CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 12/19/08

Man Versus Matheson

By jason davis

One of the most successful writers ever to conquer both the printed page and the motion picture screenplay, Richard Matheson's isolated individuals bent on surviving in a threatening world have made his writing a touchstone for storytellers as diverse as Stephen King, David Koepp, and Chris Carter.

Though he began his writing career over 58 years ago in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Richard Matheson's writing remains a vibrant fixture in today's narrative landscape. In the last 10 years alone, his metaphysical romance What Dreams May Come, the supernatural thriller Stir of Echoes, and his seminal survival tale I Am Legend have all been adapted for the big screen. Indeed, 2007's screenplay by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman was the third iteration of Legend. Matheson is a living legend whose universal protagonists, disturbing facility for verisimilitude, and malleable narratives have made his work timeless in the eyes of both his audience and the Hollywood powers that be.

"The leitmotif of all my work," Matheson states in the 1989 introduction to his Collected Stories, "is as follows: The individual isolated in a threatening world, attempting to survive." Those who know the author's work will recall Robert Neville's struggle to maintain his humanity in a world overrun by vampires in the 1954 novel I Am Legend, Mann's road-bound battle with a homicidal trucker in 1970's "Duel," and Richard Collier's love-struck defiance of time itself to meet his soul mate in 1975's Bid Time Return as diverse examples of this recurring theme. Though it's a simple statement applied to a massive oeuvre, Matheson's reliance on this theme is key to his success as a dramatist. Screenplays rely on conflict, and virtually every one of Matheson's tales pits his hero against the biggest opponent he can muster.

It's widely recounted that I Am Legend occurred to the writer after a screening of Dracula. He reasoned that if one vampire was bad, a world of them would be horrific. The same logic applied to his 1956 novel The Shrinking Man—a spider is bad enough, but a giant spider (or rather, an increasingly tiny hero facing the arachnid) is terrifying. As Matheson's career wore on, the odds only became more impossible for his protagonists as time, and even death itself, became antagonists in increasingly metaphysical narratives that echoed the writer's growing fascination with the nature of reality itself.

Against these extraordinary forces, Matheson pits the most ordinary of men. Indeed, writer-director David Koepp made a point of that ordinariness in his film Stir of Echoes, which found lineman Tom Witzky (Kevin Bacon) lamenting his banal life before a hypnosis session opened his mind to psychic phenomena. The very name of Dennis Weaver's persecuted driver in Duel, Steven Spielberg's directorial debut, speaks to the universality of the character: Mann. Vincent Price (in 1974's The Last Man on Earth, scripted by Matheson), Charlton Heston (in 1971's The Omega Man, scripted by John William Corrington & Joyce H. Corrington), and Will Smith (in the recent Protosevich/Goldsman adaptation) all portray the same man, Robert Neville. The later iterations add a scientific background to aid in combating the vampire mutations, but the universality of the protagonist is inherent in the fact that he's portrayed in each version by the au courant genre leading man. Matheson makes no secret of the fact that he often cannibalizes himself for his characters, and a quick survey of his characters reveals that many of the families central to his stories take their names from his own wife and children. It's a tribute to his economy as a storyteller that he never strays too far from himself in crafting his characters. The creative juices are better spent in creating the conflict that will drive the story, and borrowing from the world around you has other benefits as well.

Stephen King has often cited Matheson's propensity for setting stories in the world outside his front door as a major influence on his own work. Line up Matheson's novels in chronological order and you'll create a fairly accurate account of the writer's life as he spun his tales. The Gardena home from which Neville battled the undead, the cellar where the diminutive Scott Carey fought the black widow, and the Hotel Del Coronado where Collier transcended time to arrive in 1896 are all real. Matheson recalls sitting in the cellar as he wrote The Shrinking Man (adapted by the author in 1957 as The Incredible Shrinking Man) and making use of the items he saw there to create Carey's miniature world. In his introduction to Gauntlet Press' 1999 edition of Somewhere in Time, the author explains how he "lived" the book. Driving away from his home in Woodland Hills, Matheson (imagining himself as Collier) set out with a tape recorder and narrated his journey first to the RMS Queen Mary, then newly docked at Long Beach, and then onward to the Hotel Del Coronado off the coast of San Diego. Once ensconced in the majestic building, constructed in 1888, the author imagined his character (and himself) drawn to an actress who once performed at the hotel near the turn of the century.

