If you are looking for a slick tale about overnight success in the movie business, don’t read the story of Patrick Sheane Duncan’s life. Ditto if you want to hear more about the glamor that seems to attach itself to Hollywood as easily as lint does to a black wool suit.
But if you want a glimpse behind the glitter, a look at what it really takes to make it in Hollywood, read on. Duncan’s long journey from the rags of his impoverished Midwest youth to the riches that came as the screenwriter of “Mr. Holland’s Opus” and the newly released “Courage Under Fire” is a story about something people in this town deeply dislike–reality.
Long before there was Richard Dreyfuss as Mr. Holland, the inspirational high school music teacher, long before there was Denzel Washington as Lt. Col. Nathaniel Serling, the soul-searching commander of a Gulf War tank unit, there were the strawberry fields of Michigan.
“It was something we did every summer,” Duncan said reaching back to a youth when he and his family worked as migrant farm laborers in the Midwest. “You start with strawberries and then you go into cherries and blueberries, then peaches and pears. Then celery and onions. It was just hard work, hard work, hard work.”
Everything about Duncan’s early life seems to have been hard.
Before “settling” as migrant workers in Michigan, Duncan’s family wandered from job to job in seven states. His father was stabbed to death in a bar in Boise, Idaho, when Duncan was 10. Left as the oldest of 12 children, he now had to care for his younger siblings and look out for his mother who, like his father, was an alcoholic.
There followed a series of abusive men who drifted in and out of his mother’s life, one of whom took a shot at Duncan as a teenager. Ultimately, Duncan drifted into crime.
“I was always having trouble with the law,” the 48-year-old Duncan confessed recently, rattling off a list of breaking and entering offenses, robberies and assaults that repeatedly landed him in jail.
“If you grow up poor in this country you have an inferiority complex automatically because you are made to feel that it is your fault that you are poor,” Duncan said, “that there is something wrong with you.”
“I’d go into bars with some friends who would be drinking some and I’d look for a guy to pick a fight with. I was mad and I had no focus for it.”
Focus entered Duncan’s life in 1968 in the form of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and a place called Vietnam.
“When I got to Vietnam I was a good soldier and I learned that there was no difference between me and rich people,” he said. “Bullets couldn’t discriminate that way. Sometimes they got a better job, a safer job and so on, but I was as smart as they were. I was as good a leader as they were. That was a big revelation to me.”
Fascination with film
Out of the Army with some lessons learned, Duncan decided that his life had to change.
He gravitated toward hard work again. His first job after leaving the Army was in a steel factory in Holland, Mich., where he labored making parts of tractor trailers.
“But I hated that,” he said. “I was determined to find a job where I could have fun for five days a week. Where I would get up and want to go to work.”
He left the factory and went to college, getting a degree in history in two years and one term at Grand Valley State University in Michigan.
While at school Duncan and a professor opened a small art cinema in Grand Rapids called the Bijou where they showed 16 millimeter films that found a ready market among students.
“I was manager, projectionist and popcorn maker. I made a go of it and it was profitable in a year.”
He was later hired as general manager for a chain of movie theaters across Michigan. It was here that Duncan had the first flicker of desire to write screenplays.
“I’d have to go to Detroit and see these bad movies all the time. Sometimes I would see three or four a day. And I would come home and complain to my wife that I could write better scripts than that and she would say; `Do it, or shut up.’ So I sat down and wrote a script.”
That was 1975.
Never having studied writing, much less screenwriting, Duncan had no idea where to begin so he went out and bought a paperback copy of the script for the 1976 Western “Missouri Breaks.”
“I used that as my form,” he said. The script was so bad, Duncan said, that he hopes it is lost forever.
The next year Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplay for the 1976 film “Taxi Driver,” came to Michigan promoting the film and Duncan got the job of escorting him from theater to theater.
“I thought, God this guy makes a living at this. He was making big money. I said if he can make money at this, I could make money. I had a role model.”
Getting serious about writing
Duncan, who had just turned 30, quit his job and moved to Los Angeles to write. But it would be years before he could earn a living from his writing and thus was born his career as an accountant.
