Q & A With Tom Perrotta: Bad Haircut, Making Movies, and American Literature Today

Tom Perrotta
Bad Haircut: Stories of the Seventies
Berkeley Pub Group, 1997
Pick This Up!

A_P: The stories in Bad Haircut were published in the early to mid 90s. Did you write them then, and if so, what was it like writing stories based on events that happened 15-20 years prior?

TP: I grew up in the 70s, so when I started writing coming-of-age stories, the stories were naturally set in that period. I didn't have to research anything -- it was all in my head. I knew what music white kids in small-town New Jersey in the mid-70s were listening to, and I was well acquainted with the pothead culture of the times. It didn't feel like nostalgia or historical reconstruction to me, but I remember being excited by the feeling that I was writing about a time and a place that wasn't yet on the literary map.

The stories were written in mid-to-late 80s, when the 70s had lapsed into what felt like a state of permanent cultural oblivion. It took some time to get them published, but when they came out in 1994 the timing was perfect -- it was the first wave of 70s anti-nostalgia, a time when the forgotten decade was suddenly rediscovered in fiction and film. When Bad Haircut came out, the only other mainstream work that explored some of the same subject matter was Richard Linklater's excellent Dazed and Confused. As a result, Bad Haircut -- which was published by Bridge Works, a start-up small press on Long Island -- got a surprising amount of attention from newspaper reviewers, who used the book as an opportunity to discuss the 70s.

A_P: Do you do any of the actual screenwriting when your books are made into movies? How does developing a short story or novel differ from developing a script or collaborating with screen writers?

TP: I didn't write the screenplay for Election -- which I think is one the great scripts of recent years -- but I have adapted The Wishbones for film (as yet unproduced), and I collaborated on a script of Joe College and a TV pilot based on Bad Haircut with an excellent writer named Rob Greenberg. The differences in the forms are enormous. When you write fiction, you have complete control over every word. As a novelist, you're the King of your own little world. As a screenwriter, you're a collaborator at best -- that's part of the fun when things are going well -- as well as an employee of a production company or studio. Someone else is usually in charge, financially and esthetically. I don't need to tell you that the pay is a lot better, though.

Looking at a movie like Election, are you happy with the way it turned out versus the finished product in book form? I don't see it as a question of "versus." I wrote the novel exactly the way I wanted to, and I really like the way it came out. The movie, which I also love, is quite faithful to the novel in many ways, but also an act of inspired translation. It was fascinating to watch a world I'd imagined being recreated by Alexander Payne, a brilliant filmmaker with a sensibility that overlaps with my own but is quite different in a couple of significant ways. The result is a film that's much edgier and funnier than the book, but without some of psychological complexity you get in the novel.

A_P: How do/did you sell or option the story to Hollywood? Who held the rights? How'd you find a buyer?

Election was unpublished when it was optioned for film. I'd written it in 1993 -- in many ways, it's allegorical version of the 1992 presidential election -- but found that it was baffling to people in the New York publishing world. People kept saying that it felt like a young adult novel, except for all the sex and politics. They seemed not to know what to make of a book that asked adult readers not to just to care about teenage characters, but to see their stories as a commentary on the American political scene. So I put the book on the shelf for a couple of years.

In 1995 I went to Bread Loaf and gave a reading from my novel, The Wishbones, which was about halfway done. A screenwriter in the audience said she thought the book would make a good movie, and she gave my number to some producers she knew. When they called me about The Wishbones, I mentioned Election to them. I got as a far as the words, "It's about a high school election," when they said, "Send it!" At the time, Hollywood was in a frenzy for teen movies, and the very thing that had been such a stumbling block for publishers became a real asset in the movie world. I got lucky there, too -- MTV Films was just starting out, and they were interested at the time in making movies geared more toward a college-age audience. So Election was made without compromise, as a smart, R-rated high school movie. It had a hard time at the box office as a result, and there haven't been many movies like it since.

A_P: How much of the entire literary process is what you know versus who you know? What's the reality behind the myth every new writer subscribes to: write, publish, get agent, sell book, publish, get rich?

TP: Sometimes the myth holds true. There are people every year who walk out of creative writing programs, get an agent, and sell their first book for a lot of money. That wasn't how it worked for me, though. I wrote steadily throughout my twenties, published stories in little magazines, got an agent, wrote my first novel. And then the process just stalled. At a certain point, I had written three books (Bad Haircut and Election among them), none of which had been published, and was temping and ghostwriting teen horror novels for money. It was at that point that Bad Haircut got picked up by Bridge Works, a small press that offered no advance. But I was as happy as if a major press had offered me a princely sum of money. I was going to have a book, and it was what I'd been working toward all those years. And then, to top it off, the book caught on in a small way, and is still print almost ten years later, which is not usually the fate of small press story collections by unknown writers.

A_P: Why/how did you end up at Harvard? How/why did you leave?

TP: I came to Harvard to teach in the Expository Writing Program, the required freshman composition class. I taught there for four years, and stopped after Election was made into a movie. At first I expected to use the money I got from the movie option to take a year off, but then I started working as a screenwriter. I had been teaching for ten years at that point, and was happy to take a break.

A_P: What is the future of American literature? How realistic is it to expect people to digest full-length novels or collections in the face of other entertainment distractions? How do we keep from losing our "marketplace"? How do we get people to read instead of fire up the PlayStation?

TP: It's funny that you ask that question just now. Sometimes it seems like we're in a moment of immense cultural change when lots of traditional forms are being displaced -- the sitcom by reality TV, quality narrative films by high-concept blockbusters, the novel by the video game or whatever. But the new Harry Potter came out last week, and kids all over the country were lining up to buy it. So even the PlayStation generation knows the particular pleasure of disappearing inside a good book for a while, and living through characters on the page. For some small percentage of those kids, reading novels might even become a habit, or even a passion, the way it is for some small percentage of the adult population now.

A_P: What does it take stylistically, thematically to write a compelling story today, something along the lines of [David Foster Wallace's] Infinite Jest? Are the days of Raymond Carver gone?

TP: I'm not sure I buy the premise of the question, which seems to be that Infinite Jest is compelling today, while Carver isn't. It's true that literary fashions come and go, and there's a constant tension in American literature between plain-language "democratic" writers like Carver, and more elitist or experimental writers like Wallace. You might even say that it's a continuation of the Hemingway/Faulkner split of the thirties. I'm proud to say that I identify with the Hemingway, Carver, Tobias Wolff side of the equation, but it would be ridiculous to think that one side has a monopoly on "compelling" fiction.

Besides, that's not the only axis on which to judge American fiction. Where on that spectrum would you put Fitzgerald or Philip Roth or Joyce Carol Oates, for example? What about Grace Paley or Chang-Rae Lee? The great thing about American fiction is that there are so many camps, that our literature is as bewilderingly diverse as the country itself.

A_P: What projects are you working on now? What potential projects excite you down the road?

TP: I just finished a new novel, which is called Little Children, and will be published by St. Martin's next March. It's about sex and crime and punishment in suburbia, and is pretty different from any of my other books. I'm really curious to see how it's going to be received. The main characters are a stay-at-home dad and a suburban mom who meet on the playground and begin a passionate affair that's made possible by the fact that their three year-olds nap at the same time of day. During the summer of their affair, a convicted child molester is released from prison and returns to their town to live with his mother, causing a great deal of paranoia and even vigilante activity among some concerned local parents. So there's a sort of Updikean sex farce in the foreground of the book, and a real sense of menace in the background. Naturally, the foreground and background begin to merge at certain point in the story.