William Monahan

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William J. Monahan
William Monahan in October 2006
Born:	November 3, 1960 (age 46)  Dorchester, Massachusetts, USA
Occupation:	Screenwriter Novelist Journalist Essayist Critic
Nationality:	American
Debut works:	Novel Light House: A Trifle (2000) Film Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

William J. Monahan (born November 3, 1960) is an Academy Award-winning American screenwriter and novelist. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Monahan moved to New York City to pursue a career as a journalist, writer and critic. He wrote for the New York Press, Talk, Maxim, and Spy magazine. In 1997, he won a Pushcart Prize for a short story he had published in a literary journal, and in 2000, he received critical acclaim for Light House: A Trifle, his first novel.

Monahan went to work in Hollywood in 1998, when Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Light House: A Trifle, which had not yet been published, and contracted him to adapt it to the screen. In 2001, 20th Century Fox bought Monahan's spec script about the Barbary Wars called Tripoli. Although his first two commercial screenplays were never made into films, he was hired to write many scripts over the following years, and eventually his screenplay for Kingdom of Heaven was made into a film and released in theaters in 2005. His second produced screenplay was The Departed, a film which earned him a WGA award and an Academy award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Monahan has asserted that screenplays should be authored by one writer rather than a collaboration of multiple screenwriters writing competing drafts. He follows his scripts through production, so that he can rewrite the script himself as the need arises and retain his vision for the story. In 2006, Monahan started his own production company, Henceforth, and negotiated a first-look producing deal with Warner Bros. Monahan currently resides on the North Shore of Massachusetts, where he lives with his wife and two children.^[1]

Contents 1 Early years 1.1 Man of letters 2 Screenwriting career 2.1 Working scripts through production and after 2.2 Becoming a producer 3 Controversy 4 Writing process 5 Credits 5.1 Essays, criticism, reviews, and short stories 5.2 Novels 5.3 Films 5.4 Screenplays (unproduced) 6 References 7 Further reading 7.1 Interviews 8 External links

[edit] Early years

Monahan was born in Dorchester, Boston to an Irish-American family and was raised Irish Catholic. He spent his early years in nearby Roslindale, eventually moving to the suburbs of Boston when his parents divorced.^[1][2] Over the years he frequently moved, living in many of the suburban communities on the North Shore of Massachusetts with his mother and sister.^[3] He regularly visited his father's home in West Roxbury, where he would immerse himself in his father's extensive book collection; Monahan particularly enjoyed reading Shakespeare's plays.^[1] His interest in movies began at age seven, when it occurred to him that a screenwriter was behind the story in Lawrence of Arabia.^[4] Monahan wrote his first screenplay at age twelve.^[5]

[edit] Man of letters

Main article: List of the writings of William Monahan

Monahan attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.^[3] After graduation, Monahan's ambition was to be a man of letters, which required him to master the genres of the essay, the review, the novel, poetry, and the biography.^[6] He moved to New York City and contributed to the alternative weekly newspaper New York Press and the magazines Talk, Maxim and Spy.^[1][5] In 1995, Monahan wrote a cover story for the New York Press that used the crimes of John Salvi to attack the Catholic Church's teachings; six months later, he wrote another article at the Press that distinguishes him as the only person to solve the Unabomber's lexically-based targeting methodology before the bomber was caught.^[7][8] The next year, Monahan wrote an article at the Press on heroin that provoked a rash of letters from readers.^[9] In 1997, Monahan wrote a review of Oliver Stone's first novel A Child's Night Dream and became better known after winning a Pushcart Prize for his short story "A Relation of Various Accidents Observable in Some Animals Included in Vacuo".^[10][11] Monahan was also a writer and editor at Spy during the magazine's final years, where he would come in at the close of the monthly issue to rewrite the articles and improve the jokes.^[1]

By 1998 Monahan had amassed a respectable corpus. He even had an unpublished manuscript called Light House: A Trifle in the wings, that Warner Bros. had already optioned the film rights to.^[12] Around the same time, Monahan became a father when his girlfriend gave birth to a baby boy. In 1999, Talk magazine debuted and Monahan contributed a travelogue on Gloucester, Massachusetts to the first issue.^[13] Finally, in 2000, Monahan's first novel Light House: A Trifle was published and garnered critical acclaim; The New York Times proclaimed "Monahan's cocksure prose gallops along," and BookPage Fiction called Monahan "a worthy successor to Kingsley Amis."^[2][14][15] In the second half of 2001, Monahan briefly wrote a flurry of zany columns at the New York Press under the pseudonym of Claude La Badarian, a fictional restaurant critic from the equally fictional "Aristocrat Magazine".^[16][17]

[edit] Screenwriting career

"I wanted to be an old-fashioned man of letters, so I essentially prepared myself very carefully through my 20s for a job that doesn't exist anymore; you may be able to find a man of letters in Syria or the Horn of Africa, but you could work Manhattan or London with dogs for a year and never find one. Anthony Burgess is dead, Vidal is the last lion, and at any rate belles-lettres aren't where they were left. Anyway, I'm making movies now. Just before all this happened, I thought, 'Out of everything you can do or think you can do, pick one thing and be it.' What I picked was to be the screenwriter."

