Film Gecko

Film Gecko Talks With: Peter S. Beagle, Author of The Last Unicorn

by Erin Harvey on December 12th, 2005

Following a long ago post about Peter S. Beagle’s troubles with British film distributor Granada Media, and in response to several comments by Beagle’s business manager, Connor Cochran, I arranged to corner the busy author and screenplay writer for a few moments to pepper him with questions. He has responded with a sense of humour and a good dose of honesty that surprised me, and discusses his experience with the film industry in an unforgivingly candid fashion.

Film Gecko (FG): The Last Unicorn could be considered as an iconic film for an entire generation of children. As the author of the original book and the screenplay as well, how’s that make you feel?

Peter S. Beagle (PSB): Well, I didn’t set out to become an icon. And as I’ve told people for years, most of my memories of writing that book are nightmarish. I’m amazed to this day at the way it took off and I’m amazed by the lucky break — and it is luck — that made it the best movie Rankin/Bass ever made. Which isn’t necessarily saying much, given the mess they made of The Hobbit and their classic big ticket Frosty The Snow Man. But for them it was remarkable, and I never expected it, the book, or possibly me to stay around this long. So I’m enormously impressed. But it wasn’t something I had in mind. Nobody sets out to be an icon, as far as I know (laughs).

FG: What was your motivation for getting involved with the film version?

PSB: Better me than Romeo Muller, who was the house writer for Rankin/Bass. It was him or me and I knew it. Whatever happened to the movie I had to do my best for it, because I couldn’t submit it to his crummy hands.

Read more of Peter S. Beagle’s thoughts on The Last Unicorn, possible sequels, and film industry pot holes:

FG: Given the focus on the director and celebrities involved in a project, the screenwriter can be overlooked by the general public. How important a role does the screenwriter have?

PSB: Well, on the one hand they’re forever telling you “Oh there’s no movie without you. You come on board and you’re it. We may be the glamour boys, but you’re what counts.” And then they proceed to rewrite the movie themselves and not to return your phone calls. Every script…there’s a whole body of jokes that screenwriters tell. And every one of them has to do with the understanding that essentially you are powerless. You want power? You become a director. And that’s not a guarantee either. But no writer ever thinks for very long that he’s got the power to make a difference in the overall movie. It just doesn’t happen.

FG: This is obviously a subject with legal ramifications. But can you tell us the original details of your contract with Granada, and how, specifically, they have failed to meet with them?

PSB: A complete chronology and detailed FAQ are now posted at http:/www.conlanpress.com/youcanhelp. Anyone who wants to know everything should look there. But put very simply, the situation is as follows. My original contract was with ITC. Among other things it guaranteed me 5% of the gross merchandising revenues and 5% of the film’s net profits. For many years I received official reports from ITC that said the movie wasn’t in the black and that there had been no merchandising — two things which I now know weren’t true, but back then I was naïve and believed what they told me. Then in the late ‘90s, ITC went out of business and their film library was sold. It went through various owners until it wound up with Granada, who have done extremely well with the property, selling 600,000 DVDs and videotapes around the world in the last couple of years. They’ve also done ITC one better, because they are not only saying The Last Unicorn has never made a profit, they are (a) trying to pretend it cost more to make than it actually did; (b) trying to claim it cost as much to market back in 1982 as it did to produce; (c) trying to pretend that it made no money at all between its release in 1982 and their 1999 acquisition; and (d) tacking on a claim for 23 years of full-bore interest on all the supposedly unrecouped costs. All of these things are absurd, of course. Bottom line, they refuse to admit that there are any profits to share. Now, that’s something else that writers know — if they ever offer you a choice between cash up front or a piece of the profits, take the cash, because there are so many ways that studios can prove to you that a film is still in the red after 15, 20, 30 years. But in this case that simply isn’t so. Ergo, legal action.

FG: When did you first feel that perhaps you were not being properly reimbursed for your efforts on The Last Unicorn?

PSB: For a long time I think I just assumed that I was never going to see anything from any profits. I’d get these twice-a-year reports and they were so depressing. And I hadn’t thought about merchandising at all. It was…call it fatalism, or passivity, either way, but I simply left it alone. Said to hell with it and wrote something else, wrote other things. And was glad when people told me they liked the movie. And when people came up to me shyly and explained to me that they’d made copies of the videotape, or the DVD, not that they wanted to take bread out of the mouths of my children or anything like that, but…well, I just smiled and took it all as some kind of compliment. It was really only when Connor Cochran came on board to help me handle my business matters that things changed. He started looking at the record and studying old contracts and asking questions, which I hadn’t. And it began to dawn on me after a while that, like the title of one well-known book in the field puts it, THE WRITER GOT SCREWED (BUT DIDN’T HAVE TO).

FG: How did you approach Granada with your concerns?

PSB: We approached them graciously at first, then after two years of being stonewalled we finally got aggressive. Graciousness got us nothing.

FG: I noticed on the Conlan Press site that you are raising funds and awareness and trying to make some headway in the court system. What’s the next move for you, and how confident are you that this situation can be resolved?

PSB: I actually think that Granada will back down before it goes to court. I could be wrong, of course, but in truth I think we’re armed so strong in righteousness that they will be up a creek if this ever does get to a court. I also think that it has less to do with me, than the fact that they are worried about setting a bad precedent. Give in to me, and there may be a long line of writers, actors, producers, and directors who will notice and start to demand their due on work for films in the ITC library. So it’s understandable that Granada might try to fight this off. Mind you, they are an immense multibillion dollar company, so this would be “walking around” money to them, just so much change they’d keep on the night table. A tip to the pizza delivery man. But that’s exactly the stuff that they fight over. (laughs) You give an inch to a writer, and the next thing you know they start asking to be treated like human beings.

