illiam F. Nolan has 80 books to his credit and has had work selected for more than 300 anthologies and textbooks. He has also penned the script to many classic movies and TV movies.
His most famous novel, Logan's Run, co-written by George Clayton Johnson—a global bestseller, a major MGM film and a CBS television series—is now in preproduction as a remake from Warner Brothers and is going to be directed by Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects, Apt Pupil, X-Men, X2 and the upcoming Superman Returns).
His latest books, both published in December 2004, are the short-story collection Nightworlds from Leisure Books and Far Out: The Incredible Adventures of Sam Space, a limited-edition collector's book published by Delirium Books.
Voted a "Living Legend in Horror/Dark Fantasy" by the International Horror Guild, Nolan is a two-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Special Award. He is also the recipient of many other honors, including a Best Horror Film Award for Burnt Offerings, a Best Science Fiction Film Award for Logan's Run, two Golden Medallions in Europe, a citation for excellence from the American Library Association, a Distinguished Career commendation from the City of Los Angeles and the Maltese Falcon Award for his pioneering work on Dashiell Hammett.
If you had to pick four or five favorites from the Nightworlds short-story collection, which would you select and why?
Nolan: I like the first story, "Kelly, Frederic Michael," because it is based on my father and my life in Kansas City. I like "The Halloween Man" because it is one of the scariest stories I have written; I love Halloween, and one of the first things I've ever written was a poem about Halloween when I was 12 years old. Newsweek magazine selected "The Party" as one of the seven most effective horror tales of the century—I like it for that reason, if nothing else. I used "The Pool" in How To Write Horror as an example of how to write a short story; I broke it down for the reader bit by bit, showing how I constructed it and how I characterized it—it is another favorite of mine. I like "Vympyre" very much; I call it my vampire novel in miniature because it is four pages long. Anne Rice would have done it in 500 pages. I like them all them, really—I wouldn't have put anything in there that I didn't like. They are all good stories.
What speculative-fiction books do you have coming out in 2005?
Nolan: Ill Met By Moonlight (Hellbound Books), Demon! (Delirium Books), Wild Galaxy (Golden Gryphon) and in 2006, Death Drive from Hellbound Books.
What can you tell us about the Logan's Run remake?
Nolan: It was supposed to be filmed in September 2004 in Canada. The art department worked out all the background for the future world of Logan. They were getting ready to hire the cast members and start the shooting when Bryan Singer got another assignment from Warner Brothers to direct another picture first. They moved Logan's Run up to 2006.
They are returning to the death of 21 that was in the book. It was 30 in the MGM film. I told them, "It would be more shocking if [it were people] just out of their teens killed by the society that they live in, than having a 30-year-old killed, because most young people think of 30 as middle age."
Singer loved the book; he told other people that he is going to return to the book as much as possible. It should be much more faithful to the novel than the MGM version.
If the Logan's Run remake is released in 2006, it will be 30 years after the MGM film came out.
Nolan: There are whole generations who have been born and who have grown up since that time. There are a lot of people who have heard of Logan's Run. I have yet to meet someone who hasn't heard of it. Every time I say Logan's Run, people say, "Oh yeah, I heard," [though] they haven't necessarily seen it or have read the book. This will be a new experience for the movie-going public.
Also, the movie will have all the technological advances. Look at the movie Polar Express—the whole movie was made on computers. There wasn't a single shot from Polar Express that was made on a soundstage—it was all done with computers.
Logan will have the advantage of our technological society in 2006, which will mean it will have incredible special effects that could never be achieved in the 1970s. I'm looking forward to that.
Let's talk about your screenwriting.
Nolan: Great. First of all, I've written far more in these areas than most of my fans realize. I've been involved, as a professional writer, on no less than 60 separate film and TV projects, including 25 Movies of the Week.
Of the 16 motion pictures I've worked on, five were produced, including Logan's Run and Burnt Offerings. Of my 44 TV projects, 20, or almost half, have been produced. (Not always under my name and not always from my scripts. On some, I sold only the outline or treatment.)
