Djelloul Marbrook

Once in a while I invent someone whom I wouldn’t want any known actor to play. Day after day I search the shelves of my mind for just the right actor, but they’re all wrong. I think the only thing to celebrate about this is a momentary triumph over stereotype.

On the other hand, some of my characters reach out from their stories, shove me aside and claim the actors born to play them. I’m always rather glum about that. Billy Salviati, the hit-man protagonist of my little novel, Saraceno, keeps confiding to me that if anybody ever makes a movie of his story the only man who could possibly play him is the Liverpool boxer-turned-actor Gary Stretch.

Who? I asked. You know, Billy said, the guy who almost stole Oliver Stone’s Alexander the Great from Colin Farrell. Oh yeah, he played Cleitus, the cavalry commander who saved Alexander’s life at Gaugamela and was less than enamored by Alexander’s globalization theories. Definitely, Gary Stretch could glower his way through Saraceno in high style and everyone else would bend themselves out of shape to deal with that beautifully enigmatic face.

Some critics have complained that Billy’s creator never guides the tourist through Billy’s head (guilty, as charged), but ask yourself where Stone’s Alexander would be without the imponderable Cleitus. He and Billy are catalysts: without them the others fail to reveal themselves.

I like to cast stories in my head. Not just my own, but those of writers I admire. I prefer actors who aren’t household words, at least not yet. The actors who obsess the tabloids have outsized auras. Their heads are too big. They’re too big for their roles. Their roles are just cosmetics. I prefer actors who thrill you for an hour or two and then go home, and I don’t care where their homes are any more than they care where mine is. I don’t want them to bump into me in supermarkets or bore me with their complaints about their lack of privacy.

Mr. Stretch, who was as good a boxer as Billy’s prototype was a thug, would make as fine a Billy Salviati as the actress Maria Bello would make a Connie Larimer, the battered but indomitable barmaid at Mina’s in The Village.

I grew up in a movie world. No television, not yet. The first movie I ever saw was Captains Courageous. I’ve seen it twice. I liked it better the first time. The second movie I ever saw was Beau Geste, the 1939 one with Gary Cooper, Ray Milland, Robert Preston and Brian Donlevy, the most hateful sergeant in film history. I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, and I liked it best the last time I saw it.

So maybe it wasn’t an accident that when I dropped out of Columbia the dean suggested I join the Foreign Legion. I joined the U.S. Navy, and I’ve always thanked God I disliked the dean. In fairness to him, I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual, if he thought about me at all. In case you’re wondering, I did think his advice was amusing, so you see I wasn’t a dour little puke.

Writers and the characters who people their stories have always been influenced by actors. But that side of the equation hasn’t gotten much attention. We’re always talking about whether an actor has interpreted a part well, but we should keep in mind that the parts themselves have probably been influenced by the writer’s having seen actors playing other parts. The fact is, whether we’re in the bedroom or the boardroom, we never know who we’re emulating or whether we get away with it.

A writer remembers a certain look or body language. Who could forget Gloria Grahame walking away from someone, anyone? It might have been the face of a bit player, an extra. And yet it emerges years later as an unforgettable character in a book. It could have been a bad movie or a face that vanished from public view, but it lived on in some writer’s mind and finally took on a life of its own.

The glances of waitresses and old shipmates have come alive in my stories, and those glances weren’t always for me. In public places, gatherings, on screen, the fleeting interactions we arrest take up residence in us. They go on living the lives we glimpsed. Every once in a while we encounter them face to face in a book, and it feels like deja vu.

Whatever the writer writes he has seen before—faces, words, gestures. Who can hitch himself up for a hard task without remembering John Wayne’s distinctive hitch when walking? All the actors the writer has enjoyed and all their observations of the human condition play a role in his work. His redheads may not look or act like Nicole Kidman, his antiheroes like Lee Van Cleef, or his blondes like Charlize Theron, but his brain is mobbed with indispensable faces and demeanors, and so are ours. We’re haunted by the people we’ve enjoyed and despised, and our responses to people and situations come from these earlier encounters.

This confronts the writer with a dilemma. If he’s a hack he has a vast storehouse of stock characters and situations. But if he writes for posterity and not the best-seller list he worries about merely reproducing some memorable portrayal that he has internalized. He must worry about reconstituting somebody else’s work. This doesn’t mean he can’t revisit a scene that moved him, or even a theme, or an actor who opened his eyes to a recognition, but while revisiting he must not loot. Instead he must create an alembic in which his pleasurable memories mingle to create something new.