Screenwriter's Compass

PREFACE

I was twenty-seven and fresh out of graduate school. He was seventy-four and a film legend. I had just come in second in a student screenwriting competition. He had been nominated for an Oscar fourteen times and won twice. And there I was, sweating in Mexico, sitting at a cowhide-covered table, talking about my screenplay for Under the Volcano. I was full of myself. After all, there had been dozens of failed attempts by well-known writers to adapt this difficult novel into a film. And I had done it. It was my screenplay John Huston was preparing to shoot.

He was reading some pages I had just finished revising. A scene he thought wasn’t right. Wasn’t working. He stopped reading. Leaned back in his creaking basket of a chair, spindly arm ...