Bill Broyles, as Ever, at War
His screenplays for Apollo 13 and Cast Away have made him hot in Hollywood, but the Austin writer still does battle each day with an array of old demons: his memories of Vietnam, the failures that accompany his successes, and everyone's expectations of him—especially his own.
Hanks (l.) and Broyles (c.) on the Cast Away set.
EARLY IN HIS HIT MOVIE CAST AWAY, screenwriter Bill Broyles has Tom Hanks's character deliver to his Federal Express employees in Moscow a lecture on the intrinsic value of time. We live or die by the clock, Chuck warns his people. A few scenes later Broyles isolates his protagonist on a remote island in the Pacific, with nothing to his name except a pocket watch, a pager, and whatever he can claim from the rocks and sea. His options: reinvent or perish. Chuck reinvents himself—otherwise there would be no Act III—and eventually gets off the island.
Chuck isn't all that different from his creator. Bill Broyles is a man alone on an island of his own making, isolated from his peers by an obsession with greatness and the desire to do something new and better whenever he seems to achieve it. Life for the 57-year-old Austin writer has been a spectacular run of conquests, challenges, disappointments, and reinventions, yet he requires more. Not more of the same, understand, but more . . . what? What do you call the affliction when a man has everything but peace of mind? The curse of the clock, perhaps. It's Chuck again: living or dying by it, never for a moment being unaware of the passage of irretrievable time in his own life. Chuck found himself in a place where time was irrelevant. Broyles never has.
His list of achievements includes student body president at Rice University, Marshall Scholar at Oxford (equal to Rhodes but not as well known), and commander of a platoon of Marines in Vietnam. He went on to become the founding editor of Texas Monthly and later the editor in chief of Newsweek. He wrote a first-rate book about returning to Vietnam, Brothers in Arms; co-created a critically acclaimed television series, China Beach; received an Oscar nomination for co-writing Apollo 13; wrote a late version of the screenplay for Sean Connery's Entrapment and received the screen credit for last year's remake of Planet of the Apes; and in his spare time climbed the highest peak in the Americas.
This month he will be inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame, which recognizes that he is one of a handful of A-list writers in Hollywood, someone whose mere presence at the table can jump-start a film project. "People want to be in business with him," said David Friendly, the producer who hired Broyles for the Apollo 13 job. He works on two or three projects simultaneously, starting at his home office before daylight and later going to his West Austin office, where he takes phone calls from Los Angeles. His current projects include a screenplay about the siege at Khe Sanh, Vietnam, that he is writing for Tom Hanks and an original Western for Twentieth-Century Fox. On three occasions he has been hired to "doctor" screenplays by writers with Oscars on their mantel. One is a submarine movie, K-19, the Widowmaker, that stars Harrison Ford and is set for release in July, two months after the debut of another Broyles rewrite, Unfaithful. "Script-doctoring during production is like sliding down a fire pole in the middle of a fire," he said.
Along with success, though, Broyles has known his share of failure, including three marriages that ended in divorce and enough professional setbacks to cripple most men. Through it all, he continues to grapple with the central question of his life: If you think your destiny is greatness, how do you know when you've reached it?
LIKE ALL OF BROYLES'S LONGTIME FRIENDS, I regard him as one of the most complex and interesting men I know. I've suspected almost from the moment we met that Broyles is from another galaxy. It was the fall of 1972, and we drank beer at Scholz Garten in Austin and talked about a story on Dallas Cowboys running back Duane Thomas that he had asked me to write for the maiden issue of Texas Monthly the following February. Broyles tilted back in his chair, his intense blue eyes drinking in every word. I wasn't saying much, but from the depth of his attention I might have been reciting Milton's Paradise Lost. I remember thinking, "This guy operates on a different level than the rest of us." He seemed too good to be true—tall, muscular, curly brown hair, movie-star good looks, a smile that would charm a rattlesnake—but he was intelligent, honest, and above game playing. He was 28, about ten years my junior, and had minimal journalism experience—a few pieces written for the Rice student newspaper, The Thresher, three months with the old Houston Post, and freelancing for The Economist. Yet he already had the persona of an editor: He appreciated good writers and good writing, and he had a vision for the magazine.