FG: I see that there’s a remake of The Last Unicorn currently in pre-production. Are you involved with that at all?

PETER: A, it’s not in pre-production. It’s still in what the industry calls development. They are still raising funds and trying to get a workable script together. And B, I’m not involved with it at all any more, except in trying to get the rights back, in order to see it made properly, which I don’t think it can be with this company. Frankly, I’d rather have it not made at all than have it made badly. So I’m making every effort to get hold of the rights again and start perhaps from scratch, but from a much more solid base.

FG: Why don’t you want them to make it?

PSB: What I know for certain, is that in our post-Lord of the Rings/Narnia/Harry Potter/King Kong universe, it’s not going to be enough to trot out a tricked-up horse. Do you remember that old Tom Cruise movie, Legend? That won’t cut it any more. The bar just gets higher and higher for making realistic special effects, that look not “special” but rather look absolutely natural within that screen world. After all that stuff you don’t get away with sticking a horn on a pony. No matter how much you mess around with it using CGI in post.

FG: Your recent tour included a lot of fantasy conventions such as Dragon*Con in Atlanta and ELF in Orlando. What do you think of the whole Sci-Fi/Fantasy scene?

PSB: I don’t usually meet fans that much, but when I do I almost invariably like them. They’re very friendly, very kind, and lord knows it doesn’t hurt, at 66, to discover that a whole lot more people than you ever imagined were crazy about your work. And not simply The Last Unicorn. I loved going to a motor scooter convention last year and discovering that the people there treated me like the elderly Jack Kerouac of the motor scooter world, just because they’d read a nonfiction book of mine called I See By My Outfit…. truth is I’ve enjoyed the conventions, although they are exhausting at times. And, interestingly I don’t read a lot of science fiction. I do read some science fiction and fantasy, but usually it’s by people I know, or people who’ve asked me to look at something. Sometimes it will be something sent to me by an editor. But for the most part, what I read are mysteries, history, and poetry.

FG: Do you think the Fantasy/Sci-Fi scene is breaking more into the mainstream of movies, like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings?

PSB: Mainstream eventually comes down to how much money the publisher or the movie company is willing to spend on it. Money levels all genres. The fact is, my joke for a long time has been that I should start writing in Spanish and then translate myself back into English, because then I could claim to be “magical realism.” The tropes, and even the clichés and turns and tricks of fantasy, classic fantasy, found their way into the mainstream a long time ago. Just a matter of packaging. Just call it something else. “Fantasy” tends to mean a certain type, or it did up till now. And “magical realism” means something else, even when they are really both the same thing.

FG: Tell us a bit about your other upcoming projects. What’s next on the horizon for you?

PSB: Funny you should ask the question that way, because I’ve literally just signed to come aboard a Multi-Player, Multi-Level Roleplaying fantasy game called HORIZONS: EMPIRE OF ISTARIA. Which is the first time I’ve ever done anything like this, and I’m starting completely from scratch, with no knowledge of this medium. Going to have to learn in a hurry. As for what else is afoot, I’ve got a novel called SUMMERLONG coming out next year, along with a new collection of stories called THE LINE BETWEEN, and there will be several other books. One of them will be a collection of personal essays called SMEAGOL, DEAGOL, AND BEAGLE: ESSAYS FROM THE HEADWATERS OF MY VOICE. The title essay is all about my involvement with Tolkien, especially my work on the 1978 Bakshi-animated version of The Lord of the Rings. But there are also essays in there on writers and musicians and teachers who were important to me. Then there’s a curious book that Connor really put together, called THE FIRST LAST UNICORN AND OTHER BEGINNINGS, which is a collection of things that were changed, dropped, or never published, all woven together with interviews and bits dealing with my creative process. The items in that book range from the earliest beginning version of THE LAST UNICORN, which is radically different than the one people know, to the four chapters that were dropped out of my first novel, A FINE AND PRIVATE PLACE, to a couple of oddball novel openings I never went anywhere with. One of those I wrote at a sidewalk café in Malaga, Spain, when I was about 21 years old. It’s not like anything that I ever did, before or since, and it’s maddening. Because after trying hard to get back into the head of that kid, that young me who’s just sitting there with his portable typewriter, working at that story, I couldn’t figure out what the hell he had in mind. Probably he didn’t have anything in mind, he was just, sitting there and writing and making it up as he went along.

FG: What about this thing called “Two Hearts” and the sequel to The Last Unicorn I’ve heard about?

PSB: “Two Hearts” is a kind of bridge story. It’s a last bow, if you will, for several of the major characters in The Last Unicorn — least as far as I know — but it also introduces a young heroine named Sooz into that fairytale world. Sooz is nine when we meet her in “Two Hearts,” and she’ll be seventeen when we meet her again in the next novel. I probably know more this upcoming story than I did when I started out writing The Last Unicorn, but not that much more. I’ll just write Sooz and have faith that she’ll lead me through the book.

I’d like to thank Peter for taking the time out of his jam-packed schedule to pull up a virtual chair and talk with us, and wish him all the best in his legal battles with Granada Media. Fans of both the fantasy genre, and of Beagle’s other fiction work take note! He’s been kind enough to describe his current and upcoming projects, so be sure to keep an eye out for those.

For more information about Peter S. Beagle, there’s a quasi-official website dedicated to his life and work at PeterBeagle.com, and the ever-informative Wikipedia has a more up-to-date entry.

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