three years.
You know, I can’t speak to 80 but I can speak to 60. I’m 50 now. A book takes six months to write, so what am I going to do for the other six months. If I don’t do a book a year what am I going to do?
I’m not one to play golf or stuff like that.
Goes great with popcorn
Grisham’s stories don’t exactly stretch actors, but they sure do entertain
By Cathy Harding
editor@c-ville.com
It’s good to be John Grisham. It’s good to be Gene Hackman, too, and these facts are not unrelated. For just as Grisham, the man who revived the legal thriller practically single-handedly, has been a godsend to the publishing industry, he’s been mostly good news for Hollywood, too. (Grisham was the best-selling author of the 1990s, moving more than 60 million copies of his books.) The movies based on his novels tend to do very well at the box office—the films regularly gross $100 million or more—and with edge-of-your-seat plot twists around every corner, they’re mostly satisfying pop entertainment.
That’s where Gene Hackman comes in. He has starred in three Grisham thrillers, and each has showcased another aspect of his acclaimed flexibility as an actor. He’s been slimy, slimier and slimiest, even foaming at the mouth as a fourth-generation Klansman who gets the electric chair.
What about other actors? How do they look wearing Grisham’s material once it’s adapted for the screen? With the 18th Annual Virginia Film Festival running throughout this week, including a Q&A session with Grisham on Friday night on the topic of his novels and their adaptation to screenplays, I held my own GrishamFest to consider the question. The answer: Yup, John Grisham is good for actors, provided it’s the right actor, the right director and the right story.
The Firm (1993)
Directed by Sydney Pollack
Screenplay by David Rabe
Starring Tom Cruise, Jeanne Tripplehorne, Gene Hackman and Holly Hunter
A bright, blue-collar Harvard law student (Tom Cruise) gets a job offer from a small Memphis firm that really is too good to be true. Something of a legal Hotel California, the firm, as Cruise and his lovely, slightly skeptical wife (Jeanne Tripplehorne) discover, lets associates check out but they can never leave…unless it’s in a pine box. When the FBI gets involved (a strictly business Ed Harris pursues Cruise), the toothy one has to use his wits to get the Feds what they want without compromising his legal ethics.
With plenty of scenery changes (Cambridge, Memphis, the Cay-man Islands) and well-dressed bad guys lurking behind every credenza, the plot perfectly serves Cruise’s peripatetic acting style. As long as he’s running around or stealing files, he’s doing fine. (You really cannot imagine him faced with one of the societal dilemmas of latter-day Grisham, say, a crooked health insurance company. Too much thinking required!) Pretty girl Tripplehorne gets to pout and rise above her stated if not exactly demonstrated fears.
But in what presages a trend in Grisham adaptations, it’s the character actors—here Gene Hackman as an incurably compromised attorney and Holly Hunter as a smart, sexy secretary—who lend the movie its humanity.
The Pelican Brief (1993)
Directed by Alan J. Pakula
Screenplay by Alan J. Pakula
Starring Julia Roberts, Denzel Washington, Sam Shepard and John Heard
This is Roberts in her early big-hair period, this time portraying the female version of the classic Grisham hero: the law novice who will learn the hard way that justice is elusive, power is corrupting and Goliath is rarely (but not never) vanquished. She’s Darby Shaw, law student, and though she’s smart enough to figure out the probable suspect in the assassination of two Supreme Court justices, she’s dumb enough to sleep with her on-again, off-again alcoholic professor (Sam Shep-ard, phoning it in). When he gets blown up after he shares her theory, contained in the eponymous brief, with a government pal, Roberts is off and running, having some fun with undercover disguises (bad hats, short hair, a fanny pack!). She’s scared, she’s clever and she can’t trust anyone. Think of Pelican as her audition tape for Erin Brockovich.
Denzel Washington plays D.C. investigative reporter Gray Grantham, whose cool name and comfortable demeanor earns Roberts’ trust. The highlight of this thoroughly watchable movie is the growing bond between Roberts and Washington —reminding us of how rare it is to see a platonic attachment in American mainstream entertainment.
As Shepard’s FBI friend, John Heard lends complexity—and a complete willingness to humiliate himself—to the ensemble. Also look for smarty Cynthia Nixon, playing Roberts’ classmate, in a couple of scenes.
The Client (1994)
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman
Starring Susan Sarandon, Tommy Lee Jones, Mary-Louise Parker and Brad Renfro
Susan Sarandon plays “experienced.” She’s Reggie Love, a middle-age woman in transition, who happens to be a new lawyer. Her client, a smart-mouthed 11-year-old troublemaker, puts her through the paces as he tries to guard the secret of the mob-related suicide he witnessed. But she’s nothing if not unflappable, at least on the surface. Plus, she knows a little something about Led Zeppelin. At the other end, government prosecutor Tommy Lee Jones, leading an entourage and barking orders in his patented lovable asshole schtick, admires her grudgingly as she plays hardball over the kid’s civil rights. Sexy chemistry. You wonder what would happen if they met at a party.
