Fables and fortune
Novel-writing machine James Patterson keeps churning out airport fiction, but when it comes to the screen adaptations, he’s rather relaxed, finds TV Guide editor Julie Eley.
For a man of so very many words, best-selling author James Patterson has only a writers.short message for budding
‘‘Have a dream – but have a back-up dream,’’ says the man who has sold more than 300 million books with his name on the cover. ‘‘I didn’t have one. I got into advertising. That was my back-up nightmare.’’
It’s almost impossible to image that such a prolific penman actually has time for sleep.
Last year, one in every 21 hardback novels sold in the United States was written by Patterson, the man behind The Zone’s apocalypse drama Zoo, in which animals bite back against human domination.
The series, based on a book he co-wrote with Michael Ledwidge, was inspired by what he describes as increasingly bizarre animal behaviour worldwide.
‘‘You know there are more alligator attacks than ever in Florida and a lot of visual stuff like all those fish jumping into boats in Michigan.’’
Not that the 69-year-old Florida resident intends viewers to take the show literally.
‘‘This is not realism,’’ he says. ‘‘It’s a fable like or Animal Farm. It’s just a fable about, ‘Here’s our world and we seem to be doing some questionable things’.’’
He’s refreshingly honest about the Hollywood treatment of his books.
‘‘I would like to have had the Silence Of The Lambs movie,’’ he says, before adding, ‘‘Zoo is good, Morgan Freeman as Cross [Detective Alex Cross in the movie Kiss The Girls] is good. I didn’t love the movie, but Morgan Freeman is great. Women’s Murder Club on TV, not so good.’’
He’s equally forthcoming when asked how protective he is of his characters, saying simply ‘‘Not much,’’ before adding, ‘‘Look, the book is the book. They can’t mess with the book.
‘‘All I hope for the movie or the TV show is that it relates somewhat [to the book] and that it’s good.
‘‘I mean, I remember at one point, it was the Alex Cross movie that Paramount had developed. I’m not exaggerating. They sent the script. It was Roses Are Red and I read the script and this is – I’m not exaggerating to be comedic here because Hollywood is much funnier than I could ever hope to be. The only things from the book were the title Roses Are Red and Alex Cross’ name. Everything else was different. ‘OK, OK. Why did you buy that? I don’t understand’.’’
Not that he’s complaining too loudly.
Success has given him an income Forbes magazine estimates at around $89 million and he’s happy to share the fruits of his labour.
He’s provided more than 650,000 books for US soldiers and donates 250,000 to school students. He funds 400 teacher education scholarships and has donated millions of dollars to school libraries.
But now he is intent on building on that wealth with his latest project, BookShots, a new line of books under 1500pages long, intended to be read in one sitting and retailing at $US5. Many are written by him, others he co-authors and the remaining titles he handpicks. He plans to release between two and four each month. ‘‘I have more content than Marvel, that’s why I’m going to sell myself for $5 billion,’’ he laughs. ‘‘I love to tell stories and with BookShots it gives me the freedom to just tell story after story after story and of all different kinds.’’
It’s something that he has been doing since he was a child.
‘‘I can remember just going out in the woods and walking around the woods and just making up stories, stories, stories. Just telling stories to myself because there were no kids around and I couldn’t stand my sisters.’’
From there he progressed to writing Broadway musicals in his head on the 26-hour drives to graduate college.
‘‘Writing the musical, the storyline, and singing the songs, literally,’’ he says. ‘‘I mean, I’m sure they were all awful but, you know, I didn’t care.’’
Despite his passion for words he thought it would be ‘‘presumptuous’’ to think he could make a living as a writer.
His first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, was turned down by more than 30 publishers before it finally made it to the bookstores in 1976. It took Patterson another 20 years before he gave up advertising.
A rock’n’roll fan, he says success means, ‘‘I got to meet some famous musical people and stuff. That was kind of cool.’’
And then he adds, ‘‘I went to Woodstock. Everybody in my age says that but I was actually there and I left after two days because it was so miserable. It was awful. I just remember waking up the first night and I had some – it wasn’t a sleeping bag but something and I woke up because I was sliding down this hill in the mud.’’
But while Woodstock spoke to a generation that believed ‘‘the times they are a changin’,’’ Patterson hopes Zoo, with the underlying message of climate change and ‘‘take care of the animals and planet and they will take care of you’’, also has a part to play.
‘‘Zoo is not going to change the world, (but) it can begin to change the world. You just keep pecking at this thing. Sometimes it just takes a while to do commonsense things.’’
‘All I hope for the movie or the TV show is that it relates somewhat [to the book] and that it’s good.’ James Patterson
Zoo screens on The Zone, Thursday.