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I sat with Robert on the deck of his home overlooking a canyon in the hills of Sherman Oaks, California. I asked if we could take pictures to accompany this interview, but Robert refused; he doesn't allow his home or family to be photographed. (He turned down a featured article in People because they wanted to photograph him working at his home office!) We discussed the release of his upcoming novel, HOSTAGE, what's happening in Hollywood with DEMOLITION ANGEL and HOSTAGE, and the new Elvis Cole novel. HOSTAGE is your new stand-alone suspense thriller. The film rights have been bought by Bruce Willis and MGM, and the buzz on this book is incredible. Do you know how much the bound manuscripts are selling for on eBay and Amazon? No. How much? Over a hundred dollars. Cripes! Doubleday was giving them away at the BEA in Chicago. For free! Those manuscripts are a hot ticket. People who have one are mailing them to friends who are passing them along to still more friends. It's like a HOSTAGE underground. (moans) Great. Everyone in America will have read the bound manuscript before the book comes out. No one will have to buy the damned thing! (laughs) Actually, that's not true--the published book will include several small scenes not found in the bound manuscript, so if you want the full story, you have to read the book. God, I'm a sneaky devil.... You added more scenes? I wanted to strengthen one of the subplots and see more of the New York gangsters, so I wrote more scenes, yes. A bookseller friend of mine at BEA said that the line to have you sign the bound manuscripts was so long that Doubleday ran out of copies.
You gave away copies of the audiobook at the Book Expo, also, right? Brilliance did. That's right. James Daniels, who narrated the unabridged audiobook--Jamie is a wonderful actor; he did a terrific job with the material. Anyway, Jamie and I signed the audiobooks that Brilliance was giving away. We had a huge line for that, too; it just went on forever. The entire experience of BEA was amazing. What about the abridged? Will there be an abridged version of HOSTAGE? I've always wanted to record my own work, and Brilliance was looney enough to go along with me. After the BEA I went to their studios in Grand Haven, Michigan, and spent two days locked in a studio recording the abridged version of HOSTAGE. It was a hoot. They locked you in? Oh, yeah, man. The director, Sandy Burr, she was stacking chairs against the door to keep me in there; I'm begging her, "Sandy, please, lemme out!", and she's shoving the door closed, "Keep reading! Keep reading!". Actually, she was a sweetheart, just the best. Because this was my first time recording my work, Brilliance gave me their A-team--Sandy as the director and this insane engineer--Jill 'Wild Child' Sovis. Jill would peer through a little porthole and hold up insulting notes to crack me up. But, you know, it kept me loose and I'm really really happy with the product. Are you going to post an audio clip on the site? Yeah. We're setting that up with Brilliance now. So we'll be able to actually hear you read the book? Well, you'll be able to hear me read a clip from the book. You wanna hear the whole thing, you gotta buy the damned thing. Okay, let's talk about Hollywood. What's Bruce Willis really like? A superior human being. Really. Excellent taste in fiction. Have you met him? Not yet. I've met with Arnold Rifkin, who is Willis's producing partner, and the development people who work for Willis and Rifkin at Cheyenne Entertainment, which is Willis's company, but so far the man himself has been absent. He's probably off saving the world from runaway asteroids or something. Last year, you sold the film rights to DEMOLITION ANGEL before the novel was published - That's right. Even before I finished the book. That was wild. Here we are negotiating for the film rights, and I haven't even finished the book. -- and this year Bruce Willis nabbed the rights to your new novel, HOSTAGE. Had you finished HOSTAGE when he bought it?
Did you write HOSTAGE with a movie in mind? Of course not. If I wanted to write movies, I'd write movies. I love it when I see these reviews or posts on the Internet, some doof saying (Robert hunches, wrings his hands, and makes a snuffling snide voice--) "Eh...eh...it's obvious that Crais wrote this to get a movie deal." Like you know?! (laughs) Were you there?! I call these people The Mindreaders. No, I've never sat down with the intention of writing a book to get a movie deal--I have never included a scene or element or anything thinking that it would look good in a movie--it's there because I thought it would look good in the book.. I've turned down twenty-five friggin' offers for the film rights to Elvis and Joe. I could've had a movie deal when I wrote THE MONKEY'S RAINCOAT. Both DEMOLITION ANGEL and HOSTAGE have strong vivid characters in some kind of life crisis, great villains, and really fast moving plots. Those stories smoke. Hey, I'm liking you more and more. No, I mean it! What I'm saying is that even though you didn't set out to write a book that someone like Bruce Willis would want to turn into a movie, the stories have a cinematic energy to them. Cinematic energy. Hey, I like that. You know what I'm saying? Sure. You're saying that as you read the book, you see the movie in your head, and this movie moves naturally, and with all the recognizable elements of a motion picture. Yes. I'm cool with that. I write visually. I like a story that powers forward. I try to do that with the Elvis Cole novels, too. I like vivid characters who are jammed into a tight place, characters who are trying to keep it together when they're getting squeezed tighter and tighter. These elements also happen to make fine movies. It's easy for a reader to imagine the characters and get lost in the story; it's natural for a reader to see the film