William Monahan

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William J. Monahan
William Monahan in October 2006
Born	November 3, 1960 (1960-11-03) (age 49) Dorchester, Massachusetts U.S.
Occupation	Screenwriter Novelist Journalist Essayist Critic
Nationality	American

William J. Monahan (born November 3, 1960) is an Academy Award-winning American screenwriter and novelist. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Monahan moved to New York City to pursue a career as a journalist, writer and critic. He wrote for the New York Press, Talk, Maxim, and Spy magazine. In 1997, he won a Pushcart Prize for a short story he had published in a literary journal, and in 2000, he received critical acclaim for Light House: A Trifle, his first novel.

Monahan went to work in Hollywood in 1998, when Warner Bros. bought the film rights to Light House: A Trifle, which had not yet been published, and contracted him to adapt it to the screen. In 2001, 20th Century Fox bought Monahan's spec script about the Barbary Wars called Tripoli. Although his first two commercial screenplays were never made into films, he was hired to write many scripts over the following years, and eventually his screenplay for Kingdom of Heaven was made into a film and released in theaters in 2005. His second produced screenplay was The Departed, a film which earned him a WGA award and an Academy award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Monahan has asserted that screenplays should be authored by one writer rather than a collaboration of multiple screenwriters writing competing drafts. He follows his scripts through production, so that he can rewrite the script himself as the need arises and retain his vision for the story. Monahan started his own production company, Henceforth. Monahan has a wife and two children.^[1]

Contents 1 Early years 1.1 Writer and Editor 2 Screenwriting career 2.1 Working scripts through production and after 2.2 Becoming a producer 3 Credits 3.1 Novels 3.2 Films 4 References 5 Further reading 5.1 Interviews 6 External links

[edit] Early years

Monahan was born in Dorchester, Boston. He spent his early years in nearby Roslindale, eventually moving to the suburbs of Boston when his parents divorced.^[1][2] Over the years he frequently moved, living in many of the suburban communities on the North Shore of Massachusetts with his mother and sister.^[3] He regularly visited his father's home in West Roxbury, where he would immerse himself in his father's extensive book collection; Monahan particularly enjoyed reading Shakespeare's plays.^[1] His interest in movies began at age seven, when it occurred to him that a screenwriter was behind the story in Lawrence of Arabia.^[4] Monahan wrote his first screenplay at age twelve.^[5]

[edit] Writer and Editor

Monahan attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.^[3] He moved to New York City and contributed to the alternative weekly newspaper New York Press and the magazines Talk, Maxim and Spy.^[1][5] In 1997, Monahan won a Pushcart Prize for his short story "A Relation of Various Accidents Observable in Some Animals Included in Vacuo".^[6][7] Monahan was an editor at Spy during the magazine's final years, where he would come in at the close of the monthly issue to rewrite the articles and improve the jokes.^[1]

Monahan wrote a novel titled Light House: A Trifle and Warner Bros. optioned the film rights.^[8] In 1999, Talk magazine debuted and Monahan contributed a travelogue on Gloucester, Massachusetts to the first issue.^[9] In 2000, Monahan's first novel Light House: A Trifle was finally published and garnered critical acclaim; The New York Times proclaimed "Monahan's cocksure prose gallops along," and BookPage Fiction called Monahan "a worthy successor to Kingsley Amis."^[2][10][11] In the second half of 2001, Monahan wrote a fictional column at the New York Press under the pseudonym of Claude La Badarian, which ran for 13 weeks.^[12][13]

[edit] Screenwriting career

"I wanted to be an old-fashioned man of letters, so I essentially prepared myself very carefully through my 20s for a job that doesn't exist anymore; you may be able to find a man of letters in Syria or the Horn of Africa, but you could work Manhattan or London with dogs for a year and never find one. Anthony Burgess is dead, Vidal is the last lion, and at any rate belles-lettres aren't where they were left. Anyway, I'm making movies now. Just before all this happened, I thought, 'Out of everything you can do or think you can do, pick one thing and be it.' What I picked was to be the screenwriter."

