You've heard the one about the brow-beaten scriptwriter. There he is, chin cupped moodily in palms, weepy and in a furious flap as he clocks his true position in the scheme of things once it dawns on him that on the film making food chain, he is mere pond life, a fetid glob of burbling algae.
Then there's his chum, the novelist-cum-screen-scribbler, weepier still as he attempts to adapt his own work, struggling in the black hours to tweak his visionary feast into a morsel palatable to the popcorn gobblers of Iowa.
If the cliches held, a seminar on this very topic - staged at the Kino in Cork on Saturday as part of the low-profile, high-quality Ulster/Munster Literary Festival - would have been a cathartic cry-in for the two eminent Irish novelists taking part. The trouble was, both Bernard MacLaverty and Eoin McNamee were all sunny smiles and fond reminiscence as they recounted their happy adventures in the seductive world of celluloid.
McNamee certainly has reasons to be cheerful right now. Resurrection Man, the screenplay of which he coaxed from his acclaimed novel, received its Irish premiere prior to the seminar and yes, the hype is justified; it's a resonant and powerful piece of work. Focusing on the psychopathic blood-lust of a knife-wielding loyalist terrorist in the mid-1970s, it's a defiantly dark film, well written, sharply directed, nicely played and full of close-up, satanically-vicious violence that will trigger dramatic stomach-lurches in even the most ardent gorehounds. If there's a quibble, it's that the film's stylishness is occasionally self-conscious: it sometimes looks like a Caffrey's ad.
McNamee describes the film's tone as melancholic, but admits that he only came over blue himself on discovering that some 26 minutes of his original vision ended up littering the cutting room floor. "Personally, I miss it. It's a narrative strand of the film that's been taken away. But you just have to let it go."
MacLaverty, too, having scripted the adaptations of his novels Cal and Lamb, sussed the power of the scissors in the process, and confided that the loss of control was initially shocking. Both writers, though, seem to have been hugely fortunate in their choice of collaborators, trusting their directors to a degree unheard-of in the philistine wilds of the Hollywood Babylon.
It's a trust unknown in the mainstream, where commercial concerns, and not artistic ones, dictate that the scope of the written word will not be reached for on film. Just compare Curtis Hanson's LA Confidential with James Ellroy's.
MacLaverty explained the art of script-writing as a paring down or a thinning away, learning to subtract words rather than add them. "When you get right down to it, a film script is basically a series of stage directions with a couple of grunts thrown in here and there." He seemed to get the hang of it, with one reviewer claiming Cal had the most inarticulate script ever written. "This I took as praise," he deadpanned.
MacNamee expressed wide-eyed amazement at the resourcefulness of film-makers, recalling a meeting with the props buyer on the set of Resurrection Man, and his own scepticism that the perfect, mark one 1973 black Ford Capri could ever be sourced. "He had it within the hour."
Bernard was also boyishly taken with on-set wizardry. "It's really quite amazing when you write this thing down on a bit of paper in your bedroom and then you arrive on a set and there are hundreds of people working at it, walking around whistling and plugging things in."
Writers are like this, forever stunned by the casual insouciance of people whose work gets them out of the house. For both novelists, the modern alchemy of movie-making seems to have provided a welcome distraction from the quiet life of white paper. For one thing, writing a screenplay means you have to craft fewer words.
"The main difference between writing scripts and writing novels," said MacNamee, "is that at the end of the day, you're not on the same page you started off on."
