From: Luscious Lee Trevino
Category: Amis
Date: 7/28/99
Time: 10:41:11 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.97
[From *The Times* of London. August 1, 1992.]
*MARTIAN AMIS* / BY WILLIAM CASH
Martin Amis is sipping a vodka Negroni in the lobby bar of the Century Plaza hotel in Los Angeles. A grand piano tinkles above the discreet evening chatter in the ritzy salon, with its black and white marble floor, gilt Louis XIV armchairs and neo-Egyptian art. Amis slowly rolls himself a cigarette from a plastic pouch of Old Holborn. He is the only person smoking.
In front of him is a proof of a book review which he is trying to read and correct. But he is not concentrating. He's jumping the lines. He's sipping his drink again, nibbling cheese savouries, wheezing on his cigarette, enjoying the flashy cartoon of life around him.
Amis is dressed in designer jacket, open-neck cream shirt and tight, freshly starched faded Levis. Peanut-butter tan. Expensive gold watch. His thick, sugar-auburn hair is scooped back, Travolta-style, to make his eyes pop out at you like a pair of ocean-green marbles. The gnomish head is freakishly large, the voice gravelly and patrician. He's a small guy; but relaxed, affluent, in shape.
At 42, Amis is for hire in Los Angeles. Taking a break from literary fiction, he is now writing a sci-fi action-adventure film called *Mars Attacks* for Tri-Star, to be produced by Jon Davison (*Airplane*, *RoboCop*). 'It's an updated version of *War of the Worlds*', Amis drawls, 'except that they don't come to mess us up. They come in search of new markets. They talk and dress like Californian businessmen and bring all kinds of benefits, like cancer cures.'
The future has always troubled Amis, an avid sci-fi fan. After discovering the joys of Space Invaders on holiday in the South of France in the Seventies, he wrote a book about the craze (now a valuable collector's item, with an introduction by Steven Spielberg). His only previous screen-credit is for *Saturn Three* (1980), starring Kirk Douglas and Farrah Fawcett, about a maniac who builds a robot which goes berserk. 'I was replaced by another writer and then rehired on a weekly basis. You get a kick seeing your ideas given this hardware reality.'
Mollycoddled, revered and spoilt rotten as the precious darling of literary London, Amis seems to relish his mercenary status in LA. While his number of fans in America has grown into a loyal army since *London Fields*, which sold more than 30,000 copies in America and made the New York Times bestseller list, his following remains essentially highbrow rather than mass-market. Put another way, most people in Hollywood haven't heard of him.
Amis joined the *Mars Attacks* project after *Premiere* magazine asked him to write a piece about *RoboCop 2*. Amis and Davison hit it off in the interview. 'It was the idlest of coincidences, really. We chatted, I was impressed how much he loved it (the film) and wanted it to be good. He then said he had an idea, which he had been wanting to do for some time, and would I like to try to write a script?'
He quashes any idea that he is bored with writing novels, or that he has turned to scriptwriting because fiction has become marginalised by the imaginative scope of cinema. 'There may be writers who feel like that. I don't feel like that one bit. In fact, I feel this is getting to be a distraction from what I really want to do', he says.
'To write for the movies is not a literary ambition, it's a social or financial ambition', is how Amis sums up the allure of Hollywood for the literary novelist (quoting Ian McEwan, whose *The Innocent* is being filmed in Berlin and whose original screenplay, *The Good Son*, is being made into a psycho-thriller by 20th Century Fox).
'I feel perfectly happy with the amount of readers I reach', Amis continues. 'I think one is attracted by mass culture because it's fun. The trouble is that writing scripts gets very much less "fun". By the final draft, you certainly feel you've earned every cent.'
But Amis is not in Hollywood for the money. His next two-book deal with Random House in America is worth well in excess of $500,000. You get the feeling he doesn't even much like money. Doesn't care about it. Isn't interested in it. Pays someone to pay his bills. 'Money isn't really it', he admits. 'I was already going where the real money is: the Literary Novel.'
