Love Triangles Are Wasted on the Young

By Anne Flett-GiordanoOctober 30, 2015

Love Triangles Are Wasted on the Young
WRITER AND TELEVISION PRODUCER Peter Lefcourt divides his time between screenplays and novels. His television writing includes Cagney and Lacey, for which he won an Emmy, and the Showtime series Beggars & Choosers — a satire on the television business — which he created and ran. He was also, until recently, a co-executive producer on ABC’s Desperate Housewives. His time behind the scenes in Hollywood has inspired his novels, from his first in 1991, The Deal, to his most recent, Purgatory Gardens.

Anne Flett-Giordano’s career, from Emmy-winning television writer and producer to novelist, mirrors Lefcourt’s and overlaps at Desperate Housewives. Flett-Giordano’s television credits also include Frasier, Hot in Cleveland, and Becker. Her first novel, Marry, Kiss, Kill, the first in a series, was released this year. Recently, she spoke with Peter Lefcourt about his new novel, Purgatory Gardens.

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ANNE FLETT-GIORDANO: Purgatory Gardens revolves around a love triangle in a middle-class, retirement-age condo complex in Palm Springs. The characters are eccentric and funny, as is the plot. Which came first? Did you want to do a satiric love/money story with retirement-age characters, so you dreamed them up? Or were you playing around with some funny characters in need of a plot?

PETER LEFCOURT: I’d really like to answer this question in good faith, but it’s not easy. Writers’ minds are like cement mixers — constantly churning ideas around to keep them liquid and not allow them to coagulate. This particular book was probably — I used the adverb advisedly because I’m not sure — born on a trip I took to Palm Springs. The place struck me as a peculiarly specific location, in its climate and demography. There were a lot of older people around. And I kept asking myself, “What are they doing here?” Or, more appropriately, “How did they wash up on this particular shore?” And what do they do every day besides play golf, plant tomatoes, and consume air conditioning? Do they have sex? Do people over 60 have sex? How are they surviving in a world where everyone is living longer? How are they going to make it to the finish line, when the finish line keeps moving back further? How many of them are trying to escape their past? And why?

From there I went on to create three characters with colorful backstories, and a lot to hide, and put them into conflict. What better than a romantic triangle? What if each one of them had unrealistic expectations of the other two? How would they deal with it? To what limits would people go to ensure their survival? And I was off to the races. The rest of the plot was supplied by the plot fairy, who visits me while I sleep.

Happy to hear that’s how the plot fairy works. Now I can blame insomnia for keeping me from being as prolific as I’d like to be. You, on the other hand, have written 10 books, as well as several television shows. I know we have Desperate Housewives in common we’ll save that saga for another interview but I do have a television-related question. Characters over 60 are still a difficult sell on TV; were you at all concerned about the age of your characters affecting sales of the book? Or, conversely, did you consider it a plus?

I try to avoid thinking like a marketing executive when I sit down to write a novel. After all those years writing television, I am trying to make amends. However, I don’t always succeed. Ironically, the only areas of entertainment servicing the youth demographic are feature movies and certain niche TV channels (Fox, MTV, ABC Family, etc.). Books — for better or for worse — are still being consumed largely by older people. So I could make the argument that it is win-win writing older characters. Honestly, I am, at this stage of my life, more interested in the conflicts and problems of people in this age range. To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, youth is too banal to be wasted on the young. When you’re young, it’s pretty much all about money, sex, and power. When you get older, these are less interesting areas of concern; you see more complexity and nuance; you are looking both forward and backward, trying to make sense of life and figuring out what’s important.

And on another media related note, the film industry seems to be embracing vehicles for older actors. A disgruntled ex-mobster, a charming African con man, and a still-beautiful, aging actress all caught up in a romantic, murders-for-hire plot seems made-to-order for a film. Have you considered adapting Purgatory Gardens into a screenplay? And, if you have, who would be your dream cast?

Of course, I would love Purgatory Gardens to be a film. If only to popularize the book. I would enjoy getting paid for solving the storytelling challenges. With this particular adaptation, there would be a number of problems to overcome: telling the backstories of the three main characters economically, dealing with the introspective third-person narrative style, and getting away with killing a cat. (There is an unwritten rule in the movie business that you can’t kill off a domestic animal.)

The casting would be fun: when Meryl Streep turns down Marcy Gray, I’d go out to Susan Sarandon; if I couldn’t revive James Gandolfini to play Sammy, I’d settle for Jack Nicholson; for Didier I’d love Forrest Whitaker (but he’d have to try something different from Idi Amin). Kathy Bates as Evelyn Duboff; Kevin Spacey as Marshal Dillon; and Tom and Colin Hanks as Walt and Biff, the father-and-son hitmen. William H. Macy is already in makeup to play Charlie Berns.

I approve your casting choices with two exceptions: Sarandon would be my first choice for Marcy and, even though he’s far too young, I kept picturing Idris Elba as Didier. (Maybe I just like picturing Idris Elba.) As for “money, sex, and power”: while I agree our drives become more nuanced with age, I’d say those still remain the big three. They drive the plot in Purgatory Gardens to the point of mutual murder for hire. Money means security; sex reaffirms desirability; power is beating the other guy to the prize. The accompanying social commentary, however, is a powerful plus.