— William Monahan

Warner Bros. optioned the film rights to the novel, Light House: A Trifle^[14] The screenplay adaptation has not been produced. Light House was released in 2000. A few years later, he bought back the rights and took the novel off the market.^[4][8]

In 2001, 20th Century Fox bought Monahan's spec script Tripoli, about William Eaton's epic march on Tripoli during the Barbary Wars, in a deal worth mid-six figures in American dollars with Mark Gordon attached as the producer.^[15] The script was given to Ridley Scott to direct. Monahan met with Scott to discuss Tripoli and Scott mentioned his desire to direct a film about knights. Monahan suggested the Crusades as a setting, reasoning that "you've got every conceivable plot imaginable there, which is far more exotic than fiction". Scott was captivated by Monahan's pitch and hired him to write the screenplay for Kingdom of Heaven. Tripoli was eventually shelved, but Monahan retained ownership of the screenplay, and therefore the right to consider new offers at a later date.^[16][17]

In the 2000s, year after year, Monahan managed to secure work in the film industry. Notably, Brad Pitt's production company Plan B hired Monahan to write an adaptation of Hong Kong director Andrew Lau's gangster film Infernal Affairs. Monahan respun Infernal Affairs as a battle between Irish-American gangsters and cops in Boston's Southie district, and Martin Scorsese directed the completed screenplay under the title The Departed for Warner Bros.^[18][19] Monahan's work on the film would later earn him two Best Adapted Screenplay awards, from the Writers Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

[edit] Working scripts through production and after

"The crucial skill of a working screenwriter is that you have to have some depth of ability and ideation. Your ninth idea has to be as good or better than your first, and that's where a lot of people crack up. You have to remain on top of your game and in absolute control of the text and a successful advocate of your own intentions no matter what influences hit the picture or from which direction. You do that by having the best ideas in the room. If you don't, you will be replaced. It's nothing personal."

— William Monahan, on developing a screenplay.[5]

Kingdom of Heaven was the first of Monahan's screenplays to be produced into a film. Monahan had negotiated a production write-through contract for Kingdom of Heaven, which allowed him to be present on the movie sets to make modifications to the shooting script during production.^[20] It was while he was on the set of Kingdom that his wife gave birth to a second child; a baby girl named Iris. Monahan managed to get two days off to spend with them.^[21] After production, Ridley Scott's put together a 3-hour long cut of Kingdom of Heaven and submitted it to a preview screening. The preview audience felt the 3-hour long cut was too long and gradually Scott became convinced as well.^[22] The theatrical release of Kingdom of Heaven was pared down to 145 minutes. It was poorly received by critics when it was released in theaters in 2005. Kingdom was described as a "confusing compromise at best and a dull obfuscation of history at worst" by Peter Canavese of Groucho Reviews and Jeffrey M. Anderson of Combustible Celluloid wrote that Kingdom "has at its center a bold story, and yet it sits there like a stone pillar."^[23][24] Ridley Scott would later remark that he got carried away with cutting the film in the editing room and learned that "the enemy is previews" because these test screenings are tantamount to asking an inexperienced group of people to be film critics.^[25] Kingdom was reappraised by critics when it was released on DVD in the form of a director's cut that contained an additional 45 minutes of footage previously shot from Monahan's shooting script. Critics were pleased with the extended version of the film and James Berardinelli of ReelViews remarked that "now that the director's cut is available, there's no reason for anyone to watch the neutered theatrical edition."^[26]

