Adam Langer’s fourth novel, The Thieves of Manhattan
I had been on the West Coast, staying in a hovel just a few blocks away from one of my favorite places and finishing up research on a memoir about my father and speaking to a very prominent Jewish organization. The memoir was emotionally difficult work, and I knew that for my next project, I would want to do something fun. A screenplay sounded like a good change of pace, so I met with my agent in his plush office just for a few moments before he had to meet with a far more celebrated client. He told me briefly about screenplay structure — how a script needs to have three acts, last about 120 pages, and have an “eleven o’clock” moment on page 90. Before he left, he gave me a stack of screenplays, which I read on the plane ride home; one of the scripts was rumored to be a Tom Cruise vehicle.
My initial idea was to see if I could adapt one of my novels into a script, but I had trouble motivating myself to revisit an old work and, instead, turned my attention to a novel idea I had abandoned — a comic thriller set in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and told in a hyper-literary patois. I enjoyed the pace of the writing and the made-up language I was using (I had spent more than enough time reading hard-boiled thrillers that used their own hard-to-decipher lingo and wanted to pay those writers back). But the story, which had something to do with manuscript authentication, never coalesced in my mind, and I didn’t get much further than the first scene, set in a fictionalized version of a coffee shop where I like to write. Other writers, Jewish and otherwise, seem to enjoy the atmosphere at this coffee shop as well.
I wasn’t sure exactly what I wanted to write in my screenplay. I talked about collaborating with a writer friend of mineon an update of a Henry James novel, but we never made it past a quick conversation about it while walking around a fairly grotesque Chicago food festival. Without necessarily knowing where I was going, I began work on a script about a frustrated young barista named Ian, who finds himself embroiled in a confidence game when he considers putting his name to a fake memoir. I love films about con games and thought that the literary world would be a great place to set one. I found myself inspired by a great Scandinavian film about the writing life, which I saw with a fellow Jewish writer, and a classic Hollywood satire, which I saw with a fellow not-so-Jewish editor. After a few months of work, I wasn’t sure whether I had a great script or not, but I did have one with three acts and 120 pages and an “eleven o’clock moment” round about page 90.
View Adam’s first dabblings in screenplay writing:
His most recent novel, The Thieves of Manhattan
Adam Langer is a journalist, an editor, and the author of a memoir and five novels including the internationally best-selling novel Crossing California. A frequent contributor to the New York Times, he currently serves as culture editor at The Forward.
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