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Augusten Burroughs Runs With Scissors
From: www.writerswrite.com

" Running With Scissors author Augusten Burroughs discusses the adaptation of his bestselling of the same name to film.

It was from the very beginning... You know originally I had no intention of optioning Running with Scissors because I felt it would to easy to make a terrible movie out of that book. Something campy, something kitsch, something that didn't get IT, the depth, the real depth that I felt my mother... Ryan was very persistent, phoning my agent, emailing him. I thought I'd meet him and just explain that, you know, I love your tenacity BUT here's why it's not going to happen.

*****

I'm just thrilled with this movie, when I saw it, I was just devastated emotionally, but in a good way. I just didn't expect to be hit so hard emotionally. Because A I lived it, B I wrote the book, and C I toured with the book and talked about it, I don't know how many times. It just felt so incredibly fresh watching Annette Bening and Alec Baldwin fight in that scene in the kitchen. That brought back, I could smell that kitchen. It was so close to life. There were so many things in this movie are so close to life it just makes me shiver. And I think he did an amazing job with it so I could not be happier.

There's a mystery about creative writing, but it's a boring mystery unless you're interested in this one small animal, sometimes quite vicious, that makes its home in the bushes. It's a scruffy little thing with fleas and often smells of whatever nasty mess it's been rolling in. It can never be more than semi-domesticated and isn't exactly known for its loyalty. I'll speak more of this beast -- to which the Greeks gave the comically noble name musa, which means song -- later, but in the meantime, believe me when I say there's little mystery or tragic romance about the rest of it, which is why they never show the working part in movies about writers, only the drinking, carousing and heroic puking in the gutter by the dawn's early light.

Dig this: The so-called "writing life" is basically sitting on your ass.

There is indeed a half-wild beast that lives in the thickets of each writer's imagination. It gorges on a half-cooked stew of suppositions, superstitions and half-finished stories. It's drawn by the stink of the image-making stills writers paint in their heads. The place one calls one's study or writing room is really no more than a clearing in the woods where one trains the beast (insofar as it can be trained) to come. One doesn't call it; that doesn't work. One just goes there and picks up the handiest writing implement (or turns it on) and then waits. It usually comes, drawn by the entrancing odor of hopeful ideas. Some days it only comes as far as the edge of the clearing, relieves itself and disappears again. Other days it darts across to the waiting writer, bites him and then turns tail.

Mr. Richter began sending copies of the teenagers' book reports and photographs of classes to authors, hoping to entice them to visit the jail. Ernest J. Gaines was the first author to come, in 2001, after the group read A Lesson Before Dying (Random House), about a black youth sentenced to death. He has visited twice. Brian Jacques, author of the "Redwall" series, about mice who fight off evil rats, foxes and other predators, has also visited twice, on a book tour for his publisher, Penguin, from England. "They'd say, 'Why am I reading about mice?'" Mr. Richter remembered. "I'd say, 'Shuddup and read the book.' Now they love 'em." So far, 12 authors have visited.

Mr. Richter, 56, who has been working in prisons for 33 years, has no statistics testifying to the program's success or its effect on recidivism rates. But, he said: "When we first began there were lots of incidents of violence. It was nothing for somebody to walk into that unit and see three or four kids waiting in shackles to be put in disciplinary lockdown." Nowadays, he said, "we have very few incidents of violence. We may have a fight once every three months." For Tyler, charged with armed robbery, the program, "brings you into a whole new life for a brief period. Whatever you're facing here, you can put it aside."

The boys stay at the jail for an average of four to eight months. Eighty-five percent are convicted and go to adult prisons where there are few programs like this. What"s the point of offering them this brief look at literature? "If there is a salvageable lot, it's these kids," Mr. Richter said. "You can see it after they've been here a while. Their eyes grow a little less hard. They begin to believe there is hope for them." "They realize they don''t have to be dirtbags," he said, "though they might think they have to be."

"I'm certainly feeling very apologetic and deeply sorry that I inadvertently ... hurt the feelings of these people and just feel sorry about that," Oates said in an interview with The Times of Trenton. "Landfill," which was published in the Oct. 9 issue of The New Yorker, tells the story of Michigan State University student Hector Campos, Jr., who goes missing for weeks before his remains are found in a Michigan landfill.

The controversy arose after a retired professor at The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) noticed similarities between Oates' story and an incident that rocked the Ewing campus last spring, in which TCNJ freshman John Fiocco, Jr., went missing and was found dead weeks later in a landfill in Bucks County, Pa. A few professors and students at TCNJ condemned Oates' use of the incident as inspiration for her fictional piece.

Regina Kenen, the professor who ignited the controversy, was so angered by the story that she wrote Oates an email and copied it to her dean and the college's president and provost. "It was basically that it was so close to the truth and that the family and the college and the students had gone through such trauma," Kenen, who teaches a seminar at TCNJ, said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian. "It was the only case that I know about that someone went through the garbage chute. It could not do anything but bring back horrible memories."

In her email to Oates, Kenen said, "You so flimsily disguised the true College of New Jersey story upon which your fictionalized account is based, and used your imagination so cruelly, that it can only add to the overwhelming pain the [Fiocco] family has already suffered."

When it hits newsstands in April, Conde Nast Portfolio will feature lavishly illustrated journalism by some of the world's best business writers.

The new title may also distinguish itself in another way: as the last of the multimillion-dollar magazine launches.

With the Internet taking readers and advertisers away from print in dramatic fashion this year, the overall number of magazine launches is expected to plunge 17% in 2006, according to Samir Husni, a University of Mississippi journalism professor who tracks the industry. That would be the first decrease since the black days of 2001, Mr. Husni says.