Just as American writers T.S. Eliot, Hemingway, Pound flocked to the bohemian cafes of pre-war London and Paris in search of the literary action, so flying out to Hollywood with a script at the bottom of one's suitcase is suddenly *le dernier cri* in literary London.
Amis is intrigued by the job of the movie writer. Last month, *The New Yorker* (with his old flame Tina Brown as editor, expect to see his by-line more regularly) published *Career Move*, a mischievous and savagely satirical Amis short story, set in LA and London, in which he transposes the roles of poets and screenwriters.
'It's a ridiculous story', Amis says, smirking, 'but I think it works by portraying screenplay writers struggling away in garrets writing stories with absurd titles like *Offensive from Quasar 13* for little magazines that paytiny cheques that bounce.' His jet-setting, double-decaff-espresso-drinking poet Luke drives a Celebrity Chevrolet and is 'developing' a multimillion-dollar poem called *Sonnet* with his agent from Talent International.
It's not just a clever joke. For all the cultivation of his laid-back image as mid-Atlantic literary hipster ('Martin is cool', drools Peter Guzzardi, his New York editor), Amis takes his work very seriously indeed. He would long to write a really successful movie. Preferably, you feel, something a bit nasty. 'Sick is back since *Silence of the Lambs*', he says gleefully. 'I used to take a lot of girls to *The Exorcist*. It was simply a dating mechanism. Afterwards, they were too scared to sleep alone. I can't have been the first to discover that.'
As with many novelists (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Jay McInerney), Amis's first attempt at a screenplay, adapting his first novel *The Rachel Papers*, years ago was an ego-crushing experience. 'I wrote the script, and I was very pleased with it. And then the would-be director and producer came around to talk about it and they started off with what they didn't like...and I was just close to tears of incredulity and disgust. I had written it. There it was. What were these people talking about?'
He had little to do with the recent *Rachel Papers* film, directed by Damian Harris (son of Richard), which Amis, unlike a number of critics, rather liked. His own script was rejected again, being described by one senior executive as 'all over the place'. Producer Eric Feliner (*Sid and Nancy*) now has plans to adapt Amis's *Money*, from 1984, into a film starring Gary Oldman (*Sid*) as the lasciviously self-destructive John Self, although the project has run into problems with the script.
Amis's novels well illustrate the terminal difficulties plaguing any attempt to translate literary fiction into the language of film. This is because good writers suck in what they see of the world, re-creating their own universe on the page, stamped with individual style...[DELETED *MONEY* EXCERPT]...It is easy to envisage a film director mentally salivating as the images from *Money* flood into his mind. But you cannot capture this luridly self-mocking hyperbole on the screen. As Amis admits, the collaborative nature of making a movie wholly contradicts what being a writer is all about. 'Screenwriting is really anti-writing', he says. 'I would distrust any writer who can look me in the eye and say that he isn't more alive when alone. That is what being a writer is.'
When Amis says *writer*, he means *novelist*. He reserves the same brand of condescending scepticism for journalism ('Every stage in the experience seems to involve a lot of people') as he does for screenwriting. In *The Moronic Inferno*, his comet-like collection of writings about America, he reviles those writers who 'exhaust themselves in securing the right contracts, the intimate audits, the disclosures. I am no good at any of that. I skimp it, and so everything has to happen on the typewriter.'
Although he says he has enjoyed writing *Mars Attacks*, he clearly misses the omnipotence of his Ladbroke Grove writer's pad. 'I've written a first draft. I felt what I like to feel when I write, which is a kind of comic flow every now and then. But then this completely ridiculous and extraneous process takes over, and now we're having to rethink it all with an action centre. It's good and original, only it's a big-budget idea.'
The film might not even be made. 'It's got about as much chance as happening as anything else', says a senior Tri-Star executive. 'In Hollywood, you're dependent on what other people think', Amis says. 'You have no control. You're dependent on market forces that haven't cropped up for me in 20 years as a writer of fiction. But it does get you out of the house. It's fun and it's exciting, you know, the idea of it happening on the screen. And I like hotels. Who doesn't?'
