[In the following essay, Montgomery provides an overview of Russo's life, career, and literary concerns and discusses Russo's work on the film adaptation of Nobody's Fool.]

Richard Russo, novelist (three published to glowing reviews), educator (much-admired teacher of creative writing at Colby College) and seriously competitive racquetball player at the Waterville Downtown Athletic Club in Maine, is becoming a Famous Writer thanks to a movie. Thanks to the Paul Newman and Jessica Tandy movie, Nobody's Fool, now showing at your local theater and already the subject of Oscar rumors.

One of the burdens of fame is the interview and The Standard Question, which, if you write fiction, is about the similarity between the book and your own life. Recently, at WBZ-TV's cavernous studios on Soldiers Field Road, John Henning of The News at Noon asked The Question during a pre-show taping. It is a reasonable one, given that Russo has taught college English like Peter Sullivan (Dylan Walsh) in the movie, had a father who, like Donald “Sully” Sullivan (Paul Newman), the father of Peter and protagonist of Nobody's Fool, worked construction and deserted the family when Russo was a child, and who lived in upstate New York where the book is set.

The interview was swimming along under the television lights, a clip from the movie had been shown, the importance of Paul Newman had been acknowledged, when John Henning popped The Question, asking Russo if there was much similarity between him and Newman's son. Russo, and words are his business, was nonplused, flabbergasted and momentarily reduced to silence. The problem is, as Newman-watchers know, that Newman's only son, Scott, died of an overdose of pills and alcohol in 1978. And to an author, his characters are as real as any actor who plays them. “You mean Sully's son,” Russo finally realized. Cut, cancel, rewind the tape, start the interview over and, this time, avoid the autobiographical inquiry.

An hour later, while walking toward Harvard Square for a lunch and yet another interview, Russo remarked that there ought to be a constitutional amendment prohibiting questions about autobiography in fiction: “If I've been asked that once, I've been asked 10,000 times.”

FROM NOVEL TO FILM

Nobody's Fool, the novel, is a digressive, episodic, character-filled book of 547 pages. Turning it into a two-hour movie, short by today's matinee standards, was no easy task. “They made that decision early on,” Russo explained; “there are no car chases or murders, and they thought two hours was about right for people to spend sort of in the company of the characters.”

The original script by director Robert Benton was, Russo thought, “a fine, sound job.” But, a month into the filming (during the snowy winter of 1993-94, on location in upstate New York), small troubles began to appear. “They particularly started to worry about some of the bridges between the scenes Benton had pretty much borrowed directly from the novel. And they were filming out of sequence, that was the only way they could get Melanie Griffith and Bruce Willis [who play Toby and Carl Roebuck] involved, working around their schedules, and so they were working 14 hours a day and the director can't rewrite all night, so I'd get a call from Benton saying, ‘We rehearsed a scene all day and there's this problem.’

“So, we'd fax things back and forth,” Russo recalled. “When I did go down, Benton and Paul wanted to know even more about Sully than I had written, what else I imagined about him, his character, motivation. And there were some things completely missing from the movie, including Sully's relationship with Ruth [a book character who doesn't appear in the film]. Here's a character, as far as the script goes, who's been celibate for 30 years since his divorce. Paul was very interested in Sully's sexuality, how to show it. We even rewrote a scene, one in the diner, where the waitress has some verbal sexual byplay with Sully as if it were an ongoing relationship. But, when they looked at the whole movie, they didn't need it.”

Why, even on a cold, dark, December day in Beacon, N.Y., anyone would think Paul Newman might look like he'd been celibate for decades is a mystery, but that's Hollywood. It wasn't just Newman's fascination with Sully that let Russo know the novel was being taken seriously. When he saw Benton's sets, he got the message again. “I brought my family down [wife Barbara and two teenage daughters], and it happened to be the day they were shooting the strip-poker nude scene in the back room of the local saloon. Of course they keep everyone off the set who doesn't need to be there, so we waited out in the barroom. I thought it was a real bar. I was wondering how much they paid the owner to be shut down during the filming. It turns out it was an empty storefront made into a set. I thought they'd just take away the Hollywood stuff and it would be a barroom again.

“And Miss Beryl's house,” where Newman rents an upstairs flat from Jessica Tandy, “they had every single object in that house that was mentioned in the book. You remember in the novel Miss Beryl talks to Clive Sr., her dead husband, and to Driver Ed, the African mask on the wall. Well, talking to Driver Ed isn't in the movie, but the mask was on the wall,” he marveled.

THE WORLD OF WORK

There is, of course, to get back to The Question, an inevitable dose of autobiography in most fiction: Like Huckleberry Finn, Samuel Clemens did see a vicious fraternal bloody feud (although his was the Civil War itself) and he did, like Huck, “light out for the territories.” So, Russo has done his three novels set in upstate New York, and the next one, which he barely can bring himself to describe (“It won't sound right”) has a professor of English in it, and the setting this time is in Pennsylvania, a state where Russo, we are not surprised to learn, once taught English. Like Nobody's Fool, it is a novel that revolves around the world of work, in this case a department where the most administratively incompetent professor has been made chairman for a year while the search committee finds a new department head. “What he says in the novel,” Russo related with a grin, “is that they think they have put a harmless incompetent in charge, but they have no idea how much trouble he can cause when armed with a competent secretary, someone who knows how to fill out the right forms. That's sort of the idea of the novel.”

Work fascinates Russo, and has ever since he spent his summers between high school and college terms working with his father, constructing highways and bridges in New York State. The novelists he admires most have also been fascinated with work and occupation. One of them is Melville, whose Bartleby the Scrivener is purely a story that takes its themes and metaphors from employment and whose Moby Dick is infused with exacting descriptions of the details of whaling.

“Some of Larry McMurtry's best writing is about work,” Russo added. “Take Horseman Pass By, which is the movie Hud. What is it that Hud can't stand about his father? ‘Works me like a mule,’ that's what he says. And in Lonesome Dove, which may be the great American novel, the whole relationship between Captain Call and Augustus is set up by who works—Call—and who doesn't—Augustus.”

ON REWRITING WELL

And Russo flat-out enjoyed working on small revisions of the script of Nobody's Fool. He took enjoyment from the art of condensation and the opportunity to have a second go at some scenes. “There was one piece of rewriting,” he said, “that I wish I had thought of when I was writing the book. We had to condense the scene in the judge's chambers, the one where Sully and the policeman he slugged are in front of the judge who doesn't want it to go to trial.” The cop had fired a warning shot at Sully, who responded by cold-cocking him.

“‘A warning shot?’ the judge says in the movie. ‘All you warned was a little old lady two blocks away sitting on her commode.’ A great word, commode, I wish I'd thought of it earlier.”

Now just in his 40s, with a new novel under way, a Paul Newman movie credit (which puts him up there with McMurtry and Tennessee Williams, among others) and a good day job that pays the bills between royalty checks, Richard Russo has plenty of time to think of something.