Monahan's second produced screenplay was The Departed, an adaptation of the Hong Kong action film Infernal Affairs. Monahan chose not to watch Infernal Affairs so that he could create an original interpretation, and instead worked from an English translation of the Chinese script for the Hong Kong film.^[27] As he had previously done, he negotiated a production write-through contract so that he could personally rewrite his script if needed during shooting.^[20] He spent some time rewriting the character of Frank Costello according to suggestions from actor Jack Nicholson, who was going to play the part. Monahan had originally written Nicholson's character as a 68-year old Irish-American murderer who is jaded with sexual intercourse, but Nicholson had his own ideas. Monahan credits Nicholson's notes for sexualizing the character.^[4][28] Monahan received considerable praise from critics when the film was released in theaters in 2006, and was applauded for accurately depicting the city of Boston. Monahan used his intimate knowledge of the way Bostonians talk and act, learned from his youth spent in the many neighborhoods of Boston, to create characters that The Boston Globe described as distinctly indigenous to the city.^[29] By the end of 2006, The Departed had won many critics' prizes. Monahan was honored by The Boston Society of Film Critics with the award for best screenplay, by the Chicago Film Critics Association for best adapted screenplay, and by the Southeastern Film Critics Association with another best adapted screenplay award.^[30][31][32] Monahan took an unusual route for a screenwriter and hired a publicist to run a campaign promoting his screenplay during awards season.^[33] Monahan ended up winning two Best Adapted Screenplay awards for The Departed, from the Writers Guild of America and from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.^[34][35] He received an award for his writing in film at the US-Ireland Alliance’s second annual "Oscar Wilde: Honoring Irish Writing in Film" ceremony.^[2]

As of 2007, Monahan is working on a film treatment for a follow-up to The Departed, which may be either a prequel or a sequel.^[36]

[edit] Becoming a producer

In 2006, Monahan negotiated a first-look producing deal with Warner Bros. which gives the studio the first right of first refusal on any films produced by Henceforth. In return Henceforth received the film rights to produce John Pearson's true crime novel The Gamblers, which Warner Bros. had acquired the rights to.^[37] Monahan has some familiarity with the various stages of the filmmaking process, working on Kingdom of Heaven and The Departed.^[20]

After winning an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Departed in 2007, Monahan was hired to work on two film projects: an adaptation of the Hong Kong film Confession of Pain and an original rock and roll film, The Long Play. Monahan will executive produce and write the adaptation for Confession of Pain. The adaptation of Confession of Pain will be produced by Leonardo DiCaprio's production company Appian Way for Warner Bros. Pictures.^[38] Monahan's other assignment is to rewrite a screenplay about the history of the rock music business called The Long Play. The Long Play is the creation of Mick Jagger, the lead singer of The Rolling Stones, and was nurtured at Jagger's production company Jagged Films. Martin Scorsese became involved while the film project was at Disney but recently negotiated a turnaround deal to bring the The Long Play to Paramount.^[39] In 1999, Jagger and Scorsese hired Rolling Stone magazine writer Rich Cohen to research and write the first drafts for the Rock and Roll story.^[40] In the intervening years Matthew Weiss, who wrote the screenplay for Niagara, Niagara, did several rewrites of the original drafts, and Monahan will now do a rewrite of his own.^[39][41]

[edit] Credits

[edit] Novels

• Lighthouse: A Trifle (June 2000)

[edit] Films

• Kingdom of Heaven (2005; screenplay)
• The Departed (2006; screenplay)
• Body of Lies (2008; screenplay)^[4]
• Edge of Darkness (2010; screenplay)

[edit] References

[edit] Further reading

• The first draft for Kingdom of Heaven is available on Disc 3 of the Kingdom of Heaven Director's Cut (Four-Disc Special Edition) DVD.
• The shooting script for The Departed is available for download on Warner Bros. website
• William Monahan (2000-10-11). "A Gallows Sermon: Life & Death Among the Decadents". New York Press. http://www.nypress.com/13/41/news&columns/feature.cfm. Retrieved 2007-03-06. 
• William Monahan (2007-02-15). "One flew over the Boston fence". Variety. http://www.variety.com/awardcentral_article/VR1117959665.html. Retrieved 2007-02-20. 

[edit] Interviews

• Dylan Callaghan (2006-10-13). "A Man of Letters". Writers Guild of America, West. http://www.wga.org/subpage.aspx?id=2240. Retrieved 2007-01-01. 
• Frosty (2007-02-18). "William Monahan – Exclusive Interview". Collider.com. http://www.collider.com/entertainment/interviews/article.asp?aid=3700&tcid=1. Retrieved 2007-02-20. 

[edit] External links

• William Monahan at the Internet Movie Database