GARDNER
We didn’t get instruction on how to write. It was understood that you wrote and turned things in. Sometimes you didn’t have class at all, and just gave stories to your teacher. You were just supposed to write, which is the best way to learn how, I think. I had a really good teacher out there named Herbert Wilner, who believed in the direction I was taking. He didn’t want to teach me. He said, “Just keep going. What you’re doing is good. Just keep working on it.” I also had an asshole teacher who accused me of being a plagiarist for some essay I wrote about this French writer, Robbe-Grillet, whom the teacher had never heard of. He had some friend in the French department in the University of California, and he ran my essay to him to find out where I’d plagiarized it from. He was going to keep me from graduating, because he was positive he was going to bust me. I told him, This is my work, why would I plagiarize? He said, Because this is a publishable essay. I said, I’m in college, I’m taking writing courses. When he saw that I could write something publishable, he assumed I was a cheat. It was as if they never expected to turn out any talented writers in this goddamn college. I couldn’t believe it. It was a long time ago, and I’ll never forget that.
INTERVIEWER
The movie version of Fat City is a classic, and very faithful to the novel. How closely did you work with John Huston on the script?
GARDNER
Before I started to write it, he invited me to come over to his place in Ireland for a couple of weeks for a discussion about how it was going to go. He was a funny guy. He trusted me, I think, because we didn’t talk all day about the script. We talked maybe a half an hour. Then he wanted to paint. He was always painting.
INTERVIEWER
Most of his best films—Fat City, The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Asphalt Jungle—were adapted from novels.
GARDNER
He followed those novels quite well. He’d been an amateur boxer. It was lucky because my objection to boxing movies back then was that they were all the same. It’s a fixed fight and the hero won’t take a dive and maybe they break his hands afterward. I thought there needed to be a boxing film done another way. He was all for it.
INTERVIEWER
Were you around while they shot the film?
GARDNER
Every day. I watched every scene.
INTERVIEWER
One of the most extraordinary things about the movie is the casting. Stacy Keach, who played Billy, was a Shakespearean actor who hadn’t done many films at that point. Jeff Bridges, who played Ernie, wasn’t a movie star yet.
GARDNER
I think it was his second film.
INTERVIEWER
And Susan Tyrrell doesn’t even seem to be an actress—she really appears to be Oma, the character she plays, a lost drunk. How did you feel about those actors embodying your creations?
GARDNER
I felt lucky. They all had a very different approach to it. Jeff Bridges was naturally an underplayer and Susan Tyrrell was an over-the-top actress. She actually had to be brought down. She’d been a stage actress. I don’t know whether she’d ever been in a movie before. I think Huston saw her in some stage play, and when you’re on stage in a good-sized theater, you can really project your voice. She sort of started that role over the top and I kept waiting for Huston to quiet her down. I finally said something to John. That maybe she was overplaying some of the scenes. Maybe he thought so, too, I’m not saying it was my idea. Maybe I just corroborated what he was thinking.
Later, I saw her walking on the hotel grounds one day and she said, Oh! They want me to bring it down a little bit. And I said, You know, that would be okay. And she said, I don’t care what they want! I’ll play Oma if I have to grow a cock! She never really brought it down all that much. I look at it now and think that it’s a brilliant performance. She had the guts to play women that went over the top very frequently. And there are certainly people like that. It took me a while to learn to live with what she was doing. But she was sensational.
INTERVIEWER
After Fat City, how did you get by?
GARDNER
Well, I made a living somehow. I wrote the movie of Fat City and I wrote another movie called Valentino Returns. I made pretty good money on that. I wrote another movie called The Milagro Beanfield War. I never got the writing credit on that. It was based on a novel and the writer kept squawking. He would object to everything I did. In letters. And finally the producers let me go and hired him to write the screenplay. Anyway, that’s how I made a living.
INTERVIEWER
In the nineties, you worked on a television show called NYPD Blue. I read on the internet that you were a producer and wrote episodes. I remember you once told me that when you got hired for that, you didn’t even have a TV.
GARDNER
I still don’t have a TV. I’ve never had a TV.