Adventures in Austenland #2
Jerusha and I had a nice and casual conversation over burritos, she paid, and as we walked back to our cars, I was feeling anxious, as is my wont—had my conversation been interesting enough to her to make paying for my $4.
95 lunch special worth it??? I opened my car door and noticed a copy of Austenland on my front seat.
I wasn’t in the habit of carrying my books around, and I can’t remember why it was even there, but fretting that I owed her something, I grabbed it and off ered it to her as a thank-you.
I am normally very shy about pressing my books on others.
It feels so presumptuous to assume anyone would want one of my books.
That I got over this phobia in this instance proved to be serendipitous.
Jerusha emailed me twenty-four hours later saying, “Let’s make this book into a movie!”
Jerusha and I wrote the screenplay together, with the plan that she would direct, and I soon acclimatized myself to Jerusha’s writing process.
Basically, we sat in a room together pitching lines and ideas.
If I made her laugh, it was a keeper. If not, she’d say, “That’s stupid.
” Thank goodness for emails like ol’ wilted celery to build up my thick skin.
Honestly, I relished her method. It made clear that the script existed in the space between us, and we were free to critique The Idea without critiquing The Person.
I think this is the only way that creative collaboration can effectively work.
The process also made me realize that I’m not precious with my work.
Most of the ways the screenplay’s plotline broke with the book’s were my suggestions—Nobley’s identity, the blown-up theatrical, the hunting scene and aftermath in the rain, etc.
And I relished exploring the story in a visual medium, experimenting with new ways to tell it and create laughs.
But the time I dedicated was a massive risk for me.
Dean and I were not rolling in surplus dough, and it was hard for me to justify taking months of work time away from writing novels, which I would likely be able to publish, to instead work on a screenplay, a notoriously difficult writing project to sell.
But besides the gorgeous hope of the end goal, the process of cowriting with Jerusha was high-energy fun, especially for an extroverted novelist who was largely housebound with small children.
Since writing is a solitary endeavor and reader feedback distant and impersonal, it was such a treat to be working with someone and getting instantaneous feedback, not to mention how surreal to be pitching lines to a genius comedy writer.
And sometimes—sometimes—even making her laugh.
A year later, we had a decent draft of the screenplay, and my writer friend Stephenie Meyer joined our team as a potential producer.
At the time, Steph (author of Twilight, a Time 100 and a Hollywood Reporter most-influential woman in Hollywood) could have done just about anything, but she was magnanimous enough to throw her support behind female writers and a first-time female director. Her generosity still takes my breath.
The three of us spent a cozy working weekend together in Washington state, troubleshooting script problems and making movie plans.
I was hugely pregnant with twins, and even standing up provoked Braxton-Hicks contractions.
Jerusha pushed me through airports in a wheelchair and generally made me laugh so hard my womb-crushed bladder was pushed to its limits.
One afternoon after a lunch out, we stopped by a lavender farm. As we browsed the gift shop, the woman at the counter asked us, “Are you ladies headed to Forks?”
I knew Forks was the real Washington town where Twilight takes place, but I couldn’t resist this delicious scenario and played ignorant, asking, “What’s Forks?”
“You know the Twilight movies? They happen in Forks. It’s about an hour from here. We get groups of women coming through on their way. Why, one time the author of the books even came in!”
I was positively giddy that she had invoked The Author, who was incognito standing right beside me, so I said, “You’re kidding! What was she like?”
At just that moment, Steph had been taking out her credit card to pay for her purchases, but she casually put it back in her purse and went instead for cash.
“Well, I was in the back of the shop,” said the woman, “but the girls said she was very nice.”
“That’s a relief,” I said. “You really hope famous people will be nice, you know? And not so high-and-mighty that they forget the regular people.”
I held in my laugh as we left. Steph whispered, “I am going to kill you.” So far, she hasn’t.
OFF TO JOLLY OLD
My twin pregnancy came with unrelenting nausea.
By week twenty-eight my uterus was the same size as it would’ve been with a single baby at week forty—and I still had nine to twelve weeks to keep growing.
