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221 Roads that turn in on themselves or go nowhere, frontiers coming to a close, and characters seeking meaning on the fringes—these are all constants in Rudy Wurlitzer’s work as a novelist and screenwriter. A similar questing and restlessness can be found in Wurlitzer’s life. Born in Cincinnati in 1930, Wurlitzer, like William S. Burroughs, was heir to a once prosperous entrepreneurial dynasty known for its player pianos and organs. He spent most of his childhood and youth in New York, where he studied the violin. When he became a teen, he embraced the Beat ethos of wandering for its own sake. From the mid-1950s through most of the 1960s, Wurlitzer moved in and out of various emerging countercultural scenes in the United States and Europe to the extent that time and money permitted. His first novel, Nog, published in 1969, didn’t sell very well, but its mix of the mythic and the avant-garde caught the attention of Monte Hellman, who hired Wurlitzer to completely rewrite Will Corry’s draft of Two-Lane Blacktop (1971). The result was so startling that Wurlitzer’s screenplay was published in Esquire, and Two-Lane Blacktop was hailed on the magazine ’s cover as the “film of the year” months before its release. Unfortunately the film, with its quasi-Beckettian take on the conflict between two young hot-rodders (played with stone-faced brilliance by James Taylor and Dennis Wilson) and an older, enigmatic long-distance driver (Warren Oates, delivering a performance both avuncular and sinister ), went over the heads of the post–Easy Rider audience Universal hoped it would pull in. Over the years however, the film has come to be seen as a great lost masterpiece of the 1970s New Hollywood era. Two more uncompromising novels, Flats and Quake, appeared in the 1970s. Neither sold particularly well, but their cryptic storylines found INTERVIEW BY LEE HILL RUDY WURLITZER QUESTING McGilligan_Ch13 8/7/09 11:48 AM Page 221 favor among mavericks like Hal Ashby and Sam Peckinpah. Wurlitzer’s collaboration with Peckinpah on Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) was a more thoughtful and compassionate take on outlaws trying to escape their past than The Wild Bunch (1969). Although the film was cut heavily by MGM, the current director’s cut on DVD demonstrates how well suited Wurlitzer was to bringing out the best in maverick sensibilities. By the late 1970s, after several promising projects were trapped in development hell and work as a script doctor became less appealing, Wurlitzer retreated to Cape Breton, New Brunswick, where he worked with Robert Frank on two experimental films and the independent feature Candy Mountain (1987). Since then, Wurlitzer has worked almost exclusively outside Los Angeles with directors based in Europe, most notably Alex Cox on Walker (1987); Ridley Scott on a pre–David Lynch version of Dune; MichelangeloAntonioni on“TwoTelegrams”(which surfaced in abbreviated form in Beyond the Clouds); and Volker Schlondorff on Voyager / Homo Faber (1991). While some of these collaborations, such as his work on Bernardo Bertolucci’s Little Buddha (1992) and Carroll Ballard’s Wind (1992), were not completely successful, Wurlitzer preferred the less corporate style of collaboration embraced by non-Hollywood directors. Wurlitzer has also continued to write books, most notably the memoir Hard Travel to Sacred Places (1991), and the novels Slow Fade (1984), inspired by his experiences with Sam Peckinpah, and The Drop Edge of Yonder (2008).1 Although on many occasions he has come face-to-face with the mainstream studio development process at its most dispiriting, Wurlitzer talks about screenwriting with a healthy blend of idealism, patience, enthusiasm , and stoicism. He has not only managed to work regularly with directors who shared his open-ended approach to narrative, genre, and character; he continues to refresh himself with new books and collaborations on operas with old friends like the composer Philip Glass. This interview was conducted by telephone and e-mail in the spring and early summer of 2008. • • • EARLY YEARS I was born in Cincinnati, but my mother and father moved to New York, and I spent my most of my early childhood in Manhattan. When I was quite young, I played the violin. My father at the time was a dealer in rare stringed instruments so I played the violin up until my late teens. Then I grew more obsessed with literature, writing, poetry, jazz, and drugs. 222 RUDY WURLITZER McGilligan_Ch13 8/7/09 11:48 AM Page...

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