The heft of the scene-to-scene running around—dodging hit men and federal agents—is left to Renfro, a one-hit wonder whose career never really saw light again after a series of real-life criminal escapades. Putting the action on the kid leaves the adults freer to get into character. Mary-Louise Parker, tremulous and skinny, chain-smokes her way through her role as Renfro’s single mother. It’s nice watching her relationship with Sarandon move from uneasy to mutually respectful.
A Time to Kill (1996)
Directed by Joel Schumacher
Screenplay by Akiva Goldsman
Starring Matthew McConaughey, Sandra Bullock, Samuel L. Jackson, Kevin Spacey, Ashley Judd and Oliver Platt
If you ask me, if you can only see one Grisham movie, this is it (unless you see The Rainmaker). This is Grisham at his most substantial, wrapping quick action around a larger societal issue. It’s institutional racism, in this case, and the struggle to find justice in the “New South.” Samuel L. Jackson, slightly bent, basically decent, kills a couple of heavy-drinking crackers after they rape his 10-year-old daughter and leave her for dead. Can Matthew McConaughey, using unfamiliar restraint to play a mildly liberal lawyer who nevertheless likes the death penalty, successfully argue the insanity defense? Can a poor black man get a fair trial in Canton, Mississippi?
And with the Klan reactivated over the case, is the cost of pursuing justice worth the cause? This is the movie in which Ashley Judd, playing McConaughey’s long-suffering wife, first finds her footing as the damsel in distress who has a cast-iron frying pan up her sleeve. Sandra Bullock, cracking wise as usual, gets her come-uppance for being a nosy Yankee law student who helps out. In what might be considered the Gene Hackman role, Kevin Spacey is a living oil slick, playing an opportunistic prosecutor. And if you’ve ever loved Oliver Platt’s pudgy self-absorption, you’re going to appreciate him as the high-earning divorce attorney who is McConaughey’s sidekick.
Stellar ensemble cast working provocative material that combines plenty of action with a good helping of thoughtfulness.
The Chamber (1996)
Directed by James Foley
Screenplay by William Goldman
Starring Chris O’Donnell, Gene Hackman and Faye Dunaway
Chris O’Donnell is going to fight the death penalty. Which is not as crazy as sending maybe Tom Cruise to do the job, but it’s close. What’s the nice way to put this? O’Donnell is out of his depth.
The man awaiting execution in a Mississippi jail happens to be O’Donnell’s grandfather, an unrepentant Klansman who blew up a couple of Jewish children 30 years earlier. Enter Gene Hackman. He growls, he shaves badly, his teeth are yellow, he keeps his unruly curls tucked into a watchman’s cap. As his visit to the gas chamber approaches, he opens a bit, talks more, relinquishes the monster bit just a tad.
It’s not Hackman’s best work—what does he really have in common with this coarse Klansman?—but it’s a far cry better than the Faye Dunaway’s histrionic performance as his daughter. How can you depict grief and anger with a face stretched as tight as a rubber band? And, as the reviewer from The Washington Post famously wondered when the movie opened, how can Dunaway be Hackman’s daughter in this movie when she was his contemporary in Bonnie and Clyde?
The Rainmaker (1997)
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola
Starring Matt Damon, Danny DeVito, Mary Kay Place, Jon Voight and Mickey Rourke
Here’s that character again: the blue collar do-gooder working his way through law school, hoping for something great to come his way, but mostly wanting to pay the bills. And in Matt Damon’s hands, he’s appealing if not exactly complex.
Damon joins a shadowy ambulance-chasing law firm headed by Mickey Rourke, looking and sounding like the kind of party-boy shark that Joe Walsh might have become if he didn’t play guitar with the Eagles. (Grisham is great with the names; Rourke’s character is J. Lyman “Bruiser” Stone.) In no time, Damon is squaring off with a giant dirty insurance company that has wrongfully denied coverage to a family whose 20something son dies needlessly from leukemia.
Damon would be in way over his head were it not for a “para-lawyer” in Bruiser’s firm, Deck Shifflet, played like a violin by the incomparable Danny DeVito. Acting without a shred of vanity (he regularly spills food on himself, for example), the diminutive powerhouse ends up being motivated by something more than his promised slice of the payout.
It seems like Coppola couldn’t make a bad-looking movie if he tried—his classical eye for setting up shots is just that automatic. But for a Grisham movie to work it needs a heavy dose of action, too, and watching the nuanced grief of Mary Kay Place, portraying the mother of the leukemia victim, is rewarding but not exciting.
That’s where a domestic violence sub-plot involving a wan Claire Danes comes in. But as soon as Damon is done dispensing advice to her and crushing blows to her bad husband, that storyline is left behind.