— William Monahan

Although Monahan had initially set out to be a man of letters, he eventually decided that literature was no longer a practical way of earning a living in America, and turned his talents to screenwriting.^[5] In 1998, Monahan went to work in Hollywood when Warner Bros. optioned the film rights to the unpublished manuscript for his satirical novel Light House: A Trifle, a deal which briefly gave them the exclusive right to purchase the copyright at a future date, and further negotiated to have Monahan adapt the novel into a screenplay.^[18] Penguin Putnam subsequently delayed publishing Light House: A Trifle for a couple of years, so that they could release the novel alongside the film, but the screenplay adaptation was never produced. Light House was finally released in 2000, but the ordeal ended any remaining interest Monahan had in being a novelist. A few years later, he bought back the rights and took the novel off the market.^[4][12]

In 2001, 20th Century Fox bought Monahan's spec script Tripoli, about William Eaton's epic march on Tripoli during the Barbary Wars, in a deal worth mid-six figures in American dollars with Mark Gordon attached as the producer.^[19] The script was given to Ridley Scott to direct. Monahan met with Scott to discuss Tripoli and Scott mentioned his desire to direct a film about knights. Monahan suggested the Crusades as a setting, reasoning that "you've got every conceivable plot imaginable there, which is far more exotic than fiction". Scott was captivated by Monahan's pitch and hired him to write the screenplay for Kingdom of Heaven. Tripoli was eventually shelved, but Monahan retained ownership of the screenplay, and therefore the right to consider new offers at a later date.^[20][21]

Monahan's screenwriting career had taken off, and in the midst of his mid-life career change he married his girlfriend, with whom he had his first child. Year after year, he managed to secure work. In 2002, he was hired by Universal Pictures to write the screenplay for Jurassic Park IV, with John Sayles writing the subsequent drafts.^[22][23] In 2003, Monahan was hired by Columbia Pictures to write Mazar e Sharif for producer Mace Neufeld, the story of the bloody uprising in the Afghan city Mazari Sharif during the American incursion against the Taliban, based on an unpublished manuscript from journalist Doug Stanton.^[24] The same year, Brad Pitt's production company Plan B hired Monahan to write an adaptation of Hong Kong director Andrew Lau's gangster film Infernal Affairs. Monahan respun Infernal Affairs as a battle between Irish-American gangsters and cops in Boston's Southie district, and Martin Scorsese directed the completed screenplay under the title The Departed for Warner Bros.^[25][26] Monahan's work on the film would later earn him two Best Adapted Screenplay awards, from the Writers Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2004, Monahan was hired to adapt Cormac McCarthy's novel Blood Meridian for producer Scott Rudin with Ridley Scott set to direct.^[27][28] In 2005, Monahan was hired to adapt Louis Begley's novel Wartime Lies for Warner Independent Pictures, previously in development as a Stanley Kubrick project called Aryan Papers.^[29] The previous workload, consisting of adapting other storytellers' worlds and dramatizing historical periods, did not deter Monahan from taking on another historically-set project a few months later; Warner Bros. hired him to write a screenplay based on Marco Polo's autobiography Travels, for a film to be called The Venetian and set during Polo's Far East explorations.^[27][30] In 2006, Monahan was hired by Warner Bros. to adapt David Ignatius' novel Body of Lies into a film titled Penetration, about a CIA operative who goes to Jordan to track a high-ranking terrorist, with Ridley Scott directing.^[31]

[edit] Working scripts through production and after

"The crucial skill of a working screenwriter is that you have to have some depth of ability and ideation. Your ninth idea has to be as good or better than your first, and that's where a lot of people crack up. You have to remain on top of your game and in absolute control of the text and a successful advocate of your own intentions no matter what influences hit the picture or from which direction. You do that by having the best ideas in the room. If you don't, you will be replaced. It's nothing personal."

