Customer Reviews

My Movie Business

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At first glance you might think that this was simply about how The Cider House Rules got made into a film, but it is more than that. It is also an account of a writer choosing (and some times regretting) to make a journey out of a world he loves, the one of his imagination and his novels, and into one he finds rather uncomfortable. As Irving has discovered over the however many years since he began work on the project, there are a lot of unpleasant people around, especially in the movie business. He saw a close friend and associate driven, he believes, to a premature death by the snakes that slither around in those particular financial swamps, and, less devastatingly, but still disconcertingly, he has seen directors come and go along with versions of his screenplay and innumerable actors. Irving's biggest challenge was reducing a 500-page novel of Dickensian complexity into a screenplay that wouldn't lead to a nine-hour film. To do this he had to make what, for a conscientious writer, must have been a series of agonising decisions over the fates of his characters. Some had their parts in his plot reduced from major to marginal, others, who were in some cases central to the original novel, he was forced to lose altogether. He conveys this sense of loss rather movingly. I suppose that for people who know and like the novel (and I'm someone who thinks The Cider House Rules is Irving's best book after Garp), it is this part of the book that is the most interesting. The regret he felt over getting rid of Melony, for example. Irving makes several detours, describing the inspirational role his grandfather played in the character of Dr. Larch is one; others are more serious and raise issues that are close to Irving's heart: abortion and the woman's right to choose, for example. Ever since I read Garp, and identified with Irving's obvious anxieties over the responsibilities of parenthood, I have recognised some other shared views on things. In My Movie Business it's a reluctance to actually go to the cinema, but to watch most things on video at home. There are no rustling papers and chatterboxes and so on, and, as Irving says, you can fast forward through the boring bits. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that a genuine and thoughtful novelist like Irving emerges damaged by his brush with the movie world. How could find he find such a world anything but a shock to the system? Unlike the ones he is used to and happiest in, the ones he creates on the page, the real one isn't amenable to control. Incidentally, if anyone is interested in what Irving had in mind for the relationship between Dr. Larch and Homer in The Cider House Rules when it was still in the very early stages, when it was still just in his head, take a look at the New York Times of November 29 1981, and the comments he made to an audience of students.