The Washington Post, February 12, 2006, Sunday

Copyright 2006 The Washington Post
The Washington Post

February 12, 2006 Sunday
Final Edition

SECTION: Sunday Arts; N01

LENGTH: 2389 words

HEADLINE: The Price of 'Freedomland';
A Child Goes Missing. A Mother Blames a Black Man. One Writer Goes On a Long, Dark Journey.

BYLINE: Wil Haygood, Washington Post Staff Writer

DATELINE: NEW YORK

BODY:
The boy wonder burst onto the scene in the 1970s when he was all of 24 years old, with a tough, highly praised novel and soulful screenplays soon to follow. Richard Price was a hip white cat, who dug Gil Scott-Heron and Curtis Mayfield, and who used to sit in Times Square movie houses and watch "Mean Streets" over and over. That was Martin Scorsese's movie, all about crime, and the wicked, poetic, jumpy streets of New York.
Cinema back then had a kind of nasty film-noir magnetism. Some new directors were out and about, pointing their cameras in dark places. "The biggest compliment I could give a movie back then," says Price, "was, 'Now that I've seen it, I have to go write.' "
His first novel, "The Wanderers," about a teenage gang in the Bronx, was published in 1974. Two years later came "Bloodbrothers," about an 18-year-old who feels trapped by his working-class life. Both were on screen by decade's end. (Others got those screenwriting jobs). In succeeding years there would come more novels, and screenplays, too: "The Color of Money" and "Sea of Love" in the '80s and "Night and the City" in 1992.
A new movie, "Freedomland" -- from his own novel and screenplay -- opens nationwide this coming weekend. It stars Samuel L. Jackson, Julianne Moore and Edie Falco. It's about a missing child and a mother. The mother is white and she claims that her child has been snatched by a black man. So it's about taboos and history and folks who stand behind screen doors and believe what they want to believe, no matter what. "It's about the American flu -- racism," says Price.
The screenwriter first sniffed the story in the deep South, then came North and reimagined it on the streets of New Jersey.
He's rather thin and wide-eyed. Nearly Warholian. The black hair goes in various directions. Price has earned himself a fine home on the east side of Manhattan, decorated by Judith Hudson, his artist wife. Books are everywhere in his study, first editions in bookcases that rise to the ceiling. He collects them and reads them. "You go to used-book stores and they have these little sections with books under glass," says Price.
Lately he's been into Carson McCullers.
Price was still a young man when he reached a point that he could live solely by his writing. It's a rarity in American letters and he knows it. "All serious writers have to do something else," he says. "I don't know of any novelists who have kids who can take care of everything just from novels."
His 1992 novel, "Clockers," about teenage New Jersey crack dealers, was a critical success that captured the anxious cultural conversation about drugs, youth and the inner city. Price wrote the screenplay and Spike Lee directed the movie, which came out in 1995. But Lee fooled with it a lot. Price is diplomatic: "Spike does some amazing visual things with his movies." Then -- enough said -- he hunches his shoulders.
After he finished working on "Clockers," Price found himself without a writing project lined up.
It was the fall of 1994. He saw the flickers on a TV screen. Susan Smith, a white woman in South Carolina, was staring, teary-eyed, into TV cameras. Some deranged soul -- a black man -- had taken her kids, vanished, she wanted them back, Jesus.
The search played out on national TV. Like any parent, Price hugged his two young daughters, Genevieve and Anne, that much closer. He couldn't take his eyes off Susan Smith and the horror of it all. "Willard Scott was so upset once he couldn't even deliver the weather," remembers Price.
The town was Union, S.C. Price had never heard of the place. Oddly, he felt like bolting.
That night he tossed and turned in bed. "I spent all night Hamleting about it: To go, or not to go."
Next morning he grabbed some legal pads and pens, kissed his wife and daughters, and got himself out to La Guardia.
He's not a journalist in the old-fashioned sense of the word. He didn't have plans to immediately write about the unfolding drama. "I went to South Carolina without any portfolio," he says.
Upon arrival, he realized he had no feel for the South -- for sweet potato pie and folks helloing him out of the clear blue. A couple of journalists realized he was the dude who wrote "Clockers" and Price made friends quick. He went to the news conferences, asked questions and poked his head into buildings. "Everything in South Carolina seemed amazing to me," Price says. "Even the sides you could get at McDonald's. I was agog getting off the airplane. Susan Smith's whole story was right out of Dreiser."
