Film
The Screenplayer
Twenty years after she got into the business, Texan Anne Rapp has written two major scripts for director Robert Altman. Call her an overnight success.
(Page 2 of 2)
It was Benton who encouraged her to begin writing. “I always had a great relationship with Robert Benton, and when we were working on Billy Bathgate, I told him this story about something that happened to me in high school,” she said. “He loved it, and for a long time after that he would quiz me about it. It was a story that really intrigued him. I’m not going to tell you the story because I still intend to write it. Anyway, the next summer I was about to go do The Firm with Sydney Pollack. Sydney pushed the movie back a couple of months, and instead of jumping onto another project, I decided to write some stories. I read a lot, and I had always loved to tell stories, so I wanted to try to put something on paper. I called Benton and he said, ‘Just write down thoughts and memories. Don’t try to write—just write stuff down.’ But as soon as I started, I was trying to craft short stories. I was all over the map, and I knew that I needed some kind of structure—I also knew that I needed to get out of L.A. to do it.”
In the fall of 1992 The Firm was going into production in Memphis, Tennessee. Rapp joined the crew and soon discovered the town of Oxford, Mississippi, which is an hour south of Memphis by car. “On days off I started going down there and hanging out,” she said. “Oxford has a great literary history; it’s Faulkner’s hometown, and it has what might be the best bookstore in the country, Square Books. So I started reading all these Southern writers. I was reading this guy named Barry Hannah, who I had never heard of, and I found out he taught at the University of Mississippi, which is right there in town. So I wrote Barry and asked him if I could get in his short-story workshop the next year.”
Having saved enough money to take a year off from work, Rapp moved to Oxford and enrolled in school. For two consecutive semesters she did nothing but go to class and write short stories. It was during this period that she came to believe that the short story is the purest form of storytelling. “You can’t make very many mistakes in a short story,” she said. “It’s not like a movie or a novel, where you can start out slowly and draw people in. You have to take the reader into a really rich world in a very short period of time. And I knew that if I could write a short story, I could probably write a movie or a novel.”
By the end of the school year, she had managed to get a story published in The Quarterly, a New York—based literary journal. Titled “In Case of Fire,” it is one page long and concerns an encounter in an elevator. The story is typical of Rapp’s later writing in that the characters are keenly observed and their behavior is shaped by their surroundings.
Film editor Geraldine Peroni brought “In Case of Fire” to the attention of Robert Altman, whom Rapp had known socially for years through her ex-husband, Ned Dowd, a producer and an assistant director. “I had gone back to work and was on the set on a big soundstage in New York when I got a message to call Geraldine Peroni in Los Angeles,” Rapp recalled. “I didn’t think anything of it because I was subletting her apartment. She was on the West Coast cutting Kansas City with Altman, and occasionally she would need me to send her something or check and see if she had any messages. So I called Geraldine, and Bob got on the phone. He talked to me for about fifteen minutes about why he loved my short story. And at the end of the conversation he asked if I had ever thought about writing for the movies.”
That 1995 phone call led to a three-year writing contract during which Rapp wrote three original projects for Altman to direct: an episode of Gun, a short-lived television series on which the director served as executive producer; Cookie’s Fortune; and “Dr. T and the Women,” which stars Richard Gere. When I asked Robert Altman what had first attracted him to Rapp’s writing, he told me that it was her strong, unique voice. “She doesn’t fall into all the commercial traps everyone advises people to fall into,” he said. “With Anne you’re dealing with a real writer.”
Rapp occasionally wonders what the next, post-Altman phase of her professional life will be like. “I’m sure I’m in for a rude awakening,” she said. “In our very first conversation Bob said, ‘Anne, I love the way you write and I don’t ever want to change it.’ Somehow I’m not sure everyone else in Hollywood thinks that way.”
But for now, she had a semester of school to teach. She had been offered the position of visiting professor at the Michener Center by James Magnuson, the director of the three-year graduate program, whom she had met through friends in Mississippi. When the opportunity came, she didn’t think twice: “All of a sudden, when this career as a screenwriter—which I hadn’t even planned on pursuing—happened, this little voice inside of me told me that I needed to make sure I kept my feet on the ground. Because I think it’s so easy to get off track in Hollywood. You start seeing the money and then you get on that Hollywood treadmill of writing what you think people want. So when the offer came up to teach, I took it. I think that teaching makes you center back on why you write and what it’s about. So, in a way, I think I’m doing this to help myself as much as I am to try to help a bunch of students.”
I was on the road with Anne Rapp for five days. We saw a painted desert, a petrified forest, and a hole in the ground almost a mile across where a meteor had slammed into the earth more than 50,000 years ago. We saw the cotton farm where she grew up and the broken-down shell of a school she once attended, its rooms now dark and full of loose cottonseed and boxes of herbicide. We saw Rapp’s childhood friend Mike Davidson kill a rattlesnake with a tree limb in the tall grass outside that school. She told me enough stories to fill a book, which is what I imagine she intends to do.
After many miles of road had passed under those brand-new Tiger Paw tires, we pulled in to Austin. Both of us used to call the Capital City home, and it was an especially welcoming sight. We made our way to Rapp’s beautiful Hyde Park rental house, where her landlady had thoughtfully left a bottle of wine and a note telling us that she had gone to see Lyle Lovett at the Backyard. We sat for a few moments and then Rapp said she wanted to go see the show as well. We got back in the pickup and drove out Bee Cave Road.
Half an hour later, as we sat under the stars listening to Lyle and his Large Band, she turned to me and said, “I can’t believe it. I’m home.”
Pages: 1 2
My Library
