The road from Hanover to Hollywood can seem rather long and untravelled, but this weekend some of that Tinseltown glitz will sparkle in Spaulding Auditorium.
The feature film "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" won't be in theaters across the nation until September, but you can catch a sneak preview this Saturday. What occasions the film's first showing in the somewhat unglamorous venue of a college campus? The screenwriter is none other than Bill Phillips, professor of film studies.
"It's a 'Romeo and Juliet' story," Phillips said. "A lot of tragedy, a lot of comedy. It's not like anything you've ever seen."
Phillips adapted "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" from the best-selling 1985 novel by Carolyn Chute. It traces the lives of two poor families, the Beans and the Pomerleaus, who live in Egypt, a logging town in Maine.
Martha Plimpton plays Earlene Pomerleau in the film, which follows her from childhood to her early thirties. Rutger Hauer plays Ruben Bean and Kelly Lynch and Patrick McGaw also star.
Phillip's other notable screen adaptation was from Stephen King's novel, "Christine" (1983). He has written everything from comedies to westerns and romances for cable television, and has written original scripts as well as literary adaptations.
"I always try to use the author's dialogue, descriptions and story as much as possible," Phillips said. "We had to pare things down-you always have to simplify, getting rid of characters and scenes, but we stayed pretty faithful to the storyline."
The actress Jennifer Warren directed the film, her first feature.
"It's a tricky book to adapt," she said. "The book is more episodic. The strong and weak points of the book and the film are the same."
Writing a film is no small task. Phillips began writing "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" in 1988, and has revised it 10 times, for artistic and financial reasons.
"Once the budget gets locked in, they ask you to make it a little cheaper by cutting out speaking parts," Phillips explained. Often a film character is an amalgam of several characters in the book.
Just as "The Beans of Egypt, Maine" is not a conventional Hollywood story, its financing was not on a typical Hollywood scale. The film cost about $1.2 million to make. Nevertheless, it attracted stars Plimpton, Hauer and Lynch, probably because of its unusual story.
"At one time actually Roseanne Barr was interested in playing Earlene. I think we all agreed we didn't want to go for that money," Phillips said.
According to Warren, the film, which was shot on Vachon Island, Seattle, will close the Seattle Film Festival in June and is scheduled for a national release in September.
Meanwhile, Phillips balances screenwriting and teaching. He described his next project as a "father-son story," and expects Brian Dennehy to star.
It is a neat turn of events that Phillips teaches screenwriting in the same setting in which he got his first break. Soon after graduating as a Senior Fellow in film in 1971, Phillips won a writing contest. His script was made into film, "Summer Solstice" and starred Henry Fonda, Myrna Loy and Lindsay Crouse. After receiving a graduate degree in film from the University of Southern California and living and working in that area, he returned to Hanover to teach.
"It's really nice talking to kids again. I get a feeling when I'm teaching that there's an opportunity to tell the truth with a capital T, as opposed to Hollywood, where its dollars with a capital D."