In an amazingly short time Broyles learned the world of magazines. The early staff was heavily peppered with friends from his Rice days—Griffin Smith, Jr., Gregory Curtis, Paul Burka. The fledgling publication won a National Magazine Award for general excellence following its first year of existence. "The three things in my life I'm proudest of," Broyles says now, "are Texas Monthly, Brothers in Arms, and Cast Away, in that order.
By the late seventies, though, it was clear that editing Texas Monthly wasn't as fulfilling as it had once been. A pattern was beginning to form in his life: If it's easy, it must be wrong. That's why he could oppose the Vietnam War and still join the Marines and lead men into battle, and why, to research Cast Away, he marooned himself on a remote Mexican beach on the Sea of Cortez and subsisted on raw stingrays that he speared with a stick he'd sharpened with a stone. When he was in his forties, with his personal and professional life at a low ebb, he took up mountain climbing at the urging of Richard Bangs, who gave Broyles the assignment about conquering the 23,000-foot Aconcagua in Argentina as part of an adventure book he was compiling. Bangs, who subsequently became Broyles's close friend and river-running companion, theorizes that certain individuals are born with an "adventure gene." I asked him if he thought Broyles might outgrow the pesky gene. "No, it's a lifelong quest," he said. "If you give up, you die."
All of Broyles's friends speak of a dual strain in his nature. Actress Lois Chiles (The Great Gatsby, Moonraker), a friend for nearly twenty years, told me, "Bill is always in exploration, constantly trying to balance his wanderlust with his need for hearth and home. He is this great Hemingway-esque character, and yet he's very gentle, an incredible listener, a mother hen, absolutely devoted to his children." I immediately thought back to last summer, when he and his wife, Andrea, made an unexpected trip home to Austin from their retreat in Wyoming to be with an old friend of Broyles's whose son had died suddenly. Broyles's own son from his second marriage, David, was about the age of the young man who had died, and Broyles was obviously having trouble dealing with his emotions. "I was there when he was born," he told us, his face grim and exhausted. "I was the third person to hold him in my arms."
Bill and Andrea live in a historic Victorian home that they bought and restored four years ago—it's their third home since 1995, and they've considered selling it and building a new house on Lake Austin. He works at home on the weekends, seemingly oblivious to the racket of their two preschool children and two dogs. In the afternoon he works out at a gym or runs with his dogs on the greenbelt or swims in the frigid waters of Deep Eddy pool. Andrea, an artist, designed the wings that later became a central metaphor in Cast Away. At a party hosted by the Broyleses during last year's Academy awards, Bill and a few of us sat in the kitchen, his lake-blue eyes radiating well-being, talking about movies, world affairs, current events, but mostly about his boyhood in Baytown. He remembered a teacher asking how many in the class thought they'd ever get out of this backwater town. Every hand went up except his: He loved Baytown and didn't want to leave. "Broyles," the teacher said, "you may be the only one who does get out."
Broyles is down-to-earth, unobtrusive, and more interested in listening than talking. People who don't know him might guess that he teaches history at a small private academy. Bill and Andrea belong to a predominantly black Episcopal church, St. James—their son, James, born seven weeks premature, is named for the patron saint—and socialize with members of the congregation as naturally as they would mingle with celebrities at an Academy-awards ceremony. He can tutor a gang of youthful thugs or charm members of a Houston charitable group called the Bluebird Circle (of which his mother is a past president) with equal grace. He hardly ever turns away an aspiring writer or anyone else needing help. He is a mentor to a Wyoming friend, Alexandra Fuller, whose first book, about growing up with white British émigré parents during the black revolution in what was then Rhodesia (Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight), is the talk of the literary world. Broyles took the time to read a screenplay written by his baby-sitter and was sufficiently impressed to write her a letter of recommendation that got her accepted by a graduate film school in Los Angeles.
This is not to say that he is entirely self-effacing or oblivious to image. He has always been careful about how he presents himself, even back in the sixties, when he was the president of the student body at Rice. He organized the university's first protest march, over a dean's high-handed firing of The Thresher's editor; he saw to it that the students trooped around in coats and ties, and he edited the signs they displayed. "His charm is real, but it's also directed and choreographed," said an old friend. "He always knows where the camera is." In a business full of people who practice self-promotion, however, Broyles doesn't go to parties or plant stories about himself. He is constantly jetting off to Hollywood or London or Moscow to have dinner with Sean Connery or a script conference with Harrison Ford or Tom Hanks, but only for work, not for schmoozing. Hollywood is his work, but Texas is his home.
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