— William Monahan, on developing a screenplay.[5]

Main articles: Kingdom of Heaven (film) and The Departed

Kingdom of Heaven was the first of Monahan's screenplays to be produced into a film. Monahan had negotiated a production write-through contract for Kingdom of Heaven, which allowed him to be present on the movie sets to make modifications to the shooting script during production.^[32] It was while he was on the set of Kingdom that his wife gave birth to a second child; a baby girl named Iris. Monahan managed to get two days off to spend with them.^[33] After production, Ridley Scott's put together a 3-hour long cut of Kingdom of Heaven and submitted it to a preview screening. The preview audience felt the 3-hour long cut was too long and gradually Scott became convinced as well.^[34] The theatrical release of Kingdom of Heaven was pared down to 145 minutes. It was poorly received by critics when it was released in theaters in 2005. Kingdom was described as a "confusing compromise at best and a dull obfuscation of history at worst" by Peter Canavese of Groucho Reviews and Jeffrey M. Anderson of Combustible Celluloid wrote that Kingdom "has at its center a bold story, and yet it sits there like a stone pillar."^[35][36] Ridley Scott would later remark that he got carried away with cutting the film in the editing room and learned that "the enemy is previews" because these test screenings are tantamount to asking an inexperienced group of people to be film critics.^[37] Kingdom was reappraised by critics when it was released on DVD in the form of a director's cut that contained an additional 45 minutes of footage previously shot from Monahan's shooting script. Critics were pleased with the extended version of the film and James Berardinelli of ReelViews remarked that "now that the director's cut is available, there's no reason for anyone to watch the neutered theatrical edition."^[38]

Monahan's second produced screenplay was The Departed, an adaptation of the Hong Kong action film Infernal Affairs. Monahan chose not to watch Infernal Affairs so that he could create an original interpretation, and instead worked from an English translation of the Chinese script for the Hong Kong film.^[39] As he had previously done, he negotiated a production write-through contract so that he could personally rewrite his script if needed during shooting.^[32] He spent some time rewriting the character of Frank Costello according to suggestions from actor Jack Nicholson, who was going to play the part. Monahan had originally written Nicholson's character as a 68-year old Irish-American murderer who is jaded with sexual intercourse, but Nicholson had his own ideas for the character. Monahan credits Nicholson's notes for sexualizing the character of the mob boss Costello.^[4][40] Monahan received considerable praise from critics when the film was released in theaters in 2006, and was applauded for accurately depicting the city of Boston. Monahan used his intimate knowledge of the way Bostonians talk and act, learned from his youth spent in the many neighborhoods of Boston, to create characters that The Boston Globe described as distinctly indigenous to the city.^[41] By the end of 2006, The Departed had won many critics' prizes. Monahan was honored by The Boston Society of Film Critics with the award for best screenplay, by the Chicago Film Critics Association for best adapted screenplay, and by the Southeastern Film Critics Association with another best adapted screenplay award.^[42][43][44] Monahan took an unusual route for a screenwriter and hired a publicist to run a campaign promoting his screenplay during awards season.^[45] Monahan ended up winning two Best Adapted Screenplay awards for The Departed, from the Writers Guild of America and from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.^[46][47] He also received an award for his writing in film at the US-Ireland Alliance’s second annual "Oscar Wilde: Honoring Irish Writing in Film" ceremony.^[2]

As of 2007, Monahan is working on a film treatment for a follow-up to The Departed, which may be either a prequel or a sequel.^[48]

[edit] Becoming a producer

In 2006, Monahan started his own production company on the Warner Bros. lot called Henceforth. He negotiated a first-look producing deal with Warner Bros. which gives the studio the first right of first refusal on any films produced by Henceforth. In return Henceforth received the film rights to produce John Pearson's true crime novel The Gamblers, which Warner Bros. had acquired the rights to.^[30] Monahan has some familiarity with the various stages of the filmmaking process because of his experiences, from development to completion, working on the films Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed.^[32] Nevertheless, as a producer Monahan would have obligations unfamiliar to a screenwriter, such as raising the finances to pay for the production of the film, managing the film through production, hiring the director and film crew, and finding a distributor to release the film.^[49] Monahan will also be the one adapting The Gamblers to the screen.^[12]

After winning an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Departed in 2007, it was announced that Monahan had been hired to work on two film projects: an adaptation of the Hong Kong film Confession of Pain and an original Rock and Roll film called The Long Play. Monahan will executive produce and write the adaptation for Confession of Pain. It is Monahan's second adaptation of a Hong Kong film.^[50] Both of the Hong Kong films he has been involved in adapting, Infernal Affairs and Confession of Pain, were originally produced by Media Asia Films and created by directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak and screenwriter Felix Chong.^[51] The adaptation of Confession of Pain will be produced by Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way for Warner Bros. Pictures.^[50] Monahans' other assignment is to rewrite a screenplay about the history of the rock music business called The Long Play. The Long Play is the creation of Mick Jagger, the lead singer of the influential British Invasion group The Rolling Stones, and was nurtured at Mick Jagger's production company Jagged Films. Martin Scorsese became involved while the film project was at Disney but recently negotiated a turnaround deal to bring the The Long Play to Paramount.^[52] In 1999, Jagger and Scorsese hired Rolling Stone magazine writer Rich Cohen to research and write the first drafts for the Rock and Roll story.^[53] In the intervening years Matthew Weiss, who wrote the screenplay for Niagara, Niagara, did several rewrites of the original drafts, and Monahan will now do a rewrite of his own.^[52][54]