As the insurance company’s unctuous, arrogant defense attorney Jon Voight is delicious, nearly chasing Gene Hackman from one’s mind.
The Gingerbread Man (1998)
Directed by Robert Altman
Screenplay by Clyde Hayes, a.k.a. Robert Altman
Starring Kenneth Branagh, Robert Downey Jr., Embeth Davidtz and Darryl Hannah
Uh, yeah. Wrong director, wrong screenplay, wrong weather (“Hurricane Geraldo,” apparently a three-week long storm, darkens every scene—literally), wrong leading man. Yes, thanks to his classical British stage training Kenneth Branagh can adopt any accent, so he sounds convincing as a Georgia lawyer named Rick Magruder. Too bad he’s hamstrung by a convoluted set-up, which begins with a desperate one-night stand with Embeth Davidtz (I’m told she’s an attractive woman, but who can say in all that dark lighting?).
Those who belong to the cult of Robert Downey Jr. will relish his magnolia accent, though his hackneyed barroom scenes are the kind of thing he could toss out before morning coffee. Darryl Hannah is foxy in a red bob wig.
Runaway Jury (2003)
Directed by Gary Fleder
Screenplay by Brian Koppelman
Starring John Cusack, Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman and Rachel Weisz
Things are bound to get spicy when Gene Hackman comes on the scene sporting a goatee. He’s the supreme jury consultant, hired to get a firearms manufacturer off the hook in a case involving a shooting spree with one of the company’s semi-automatic weapons. He’s 100 percent sleaze in a finely tailored suit. He enjoys winning at any cost, and it’s fun to watch him rising and falling.
On the other side of the aisle, Hackman faces Dustin Hoffman, seeming way too Zabar’s to be a bumbling Southern attorney. Hoffman’s come-and-go accent hampers things, too, although his scenes with good-guy jury consultant Jeremy Piven, now famous as “Entourage’”s Ari Gold, convey a nice spark.
John Cusack is the heart of the movie, and smartly, we can never be sure where that heart lies until the final scenes. You know he’s lying, but you cannot be sure in precisely which direction his duplicity leads. Though he’s losing his crush-worthy puppy-dog looks, Cusack still combines charm with a hidden agenda and plenty of physical energy. He can carry the action (fires, explosions, lunch in a fancy New Orleans restaurant) as well as the morality.
Rachel Weisz is Cusack’s sneaky collaborator, managing to come off as tougher than she seems at first. But as a female supporting character, she gets the cursory treatment typical of Grisham’s women.
Mickey (2004)
Directed by Hugh Wilson
Screenplay by John Grisham
Starring Harry Connick Jr. and Shawn Salinas
Harry Connick Jr. plays a tax evader with a heart of gold and an incurable love of Little League baseball. In a departure from his legal thrillers, Grisham wrote this screenplay as a homage to baseball, his dearly beloved pastime. Not that the legal piece is abandoned altogether, as Connick and his teenage son, played by Shawn Salinas, take off across the country with new identities to escape the I.R.S. Along the way, the son, now known as Mickey, loses a year off his birth certificate. Which means, naturally, that he can put in another year on the Little League mound.
Quite a few locals, including Grisham himself, make cameo appearances in this easy-to-like family flick. Connick didn’t mean for everything to go so far off the charts—in a remark that summarizes the plight of so many Grisham characters, he tells his son, “I planned to cheat a little bit. I didn’t think it would end up like this.” He gets apprehended, but it doesn’t hurt that much.
In short, the story doesn’t require much heavy lifting from the actors, but the film is warm entertainment for any family that includes little sluggers.
Christmas with the Kranks (2004)
Directed by Joe Roth
Screenplay by Chris Columbus
Starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Tim Allen and Dan Aykroyd
Grisham’s novella Skipping Christmas inspired this comedy, which will not be available on DVD until later this season. Here’s the story: The Kranks, Nora and Luther (Jamie Lee Curtis and Tim Allen), decide to skip Christmas and take a beach vacation being that their daughter won’t be coming home anyway. Their neighbor, Vic, played by Dan Aykroyd, will have none of it. Much hilarity and falling from roofs ensues until the daughter changes her mind.
Not having seen it, I offer this analysis from the Los Angeles Times: “The more Vic tries to bully the Kranks into submission, the more Nora shrieks and cowers under the bedding. It’s a bit of a shock to see the onetime slayer of Halloween’s Michael clutch the curtains in terror and demand that her husband come home at once because a small suburban mob has gathered on her lawn.
“At least Allen gets some perverse joy in bucking the system. Newly liberated and getaway-mad, Luther ‘base tans’ himself to a crisp and paralyzes his face with Botox; Allen turns two throwaway minutes of trying to chew his lunch into the best thing in the movie by far.”