Today Lara Parker attended the Los Angeles Times' Festival of Books on the campus of USC. She participated on a panel called "From Page to Screen to Page" alongside Brian McGreevy (creator of the supernatural show "Hemlock Grove"), Tod Goldberg, and Pamela Ribon. The other panelists had all written works that were later adapted for film or TV; Lara came from the other direction, beginning in television and turning to write novels. "So it's all over for me," she joked.
The discussion got off to a slow start. Moderator Richard Rayner talked extensively and somehow managed to turn his introductions of the panelists around so he ended up talking about himself. When introducing Lara, he erroneously said she came from Texas (she's from Memphis, TN). McGreevy, who's lived in Texas, interjected, "If you want to figure out whether someone is from Texas or Tennessee, ask them how they do barbecue."
Lara didn't speak until almost the end of the session, and then she went into detail about her journey from screen to page. She began taking screenwriting courses through UCLA's extension program because she was tired of the terrible lines she had to read in the scripts she was given. (The worst was, "There'll always be a candle in the window for you, Steve!" from "The 6 Million-Dollar Man.") "When you do screenwriting, you do everything from scratch, so all the years I spent as an actress didn't help me at all," she recalled ruefully.
Around this time, Harper Collins decided to launch a series of novels based on DS and someone from the company contacted Lara, knowing she was doing screenwriting. "I told them, I don't know anything about writing a novel. And they said, 'Well, we really want to use your name, so just write something. We'll bring in a real writer to fix it up later.' And I thought, I'm going to spend a year, maybe 2 years, writing this and some smartass is going to change it all? No, I'm going to do the best I can. So I had all these models--DS borrowed from all the great horror stories in literature--but I had no idea how to begin. I spent about a year and a half just reading, looking at structure, dialogue, story, trying to find a model. I think I finally settled on Daphne Du Maurier."
Rayner stepped in. "That's where your acting experience came in handy! All the scripts you've read must have given you an idea of story."
Lara shook her head. "No. All you do is learn your lines and show up, hit your mark. What did help was that as an actor, you create a character. You come up with a backstory in your head for them. My first book was about my character, the witch, and how she became a witch. I spent about three years writing it and when I got to 575 pages, my editor said, 'You need to stop.' 'But I'm not finished,' I said. 'Save it for the next one.'"
Later, she reflected on the Burton film. "It's too bad Tim Burton didn't contact me to help him write his script for the Johnny Depp movie. I could have fixed it for him and we would have had several movies by now and my books would be selling better. But he didn't want to have anything to with the old guard. Isn't it always that way? No one ever cares about learning what worked in the previous version. Tim Burton, bless him, is a brilliant man but he doesn't care much about story. The show was all about story. We kept people on the edge of their seats, tuning in every day for five years. His movie was a series of set-pieces, one after the other, all of them good looking, but you just didn't care about anything that was happening. He was off the mark with it. The TV show was very serious, but he made fun of it. Our vampire never would have hung upside-down from a chandelier!" (I thought that was a very good analysis.)
She did say that she has a feeling a new film, "a real version of DS," is likely to happen someday, given the perennial interest in remaking DS. "And I have a contract that says I get a percentage if they choose to film any of my books!"
Several DS fans were in the audience (as were Jim Storm, Jim Pierson, and Ansel Faraj). One man asked if Lara was concerned about the possibility of running out of material: given that DS had covered so many themes and stories already, how many more books or audio dramas can continue? Lara laughed. "That's right, we did run out of ideas, didn't we? And then we started to repeat ourselves." But she has no such fears for herself. "As a writer, you have a platform to communicate with your readers about themes that are important to you. I put into my books (Angelique's Descent and The Salem Branch) my hatred of hypocrisy and of people in power abusing the people below them. But I never came right out and said any of that. I was just telling a story. You can riff on any number of themes when you have a platform." Another woman said that she was one of the kids who ran home from school to see DS. She remembered Angelique's top-knot hairstyle and frilly blouse (the 1795 costume), and she expressed sadness on learning Jonathan Frid had died. It was an interesting discussion and I'm glad Lara got to participate and share her experiences.
ProfStokes
