Author’s Note

The Taming of the Mambo

A film version of The Repossession Mambo was released under the title Repo Men.

This is the story of how The Repossession Mambo was wrangled from short story to novel to film and back to novel again over the course of approximately twelve years. It should be interesting to anyone curious about the adaptation process or looking to make a career in writing, and though it’s short on tabloid-style gossip, I’ll be sure to throw in a little Hollywood intrigue.

There are three main methods via which a book (or article or comic) is adapted into a motion picture, and I’ve now been involved in all three.

Method #1: Author writes a book, author sells a book to a publishing house, the book is published, the rights are optioned and/or purchased by a film company, a script is commissioned, a crew is hired, the film is produced, distributed, and everyone’s happy, or sad, or litigious, but in any case, done. This is how it worked with my Rex series, a comedy/sci-fi series exploring the lives of dinosaurs hiding as humans in modern-day society. Turning it into a two-hour TV movie was a process that took approximately five years from publication of the first book to its eventual appearance on the SciFi Channel.

Method #2: Author writes a book, author sells a book to a publishing house, the manuscript is “leaked” to the film companies, who decide to option/purchase the rights before the book is even out, and the rest pretty much picks up right along with Method #1. The book usually comes out long before the movie does, because print production schedules, though lengthy, take a fraction of the time that it takes to get a film up and running. This is more or less how it worked with Matchstick Men, a book I wrote in 2000 about a con artist with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The book was published in 2002, and Warner Brothers released the feature film in 2003.

And then there’s Method #3, which I shall describe, in excruciating detail, below. Method #3 is, as far as I’m aware, relatively rare, and my personal experience with it goes like so:

Sometime in 1997, while visiting my family in South Florida, I was driving along a street near my old high school and passed by a pawn shop I’d never noticed before. It must have been around Valentine’s Day, because in the window was a big cartoon heart, poorly drawn in marker, and I found myself wondering: Are they suggesting you pawn something you own to buy your sweetie a present for Valentine’s Day, or are they actually looking to buy used hearts? By the time I got back to my parents’ house, I had an idea brewing.

The result, a thirteen-page short story called “The Telltale Pancreas,” told the tale of an unnamed “biomechanical claims and collections” specialist who’d had an unfortunate accident with a defibrillator, received a new artificial heart that he couldn’t pay for, and was now holed up in the basement of his house, waiting for his former employers to try and come take back what was fiscally theirs. Sound familiar?

Now, keep in mind that in 1997, I was twenty-five years old, relatively fresh out of college, and teaching SAT and GRE test-prep to supplement the income my wife, Sabrina, was making as an elementary-school teacher. I had written but not yet sold Anonymous Rex, and it’s not like the short-story market was the booming, multibillion-dollar business that it is today. I didn’t expect much out of my little yarn, and with low expectations come low results. (That’s an important lesson to remember, kids.)

I do remember a few people being interested in the story, one of whom was Bob Kurtzman, a director, special-effects wizard, and friend who’d given me my first screenwriting gig ever. He felt like there was a potential film lurking in the tale, but I wasn’t ready to let the story go just yet. I found that I wanted to know more about my main character, and about the world he lived in. It was one of those ideas that held on and wouldn’t let go, and usually the only way to pry off the claws is to just write the damned thing. I decided to turn it into a book.

By this point, a year had passed, and in December 1998 (according to my computer) I started in on the novel. I’d recently sold Anonymous Rex, and I imagine that I was flush with dreams of literary stardom, anticipating that every word I’d write would receive accolades from critics and millions of sales orders from adoring fans.

It’s good to be young.

I worked on the novel over the course of the next year or so, interrupted here and there by publicity duties for Anonymous Rex (published in the fall of 1999) and the beginnings of Casual Rex. Mambo wasn’t the quickest book I’ve ever written, or the easiest. Its main difficulties, writing-wise, lay in the structure that I’d chosen for the piece. In order to portray a man whose job and worldview had taken away his ability to interact with and perceive humanity as anything other than a dysfunctional collection of its representative parts, I created a book that had a constantly looping internal structure and populated it with a bunch of characters who were independently related to the protagonist, like spokes of a wheel. Twenty years, five wives, ten soldiers, a score of co-workers, a hundred different clients, all in bits and bursts of sentences and paragraphs—not the most straightforward narrative.

Keep in mind, meanwhile, that the first draft of The Repossession Mambo was not the tome you now hold in your hands, but a rough-hewn ancestor, unruly and wild. Naturally, you’d think I’d dive into a rewrite and polish up those edges, tout de suite.

You’d think.

