A ‘Floor’ plan that worked

If this were a story written by John Irving, it would begin with the ending: A movie starring Jeff Bridges and Kim Basinger has been made of the first third of his novel “A Widow for One Year.” Its title is “The Door in the Floor.”

The journey from page to screen would be detailed, of course, with attention paid to the collaboration between a literary lion and a cub with a vision. But Irving usually starts his books by divulging the denouement. “So many films are ruined for me by a surprise being revealed at the end,” he says, “because you realize the writer and director didn’t have confidence in the power of what happened, and therefore they have to manipulate the order in which the audience receives the information.”

So on the first page of “A Widow for One Year,” 4-year-old Ruth Cole is introduced, and on the second, the reader learns that her two brothers died as teenagers in a car crash, “before Ruth was born (before she was even conceived).” It is summertime in the Hamptons, and although her family’s shingled seaside home is shelter-porn pretty, rage and sadness envelop it like the thick fog that creeps up from the beach on chilly mornings.

Since 1982, when the film version of “The World According to Garp” warned audiences fond of swimming in the ocean to “beware of the undertoad,” screenplays based on five of Irving’s 10 novels have been produced -- “Hotel New Hampshire” came next, then “Simon Birch” that was inspired by “A Prayer for Owen Meany” -- and two more are in development. “The Cider House Rules,” the most recent and successful adaptation, was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including best picture, and it won Irving an Oscar for adapted screenplay. So it wasn’t surprising that Irving had already received (and rejected) several advances from Hollywood before writer-director Tod Williams came to him with a rather radical idea for how to bring “A Widow for One Year” to the screen.

Most of “A Widow’s” cinematic suitors wanted to start the story with Ruth as an adult, then flash back to that fateful childhood summer. Irving had considered such a structure when he wrote the book, and abandoned it. “Given my 19th century narrative storytelling proclivities, to do it that way seemed artsy-fartsy,” he says. “It seemed like a kind of willful manipulation of the reader for the sake of ending with the devastating accident last.” Early knowledge of the tragedy that traumatized Ruth’s mother, Marion, and father, Ted, a celebrated creator of children’s books, doesn’t diminish its emotional impact. “Ted’s idea of storytelling is very much my idea,” Irving says. “Let the audience see what’s coming, but don’t let them see everything that’s coming.”

Road trip

WILLIAMS didn’t plan to let the audience know everything that would happen to Ruth Cole in the 37 years the novel spans either. He had read the first 185 pages in a sitting and, before turning to the next page, recognized that the first of the book’s three parts contained a discrete story. It was poignant, intimate, funny and sexy, enriched by several of the themes that recur in Irving’s work -- loneliness, lust, love and loss; fear of disaster, of wayward snowplows and unnameable terrors that lurk under the floorboards of happy homes. It was “a complete experience,” Williams says.

“Kip” Williams, now 35, was then a 31-year-old graduate of the American Film Institute’s directing program with one $350,000 feature on his resume, The Adventures of Sebastian Cole.” The sanest, most responsible character in that coming-of-age comedy was the protagonist’s stepfather, Hank, who becomes Henrietta in the middle of the movie. Reviewers who were reminded of Roberta Muldoon, “The World According to Garp’s” sweet transsexual, described the film as “Irving-esque.” It was an official selection of the Sundance Film Festival, but was criticized for being too episodic. With hindsight, Williams agrees. “My first movie was kind of formless. I spread my focus over a bunch of different characters, and didn’t know where to go with them. Part of what appealed to me about the first part of ‘A Widow for One Year’ was there wasn’t a ton of story to tell as much as there were characters to reveal. By not doing the whole book we could really spend time with these people, and I was interested in learning from John’s incredible sense of structure.”

He envisioned a movie based on just the first part and told his idea to Ted Hope, an independent producer with a distinctive list of credits (“The Ice Storm,” “21 Grams,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”). “I thought he was crazy,” Hope says. “The idea made sense, but I still thought we’d never get permission to do it. We didn’t have any money and weren’t planning to develop the project with a studio. I figured John’s books went for hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction, and he was notorious for not being pleased with the results.”

But Irving’s motion picture agent, Robert Bookman of Creative Artists Agency, was encouraging. “John isn’t driven by money,” he told Hope. He suggested the filmmaker explain his concept in a letter. Williams worked on his letter for three weeks. Hope wrote one too, including his memories of Irving as his wrestling coach at Exeter in the late ‘70s, just before “Garp” became a publishing sensation. Hope’s partner, Anne Carey, gave notes on both. The day after Irving read the letters, Tobey Maguire re-introduced him to the producer at the 1999 Toronto Film Festival, where the Ang Lee film Hope co-produced, “Ride with the Devil,” and “The Cider House Rules,” both starring Maguire, premiered. Irving had been sufficiently intrigued by the epistolary pitch to ask Hope to send him a tape of “The Adventures of Sebastian Cole.” The sensitivity and storytelling skill Williams would bring to “The Door in the Floor” wasn’t evident in his debut film, but Irving liked the movie well enough. An invitation to the author’s Vermont home followed.

New England’s fall foliage was in full glory when Williams and Hope drove from New York to the adopted land of Ben & Jerry. Williams found the prospect of meeting Irving intimidating, and feared they might be traveling a long way to hear the writer say, “No.” Hope recalls, “I was afraid I was going to screw it up somehow and we’d reveal that we weren’t smart enough or something.”

The initial meeting lasted two hours. “In a very short time we realized we understood each other,” Williams says. “John made me feel very, very comfortable because we were talking about concrete things. I felt I was on solid ground because I knew exactly what I wanted to do. John is so confident, but he isn’t cocky at all. There’s a humility there too.”

