Interviews

Julie Sands, the producer and powerhouse behind getting this movie done, has had some kind things to say about my short stories. She told me about her desire to adapt the King short story, and I was familiar with the process through my Cemetery Dance column, so I gave her some advice. First, have a good script in hand, I told her. She asked if I was interested in writing it. I'd never done a screenplay, but that's never stopped me before so I said, sure. I had to research all the formatting specifications--script layout is very precise--but I've read enough screenplays that I had at least a general idea of how to go about it.

Turtle Bay: How did you co-write the script? How long did it take you?

The first draft took only a few days, if I recall. The short story is so cinematic and the dialog is excellent, so that's where I started. I had a few constraints -- Julie wanted to keep the movie shorter than 15 minutes, and getting permits to film on the streets might be problematic, so I had to rearrange some of the staging, moving scenes from streets into back alleys, for example. Anything that looked like it might be expensive to film or use up valuable screen time, I scrutinized carefully to see if there were alternative way of getting the point across. For the sake of brevity, I removed all interaction between Steve and his lawyer, since most of it could be recapped in a few sentences of dialog later. My main focus was laying down enough background so viewers could understand the situation, then get to the Cafe, where the real story takes place.

I e-mailed  the script to Julie, who was probably surprised to see something that quick (!), and she and Peter Schink went over it and made some changes. From that point on it was an iterative process, sending it back and forth, tweaking it a little at a time. Julie and Peter added some great background motivation for major characters, and any time I thought the story was straying too far from the source material, I said so. Julie gave me script approval, which extended even into the editing process when she had to make some creative decisions that affected the characters. By that point, I knew Julie respected the King story and I relied on her decisions without question.

Turtle Bay: How did you get started as a writer?

I wrote some well-received essays in high school, and when I went to university I dabbled in writing horror stories, but I never did anything with them. Oh, I sent one in to Twilight Zone magazine when they were holding a contest, but I'm sure it was dreadful, and probably written in crayon on construction paper. Dan Simmons won that contest...I was so far out of my league I had no idea. Peter Straub was one of the judges and I'm glad that no copies of that story exist to this day!

In 1999, I decided to give writing another try. People had often complimented me on my writing. I set a goal: to get a short story published in a paying market by the end of 2000. The first thing I sent out was accepted in the closing days of 1999.  However, the magazine cratered the issue before my story was to run, so I had to go back to the drawing board. Then I won The Harrow's first Halloween story contest in 2000 with "Harming Obsession" and went on from there. I still get more rejections than acceptances, but the rejections are nicer than they once were.

Turtle Bay: Tell us about your experiences as a writer and how you came to write a book about Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

Writing for Cemetery Dance magazine has opened up some doors for me. For one thing, King reads the magazine, so he became familiar with my style and approach. When I had this flash-from-the-sky idea to write a book about the Dark Tower series one day back in 2002, the first thing I did was propose it to King. If he didn't like the idea, I wanted to know before I did any work. Fortunately, he agreed to endorse the project, and his support and faith made the whole thing possible. He did the unexpected by agreeing to send me copies of the unpublished manuscripts of the final three books, which enabled me to have the book ready for publication concurrently with the final book in the series.

That book will probably open up some more doors for me in the future, so it's just been a whole series of good luck occurrences from that day back in 1999 when I thought I'd "give writing another try."

Turtle Bay: What were some of the memorable things for you about working on Gotham Cafe?

I kept in close touch with Julie during the process since I wasn't able to go out to LA during production. I experienced filming vicariously through her. She shared some of the casting results with me, especially when they found Cullen Douglas, who was the epitome of Guy, the maitre d'. I helped put her in touch with Mick Garris, who I'd interviewed for Cemetery Dance, and that resulted in Mick doing a cameo for us, which was a lot of fun. Wait until you see him in his priest garb.

Her excitement was contagious and it sounded like they were having a blast out there, though I know the hours were long and it was hard work. Then, when the photographs from the set started rolling in for the web site, I got to see how classy and professional the production looked. The next memorable thing will be seeing the first polished cut of the movie. Julie won't show it to me until it's all done!

Bev Vincent's web page is http://www.bevvincent.com