Instead, I did what I seem to do with certain books (and yet not with others)—I passed it around to friends. Surprisingly, few of them were frightened of me afterward, and most were excited by the potential. Special mention here to Brian Carter, who, over the last nine years or so, has never stopped asking me what’s going on with “that organ book.” Well, Brian, here it is. Ta da.

Then, a crucial turning point:

In May 2001, my daughter Bailey was a year old, and my wife did what many new mothers are conditioned to do: She joined a playgroup. It’s a good way for babies to get a chance to meet (and pull and pinch and occasionally smile at) their peers, and for moms to speak to other adults once in a while. One of the babies in that group was an adorable little boy named Zeke, and his mom was a friendly blonde named Kim.

Kim and Sabrina became fast friends, and, as will happen, they wanted to force their husbands to get along so we could all hang out together. It helped that Kim’s husband Garrett was a television writer, and we had all grown up within twenty miles of each other in South Florida, even though we now lived in California.

Garrett and I quickly formed a friendship. Though we had a lot in common, we never really talked about working together, mainly because I don’t have the stamina to write for television, and Garrett didn’t have a lot of interest in writing novels. What’s more, Garrett already had a longtime writing partner, a good egg named Russel Friend, and that’s not the kind of relationship you mess with lightly.

As will happen, I eventually forced The Repossession Mambo on Garrett, just to gauge his reaction and potentially alienate a newfound friend. Lo and behold, Garrett not only liked the book, but enjoyed it enough to suggest that we write a screenplay adaptation of it together.

Of course I’d considered the idea prior to this, but only in a far-off, one-of-these-days way. I’d never given thought to writing a script adaptation of one of my novels before even placing the book with a publisher. It simply wasn’t done. But as soon as Garrett said it, it made sense. No reason I couldn’t write the script at the same time as I was revising the book, right? As soon as Garrett ran it past Russel and got the okay—opening up their marriage, so to speak—we were off.

It was May 2002 when we began; Garrett was on hiatus from the TV season, and we worked diligently through the summer to wrestle the story lines in the book into something resembling a linear tale. We knew we’d need to give the main character a name, if only to be able to refer to him in the action of the script, and Garrett came up with Remy (ReMy—RM—Repo Man). We worked with note cards, a different color for each story thread, hopping back and forth in time and space, hoping that the visual nature of film would ground what was otherwise a tangled web of a narrative. Green note cards represented the main character’s present story line; yellow note cards were his past, slowly coming up to meet the present halfway through the film. Purple cards were designated as “pops”—quick bits of introduction to help ground the viewer in the world we’d created. The walls of my office slowly but surely filled up with this shifting, multicolored pattern.

On July 29, 2002, we had a draft. That first screenplay, while a definite adaptation, more or less presented the story as it was in the book you just (presumably) read. It starred our Bio-Repo man, his five wives, a sixth love interest and partner-on-the-run named Bonnie, a lifelong best friend named Jake, and their employers, the Credit Union.

It began in a rotted-out hotel room, with Remy at a typewriter, pounding out his life story, and ended with him in a hospital room, finishing up his tale, Bonnie’s heart beating away inside his chest. There were scenes of repossessions, of triumphs and arguments with his wives, of good times and bad times and scary times with Jake, and a lot of dark comedy that made Garrett and me laugh every time we read it. Many of those scenes would eventually make it into the shooting script and final film; many would not.

That fall, Garrett and I sent the script to our respective agents. We’re each fortunate to be represented by some of the largest talent agencies in the world, with immeasurable contacts in the industry. Naturally, we were excited when our script went out to select producers, and—

Crickets.

It was too strange. Too dark. Not action-y enough. Not for kids. Not for adults. Too expensive. Not big enough. Name the reason, and we had a pass for it. This is generally par for the course in Hollywood—there’s way too much product for too few buyers, and the law of supply and demand holds true everywhere—but doubly so for a script that actively tries to flaunt the rules. Our hero killed five “innocent” people within the first ten pages (and they said it like that was a bad thing).

Yet there was one lone voice of encouragement, calling out to us in the wilderness: Valerie Dean.

Valerie is a producer with fantastic taste, who’s got a knack for tearing off messy wrapping paper to uncover the perfect present within. She’s also got a wickedly dark sense of humor, which matched the Mambo sensibility perfectly. Over the course of the next half-decade, we’d find similar folk who would immediately spark to the script and invariably they’d be people we’d end up liking quite a bit. There’s a definite type that finds this sort of thing entertaining, I guess, and I’m proud to count many of them among my friends.

Val loved the script, and really seemed to get what we were going for. If anything, her suggestions were to make the script even darker in tone, and I couldn’t argue with that. My trusty computer lists 10 different drafts between April of 2003 and February of 2004, as Garrett and I refined the script based on our own ideas and excellent notes from Valerie.