The detail with which the novel is rendered leaves no doubt to Matheson's account of its creation. Nineteenth-century thespian Maude Adams served as the template for Elise McKenna, the actress who falls in love with Collier after he makes his way into the past. Even the books referenced as Collier attempts to unravel the mysteries of time travel are real—Matheson bought them before heading south from Los Angeles. Of course, as the author admits, once the character breaches the laws of physics, the writer was forced to head home and complete the tale in his imagination, but the sense of verisimilitude achieved by the experiment is evident in the finished work. Even the increasingly metaphysical content of What Dreams May Come, which finds the recently deceased Chris Nielsen leaving his euphoric afterlife to recover his suicidal wife's soul from her self-imposed hell, carries an extensive bibliography detailing the over 50 volumes the writer read in developing his concept of the undiscovered country. There may be no way to prove the reality of Matheson's posthumous realms, but there's no shortage of sources to prove he did all the homework he could short of dying.

Though the universality and realism of Matheson's work is undoubtedly a key factor in his ongoing success on both page and screen, his fortunes in the latter venue are also governed by the malleability of his narratives. I Am Legend provides an obvious example in that the two later film adaptations use Matheson's book as a starting point and then veer off into their own unique takes on the material. The Omega Man supplants the book's science-based vampires with a cult of mutants led by a charismatic leader (Anthony Zerbe) in a Ludditic war on technology that includes the extinction of Neville as a key point on the agenda. The 2007 take on the novel renders the book's sentient vampires bestial and posits a much more savage portrait of Neville's post-apocalyptic world. In a superior edit of the film released on DVD, the movie's divergence from Matheson's text is justified by a narrative twist that really shows off the versatility of the basic concept.

The universality of Matheson's creation once again rears its head in accessing the latitude filmmakers appreciate in adapting his tales. In all journeys from one medium to another, the story endures some upset in the process of reimagining. The Incredible Shrinking Man completely resequences the book's plot to create a chronological account, whereas the text dances back and forth in time to break up the progression of Carey's plight. In a visual medium, that journey is more powerfully rendered as a continuum of action. Technical considerations forced Somewhere in Time to abandon the San Diego setting that was so pivotal to the book. The modern surroundings of the Hotel Del Coronado proved too difficult to camouflage, and the production moved instead to the Grand Hotel on Michigan's Mackinac Island. The years were changed to maintain the present day's distance from Collier's destination, and the music of Rachmaninoff replaced that of Mahler as a key plot point due to the latter's lengthier movements being unfit for the film's pacing.

Technical considerations aside, the greatest change between Bid Time Return and Somewhere in Time was the very nature of the narrative itself. Not only was the novel strictly told in the first person by Collier, but the character is suffering from a terminal brain tumor as he relates his story. The novel is framed by Collier's brother's account of finding the text after his sibling's demise and bathes the entire story in an ambiguity missing from the screenplay. While the book questions the reality of Collier's experience in the past at virtually every opportunity, Matheson's screenplay definitively asserts that the time travel did happen by opening his tale with an elderly Elise McKenna seeking out her one-time lover in the present day and gifting him with a watch that will be left to her when his journey to the past concludes. The net narrative effect is an astonishing re-imagining of the book that leaves the viewer in a different place emotionally when the story concludes.

While Somewhere in Time diverges in a stylistic sense form its literary antecedent, Stir of Echoes abandons almost every detail of the novel, yet maintains its links to the text, despite Koepp's liberties. Matheson himself wrote an adaptation of A Stir of Echoes around 1960 that accurately transposed the novel to the visual medium. Though that film was never made, Koepp eventually optioned the story and crafted his own screenplay for the 1999 feature. While the spine of the story—everyman Tom Wallace develops psychic abilities that help him solve a neighborhood murder—remains the same, virtually every detail of the plot is changed. Like Matheson had 40 years before, Koepp used his own home as the template for the protagonist's dwelling. Chicago, a mid-Western equivalent to Matheson's Los Angeles, was the setting, and even the victim, perpetrators, and their motives proved amenable to Koepp's modification. Virtually no plot points remain the same, yet a viewer familiar with the book will immediately recognize the film as an adaptation of the story.

As Matheson approaches his 83rd birthday early next year, two of his tales are being re-imagined for theatrical release—Richard Kelly's The Box, from the short story "Button, Button," and yet another take on The Incredible Shrinking Man. His stories for The Twilight Zone remain some of the most memorable installments of that venerable anthology, and his novels remain in print alongside newly released stories penned years ago that emerge from his capacious desk drawers with regularity. Writers such as Chris Carter (The X-Files: I Want to Believe) and J. Michael Straczynski (Changeling) cite him as a significant influence and have even named characters after him, all part and parcel of his extraordinary imagination and deft hand at rendering stories that speak with universality and realism to an ever-growing audience.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.




I Am Legend courtesy Warner Home Video
Stir of Echoes courtesy Lionsgate Home Entertainment

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