In the industry, as a scriptwriter, I am most closely associated with producer/director Dan Curtis. I met Dan in June of 1972, when he'd come out to California after doing his Dark Shadows series. He was looking for writers he could trust to do quality work and do it quickly. Dan chose Richard Matheson and me, and for several years we were his two main writers. I ended doing a dozen scripts for Curtis, nine of which he produced and directed. As a sequel to The Norliss Tapes, I wrote The Return for Dan, in which David Norliss moves through time to encounter his boyhood self. It was paid for but never scripted or produced due to a Writers Guild (WGA) strike that killed the Norliss series.
In all, I have written and sold some 28 scripts for other producers beyond Dan Curtis, a dozen of which have been produced in one form or another.
Now, having given you a broad overview of my industry career, let me address the individual questions. ...
What's the story behind the unproduced script for The Night Killers written by you and Richard Matheson?
Nolan: It was to become the third Kolchak Movie of the Week. Dan asked me to write the first draft and set up the basic plot and characters. This was in late 1973, after he and Matheson had done The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler. I wrote the 100-page first draft in just seven days. The original story was mine. Then Matheson took it over for the final teleplay, adding and cutting. Curtis and the network okayed our final and we were all set for the shoot in Hawaii when we were informed that Kolchak had been sold as a weekly series. This killed our Movie of the Week and—until last year, with its inclusion in Gauntlet's publication of Richard Matheson's The Kolchak Scripts—our teleplay has remained buried. At least now people can see what it would have been like on the screen had the script been produced as planned.
The Norliss Tapes was based on a story by novelist Fred Mustard Stewart. How did the story and your screenplay differ?
Nolan: I'm sure that I read the story outline by Stewart, but I can't recall it. It had something to do with a walking dead man. Beyond that, everything in the teleplay is mine. I wrote it without any references whatever to the Stewart story.
You did the adaptation of Henry James' The Turn Of The Screw that was filmed in London with Lynn Redgrave in 1974. Was James' story easy or difficult to adapt?
Nolan: Difficult—in that I had to "extend" the material from a novelette to a two-night miniseries. I wanted to retain the mood and period atmosphere and to remain faithful to James' concept and characters. Apparently I pulled it off, because the critical reception to my teleplay was very positive. It remains one of my best scripts.
Karen Black starred in all three stories in the first Trilogy of Terror. Was that planned when you wrote the two teleplays, along with Matheson's, for the show? And what did you think of Black's performance?
Nolan: She was extraordinary in those multiple roles. Very impressive. And, yes, Dan wanted the same actress to star in all three tales. My two were totally eclipsed by Matheson's Prey, featuring that evil little [Zuni fetish] doll. That's the one that everyone remembers. It made a terrific impact.
What are your thoughts on Terror at London Bridge?
Nolan: Well, I had always wanted to write a story about Jack the Ripper, but the problem was to find a totally fresh approach. That problem was solved when my wife [Cameron] and I visited the London Bridge in Lake Havasu, Arizona. A wealthy American bought the bridge from England [and] had it torn apart and shipped over, stone by stone, to the U.S. They rebuilt it in Arizona and diverted a section of the Colorado River to run under it. When my wife and I arrived there, it was late at night and all the other tourists were gone. We were the only people in this British village built around the bridge. I stood there, looking up at the dark stone structure. Then I said, "I'll bet Jack the Ripper walked over this bridge after his murders in Whitechapel." And that did it. I had my fresh approach. My idea was that Ripper had been shot on the bridge and had been crushed by a stone that fell with him into the river. It's found at the bottom of the Thames a century later and brought back to Arizona to be fitted into the structure, and a drop of tourist's blood brings him "back" to start his reign of terror all over again. It worked out beautifully. Prime popcorn entertainment.
What was the inspiration for Burnt Offerings?
Nolan: The studio asked Dan Curtis to direct a film version of the novel, and Dan said yes—and called me in to write the screenplay. We threw out the first section of the book (which was set in downtown New York) and started in the country, when the family arrives at this haunted house. Most critics panned the film, but the public loved it. I happen to think it has some really scary scenes. Last year Dan and I did an audio commentary for the DVD edition.
What led up to you, Richard Matheson and Dan Curtis working together again for Trilogy of Terror 2?