Irving had seen no way to make the passage of time in “A Widow for One Year” work in a film, but he found Williams’ solution “so perfect.” “From a novelist’s point of view, the kind of adaptation Kip did is not only faithful, but it leaves the rest of the book to be discovered by moviegoers who want to find out what happens to Ruth,” Irving says. “This novel is in three parts, like a play in three acts. There is beginning and closure to its parts. In a sense, you lose nothing. One thing we talked about early on was it isn’t enough in a film to be faithful to the book. There are those films which are literally faithful to a book which fail in many ways because they’re too faithful. We talked about Kip having to do something that made this his film, and not my novel. I think that’s what he really did brilliantly. From the very beginning I was impressed by his ideas about how to do something that I didn’t do, even if it meant repositioning something that was in the novel. If you feel you’re being faithful to what matters about the story, then you can be brave enough to do things that were never in my story. Kip did that in the first draft, and even more so as he progressed.”

The first conversation at Irving’s home moved on to dinner at a local restaurant, then an invitation to stop by the next day. By the time Hope and Williams left, they had a handshake deal for Williams to write a script that he would direct. Irving would act as an advisor, and was given approval of the script, casting and the film’s title. (“The Door in the Floor” is the title of one of Ted Cole’s books for children.) This agreement gave Irving unusual control, but he didn’t receive payment until the film went into production.

In Vermont, Williams developed a bit of a crush on the lifestyle of the man who would become his mentor and good friend. “John is one of the first people I’d met who had figured out the best way to live,” he says. “All his work is at his fingertips and in his head. He can do it without anyone else’s permission. He seems madly in love with his wife, madly in love with his children, and totally able to keep the rest of the world exactly where it needs to be. I’d like to emulate not just his success, but his creative separation from the world and the way he’s able to come in and out of it.”

Back and forth

The first draft took a month to write. Then Williams wrote 100 more. “You just have to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite,” he says. “That’s what John does and what he taught me to do.” Candor was at the heart of their relationship. “Even at the risk of alienating someone, you have to say what you like and what you don’t about the material at hand and why you like this more than you like that,” Irving says. “Because how else can someone get to know you? In the 13 years it took to get ‘The Cider House Rules’ made, I went down short and long roads with a couple of directors before we got to Lasse Hallstrom. One of those collaborations was ludicrous, and the other was frustrating for the very reason of how much candor was lacking on the part of the director.”

Irving is a trim, compact middleweight with superior posture, a natty dresser whose manner is infused with Yankee formality, the occasional four-letter word notwithstanding. Although Williams chooses his words carefully, his casual style is defined by a tendency to let his thick black hair do whatever it wants and to make shaving a low priority. After an advance screening at the Writers Guild in April, they huddled together, discussing plans for the following day’s joint interview. Huddling presents something of a challenge, since the rangy young man towers above the novelist, 27 years his senior.

Williams was always respectful with Irving, but not guarded. “From the beginning, John made it clear that we could disagree without rancor,” he says. “If he’d had an imperious, ‘Don’t touch my stuff, don’t mess with anything’ attitude, then we’d have had a collaboration that became about trying to figure out ways to get around each other. I could speak my mind, and he didn’t make me feel like I couldn’t say something dumb. That was an amazing gift.”

At various stages, there were a number of problems for the production team to solve. Irving and Williams talked frequently on the phone, considering such questions as whether to abandon the period setting of the first part of the novel, which takes place in 1958. No one wanted the movie to be an exercise in nostalgia, so it was updated to the present day. Other decisions were thornier. Irving’s characters go through their days shifting from delight to dread. How would his signature changes in tone be navigated? And whose story was this? In the book, it’s Ruth’s. In the film, it could be Ted’s, Marion’s or Eddie’s. Since Eddie has an affair with the shattered Marion, there was the danger of the movie turning into his coming-of-age chronicle, a soft-focus “Summer of ‘42” redux. Speaking of the 16-year-old’s erotic awakening, as well as Ted Cole’s philandering, how would the sexuality be handled? As some early choices were reconsidered, scripts, dailies and rough cuts were sent to Vermont, and Irving offered suggestions in long, typewritten faxes.

Irving particularly enjoys how a film is shaped in the editing room. “Writing a screenplay isn’t like writing a novel at all. The process of making a finished film better, of losing things, putting things back, repositioning, taking the music out here and a line of voice-over out there, that’s a lot more like writing a novel, so I felt I had a feeling for that,” he says. “As a writer of long novels, I over-tell everything. I feel you can’t say something enough. Kip’s instinct is not to say it at all. Going through as many rough cuts and final cuts as I saw, I now feel it’s entirely in keeping with the tone of this film to do less.”

Williams and Irving shared a crucial dedication to making the audience feel compassion for their characters. The director tended to give Ted a clean slate. The author was less judgmental of Marion, and that conflict created balance. As Ted says in the film, “Everyone feels morally superior to someone.”

To Irving, the challenge in storytelling is to create sympathy for someone who on the surface isn’t sympathetic. “People judge other people for what they do. We all do it. There is a degree to which the novel and this film are studies of the kind of people who can get over things and the kind who can’t,” he says. “It’s about expanding sympathy for people who, if you heard an outline of the events of their life, you wouldn’t necessarily feel any for.”

Chances are, anyone who believes that infallible human beings actually exist was born yesterday. Irving portrays flawed people, and in the process illuminates ... everyone. And he does so with generosity that is at once substantial and subtle. “This film asks you to understand, over a period of time, characters in their contexts,” Williams says. “In some ways, the movie is asking the audience, with very little evidence, to give Marion grace. That is the whole question -- whether you can or can’t.”