He was there during the manhunt. The pain in the air fascinated him, how it seemed to bruise everything. He took a motel room out on a highway. At night he scribbled away on his legal pad.
Then the truth heaved up from the throat of Susan Smith: She had lied. There was no black guy. She put her two little boys -- one 3 years old, the other 14 months -- in her car and let the car roll into a lake, where they drowned. She would give her reasons -- she was depressed, her lover had abandoned her -- and a nation had to swallow hard.
But for many blacks, it was another case blazing up from the embers of history. A boogeyman with black skin.
It was the terror of it all that fascinated Price. How the drop of blood -- black guy, black guy, black guy! -- had contaminated the whole pool of water.
Price -- who returned to South Carolina for Smith's trial, in which she was convicted and sentenced to life in prison -- saw Smith as standing in the eye of a storm where sex and race converge. "You say a black guy did it, and it comes out so fast," says Price. "You don't even know you said it. What are you gonna say? A Bangladeshi guy did it?"
"I wanted to bring back with me why she had blamed this phantom black guy. People bought into it across the country."
The novelist had his tale.
And while he didn't know rural Southern towns, he did know the urban North.
"What happens if some white lady says, 'My kid got jacked in the projects?' What happens during the four to five days before she confesses?"
The novelist had his "Freedomland."
He created a detective, Lorenzo Council, who wears a porkpie hat, who knows the housing projects, who digs Al Green, who gets a call about a carjacking.
And he created Brenda Martin -- willowy, pale, spooky. But the novelist gave her something else: heart, layers, a thirst for love. She listens to soul singer Ann Peebles, who had a hit, "I Can't Stand the Rain." Back in the '70s.
Price spent nearly three years on the novel.
He is one of the few white novelists who write fully and energetically about black life. "Northern white writers sometimes see black people as another species," he says. "I think the white writer sometimes says, 'No, no, that's a hornet's nest.' Maybe even thinking it's cultural piracy. Whereas the white Southern writer says, 'I know blacks. I grew up with blacks. We were friends.' "
While working on "Freedomland," he hung out with homicide detectives in Jersey City. "You do what Damon Runyon did, hang out. I believe in hang time."
"He does his homework," says Detective Calvin Hart, whom Price befriended a decade ago while researching "Clockers" and chatted up while working on "Freedomland."
Hart recalls the day his superiors told him a writer was coming over to the Curries Woods housing projects of Jersey City to talk with him. "I said, 'Oh my, somebody I'm going to have to take out to lunch.' It was Richard, this little Jewish white guy. I said, when I first saw him, 'Damn, he looks like one of the guys I have to be chasing around the projects.' "
"Freedomland" was published in 1998. Critics adored the novel and Price holed up to write the screenplay.
For five years, though, the script languished. In Hollywood, things either languish or get made; sometimes the rhyme eludes the reason.
Years passed. Price, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter (for "The Color of Money"), mulled the idiosyncrasies of Hollywood. Of how a movie idea is hot one day, one week, only to vanish the next. "I was a prolific screenwriter in the late '80s and early '90s," says Price. "Hollywood had room for the $25 million movie then. And the movie could be about darker, edgier subjects. It could be about subjects that might not pack 'em in at the movie houses in Iowa."
So "Night and the City" got made, "Clockers" got made.
He stopped hearing anything about "Freedomland" making it to the screen.
Julianne Moore saw the script in 2000, wanted in the worst way to play Brenda Martin, but time passed. "I'd run into Richard at parties and ask, 'Is it gonna happen?' " remembers Moore.
The Brenda Martin character -- pulled from the whisperings of Susan Smith -- was not as coldblooded as Smith, which is what attracted Moore. "Susan Smith is psychotic," says Moore. "Brenda Martin has been ravaged by grief. She's self-punishing. She's loved in the community."
Price's saga, in both novel and script, is told in a zigzag motion. Jumping from the housing project to the white woman to the black detective to the woman whose activist group looks for missing children, the changing perspective is nostalgic for Price. "Everybody knows the '70s were the great day of independent filmmaking. The urban movies then were not beholden to a linear narrative. It was just one vignette after another."
