The price of city life

Writer Richard Price is a noir naturalist, the bright, savage love child of Emile Zola, James T. Farrell, and Mickey Spillane. Born in the Bronx in 1949, he has never really left, in imagination, that borough of the unglamorously damned and doomed. Price's early novels - The Wanderers (1974), his first, and Blood Brothers (1976) - dealt with the kids of his own youth. His last novel, Clockers (1992), was set in Jersey City; the movie Spike Lee has made of it, from a script by Price and Lee, transfers the action to Brooklyn, though its edgy, angry despair is pure Bronx - and a grimmer Bronx than that of Price's salad days. It's a story of two cops (Harvey Keitel, John Turturro), a Fagin-like drug dealer (Delroy Lindo), and two black brothers - one a "clocker," or small-time dealer (Mekhi Phifer in a remarkable debut), and the other a hardworking family man (Isaiah Washington).

Although Lee sounds notes of responsibility and self-help, for Price there are no villains, no happy endings, no hope. But he has a fine ear for the talk of the streets and an ability to heighten that talk into art. Before Clockers, he had written a bunch of films, never straying from his urban oeuvre: The Color of Money (1986, directed by Martin Scorsese), Sea of Love (1989, Harold Becker), Night and the City (1992, Irwin Winkler), Mad Dog and Glory (1993, John McNaughton), and Kiss of Death (1995, Barbet Schroeder).

DONALD LYONS: Do you like working in film?

RICHARD PRICE: I complain about it a lot. But I guess the dirty secret of everybody who complains about it a lot is that they also like it - and they like to complain about it. I like writing first drafts the best, because you lose your independence after that and have to write interminable new drafts. Each time, you con yourself into thinking that this is the draft that's going to be accepted. It's like being in A.A. One draft at a time. You take the money, do the job. You don't want to do the job, don't do the job, don't take the money.

DL: Were you happy with the [1979] film of your first book, The Wanderers?

RP: I liked parts of it. It didn't seem like my book to me, which in a funny way made the experience better, because I didn't take personally how they interpreted everything. For me, seeing it was like an out-of-body experience.

DL: Was it filmed in the Bronx?

RP: Yeah. When The Wanderers was playing in the movie theaters I grew up around and had gone to as a kid, it became like the Rocky Horror Picture Show for the neighborhood. People would see it a million times, because a lot of the local kids were extras.

DL: Theaters like the Loews Paradise on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx?

RP: Yeah, like Moorish palaces. The Paradise was the biggest. I graduated from junior high and high school in the Paradise.

DL: I grew up in Queens, and we had the same deal. What kind of movies did you like as a kid?

RP: Horror movies, number one. And then macho movies like The Hustler and The Manchurian Candidate and Requiem for a Heavyweight. They were all at the literary level of Rod Serling; they'd seem brilliant to a ten-year-old, yet couldn't be more complex.

DL: Did you try for those colors when you started writing scripts?

RP: The first script I wrote was Night and the City. I had read the novel and seen the original movie, which was pretty dark. In my version, I wanted the guy, Harry [played by Robert De Niro], to die like he did in the 1950 film, but it was just unacceptable to the studio. It's amazing what the studios won't let you do anymore. They can't risk people coming out of the theaters unhappy and not telling their friends to go.

DL: What was there about the '40s and early '50s that permitted tragic endings?

RP: Back then they were showing double bills and there was less economic pressure on each film. Plus, we were coming out of the Second World War and the films all had these isolated heroes with no illusions - just a bottle of Jack Daniels in the drawer, and a name on a frosted-glass door, and footsteps in the dark. It was about being fucked-up.

DL: As a writer, you're the director's servant, right?

RP: A writer exists on a movie at the pleasure of the director. You're working for the guy and he owns the tailor shop and you're one of the tailors. Some people want you on the set every minute of every day, and they'll be on the phone with you incessantly: "What about this? What about that?" For other directors, the last thing in the world they want is a writer around because they don't want someone freaking out when they change things. I like writing for Martin Scorsese because I've cultivated a shorthand with him in terms of understanding what he wants, which isn't that dissimilar to what I want. He is very antischematic. He's repelled by anything that smacks of the good getting rewarded and the bad getting punished - and I am, too. I also like working with Barbet Schroeder. He's a sort of pathological democrat who insists you be involved in every decision. Whereas Scorsese kept me off the set unless he needed me, Barbet would have been happy if I just moved in with him.