Which is just as well, as he has been spending rather a lot of time in flash and swanky American hotel suites. Book-signings. Late-night television appearances. First-class ergonomic seats. Limousines. In-room video messages. Immodest tips. Amis loves this stuff: the 'pornography of travel'.
He has difficulty viewing Los Angeles as part of America. It is more like another country, or a tropical island inhabited by cannibals. In Hollywood, he is on literary safari. He can't seem to help being attracted to what he finds most abhorrent.
'I hated LA the first few times, but I do rather like it now. My best friend here died recently, so I was rather expecting to enjoy it less this time. But I do like the rhythm of it. I don't really know it well, not like I know New York. It's exotic.'
Amis says he doesn not know any film stars (except Oldman and John Malkovich), agreeing with John Updike that fame is a voracious idiot. 'Voracious is the key word. People spend millions and millions of dollars seeking advice. The first thing Americans want to know about a famous person is: can you help me psychologically? It's a greedy culture and needs to chew things up and spit them out at a terrific rate.'
He does, however, like the American celebrity circus, where he finds he is received with more goodwill than in London. 'In England, I'm in a special situation because of my father. I've exhausted the goodwill there in a general sense. And the forces of resentment lock in earlier.'
'By the time you've finished a book tour you are absolutely nauseated by the sound of your own name and don't want to talk about yourself. Then a year later you feel neglected. I like touring America because of the great cities. Miami, Chicago, New York.'
What seems to irk Amis is that celebrities in America are usurping the role of writers, as advice-givers, interpreters of the American condition. As Saul Bellow has argued, most Americans today regard novels as 'how-to books' about life. The writer is no longer 'curer of souls', or sage: he is reduced to the level of the agony aunt.
Laying part of the blame with the media, Amis chooses his words carefully while inveighing against *Vanity Fair*. 'What seemed to be the master-stroke there was that you do a profile of someone who doesn't give profiles because they are such frightful shits and are fed up with bad publicity. You do this profile and say, well, actually, he's rather nice and then before you know it all these frightful shits are ringing up saying: 'Nobody has said anything about me for a while, so why don't I have one of these pieces?'
Scriptwriting is fine as literary prostitution, Amis suggests, fine for a get-rich-quick Hollywood fling. But, at the same time, the writer has responsibilities. 'Writers are here to interpret America. Is it just a collection of people from Europe and Africa and Mexico, is it the melting pot? Or is it really a country? What is America?'
What frightens Amis about America's obsession with Hollywood and celebrities is the intensity of the fandom. The American public, he maintains, are forever searching for forms to latch on to; craving identity. 'When serial killers and winners of ugly contests are besieged with offers of marriage the next day, a society is warped. Lost its sense of value.'
The fear of the American writer, he says, quoting Don DeLillo, is the moment when the person steps out in front of the crowd with that smile that he has been rehearsing for years. 'The fan to whom your books have spoken in strange and interesting ways, the fan who has taken it all a bit seriously. The difference being is that in America he will have a gun rather than the fist. I've had the fist. I got attacked by a fan. It was a very strange experience. It was someone I vaguely knew at Oxford, who flipped. He came into my father's house and started smashing things up. It was very unpleasant.'
Although Amis himself has profiled such Hollywood heavy-swells as Spielberg, Hugh Hefner and Brian DePalma, he says that nowadays he wouldn't bother. 'Occasionally a magazine like *GQ* rings me up and says: 'Do you want to do Clint Eastwood or Boris Becker?'. Well, the way I do them now is I wouldn't interview them. I mean what are you hoping to get? All you are doing is examining their publicity machine.
'I would rather just hang around them for a bit. I'd rather watch them being interviewed than interview them. It's post-modern now. You have to take a step back. You write about their PR act, because that's as close as you're going to get. To be quite honest, I have long thought that the interview is a completely dead form.' Ah.