The "Sideways" Play is Here!
I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.
— Oscar Wilde
It has been a year-long ride since Jason Matthews of the modest Ruskin Group Theater, here in Santa Monica, approached me at a huge Pinot Noir (of course!) wine event where I was peddling copies of my Sideways sequel Vertical and wondered if I would be interested in turning Sideways into a stage production. I was circumspect. We met a few days later to talk about it. Not only for contractual, but for artistic, reasons, Jason was insistent that the play be based on the book, even though the now iconic, and wildly successful Alexander Payne film of my novel was pretty damn faithful. I was impressed with his articulate, and intelligent, pitch. A few days later I met the core of the Ruskin Group Theater: John Ruskin, the Artistic Director; Mike Myers, the Managing Director; and Mike Reilly, the Production Manager. As blogged here previously, all were sincere, smart, devoted to this art form I knew little or nothing about. I knew about character, I knew about story, and my forte, dialogue, has often been praised, I'd written tons of scripts, directed two indie features, hell: why not theater?
Two nights ago I got to see the first cast read-through of the finished play. It was a staggeringly satisfying moment of personal, and collaborative, accomplishment that nearly brought tears to my eyes. The cast we assembled were simply amazing — and they have a glorious six weeks of rehearsal to get even better! The writing process went through 15 drafts, 5 cold reads to test those drafts, a director interview process, and a grueling audition and casting ordeal. As I said, the cast is set and will be announced any day. I couldn't be more thrilled. But there were doubts on my part all along the way. What never wavered for me was the story and the characters.
One of the great decisions I made was selecting relatively young (30) Amelia Mulkey as the director. (Yes, the writer is king in theater, and he gets to choose his director; unheard of in Hollywood.) Wisdom would have it that a neophyte playwright like might should elect to go with experience. In my case I wanted someone – Amelia only has one full-length play to her directing resume – who would take risks, who would work harder than anyone else to prove that she was the right choice. But, even more important, I wanted someone I could work creatively, and copacetic, with. I didn't want anyone who didn't share my vision, but, by the same token, I didn't want anyone who would be so in awe of the fact that I was the guy who wrote Sideways that she wouldn't challenge me on the play-script. Amelia was neither. After two cold reads, and with the play in an inchoate, but still developing, form, she was officially hired after a two-hour interview in which she mesmerized me with her profusion of ideas, exciting energy, eagerness to roll up her sleeves and make this as great as it might be.
Amelia went to work on the script — I should say: we went to work on the script. I have to say in all honesty that we never once had an argument, we never once even had a heated discussion. Many of her concerns centered on the pacing and staging, but she also supplied several other very important things: she got me to focus on the women characters (Maya and Terra) a little more, and she pushed me to come up with creative solutions for problems that arose in the staging without losing things that she wanted to keep. It was a process. She critiqued, I wrote; she critiqued, I wrote; we held a cold reading, conferred … and always – always! – were in synch about what the play needed before we went to the casting process. I sometimes shudder to think what this process what have been like – a process I had no idea was going to take this long! – if it had been with a director I didn't relate to aesthetically; hell, a director I didn't like personally!
Play-script done, my writer friend Marco Mannone were getting ready to head off to, of all places, Texas, on a terrestrial road trip to research a screenplay we're going to write for my Oscar-winning ex-wife Barbara Schock – that's another story and another blog of high hilarity, coming later. A week before our trip we held one final cold read (our 5th). I was pretty sure the play was locked. Not so fast. A day after the read I met with Amelia and Jason to talk over final tweaks before we went out with the cast breakdowns, at which point the casting process would begin in full swing. I was eager to put the writing process behind me because I was getting burned out. However, John Ruskin had a radical idea. It involved cutting 14 pps. from the second act. 14 pps.?! Are you out of your fucking mind? I almost screamed. I felt like I had been struck by a curare dart. But the more I thought about it, the more I started to wrap my head around it, the more I realized what a brilliant stroke it was. Not only would it make the second act more manageable time-wise, the scenes in question – iconic scenes in the movie – were simply just unnecessary. Not only that, they involved making such compromises in their staging that it was a actually relief to see them go. And when I did, something wondrous happened: the other scenes suddenly came more to life; they slowed down, as it were and were like like discrete gems found scattered on a road leading to a terminus, which was the end of the play. What was going to be a breakneck-paced second act now was going to be able to play out with the pacing we wanted. Cutting those 14 pps. I was also afforded the opportunity to expand a scene with Maya and another one with Terra - characters whose roles I wanted so badly to enlarge because I loved the two actors we cast so much and didn't want to short-sight them - and make the women more prominent. But, even more important, in considering cutting those 14 pps., I realized – and this was the point of the play all along – that this was no longer the movie, it was the novel, the novel I wrote in '98, and which wasn't published until '03. Hard as it was initially to make that huge excision – with only a few days on my hands before my TX trip! – it was like removing a tumor when I had successfully executed it. Even more surprising, I was shocked at how little collateral damage there was after I had done it. A few little tweaks, and I didn't miss anything. It was as if jet plane had cut a white wound in the sky. Suddenly, everything effloresced … and the play, thanks to everyone at Ruskin who worked so hard through the writing process, suddenly, finally, became, at last, a thing unto itself. It had unshackled itself from the book and the movie and was now like a sleek yacht, sails gloriously unfurled, bent to the white-capped water, speeding to the horizon.
I gave a long interview the other day to a journalist doing a piece on the play. The first thing he said to me after the usual introductions was: "Rex, I confess I've not read your book, I've seen the movie numerous times, but after reading your play I think it's better than the movie in some ways." Whoa, hold on there! You said it, dude, not me. Besides, it hasn't even premiered yet (5/18 is the official date), and I don't want you to jinx us. For the record, I love the Alexander Payne movie, and though the movie is very faithful to the book, there are differences, and the main difference is the way in which Alexander viewed the characters of Miles and Jack. It was different than how I saw – and lived! – them in the novel. One of the first things Alexander said to me when we first met in person was: "You know what I love about your novel? Your characters are so fucking pathetic!" Well, I thought, just make the movie so I can climb out of debt. And he did, and it was brilliant, and it won over 350 awards and is now enshrined in the WGA Theater in Beverly Hills as one of the 101 Greatest Screenplays in the history of cinema – a flawed list, but still! - and the rest is cinematic history.
But the characters aren't pathetic. Miles is who I was circa '98 and Jack is my old friend Roy Gittens, a film electrician, circa the same time. The novel chronicled our friendship, narrated as it was in a frenetic week of excessive wine drinking and sexual, and other, escapades. But they weren't pathetic. Sure, they acted transgressively at times, but they weren't pathetic; they were just singularly human. And that's what, I believe, the play, based on my novel, not on the film, celebrates: our foibles, our frailties, our attempts to produce light out of the darkness, comedy out of the despair; in short, the humanness in all of us.