At least two of the wives disappeared during this phase, a necessary cutback to allow us more time with the central characters. Furthermore, Val had the inspired idea to fuse the Bonnie character with the Beth character, allowing Remy not only to find love in the middle of the chase, but to re-find it, as well. We adjusted the ending to make it bigger in scale and concept, introducing the idea that there might be a way for Remy to free not only himself from the clutches of the Credit Union, but others, too.

The script, no doubt about it, was getting better.

Things move very slowly in Hollywood, and just when you think they can’t get any slower—boom—they all but moonwalk backward. But every once in a while, there’s a small shift that indicates progress. Just as we’d found Valerie a year or so before, we soon came upon the next piece of the puzzle.

Through Val, we were introduced to a young film director named Miguel Sapochnik. A British Argentinian—or is it Argentinian Brit? I still don’t know—he’d directed some music videos and commercials, but had really hit the mark with a short film called The Dreamer, which I’d recommend to anyone interested in cinema. (Notice how I used the word ‘cinema’ to make it sound all fancy? Hell, it’s just a great short film.)

As soon as Garrett and I saw The Dreamer, which is a visual mix of Ridley Scott, Terry Gilliam, and Stanley Kubrick (I know, big shoes), we knew Miguel would be a perfect fit for Mambo. Meeting Miguel in person only cemented our feelings; his wit was dry, he was incredibly easy to get along with, and, as we’d soon learn, he had a nonstop motor.

Miguel had only one concern: The ending. It was a bit too pat, a bit too easy, and didn’t follow through on the promise of the first two acts. Fortunately, it didn’t take long before we all figured out exactly what we wanted to do: a finish to the film that truly reflected the themes we’d worked so hard to infuse throughout the movie, and one that seemed to actually follow, logically, from the story that was already there. We went through a process of honing the screenplay even further.

More wives got lost along the way, and suddenly our main character was down from five wives plus a current love interest to two wives total. Peter was introduced as a character in his own right, rather than just someone who got mentioned here and there. Sergeant Tyrell Ignakowski disappeared, reappeared for a brief but glorious moment, then disappeared again. The war scenes got trimmed back; war training got lost entirely. In a screenplay, space is limited. You’ve got 120 pages, max, to tell your story, translated to 120 minutes up on that screen. Each moment so precious and difficult to pull off it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars—if not millions—to create. Every scene, every action, every bit of dialogue, has to drive the story either through narrative, character, or theme, or it goes bye-bye. There’s no space for fun but nonessential flourishes.

We lost scenes that I loved, but created more that I loved just as intensely. The Repossession Mambo, the film, was becoming quite different from The Repossession Mambo, the novel, yet still somehow retained the same feel, tone, and story. It’s what I imagine might happen if you were to clone someone at birth and raise the original and the clone in different households—their core makeups would be the same, but no doubt the environments would play a huge factor in the people they’d eventually become, and when they’d meet at the family reunion BBQ, they’d remark on how their hair and teeth and smile were the same, but one loves potato salad and it makes the other want to hurl. And so forth. We’d created both Mambo versions with the same DNA, but cultured one in a petri dish of words and the other in a petri dish of images. Neither was superior or inferior to the other; they were simply different creatures of the same lineage.

On November 7, 2004, we had a draft that we all adored. From that point on, everything should be smooth sailing, right? Great script, great director, what could possibly get in our way?

Lots and lots of nothing. Okay, perhaps it’s not fair to say “nothing,” because we had a fair number of nibbles along the way. Overtures from one company, “firm” commitments from another. We always believed that Mambo would find its best traction with an independent film company, one willing to put up a small-to-medium budget. Such companies are, theoretically, usually more willing to take chances with material than are the studios, yet as a result of said chances, most indies don’t have the funds or power to throw around, so things tend to take even longer. I started to believe that I’d be well into my sixties by the time the film ever got made.

Another year and a half went by, during which time Miguel was a tireless advocate for the movie. He went to more Mambo meetings than I’ve had hot meals, and each one looked promising before it, too, fell apart.

By this time, I’d already written and published Hot & Sweaty Rex; written, published, and seen the film version of Matchstick Men; written and published Cassandra French’s Finishing School for Boys. It wasn’t looking good.

Hey, that’s okay, I figured. I’d been meaning to get back to the book, anyway…

Then we got lucky.

