ROOSTER BAR TOUR: Second stop: Memphis.

Hi, I'm John Grisham, and you're listening to the second season of Book Tour. In this episode, I return to my hometown of Memphis. My guests include historian Hamptonsides and booksellers Corey Messler and Matt Crowe. The event was held at the auditorium at Christian Brothers University and was co-sponsored by Berks and Novel Bookstore. Thanks for listening. Let's start the show.

Good evening, everybody. My name is John Smorelli. I'm service president of Christian Brothers University. It's a wonderful opportunity to welcome you to this very, very, very special event. We're very honored at CBU to to partner with. with two locally owned and independent bookstores, Burke's Bookstore and Novel Books. So we ask you to continue to patronize these bookstores.

We at CBU are very, very proud to co-sponsor this event, and I want to give credit to our Memphis Reads program and Dr. Karen Golightly in our Modern Languages department. It's an incredible... program every year we have a memphis reads and where we bring an author in and what to be better here i'm going to keep my introductions very very brief because you don't want to hear me you want to hear our our two wonderful authors

Hampton Sides, native of Memphis, Yale graduate. He's the editor for Outside and a frequent contributor to National Geographic and other magazines. His journalistic work has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing. He's the author of best-selling histories, a number of them, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, just to name a few. We also want to warmly welcome, okay, let me just, the book is also, let me just get one more plug for Hampton.

The book is also the basis for the acclaimed documentary, Roads to Memphis, on the PBS show, The American Experience, which Hampton served as historical consultant. Welcome, Hampton. John Grisham. Long before his name became synonymous with modern legal thriller, he is working 60 to 70 hours a week in small South Haven, Mississippi law practice, squeezing in time before going to the office.

during courtroom recesses to work on his hobby, writing his first novel. Born February 8, 1955, in Jonesboro, Arkansas, to a construction worker and homemaker, John Grisham. As a child, dreamed of being a professional baseball player. Go figure. Realizing he didn't have the right stuff for a pro career, he shifted gears and majored in accounting in Mississippi State University. After graduating from Los... This is CBU. Remember that.

After graduating from law school at Ole Miss in 1981, no more applause also, he went on to practice law for nearly a decade in South Haven, specializing in criminal defense and personal injury litigations. In 1983, he was elected to... State House of Representatives and served until 1990. He is the author of 31 novels.

one work of nonfiction, a collection of short stories, and six novels for young readers. There are currently over 300 million copies of John Grisham books in print worldwide, which have been translated into 40-plus. languages. Nine of his novels have been turned into film. What an awesome performance. So let me just stop talking and welcome our wonderful panel and we will begin our project. You're out.

Thank you, Mr. Perez. Happy to be here at CBU. When I was a kid, it was CBC. It was a long time ago. And I'm on a book tour for Rooster Bar, which came out Tuesday.

now available in fine bookstores everywhere and in hardback and audio. And I suppose you can find the e-book version somewhere in the world. And I'm traveling around to 7. cities with this is your phone on Cory would you turn it off that's a music just turn it off for you We've been we've been bitching for about 25 years each other because he owns books bookstore And every time I go there, it's you know, it's it's a challenge to get through the afternoon

Back in June, I published a book called Camino Island. And for the first time, thank you. For the first time in 25 years, I went on an author tour. And I went to 13... bookstores in 13 towns and had a ball I love to go to independent bookstores and kind of and then see them and hang out and hang out with the booksellers and

meet some of the fans and it's the first time i'd done it in a long time it was very gratifying and we decided to do a podcast and i wasn't sure what a podcast was until they they sent me a podcast and i listened to it and i said this will be fun after each book signing to invite local writers in the area to come like this and sit down with me and the booksellers and have a conversation, talk about writing.

and reading and book selling and whatever you want to talk about. And that's what we're doing. There's no script tonight. Nothing is planned. We can't screw up because there's no way to screw it up. There's nothing planned. For many years, even more years than I've realized until about an hour ago, I've been enjoying... Hampton's books. I thought the first thing I read was Ghost Soldiers. As it turns out, he wrote for Memphis Magazine years before.