as they read. It's mind theater. Do you think this is why your work has been so popular with the movie people? DEMOLITION ANGEL sold even before it was finished and HOSTAGE sold as soon as you put it on the market. That, and because I have really nifty ideas. You were in Colorado when the book sold? I was giving the keynote address to the Pikes Peak Writers Conference. That was a Thursday. I finished the book on the weekend before the conference, gave it to my agents, Tricia Davey and Emile Gladstone, on that Monday. They read it Monday night, and flipped for it. They felt sure that we had a movie, that the book would sell quickly. They brainstormed who best to submit it to because they wanted to create a auction situation, then submitted it to, I dunno, I think it was ten select producers and studio execs--people with a history of successful suspense pictures featuring strong characters. Get the studios bidding against each other. Right. And then, of course, I tell'm that I'm going out of town. They freaked. 'WHAT?!?! You can't go out of town! We've gotta be able to reach you!' So I gave them my cell phone number and off I went to Colorado. That was Thursday morning, and we had submitted the book Wednesday night. I arrive at the hotel--no messages. I check in, hang out with the conference people, go out to eat. Well, all day Thursday I don't hear anything. I keep listening for my cell phone to ring, but I don't hear anything, and I'm thinking, crap, no one is gonna buy this book, we're not even gonna get one crummy offer. Then I get back to my hotel room that night-it was something like ten in the evening, Colorado time-and there's a dozen messages waiting. There's so many messages that the message waiting light is having apoplexy. How come they couldn't reach you? I had given them the wrong cell number. (laughs) Three or four studios were making offers, but Willis's company and MGM stepped in with a pre-emptive bid and took HOSTAGE off the table. They blew everyone else out of the game. Can you see Bruce Willis as Jeff Talley? Absolutely. My agents and I had specifically set about getting the book to him because he's so right to play Talley. Here's this guy with a kind of weary maturity, haunted by his past, yet you will believe completely that he has the store of strength necessary to do what Talley has to do in the story. He's going to make a terrific Jeff Talley. Can you tell us what's happening with DEMOLITION ANGEL?
What did they want that you didn't give them? Toward the end of the process, I sensed that the studio wanted less of a character picture and more of a stalker picture--make the whole story Mr. Red versus Carol Starkey, the maniac stalking and terrorizing the cop--and I didn't want that. DEMOLITION ANGEL is about more than that--it's about Carol Starkey recovering her life. Does that experience make you nervous about writing the screenplay for HOSTAGE? Not at all. I'm writing the screenplay for HOSTAGE now, and then I'm starting the next book. That's where my head is right now--the next book. It's an Elvis Cole novel. I want to get back to Elvis and Joe. I miss those guys. So do your fans! Can you tell us what it's about? As L. A. REQUIEM was to Joe Pike, the new book is to Elvis Cole. It takes up more or less where L. A. REQUIEM left off--maybe a few weeks or months later--and it will be life-changing for Elvis Cole. Just as you saw how Joe came to be Joe in L. A. REQUIEM, you're going to see how Elvis came to be Elvis in this book, with flashbacks to his childhood, to his service in Vietnam, and to his early days as an apprentice with George Feider. You'll even see the scene in which Elvis and Joe first meet. I've already written that scene, and it's a riot as well as being very very powerful. Will Joe Pike be as prominent in this book as in L. A. REQUIEM? Yeah, but remember, L. A. REQUIEM was about Joe; this book is about Elvis. It's going to be a hard, tough book. The changes that began in L. A. REQUIEM are going to culminate in this new book. Big changes and big choices. Uh-oh. Will Elvis and Lucy get back together? You'll have to read it to see. Is something bad going to happen to Lucy? You've gotten all you're going to get; my lips are sealed. Let's go get some lunch. I've gotta write. |
Yeah, that's true. Everyone was caught off-guard. Doubleday had set up a signing to give away copies of the bound manuscript to promote the book. So I show up and see this huge line. I actually thought to myself, jeez, James Patterson or Nelson DeMille must be here--where am I gonna sign? (laughs) We had over 300 people in line, and Doubleday had only brought 200 copies of the book. They were collecting business cards and promising to send copies to the people who had to go home empty-handed. That was the only sour part of the BEA for me--I hated that we had to turn away people who had stood in line for so long, but we just didn't have any more books.
(laughs) Damn right. No one saw this manuscript until I was finished. Not even my agents. I was way late with this book. The only way I could finish it was to put everything else out of my head, just focus on Jeff Talley and what was happening to him and keep typing. Because of all the attention from DEMOLITION ANGEL, my agents were getting calls every day from producers and studios asking when the book would be finished, wanting a sneak peek, wanting to get a jump on the other guy. I didn't even want to know that stuff. I had to stay with Talley and the kids in that house.
It's somewhere in Development Hell, which is like having a time-share in Movieland Purgatory. I really don't know what's happening with it. I wrote three drafts of the script, and had a great time working with Larry Mark and Jonathan King, the two producers, but the studio decided it needed something out of the picture that I wasn't providing. So now they've assigned the script to a team of writers to develop a new draft.