As the writer/director of such scatalogically wonderful boxoffice hits as Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary, Peter Farrelly is credited with being one of the funniest people in modern filmmaking. You might reasonably expect, then, that his just published novel, The Comedy Writer - a satire on Hollywood life - would come complete with bawdy gags, toilet humour and the written equivalent of slapstick routines. Not a bit of it. More Elmore Leonard than Viz magazine, Farrelly's book is a darkly serious, semiautobiographical account of a struggling script-writer.
"You gotta realise," he says, "a movie is just about entertainment. Writing a book is a way of finding some sort of truth."
An impossibly young-looking 42-year-old, the hugely successful director-turned-novelist is sitting on the pavement outside a minimalist, chic London hotel, halfway through a British reading tour of his new work. He chuckles to himself as he reflects on his distinctly non-literary upbringing: "It's so weird, the idea of me writing a book. I never, ever read anything when I was younger. I'm not joking you but I used to think The Great Gatsby was about a boat."
He's clued-in enough, though, about matters literary when he predicts how his book will be reviewed: "I expect to be condescended to by book critics. They're a very close-knit clique and I think they really resent movie people like me - even though I'm the first to admit I'm not Raymond Carver."
Describing The Comedy Writer as "52 per cent autobiographical - in that it's more than half true", he happily reels off the similarities between his life and that of his protagonist, Henry Halloran. Both of them are from New England, both had "crummy jobs in sales" before splitting up painfully with their girlfriends, packing up and moving to Los Angeles with dreams of making it as a comedy scriptwriter.
"I'd say the main difference between the main character and me is that he is really broke as he attempts to sell his scripts around the place, whereas I was quite lucky when I arrived in LA - I was always employed, even though most of the scripts I wrote never made it into films. It's a lot easier to sell scripts than get them into development, believe me."
An unnerving incident he witnessed within days of arriving in Los Angeles forms the backbone of the book: Henry Halloran tries and fails to stop a woman throwing herself off the roof of a building. When Halloran writes an eyewitness account of the incident for the LA Times, the dead woman's unhinged sister tracks him down and ends up moving in with him.
"That actually happened to me," says Farrelly. "I did witness a suicide and I did write an article about it in the LA Times. Because my phone number was listed in the directory, I got all these phone calls from people who were moved by what I wrote and I ended up meeting about 30 people who wanted to talk to me. It's sort of strange because I toned down the suicide story in the book. I don't think anybody would believe what really happened."
What really happened was that he did manage to talk a woman down from the roof of a building. He asked her to go for a cup of coffee with him but she sped away in her car. He took down her registration number and reported it to the police, who said they could do nothing about it, even if she was planning to jump off the building. Two days later he was walking past the same building and the woman was on top of the roof again. As soon as she saw him, she jumped.
The book, which has been described as "A Confederacy of Dunces meets The Player", has a satirical bite - particularly in the passages which deal with Henry and his agent and his struggle for recognition in the screenwriter-saturated city, but more impressive are Farrelly's use of dialogue (which is very Elmore Leonard) and his snappy and sharp observations.
Here's Henry Halloran's agent offering him advice: "Listen to me Henry, Picasso said that art is a lie that tells the truth and films are just big lies. Everyone in this business lies. Every single one of them. That's the first thing I learned when I got out here: Don't be afraid to lie. It's not like the rest of the world. Lying is accepted here. It's as much a part of the game as bluffing is to poker. If you don't like it, be an accountant. Moreover, lying is presumed here. If you don't lie when expected, it screws people up. People lie so much in Hollywood that when they want to tell the truth they preface it with `True story . . .' And usually they're still lying."
Nervously, I suggest that such is the strength and depth of the book that people may find it hard to believe from the person behind There's Something About Mary. Farrelly accepts the observation, while saying: "I don't believe in these arguments about art forms and lesser art forms when it comes to films and books. Yes certainly, the films I have done are about entertainment, so when I came to write the book, it was a lot harder to do, because every word has to mean something. When you go to see a film, you've got the viewer for two hours and they're unlikely to walk out unless it's really horrendous. But 50 pages into a book and the reader isn't with you, they're not going to stick with it".
Farrelly grew up in Rhode Island in a family "big on education". His father was a doctor and his mother a nurse but he "partied" his way through school and says he was "never remotely involved in any artistic endeavour whatsoever". He went on to study accountancy, taking a job in sales after graduation. He says he only started writing after the death in a car crash of his girlfriend. "Where I grew up, people just didn't become writers."
He was a good but not exceptional comedy screenwriter when he moved to Los Angeles and the highlight of his career was when he almost got a job writing for Seinfeld in 1990. Four years later, though, he and his brother Bobby wrote the film Dumb and Dumber (an early Jim Carrey vehicle) which was a delightfully stupid comedy caper, full of rude jokes and insensitive observations.
The unofficial follow-up, Kingpin, "bombed", but the two struck paydirt in 1998 with There's Something About Mary, a romper of a comedy that was one of the biggest commercial successes of the year. His most recent film, Me, Myself, Irene (again starring Jim Carrey), is due for release later this year.
Saying how much he is enjoying his current book-reading tour, he admits to making up for lost literary time over the last few years. "Coming from a position of having read nothing, I'm now reading everything," he says. "At the moment I'm stuck into the great American classics and really liking the works of Philip Roth, John Updike and Norman Mailer. You know, I'm still very unsure of my own merit when it comes to writing books, but the one thing I think I have achieved with this book is that people will come to it expecting one thing - and they'll get another."
The Comedy Writer by Peter Farrelly is published by Faber and Faber, £9.99 in the UK