Hollywood studios release about 150 movies a year, in aggregate. For every film that gets released, there are at least twenty-five in “development,” most of which will never see the glow of a projector. Much of the time, scripts languish not for lack of creativity—the writers and producers who put them together are talented people who, Hollywood tales of debauchery aside, work hard and believe deeply in their stories. Yet there are only so many release dates to go around, and only so much money that a studio, even a giant conglomerate, is willing to shell out. They want assurances that audiences will come to see the film, and there’s one sure-fire way to convince them of that:

If a movie star is willing to “attach” himself to the project, to essentially promise that he’ll act in it, then it gives the script a major boost in the eyes of the studio. Most films these days are set up only once they’ve got at least one attachment, and very few films, if any, are given the green light to start production unless the primary acting corps is in place.

In mid-2006, Jude Law read the Mambo script, and loved it. Even better, he loved the character of Remy, and wanted to play the part. I’m not going to start name-dropping (even though I just did), but I can’t say enough about Jude. He’s not only a fantastic, committed actor, but he has a knowledge and passion for the character that really helped to shape who Remy was and how he functioned in the world we created. Jude’s notes were on target, throughout the process. He’s bright, literate, and, okay, ridiculously handsome, and if he weren’t so damned nice I’d have to hate him just for that.

Now things really got moving. By the end of 2006, we’d hooked up with Scott Stuber, a producer who’d only recently given up running Universal and had a deal at the studio to produce films for them. At first blush, we were concerned that a place like Universal, home to blockbusters and broad comedies, might not be interested or the right place for our movie, but after conversations with Scott and our awesome executive, Jeff Kirschenbaum, we came to believe that they had the same vision for the movie that we did.

So: More revisions were suggested, and more revisions were implemented. Everything started to move quickly as the film began to come together. As we were rewriting throughout the first half of 2007, Miguel was meeting with actors and actresses to play the other parts, even before we’d officially made a deal with Universal. Word was out: We were going to make a movie.

Of course, there were still some minor things to settle, like filling out the cast, finding a location to shoot, hiring a giant crew, and getting the studio to sign off. Fortunately, all Garrett and I had to worry about was making the script the best it could be.

Finally, in late spring 2007, we made the deal and began working throughout the summer on further rewrites as we geared up for an October 2007 beginning of production. Soon, Forest Whitaker signed on to play Jake, Remy’s best friend and partner, and Liev Schreiber took the role of Frank. We couldn’t have asked for a stronger cast, or better actors to bring these characters to life. Remy, Jake, Frank—the people who’d lived inside my head for a decade—were finally becoming flesh and blood.

On October 15, 2007, we went before the cameras in Toronto, Canada, and with that, The Repossession Mambo was officially in production. I won’t bore you (much further) with the details, but from the day we finished the very first adaptation of The Repossession Mambo in summer 2002 to the day we finally began production, more than five years later, we’d written thirty-nine drafts. It had been seven years since I began the book, and nearly ten years since I wrote the short story. By the time you’re reading this in 2009, a full twelve years will have passed from inception to distribution.

An overnight sensation!

The upswing in the project’s film fortunes got me excited once again about the novel, and in early 2007, I dove into my own rewrite, tackling the book even as I worked on the screenplay.

Look, I love writing scripts. It’s fun, it’s a challenge, and I am, quite simply, a fan of the medium. I’ve spent many a wonderful hour in a darkened theater, and I can rant and rave about my favorites along with the geekiest film buff out there.

There’s something about writing prose, though, about really digging into the characters and story, shaping it in the manner that I want to shape it, that brings me unparalleled joy. Revising The Repossession Mambo, the novel, was like Dorothy returning to Kansas. I’d seen all my friends over there in Oz, and had a great time, but still and all, there’s no place like home.

So I kept the unruly structure, the five wives, the soldiers, the clients, the bits and bursts and all of that, but now with nearly seven years of distance, I was able to find the parts that weren’t working and either make them sing or cut them completely. I was able to see what had been missing before and find a way to fill in the gaps. Soon we sold it to William Morrow, and I got to work with my fantastic editor, Jennifer Brehl, in continuing to refine the story, world, and characters.

In short, it became the book I wanted, the way I wanted it. As a novelist, I couldn’t ask for more.

As I write this in the summer of 2008, The Repossession Mambo, as a novel, is finished, edited, and more or less out of my hands. The Repossession Mambo, the film, is still in post-production, but every cut I’ve seen indicates that we’ve made a movie that I’d adore even if I’d had nothing to do with it.

If there’s a take-away lesson for other writers (and there’s always a take-away lesson), it’s simply this: Write the things you want to write. If they’re weird or strange or don’t fit into some mold that the rest of the world seems to conform to, don’t stress over it. Don’t change what you’re doing one iota, so long as you still believe in it. That sounds all hippie-dippie and Up-with-People, I know, but I strongly believe that if I’m not absolutely in love with what I’m writing, then all I’m doing is typing. And there are lots of people out there who type a hell of a lot better than I do.