“MIRAMAX would kill me for saying this,” Mark Jude Poirier blurted out with a conspiratorial little smile, “but when you think about it, nothing really happens in ‘Smart People,’ ” the Miramax film, opening Friday, for which he wrote the screenplay. “Try to pitch this movie: Well, it’s about a depressed professor, and he’s a little bit less depressed at the end.”
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Screenplay Excerpt: 'Smart People'
Trailer: 'Smart People'
Whether the studio approves or not — and let’s hope there will be no reprisals — this is a perfectly accurate summary of “Smart People,” which Mr. Poirier wrote a few years ago while on something called the Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship. At the time he applied for the fellowship he considered himself a fiction writer; he had published a volume of short stories called “Naked Pueblo” (1999) and a novel, “Goats” (2001), both to some acclaim.
“I kind of applied out of desperation, not out of any passion to write screenplays,” he said over a bowl of tomato soup at the Blue Lemon restaurant in Westport, Conn. “I’d been teaching at Portland State, in Oregon, and my contract didn’t get renewed, and I was, like: ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to eat?’ ”
The screenplay he came up with was, not surprisingly, about the academic world, with which Mr. Poirier has more than a passing familiarity. His father was a professor of engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Arizona, and he had by that point done time himself as a student or a teacher or both at Georgetown, Stanford, the University of Iowa and Johns Hopkins, in addition to Portland State. (He later taught at Louisiana State and Bennington, and his companion, Ed Cahill, is an American literature professor at Fordham.)
And — maybe even less surprisingly given Mr. Poirier’s literary and academic credentials — the script he wrote was supposed to be a novel. “ ‘Smart People’ had been living in my head for a couple of years as the novel I was going to write next,” he said. “And when I couldn’t think of anything to write for a screenplay, I figured, what the hell, let’s try this.”
It’s the story of Lawrence Westerhold (Dennis Quaid), a flabby, rumpled, misanthropic English professor at Carnegie Mellon, who lives with his high-achieving Stanford-bound daughter, Vanessa (Ellen Page), his stoner-slacker brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church), and, most intimately, the painful memory of his dead wife. He drags himself from class to class, blithely alienating his students with his unconcealed contempt for their intelligence and character. He has written a book, with the snappy title “The Price of Postmodernism: Epistemology, Hermeneutics and the Literary Canon,” which no one will publish; and he has put himself forward, quixotically and with no very urgent desire, for the chairmanship of his department. (His slim chances rest entirely on the fact that he’s the head of the search committee.)
“Because this wasn’t formed in my mind as a screenplay, I had to work really hard to structure this,” Mr. Poirier said, having moved on to a vegetable sandwich. (He’s a vegetarian.) “For a while the main structure was, let’s have him chasing this head of department thing, but then it’s just a story about a guy who wants to the head of a department. And then it was about the book, and that was just a story about a guy who wants to get a book published. But as I worked on later drafts, it became more importantly about someone coming to grips with the fact that he’s miserable. I don’t think he’s that much less miserable in the end, but at least he’s aware that he’s miserable and that everything he’s been doing has been a way of dealing with misery.”
There’s a fairly neurotic love affair between Lawrence and a former student (Sarah Jessica Parker), who’s still a little annoyed at the C he gave her on her “Middlemarch” paper, and their up-and-down romance generates a bit of movielike suspense. But mostly nothing happens, except in the sense that novelists and short-story writers understand. For them moving a character from not knowing that he’s unhappy to sort of acknowledging it qualifies as a pretty momentous event.
And that may be why so few writers of fiction manage to succeed, or even to be minimally comfortable, in Hollywood. There was a time when the studios, hankering for prestige, would throw money at well-known literary figures and set them to work on projects to which their actual talents were almost risibly irrelevant: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, William Faulkner, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote, among others, all did their stints and went home, for the most part, baffled. (Playwrights, with their expertise in dramatic construction and ingrained audience-pleasing instincts, usually fared better.)
These days Hollywood — even “independent” Hollywood — doesn’t frequently come calling on novelists of any literary stature. John Sayles, who directs his own screenplays, has had a productive career, and Richard Price and Larry McMurtry get work too, but it’s a short list. Producers care less about prestige than about marketable stories, and what in the world do fiction writers know about stories?
The remarkable thing about “Smart People,” which was directed by Noam Murro, is how strongly it resembles Mr. Poirier’s fiction. It’s easy to imagine it as the novel it was once intended to be — and would, Mr. Poirier said, “totally” have become if the screenplay hadn’t worked out. His published writing, which also includes a second story collection, “Unsung Heroes of American Industry” (2001), and a second novel, “Modern Ranch Living” (2004), is distinguished by good, dry jokes, a fine appreciation of messy families (he is one of 11 children), a tremendous affection for teenagers and losers, and a strange fascination with amusement-park rides. Only the last is missing from “Smart People.”
And, more to the point, all his stories, short and long, are constructed to bring their characters to the kind of tentative, reluctant self-knowledge that Lawrence arrives at in the end. Every Poirier story turns out to be about the difficult process of admitting that your life is what, in fact, it is. That’s not nothing.
Over a cup of herbal tea Mr. Poirier talked about his many screenwriting projects, some far enough along to have a director and actors attached, others at more nebulous stages of development. There are adaptations of his two novels and one of his “Naked Pueblo” stories, of the Alice Munro story “Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage,” of the Douglas Coupland novel “All Families Are Psychotic,” and of a David Benioff magazine article on the Russian bride industry.
There’s an original screenplay based on the “Bong Hits 4 Jesus” free-speech case, in which a teenager was suspended from school for holding up that sign when the 2002 Olympic torch relay passed through Juneau, Alaska. (When lunch was over, Mr. Poirier would, he said, be heading home to nearby Weston to pore over Supreme Court transcripts.) And there’s something now known, tantalizingly, only as “Untitled Arizona Real Estate Agent Project.”
All of which might, eventually, bring Mr. Poirier to just the sort of small, grudging, semimomentous acknowledgment of reality that his characters always seem to come to when his nothing-happening stories are over. “I didn’t even start writing until I was in graduate school,” he said, “and it took me a really long time to call myself a writer. I thought it sounded pretentious.”
Four published books forced him to change his tune on that one. And although “my fantasy is to be known as a short-story writer,” he said, it may be time, or past time, for him to admit that he is now something else: his latest book of stories appeared seven years ago; his latest novel, four. So, it was suggested to him, gently, as the lunch check arrived, maybe he is not so much a writer of fiction anymore as he is, pardon the expression, a professional screenwriter. Looking mildly stricken, he said: “I know. It’s weird. Shut up.”
When you think about it, that’s a Mark Jude Poirier story in six words.