Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, September 16, 1995 TAG: 9509180025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: B7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
``When you deal with Hollywood,'' King told him, ``get all the money you can up front.''
Grisham has followed that advice well, regularly getting seven-figure sums for his books such as ``The Pelican Brief'' and ``The Chamber,'' but has added a twist of his own: Kiss it goodbye.
That's just so you won't feel bitter when the movie turns out to be something quite different from the book, says Grisham, which it often does.
``Nobody makes us sell our books for film,'' he adds.
So, now look what he's doing. Instead of just selling the film rights to his latest bestseller, ``The Rainmaker,'' and walking away from it, Grisham is writing his own screenplay. He also has written an original screenplay, ``The Gingerbread Man,'' which Island Pictures will start filming this year.
There's even more recent evidence Grisham is hedging on his own advice: He's serving as one of the producers for CBS' ``The Client,'' the first TV series adaptation of one of his books, which premieres Sunday at 9 p.m. (WDBJ, Channel 7) as a two-hour movie, then starts its regular weekly run Tuesday at 8.
``I was told from day one that I could do anything I wanted to do,'' says Grisham. ``I could be as involved as I wanted to be or I could ignore it.''
At first, Grisham thought he'd just look over the script for the series pilot - the Sunday night movie - and make a few suggestions. Instead, he wound up spending a lot of time with the script.
``I had a lot of notes and a lot of questions,'' he says. ``I had a lot of good things to say and a lot of bad things to say - and I said them.''
Grisham spent long hours on the phone from his home in Oxford, Miss., to Hollywood, where executive producers Michael Filerman and Judith Paige Mitchell are based.
``We worked through a lot of the problems I had with the script,'' he says, ``and I think we made it better. When I saw the pilot, I saw that a lot of the things I'd suggested had been listened to and some of the ideas I had, which probably weren't that good to begin with, were ignored.''
The result has been a gradual increase in Grisham's participation, at least for this initial season, because he had finished the one novel he likes to write each year and had time for the TV project.
``What I probably will do is suggest stories, not write them,'' he explains. ``I really don't have the time to write them and don't have the desire to do the writing.''
``The Client,'' which became a hit movie in 1994, is about lawyer Reggie Love, a divorced woman and a recovering alcoholic, who's locked in an ongoing child custody dispute with her ex-husband. She specializes in child welfare cases and, in Sunday's movie, helps a youngster who picked up a bag of stolen money after witnessing a brutal murder and is being stalked by the killer.
Susan Sarandon earned an Oscar nomination playing Reggie in the movie. Another film star, JoBeth Williams, takes on the role for the TV series, with John Heard taking over for Tommy Lee Jones as prosecutor Roy Foltrigg. Polly Holliday, best known as Flo from the old CBS sitcoms ``Alice'' and ``Flo,'' plays Reggie's Mama Love.
Grisham believes ``The Client'' is one of his few novels that could be easily translated into a weekly TV drama because the main characters don't end up on the run. He's also especially partial to Reggie Love as a character because her law practice is similar to the one Grisham had when he was a working lawyer.
``The ideas and stories sort of come naturally'' for that reason, he explains.
Right at the start, though, Grisham had to swallow one major compromise. The producers have switched Reggie Love's practice from Memphis to Atlanta, because Atlanta is a much busier film production center and the crew people who work on the show will be able to live at home, considerably reducing expenses.
``It didn't bother me,'' says Grisham. ``It doesn't have a strong geographical base to it, so you can set the story anywhere and it will work.''
by CNB