After five weeks of bed rest (“rest” is misleading—more accurately it was weeks of incarceration, insomnia, and constant pain), I had a C-section, and then was home full-time in a cold-and-flu-riddled winter caring for twin babies, in addition to my three-year-old and six-year-old.
I often went an entire week without even stepping outside the door of my house.
It was a long, complicated, horrible year—and somehow at the same time, joyfully glorious to a magical degree.
The babies were just so awesome. Despite the challenges, I was completely in their thrall. Babies are the most deceptive, cleverest predators in nature. I served the baby overlords and was happy in my captivity.
And yet at the same time, I was legit stir-crazy.
In the spring of 2011, preproduction began.
It was to be an English summer shoot, and after anxious, panicked weeks trying to decide if I really could leave my seven-year-old and four-year-old for seven weeks, I decided this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience I would always regret missing.
Dean agreed. So I swept up my twin babies and Kayla, our game-for-anything teenage neighborhood babysitter, and flew to England for the entire shoot as an associate producer/book writer/co-screenwriter/happy-to-be-there bystander.
I arrived a few days early to try to learn to drive my rental car on the other side of the street and to acclimate to the time change.
Or acclimate two babies. There were a lot of three A.M. squeal parties.
So by the first morning of the shoot, I was still pretty sleep-deprived and driving-nervous.
The night before, I’d preprogrammed the GPS, aka satnav, and studied the route several times.
I was anxious to be on time, but given the previously mentioned midnight baby wakings, I also needed to sleep in as long as possible.
So I set my alarm for only an hour before I’d have to arrive.
The babies and nanny were still asleep as I got ready.
I was going to be on a movie set full of beautiful actors, so I was determined to at least try to look my best. The only clothes that fit my postpregnancy/still-nursing body were a few maternity pieces and baggy sweaters, and I hadn’t had the time, money, or energy to shop for a whole new wardrobe for between-body. But maybe I could have cute hair?
I plugged my flat iron into the transformer, unaware that those things do a rotten job transforming the UK’s high voltage for energy suckers like flat irons.
Anxious and in a hurry, I’d finished my whole hair by the time I finally noticed that unsettling burning smell.
The flat iron had been Hades hot. I completely fried my hair.
No time to deep condition or chop it off or buy a wig—the call time was in thirty-five minutes, and I was thirty minutes away.
As I drove, I chanted to myself, “Stay left, stay left, stay left,” and then, as I approached a roundabout, “Yield right, yield right, YIELD RIGHT!” Then I got on a highway, where at least I didn’t have to worry about staying and yielding. I was home free! But . . .
When I was ten minutes away, the satnav suddenly said, “Recalculating . . .” in a judgmental and posh tone, and then changed the time of arrival back to thirty minutes.
I cursed in British and kept driving, paying even closer attention, determined not to make another mistake.
Sometime later, as I was driving straight, just as the satnav had seemed to tell me to do, again I got “Recalculating . . .” and the arrival time reset to thirty.
A second fluke? I refocused. It happened again.
And again. And again. Again . . . Driving on the right side of the car took all my concentration, the roads were unfamiliar, and I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong.
I couldn’t even figure out how to get off the freeway to ask for help, stuck on an endless looping speedway.
An hour and a half in I was sobbing. Two hours in I was praying to the deities of English freeways.
Was I being divinely punished? Had I been inserted into The Twilight Zone ?
Two and a half hours in, I almost believed I’d entered some version of hell and would live on Sisyphus Freeway for eternity.
Eventually, I came to recognize the point at which it would reset back to thirty minutes, and just before, I made a different choice than the satnav asked me to.
It worked, I crawled my way out of whirling loops of Charybdis, and I found the set—three hours late and with hair that looked like a haystack.
But I had arrived. I was on the set for the movie of my book.
A REAL LIVE MOVIE SET
“You don’t really want to be there for the entire shoot,” several movie-savvy people had told me. “Moviemaking is boring. You just sit there far away from all the action, watching on a tiny screen, listening in on a headset, all day for take after take after take . . .”
They were so wrong.