[edit] Controversy

In 2005, author James Reston Jr. claimed Monahan's screenplay for Kingdom of Heaven violated the copyright of his 2001 novel Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade. Reston claimed he had previously offered Ridley Scott the book for a movie deal but was turned down. He alleged that the entire second half of Monahan's shooting script was based on the first 105 pages of his book, and noted that Kingdom of Heaven is the title of the second chapter in his book.^[55] 20th Century Fox denied all of Reston's claims and Monahan commented, "There was no infringement, period. I've been familiar with the fall of the Latin Kingdom for thirty-odd years". Reston did not pursue the matter and never filed a lawsuit.^[56]

[edit] Writing process

Monahan has asserted that screenplays should be written by one author and does not support the collaborative model in which multiple screenwriters write competing drafts until the producer and director are satisfied.^[4] His interest in motion pictures began at an early age, but he steered clear of the film industry because he mistakenly surmised that the collaborative model was a de facto practice for creating screenplays.^[5] In his late 30s, he went to Hollywood to adapt his first novel into a film.^[18] Since then, he has generally been the sole writer on his screenplays, except for Jurassic Park IV, which was taken over by John Sayles and rewritten when Monahan had to go on location for Kingdom of Heaven.^[4] Monahan's view is that a screenwriter can retain the authorship of their screenplay if they have the support of a powerful film director and successfully advocate their ideas, even in the face of the inevitable influences of actors, directors and producers. He prefers writing screenplays over other genres because generally a released film will reach a wider audience and have a greater cultural effect than a published novel.^[5] His produced screenplays have so far been exclusively historically-based stories and adaptations of other authors' works but nevertheless, he considers his adapted screenplay The Departed his most personal work because the plot of Infernal Affairs is transposed from Hong Kong to his hometown of Boston and is heavily influenced by those roots.^[33]

In his youth, Monahan developed an appreciation for Shakespeare and went on to concentrate on Shakespeare's works at the University of Amherst. He has studied English drama for over thirty years and has stated that because of those efforts he has reached a level of ability where he is "post-conscious about craft."^[12] He has a strong interest in history and reads the available primary sources when researching a historical period.^[57] His first major screenplay sale was Tripoli, which chronicled William Eaton's campaign during the Barbary Wars.^[19] Monahan has commented that he aims for historical accuracy but even Shakespeare would take liberties in order to dramatize a scene.^[56] Monahan has criticized screenwriting courses that emphasize formulaic approaches to storytelling in which every story has to have characters that change and go on Hero's journeys. He argues that these are types of stories, and that screenplay structure doesn't always have to follow those archetypes.^[12]

Monahan has quipped that he would prefer to work on an old Olivetti Praxis typewriter in many instances because there are too many distractions on a modern computer.^[12] He was previously represented by literary agent William Clark for his novel Light House but is currently represented by the Endeavor Talent Agency in matters concerning the film industry.^[58][59]

[edit] Credits

[edit] Essays, criticism, reviews, and short stories

Main article: List of the writings of William Monahan

[edit] Novels

• Lighthouse: A Trifle (June 2000)

[edit] Films

• Kingdom of Heaven (2005; screenplay)
• The Departed (2006; screenplay)
• Jurassic Park IV (in pre-production; 2008; first draft of screenplay)
• Penetration (in pre-production; screenplay)^[4]

[edit] Screenplays (unproduced)

• Light House (2000)^[60]
• Tripoli (2001)
• Mazar e Sharif
• Blood Meridian (adaptation)
• Wartime Lies (adaptation)
• The Venetian
• Confession of Pain (adaptation)
• The Long Play (rewrite)

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• The first draft for Kingdom of Heaven is available on Disc 3 of the Kingdom of Heaven Director's Cut (Four-Disc Special Edition) DVD.
• The shooting script for The Departed is available for download on Warner Bros. website
• William Monahan. "A Gallows Sermon: Life & Death Among the Decadents", New York Press, 2000-10-11. Retrieved on 2007-03-06.
• William Monahan. "One flew over the Boston fence", Variety, 2007-02-15. Retrieved on 2007-02-20.

[edit] Interviews

• Dylan Callaghan (2006-10-13). A Man of Letters. Writers Guild of America, West. Retrieved on 2007-01-01.
• Frosty. "William Monahan – Exclusive Interview", Collider.com, 2007-02-18. Retrieved on 2007-02-20.

[edit] External links

• William Monahan at the Internet Movie Database