I read something he wrote 30 years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, but his books have always been informative and compelling, and I love great storytelling. this guy is one of the best and I wanted to meet him and I knew he was from here my neck of the woods and so Hampton's here so glad to have you.

One thing we're doing all is also showcasing independent bookstores and in 1991 when I published a time to kill Most of the stores did not have did not have time for, you know, an unknown writer with a book nobody had heard of, published by a company no one had heard of, and it was tough getting in bookstores. And there were a handful of stores in the Mid-South area.

that supported me way back then. And a few years later, well, 18 months later, 17 months later, when the firm came out, it was a different story. And I began signing at Burke's Bookstore. At that time, owned by Fred and Harriet Beeson. But Corey and Cheryl ran the place. We all know them. They've been around for a long time. And I love the old bookstore, and we begin having these marathon signings at Berks. They would last for...

A few folks were there. I still want to thank you for showing up. I want to choke you for showing up because we signed for 15 hours one day and we thought we were crazy. It was firm, Pelican brief client. Chamber was probably the day we broke our back. We said, we can't do 15 hours every time. But it was Memphis. It was my backyard. A lot of folks were showing up and so for years I would come back and sign still at Berks.

Square Books in Oxford, Lemuria and Jackson, the bookstore in Blyaville, Reed's in Tupelo, and then later Turn Row Books in Greenwood. And that was kind of my little private book tour. But I've always... tried to support the independence. In this market, it's very difficult to survive as a bookseller, but Berks has been fighting the good fight for a long time.

A big hand for Corey and Cheryl Messler for Berksman. Some months back, I got a... frantic email from john virgos and he said well you know we're losing our bookstore we're losing um our last big community bookstore and and can you help us and i said well first of all i'm not investing okay I've lost money in everything else. I'm not going to lose money in a bookstore.

And I said, why don't you talk to Richard Haworth at Square Books and John Evans at Lemuria. Those guys have been doing it for 35 years. They know everything. They're successful. And John did. And John and others. scramble and put together a very enthusiastic and and not desperate but a determined effort to to to save the bookstore and they've been successful and novel open

Six weeks ago? About two months ago. Two months ago. And there were 23 or 24 investors who came together and put up the money and opened a beautiful bookstore. I went there today for the first time. and signed a bunch of books and enjoyed the staff and enjoyed the setting, and it's really remarkable. And John Virgos in one of his emails said,

If we lose our big community-based bookstore, the town's not going to be the same, so we've got to have it. If you haven't been to Novel, you've got to go, you've got to support it, but a big hand for the folks at Novel Bookstore. So for the next hour or so, we're going to talk and ask each other questions, and I want to encourage you guys, yeah, you too, if you have questions that you want to ask us about book selling.

We're going to ask you questions about that, but also about writing and the process and publishing. And if we have time at the end, we'll be happy to open it up for questions from the floor.

So Hampton, my first question to you, in view of the fact it takes so long between books, that's kind of a joke. I mean, it takes him five years, okay? What are you working on now? Yeah, I need some tips on how to be a little more prolific. Write fiction and not fiction, okay? I'm working on a book now that turned out to be very current. I didn't intend it this way, but it's a book set in North Korea in 1950 when the United States was pushing towards the Yalu.

the group of Marines, the 1st Marine Division. got itself trapped in the mountains, and got surrounded 10 to 1 by 100,000 Chinese. In North Korea. In North Korea, in the dead of winter, 20 below zero. And they had to figure out a way to get themselves out of this trap. And the story got a lot more current in the last couple of months. And I'm trying to outrun, I feel like I'm trying to outrun news events right now to get this thing.

