As part of our ongoing Novel Film Series the SLC Film Center, The King’s English Bookshop, Mayor Rocky Anderson and Salt Lake City Reads Together (the Mayor's city-wide book club) are delighted to welcome Mark and Virginia Spragg to the Tower Theatre (876 East 900 South) on Monday, September 5 at 7:30 pm for an advance screening of
AN UNFINISHED LIFE, directed by Lasse Hallstrom and starring Robert Redford, Jennifer Lopez, and Morgan Freeman. A Q&A session with the author Mark Spragg and the screenplay writer, Virginia Spragg will follow the movie.
Join us for a fascinating look at how a novel becomes a screenplay. Mark Spragg has long been a favorite of Utahns, first for his memoir,
Where Rivers Change Direction, and later for his novel,
The Fruit of Stone. Just released in paperback,
An Unfinished Life (Knopf, $13.95) is the story of a family torn apart by time and tragedy, set against the backdrop of the Wyoming landscape. Virginia Spragg wrote the screenplay for the movie to be released by Miramax this October.
An Unfinished Life is one of three selections for the next cycle of
Salt Lake City Reads Together, Mayor Anderson’s city-wide book club. The other titles are
Refuge, by Terry Tempest Williams and
Charlotte’s Rose, by Ann Cannon. (Ann Cannon will also be at the theater before the film to sign her book.)
THE ADAPTATION PROCESS
Mark Spragg and his wife, Virginia, began working on the screenplay before the book was finished. During the long gestation of the novel over six years and "hundreds of hours of road trips" that Mark and Virginia made from their home in Cody, Wyoming, to visit friends throughout the West the pair talked ceaselessly about the characters and events that were inhabiting Spragg's thoughts. Spragg describes the adaptive process as a wonderful puzzle — to hit a point in the narrative and wonder how it could be satisfied in a novel and how it could be satisfied in a film. Eventually Virginia, a therapist with no prior screenwriting experience, decided to take first crack at the film script. Spragg says. "She broke every rule I had in my mind about how writers develop." During pauses between drafts of the novels, they worked together on the script.
WHERE THE STORY CAME FROM/STORY SYNOPSIS
An Unfinished Life is, the story of Einar Gilkyson's (Robert Redford) bitterness. Spragg relates that for several years his daydreams and night dreams were frequented by "an older man sitting tightly in a chair on a porch, scowling, sort of screwed down tightly in his bitterness, with a mob of half-feral cats about him. So when he and his wife started to talk about him, an inevitable therapist question arose — why is this old man so embittered?"
Einar's bitterness, readers quickly learn, stems from the untimely death of his 21-year-old son Griffin in an automobile accident about a decade before the novel opens. Since then, Einar has retreated into isolation on his ranch outside of Ishawooa, Wyoming. His main reason for continuing to live at all is to care for his oldest friend, Mitch Bradley, (Morgan Freeman) a black cowboy who has lived and worked with Einar for about 50 years and who was grotesquely mauled by a bear some years before and is now confined to the ranch bunk house.
Spragg says he realized quite early that "An Unfinished Life" was going to deal with forgiveness and, with that theme in mind, he could begin to populate the novel. Einar's opportunity to practice forgiveness comes when his daughter-in-law Jean (Jennifer Lopez) shows up uninvited and unwelcome at the ranch after running out of places to go. Jean was at the wheel when her husband was killed, and Einar blames her for the death of his son; and quite frankly, he is not about to forgive her.
And Jean is not about to forgive herself either. She has spent the past decade working out her guilt over Griffin's death in a series of abusive relationships. In fact when she arrives at the ranch, her most recent boyfriend, the malevolent Roy Winston, is tracking her across the country. Jean's one saving grace is her nine-and-a-half-year-old daughter Griff. (Bekka Gardener)
This child, with her mixture of tentativeness and bravery, wisdom and innocence, is Spragg's most shining creation. She's a very brave child, a child who's required to act older than she is, but who has the same fears and dreams and hopes as other children of that age. The relationship that slowly and excruciatingly develops between Griff and her grandfather, both of whom are astonished by the existence of the other, is one of the marvels of the novel and the film.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
One of Sweden's most renowned directors, Lasse Hallström is best known to international audiences as the maker of such poignant but resolutely unsentimental coming-of-age films as MY LIFE AS A DOG and WHAT IS EATING GILBERT GRAPE. He also directed other novel film adaptations such as CIDER HOUSE RULES, CHOCOLAT and THE SHIPPING NEWS.
LOCAL ANGLE
In addition to starring local actor and activist Robert Redford, AN UNFINISHED LIFE is Mayor Rocky Anderson's pick for the SALT LAKE CITY READS TOGETHER initiative, a national program that has been adopted by Mayors across the country. Mayor Rocky Anderson is sponsoring this new book club in the hope that readers can find common ground for discussion and understanding through reading. Mark Spragg, a native from Wyoming is a beloved Utah author and personal friend of Betsy Burton, owner of THE KINGS ENGLISH BOOKSTORE. For more information on the SLCREADS TOGETHER initiative go to www.slcreads.com - information on the book www.kingsenglish.com - information on the film go to www.miramax.com
Join us for a rich discussion on how an author and his wife journeyed to take the poignant, poetic and often sparse language of AN UNFINISHED LIFE and visually show us the depths of grief, embitteredness and ultimately forgiveness,