Ernest Hemingway expressed the opinion that “the first draft of anything is shit.” Personally, I like to keep rewriting until my publisher, or a show runner, rips the pages from my hands. Would you say you agree with Hemingway? Or are you a first draft/best draft guy, who just does a quick polish? And while we’re on the subject of process, do you show your work to friends and ask for feedback as you go, or do you keep your own counsel till the end? 

I think there is no simple answer to the Hemingway maxim about first drafts being shit. Some are; some aren’t. In his case, he had to keep going back to remove the adjectives. With the advent of word-processing, greatly facilitating the process of revision, we may, in fact, be over-revising. It’s so easy to make changes now that writers often do it with the mistaken idea that different is better. Again, sometimes it is; sometimes it isn’t. Knowing the difference is the key to good writing. To quote Hemingway again, writers need to develop a good bullshit meter. Reading and evaluating our own work is tantamount to a musician’s ear for music.

I do not show my work to anyone before sending it to my agent. I find that there is such a degree of subjectivity in responding to literary work that opinions are mostly just that: opinions. After years of getting quixotic notes from television executives, I may be overreacting here. My agent may give me some general suggestions, often, though, in the area of marketability — which is his expertise. And then, of course, I do listen to the assigned editor’s notes, though enjoying the fact that they are suggestions and not commands. A good copyeditor is invaluable, in their ability to pinpoint redundancies and infelicitous usage. I have been fortunate to have had some very talented copyeditors.

The more I write, the more I edit myself. I find that I can “kill my children” more easily — eliminate superfluous, self-indulgent content. Unless you’re Dostoevsky, Joyce, or David Foster Wallace, prolixity is not something you can get away with. Quantitatively, I find myself cutting somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of a first draft, and then another five percent the next time through. Less is always more. One of my favorite Zen maxims is, “Words are the enemy of the writer.”

I also find “less is more” to be a good guideline, and rewrite more to shape and define, than to go for something new. In the interest of that maxim, I’m going to wrap this up with three more quick questions: In Purgatory Gardens you made a snuff contract funny; how did you approach that?

I believe that there is no hard-edged dividing line between comedy and drama, that human emotion lives on a continuum — with tragedy at one pole and hilarity at the other. My favorite authors hit the sweet spot in between: Kafka, Vonnegut, Pinter, Elmore Leonard, the Coen Brothers. Their work enables you to move quickly from tears to laughter, and back again. Trying to explain humor is a futile endeavor. Maybe contract killers aren’t funny, but, to my mind, contract killers with a patio tile business and a Facebook page are. A cat eating poisoned pizza may not be funny, but a cat owned by two crabby middle-aged Finnish lesbians eating poisoned pizza meant for a former African dictator’s henchman living as an art dealer selling phony African art in Palm Springs just may be.

What’s Charlie Berns, the hero in two of your other books, The Deal and The Manhattan Beach Project great title, by the way doing in this one? Do you just like keeping in touch with him? Is he getting residuals?

Recycling characters is ecologically responsible. Charlie Berns was sitting around with nothing to do. I needed a film producer for my story, and I thought, “Why go to the trouble of creating a brand new character and backstory when I already had a perfectly good one?” It was feasible that Charlie, at this stage of his life, would be living in genteel poverty in Palm Springs. So I used him. (Kermit Fenster, the fixer that Charlie recommends to Sammy Dee, is a major character in The Manhattan Beach Project, as well as in the book I have just finished.) I am stiffing him on residuals — as Charlie would clearly do with me, given the opportunity. Waste not, want not.

And lastly, what are you working on now?

I have just finished a draft of a new book I am calling The Improbable Jihad of Arthur Castle. The eponymous Arthur Castle is a laid-off Warner Brothers film marketing executive who has fallen on hard times. Unemployed, being sued for back alimony, about to be evicted from his apartment in Burbank, he is contacted by (who else?) Kermit Fenster, who offers him a job unloading 1700 hot cell phones in Afghanistan. Desperate, Arthur takes the job and gets to Kandahar, via Tbilisi and Ashgabat, where he is snatched out of the bazaar by the Taliban, hoping to ransom him for money. When the jihadists find out that not only does Arthur Castle have no money but that he owes money to a lot of people, they decide to execute him. To save his life, Arthur pitches them a project to revive their fading brand. He manages to convince them that ISIS is eating their lunch and volunteers to become their new Director of Marketing. Pro bono. He creates “The New Taliban” — a kinder, gentler, more socially relevant jihadist group — and succeeds to refurbish their brand so successfully that the US government decides to get Arthur the fuck out of there and sends in a crack group of Navy SEALS to re-abduct him. A lot of weird shit happens. That’s all I’m going to say. It’s either going to be a big hit, or I’m going to get Salman Rushdie’d.

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Anne Flett-Giordano is a five-time Emmy-winning television writer and producer whose credits include Frasier, Hot in Cleveland, Becker, and Desperate Housewives.

LARB Contributor

Anne Flett-Giordano is a five-time Emmy-winning television writer and producer whose credits include Frasier, Hot in Cleveland, Becker, and Desperate Housewives. In addition to the three Best Comedy and two Best Writing in a Comedy Series Emmys, Anne (with her screenwriting partner Chuck Ranberg) has won a Producer’s Guild Award and a Golden Globe and was nominated for the Writer’s Guild Best Writing in a Comedy Series award. Anne divides her time between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara, California, where she shares a home with her husband, Arnie, and two book-blocking cats, Raider and Gracie. Marry, Kiss, Kill is her debut novel and the first in a series.

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