When Price stopped hearing anything from Hollywood about "Freedomland," he turned it into a play. An old-fashioned theatrical drama. Toni Morrison invited him to come to Princeton, where she teaches, and stage it with a roomful of student actors. (One day, Hart, his detective friend, was invited to come have a look-see. Big, tough Hart came in hauling first editions of Morrison's books. Anyone who knows Morrison knows that's a no-no. "You should have seen it," remembers Price, guffawing. "Calvin with those books. Morrison doing a slow burn, half grin and half scowl. She signed them though.")
Then one day the phone rang. It was Joe Roth, head of Revolution Studios. "We're gonna make 'Freedomland,' " he said.
Price was back in the game.
Price was born in the Bronx in 1949. His dad drove a taxi and his mom had a small hosiery store. His only sibling, a brother, works for Con Edison, the New York power company.
Price went to the well-regarded Bronx High School of Science. "The alternative was to go to some big public school and get my ass kicked every day."
The housing project where his family lived didn't have the stigma of today's projects. He recalls World War II vets raising families. Maybe there were some knife fights, but he doesn't remember gunfire. "In the '50s and '60s, housing projects worked," Price says.
Raised modestly -- his was never a stone-broke Bronx family -- he's quick to give a buck. "I'll throw a track meet for the kids in the projects," says Hart, "and Richard will buy the food. He's been like that since I met him."
Price was accepted into Cornell and majored in labor relations. "For me," he says, "growing up and going into Manhattan was like being one of the Clampetts. So Ithaca was like Eden."
During his summers away from college he worked in construction. After Cornell, he got into the graduate writing program at Columbia. A short story of his got noticed, got sent to an agent, became "The Wanderers."
His daughter Anne is at Yale, and daughter Gen attends the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. Price teaches at Yale, so "I can see my daughter once a week." Gen acts, and appears in "Freedomland."
Price also writes for "The Wire," an HBO drama set in Baltimore. He wrote a part for Gen last season. "Last year she played someone buying cocaine," Price says. "She said, 'Geez, Dad, thanks.' This year I got her playing a crackhead."
He loves movies. But he doesn't feel that the industry -- old, old song -- always loves him back because it has gotten harder to get projects to the screen.
"I don't know where Spike Lee gets his money to make movies," he says. "I bet it's harder now." He's sighing. He goes on: "They can't afford to make cheap movies. I don't know why. I don't read Variety. But movies are geared toward big budgets. And the big budget story has to be simpler. Paul Schrader [who wrote "Taxi Driver"] once said to me that someone at a studio told him, 'Tone down the nuances.' "
And yet Price admits he roots for the town, the industry. "You keep wanting for Hollywood to say, 'Let's make smaller movies about people.' "
Roth, the Revolution Studios head and "Freedomland" director, also laments some of the changes across Hollywood. "I remember when a movie like 'Dog Day Afternoon' was considered mainstream."
Many smaller movies do find outlets, Roth allows, within subdivisions of big movie studios. It is the marketing and advertising for those movies, many contend, that get short shrift.
Roth and his eclectic cast -- Moore, Jackson, Falco, Ron Eldard and Aunjanue Ellis -- filmed "Freedomland," for the most part, in an old housing project in Yonkers, N.Y. Much of the movie takes place at night, with a palette dark and hard and nearly brittle.
The $30 million film shoot was quick, done in a little more than 40 days. Price says he marveled at watching Jackson, Moore and Falco work. Falco -- unrecognizable to those who know her only as Carmela Soprano -- plays Karen Collucci, an activist leading a search party for the child. Falco is black-haired, intense, at times acting with nothing save silences. "You can say movies are superficial to books," Price says. "But no. It's a trade-off. What a movie can give you is faces."
He has no idea how "Freedomland" will do, but he likes it, is grateful the project was retrieved.
Like Theodore Dreiser, who wrote about the poor and the desperate, he seems to bleed for his work.
"I wake up every morning," Price says, "and ask myself, 'What have you done for me lately?' I'm in low-key panic most of the time."
He's at work on a new novel, one rooted in the streets of Manhattan. Some poor kids and well-off kids, coming to blows. It's about class and culture, about what one group might believe about the other, beliefs leading to murder. It's about the bruises that hang in the air.