It's going to come out sometime in October of next year. So look for it. The tentative title is The Reservoir. It's the Battle of Chosen Reservoir. That's like one of my titles, The Something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I really struggle with titles, obviously, but, you know, The Firm, The Appeal, pretty dull stuff. The Brief, yeah. But Ghost Soldiers was a great title. Blood and Thunder and Hell Hound on his...

Trail or tail or what's that? That was kind of a mouthful. Hellhound, that one was a tactical error in terms of the title. I like the title. It's from an old blues lyric, you know, from Robert Johnson, Hellhound on my Trail. But I have been introduced... all the time, up on stage, in so many different ways having to do with that book. Like, one time I was literally introduced as the author of Hellbound for Some Tail. So, it was not...

It was not good. It was not good. So maybe. Which could have been appropriate at one point in your life before. Yeah, that's true. My wife's right here, so I got to be careful. Anne's here, so let's.

Let's clean it up already, okay? So a question I have for you. I mean, your topics are so diverse. I love Ghost Soldiers, and I love Blood and Thunder, the Kit Carson story, and I love the James Earl Ray story. You kind of... bounce all over the place. Every writer hates the question, where do you get your ideas? That's a question we always get. But for you, it's how do you pick a topic?

that you've got to spend four or five years researching extensively and hopefully turn that into a compelling story. How do you go about choosing those topics? Every book is a little bit different, but with every book, there is a process that's both kind of rational, it makes a lot of sort of sense, and then there's a part of the process that is irrational.

The rational part is just simply, is this book a book that has good characters, good plot, good setting, all those kinds of characteristics that any good story... has to have, and that's true with all your novels as well. The irrational part of it is like, well, wait a minute, I got to live with this thing for five years. If I don't have that funny feeling, that feeling of like the hair standing up on the back of my neck, that feeling of being in love with this thing early on.

then how am I going to maintain that feeling for four or five years as I do the research? Because I spend a lot of time in the archives. I spend a lot of time traveling to these battlefields and these different locations. And you know, you're going to lose that feeling at times. you know, during those four or five years, you know, that funny feeling goes away. Do you enjoy the research? Say that again? Do you enjoy the research? I love the research. See, I hate the research. Yeah, okay.

Well, I'll do the research, you write the books, we'll be a team. I learned to hate research in law school. I tried to avoid it when I was a lawyer. My father was a law professor. Well, the part of the research that's fun is when you get to go places and see things and interview people and, you know, I've been to a lot of prisons and that's always fascinating.

It's depressing, but you find good stories there. I really dislike the legal research that I have to do with certain books, but I cannot imagine. I wrote one nonfiction book. The Innocent Man came out 10 years ago, and I was in way over my head. At one point, I was staring at 10,000 documents of prison records for this guy, and I'm thinking, you know, I didn't ask for this. Yes, I did, too. I signed up for it.

And so I started hiring research assistants to do all the work, but I can't imagine researching diligently for four years and having all this tons of... research and data and then trying to weave that into a comparative compelling narrative that's it's hard at times and uh you know one time when one of my boys i have three boys one of them came to work one day and watched me work and uh

You know, I was picking up a document and putting the document down. And then picking up maybe another document, put it down. He was watching me. You know, I think he was hoping his dad was an astronaut or a fireman or something. And at some point he just said, Dad, is it always like this? And so needless to say, none of my three boys are writers.

It is hard work, but truly, sitting in archives, I love the smell of all these old... diaries and you know people in the old days used to write beautifully you know now it's you know it would be a text or something uh and i love you know that feeling of connection with history that way when you when you go to the national archives or or you go to anywhere where these relics are stored that's a

part of the joy of doing these books. So you have three books. The fourth one comes out next year, supposedly. Obviously, your publisher does not give you a deadline because it takes so long. But I mean... Do you see... You're fairly young. Do you see this going on for a number of years? This is your plan? Or do you want to switch and write poetry? I don't know.

I don't know. If I was smart, I would get into something different. Maybe a little porn or something. I said poetry, not porn. I love it. The weird thing about it is that even though there is a masochistic side to this kind of work... which is all the years of sort of digesting the research. It's really not doing the research that's hard. It's the digesting.