Nolan: Richard Matheson had nothing to do with the second Trilogy. Dan simply reshot Matheson's Bobbie from his earlier script and put it in as the middle story. Then he and I wrote the other two as a team. I had always wanted to have a crack at writing about the Zuni doll (since it was all anybody ever talked about from the first Trilogy) so it was very satisfying being able to do it at last.
I felt your two stories in Trilogy of Terror 2 were even better than the original Trilogy. Do you feel the same way?
Nolan: I'd like to say I do, but it's not up to me to judge. I can't be objective about them. I did the best I could with the material at hand. In my opinion, the best segment of all would have been my adaptation of Philip K. Dick's The Father-Thing, but it got dropped at the last moment and replaced with Matheson's Bobbie. My Dick teleplay was very frightening, but no one ever got a chance to see it.
Nine of your produced scripts were directed by Dan Curtis. Why do you think you two work so well together?
Nolan: Chemistry. We operate on the same wavelength. Think alike. Laugh at the same stuff. Curtis can be thorny and doesn't get along with everybody, but he respects me, and I respect him, so we seem to hit it off. I hope to work with him again someday.
You say that you've written 19 unproduced scripts. What are some of the best of these, and why weren't they produced?
Nolan: That's a tough one to answer, because I'm fond of all of them. Most people are not aware that in Hollywood only about one of 10 accepted scripts ever gets produced. The others are assigned, paid for, written in blood, and then, for one reason or another, put on the shelf. I worked my ass off on every one of my 19 unproduced scripts.
For Murder on the Istanbul Train, the network sent me overseas, where I rode this train across Europe into Vienna—and turned in a really exciting script. But the actress who was to star in it, and for whom it was written, took on another project. My train was dead on the tracks. George Clayton Johnson and I sold an original half-hour teleplay, Dreamflight, to [Rod] Serling at The Twilight Zone, but they went to hour scripts for the season, and that was that. I wrote a neat, moody screenplay for director Billy Friedkin, who flew me down to the Gulf of Mexico to scout locations, but before we could get De Pompa produced, Billy was off to New York to direct The French Connection. A producer at MGM called me in to write an action western I called The Nighthawk Rides! They decided, once it was done, that it was "too close to Zorro," so it never got made. It was later printed in The Best of the West. The irony here is that they had originally asked for a "Zorro-like" script! Buck Houghton, who worked for Serling in producing The Twilight Zone, hired me to write the pilot for a new TV series, Just Before Dark (a clone of Zone), and I based the script on my oft-reprinted story The Small World of Lewis Stillman, but the producer died before the cameras could turn.
And I've written before about the ill-fated story behind my two-night miniseries based on Peter Straub's Floating Dragon. I spent six months adapting his novel and finally had a shooting script everyone loved at the network [NBC]. It was green-lighted for production, and just eight days before the first day of principal photography all of the execs at NBC were fired and their projects scrapped. End of the Dragon!
I could go on, with other sad tales about aborted scripts, but it's too painful. I must stop.
Just how serious are you as a scriptwriter? Do you try for depth and symbolism?
Nolan: Basically I'm an entertainer, a storyteller. I'm not out to challenge Shakespeare. Whatever makes the story I'm telling work well for the screen is what I put into the scripts. I never deliberately try for depth and symbolism. If people find these elements in what I wrote for films or television, that's fine with me. But I never say to myself, "Ah, I'll make this scene deeper," or "Ah, I'll put in a symbol here." Whatever works best for the story, that's what concerns me.
What does the F in William F. Nolan stand for?
Nolan: The F is for Francis—a name I've always disliked. Which is why I called the villain "Francis" in Logan's Run.
Last words?
Nolan: I hope to be in Canada with the crew and the cast in 2006. I hope to be a consultant of the film—but we haven't worked that out yet. That is still up in the air.
I have a voice-over commentary for Trilogy of Terror, which is going to be released on DVD in 2006.
I will be teaching creative writing in the spring and summer at Oregon Central Community College in Bend, Oregon.
I expect to retire on my 100th birthday [laughs]. My ambition is to have 100 books published before I cash in my chips and retire. I'm up past 80 now, so it's possible I can achieve that goal.
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