“I lied to get the job,” Duncan said of his first position as the director of accounts receivable in a minor studio after being turned down by numerous others. “I said I would work for free for two weeks and if they did not like me they could fire me.
“Suddenly I had a career as an accountant, which I hated. I tell anybody who wants to be a writer to get a job they hate. You’ll write.”
And write he did. Duncan would write before work, after work, on his lunch hour. “I wrote a lot in Burger King,” he said.
Duncan’s first “big job” was a rewrite on a film called “Disc Jockey.” “I think they gave me a hundred bucks. I had to do it overnight,” he said. “That was important. Somebody had paid me to write.”
For years Duncan went from studio to studio, producer to producer, door to door trying to get his scripts read. Frustrated, he used whatever means he could to get his scripts in front of producers. “I even asked a secretary; `Would you read it? And if you like it would you give it to him?’ That actually worked.”
“I kept on writing on spec,” he said. “As my reputation grew and as the writing got better, I don’t know. It was all of those things. I never had anything happen like–bang!”
Duncan said that he still remains an angry man, but that he now focuses his anger and transforms it into scripts. His two most recent films and a new stage play about the Los Angeles riots all grew out of anger, Duncan insisted.
“I wrote . . . `Mr. Holland’s Opus’ because of what (California) Gov. (Pete) Wilson was doing to the state’s education program,” Duncan said.
Caught in a traffic jam on the way home one day Duncan discovered the tie-up was the result of a protest by teachers who were angry about cutbacks in state funding for schools.
“I started thinking about how I wouldn’t be here if it hadn’t been for some teachers,” Duncan recalled. Before he was out of traffic he had the entire story line for “Mr. Holland’s Opus” finished in his mind. Within a week the first draft of the screenplay was done.
His play about the L.A. riots, “Souls on Fire,” similarly grew out of anger.
“I got angry because nobody seemed to have learned the lessons of the riots and so I wrote the play. Everything that was wrong before the riots is still wrong. There are still no jobs and there is still nothing being done.”
`Anger fuels me’
And the same anger led to his latest film, “Courage Under Fire,” a screenplay about the search for truth and the meaning of courage presented through the intertwined stories of two officers (played by Washington and Meg Ryan) during in the Gulf War.
“And `Courage Under Fire’ was because of this whole debate over politicians saying that women can’t serve in combat. Come on now!
“I still get mad that they seem to have forgotten the lessons of Vietnam. For a long time after Vietnam our politicians thought twice about sending young men into battle. With Reagan and Bush, with any political problem they would invade Panama.”
“So yeah, anger fuels me.”
His anger over the way President Clinton’s avoidance of military service has been presented also led to a screenplay Duncan is now writing.
“Nobody was trying to go to Vietnam and now Clinton is condemned because he did what 99 percent of the male population did. Clinton did what everybody was doing.
“So I got mad about that and I am writing a script about the anti-war movement.
While Duncan has found great financial success in the last few years, (“Mr. Holland’s Opus” sold for $1.6 million and “Courage Under Fire” for about $2.5 million) he has found only the limited fame that Hollywood allots even its most successful screenwriters.
“You never get invited to the junkets,” he said talking about post-production and pre-release tours which always include the stars and directors. “Nobody wants to talk to the writers. The directors and actors soak up all the publicity. Sometimes you don’t even get invited to the cast and crew screening.
“Part of it is that writers are notoriously shy. But this is a town where perception is stronger than reality and publicity is what establishes those perceptions.”
And, Duncan said, there is practically no interaction between screenwriters and the actors who star in their movies.
“None. I’ve never met Meg, or Denzel. You are lucky if you get invited to the set. I met Richard (Dreyfuss) because I had to talk him into doing the movie. He didn’t want to do it,” Duncan said.
“I try not to whine and so on. It’s just the way things work. Actually it does not bother me that much.
“I take great satisfaction in the writing. I try to write about regular people . . . blue collar people, people doing their jobs, like Mr. Holland, a guy trying to do his job the best he can. These are people that get forgotten, neglected, just like writers.”