Figuring it out like all these just trying to reconcile all these different contradictions in the historical record That's really what takes the time and that's the really the hard part. I love

writing. I love the revision process. I do all my writing in a coffee shop. I found that I have to leave the house. I go to this coffee shop in Santa Fe. One time I was actually, I became such a part of the furniture. that they forgot I was in there. Schreider's go to bars, okay, and he goes to coffee shops. And I like to get highly caffeinated, and they forgot I was in there, and I was over there by the ferns, and they just forgot about me, and they locked up the shop.

And, you know, I pulled an all-nighter in a coffee shop. So that's kind of the weird MO. I think all writers have to figure out some way to... I'm curious, where do you write? You don't write in coffee shops. Everyone knows you. I don't go to coffee shops to write. I have a little office in a separate building behind the house, and I've been there for...

20 years and I go over every morning at Seven o'clock with the same cup and the same coffee and fresh coffee and Sit in the same chair with the same quilt and it's dark, it's a desktop computer, but there's no phone, no fax, no internet, no music, and it's wonderful. And the first... I love the hours from 7 to 10 in the morning when things are still quiet. I'll go back to the house for more coffee or back and forth to stretch my legs, but that's a great day right there. I'll work till...

11, sometimes 12. Once you write for about four hours, your brain's pretty well mush. And a good day is... 1,000 words, a really good day is 2,000 words, a slow day is 500 words. But I mean, there's no such thing as a day off. I'll start in January and give myself six months. And it's five days a week. You, every day? Well, I mean, I spend two or three years where I don't write a single word. I believe that because look at it. Because I'm traveling and I'm...

going to places. I'm reading all these books about the Korean War currently, but man, the Martin Luther King story about the assassination. There's so much literature on the King assassination that nearly gave me an aneurysm. processing it all and and then of course the conspiracy theories and everything else so yeah uh there's two or three years where i'm not writing at all and i know

that it's customarily said that a writer should write something every day, but I literally go years without writing. And then I write like a bat out of hell because, you know, my editor says it's time. It's code blue. You know, it's time. It's time to write. And because I came out of a magazine background, I think I kind of enjoy deadlines, and I do pretty well under that kind of pressure. I kind of write as if I'm still writing for a magazine.

Corey, you've published eight books, eight novels? Yes. Do you write every day? I do write. I do write every day. Sometime during my 40s, I learned discipline, and I started going to bed early. I'd get up between 5 and 6 every morning. Even when I was working, which I don't work as much anymore, that gave me hours.

And so all of my books are early morning books. But I have a question. Can I ask a question of both of you? That's why you're here, Corey. Thank you. Obviously, the differences are that... Hampton writes nonfiction, you write fiction. I don't know if Hampton's ever tried a novel. You tried the nonfiction and didn't like it. And differences in the style you're writing remind me of what Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, when they met...

Bob Dylan asked Leonard Cohen about a song that he particularly liked of his and said, how long did that take you? And Leonard Cohen said, that one took about two years. And Leonard said, I really love... Something else of yours. How long did it take you? And Bob said 15 minutes. So I think you're the 15 minutes. But here's the similarity. I'm Bob Dylan and you're Leonard Cohen. It's a nice analogy. I'm flattered. Rob's alive. Me too. Something Hampton said triggered this in my head.

You're both looking for characters. And one of the strengths of John's book, I'm sure you've all read all of them like I have. Of course, he's a plotter. He's maybe the best plotter in fiction. But it's characters. There's always a character. I can still picture Darby Shaw. You obviously have to use real people, but you said you go in search of a character and a narrative.

I'd like to talk about that similarity, the fact that, to me, a book is character-driven. So with Blood and Thunder, did you start with Kit Carson? Not exactly not exactly, but I'm always looking for characters, and I think that it really is This kind of history that I do is kind of a redheaded stepchild of history. It's not academic history. