Scott Phillips
By Traci Angel
Photograph By Peter Newcomb
Your third book, Cottonwood, is now in paperback, and the big-time movie based on your acclaimed first book, The Ice Harvest, comes out in November. What are you up to these days? I’ve been working. I was in California and then at a conference and a book festival, but I’m trying to get back into everyday book writing. The other stuff is necessary, but it doesn’t put words on the page.
Can you reveal anything about your next book? Will it be another crime novel? If you have success with a crime novel, pretty much everything else you write is considered a crime novel. The next book is about a photographer. It’s loosely based on a true story that hap-pened in Wichita, Kan., in the 1950s, where a young woman, 20 years old, is found shot to death with a gun in her hand. Pretty obviously she had a traumatic life, but it also happened that her boyfriend was the married editor of a Wichita newspaper and they had just broken up. The other paper in town was playing it up that the editor may have killed her. There were no motives for him to kill her—she had had a couple of abortions, his wife knew about her—and there were plenty of motives for her to kill herself, yet the paper was writing things that were unbelievable.
You grew up in Wichita. Was this something you remembered from your childhood? I was too young to remember. My dad knew the guy. In researching this I found that they’ve never been able to find anyone to say anything bad about him. He was a very well-liked guy.
In your books, you often return to Wichita. When you’re gone from a place, you are constantly re-creating it in your head. I kind of feel that way about L.A. now that I’ve left. But Wichita has all these great anecdotes and characters—people in Europe think Wichita is a foreign, exotic place.
You lived in Paris for years, then in Los Angeles. Why did you return to the Midwest? My wife lived in St. Louis and worked at Wash. U., running the Edison Theatre. She loved St. Louis, and we wanted to get out of L.A., the traffic and the congestion and the expense. I love L.A. and I do miss it, but it’s not a great place to live.
St. Louis isn’t much of a writers’ market. Do you find it tough to work from here? There is something about having a book made into a movie that makes people treat you much more respectfully. I’ve always written for an imaginary reader whose tastes are more or less the same as mine.
You have a background in screen-writing. Were you considered to write The Ice Harvest’s adaptation? I had asked to do the screenplay and they said it was a possibility, but it wasn’t in the contract. They decided to ask Richard Russo and Robert Benton. Russo is probably one of my favorite American writers. To me, a screenplay with their names on it would get read.
Did you think your book was compromised in any way? Benton and Russo actually stayed closer to the book than I would have. When I saw it, I thought, “This really seems just right.” It was amazing. Oliver Platt [who plays the main character’s drinking buddy] is incredible. I was thinking, “Holy shit—he is really funny.” John Cusack, I thought, was kind of young to play Charlie [the main character, an attorney turned swindler] but as soon as the cameras were on, he aged 10 years into a middle-aged, beaten-down drunk. I watched it and thought it was perfect. There is a slight change in the ending.
So filmgoers should read the book first? I don’t care, really, as long as they buy the book. [Laughs]. I have no complaints with the movie.
Will Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton [playing Charlie’s partner in crime, Vic Cavanaugh] come to town for a big premiere at the Tivoli Theatre? There’s talk of doing something in conjunction with the [St. Louis International] Film Festival or a fundraiser for the county library. The Tivoli would be the place to do it, but it will be a matter of coordinating schedules. Those guys have a lot of places to be.
How did living in Paris change you? The main thing I miss about Paris is walking. I walk to my office in Webster—it’s about two miles—but it’s the same walk every day, so it’s not all that stimulating. The reason I do it is, I can do all my prep work in my head during the walk, and by the time I get there I’m ready to start typing. I also used to hang out in bookstores a lot in Paris. St. Louis is a good book town, with Left Bank, Big Sleep and any number of great used bookstores like The Book House and Patten’s. And one of the things that surprised me about St. Louis is how good the restaurants are. Nobu’s, Balaban’s, Cardwell’s, Rearn Thai ...
The Ice Harvest has been called “bitterly funny.” Can you explain the oxymoron? To quote Brian Wilson, “The laughs come hard in ‘Auld Lang Syne.’” My sense of humor is pretty grim, so my desire to write books that are at once funny and grisly comes naturally. I was talking once to a journalist who clearly didn’t like my first book. She was talking about how hard it was to get through, how dark and violent it was. Finally I said, “You didn’t think any of it was funny?” She was shocked. “It was supposed to be funny? Let me call you back.” A couple of days later she called, having reread it for the laughs, and told me she loved it. She started her article: “I failed in my first attempt to read The Ice Harvest.”
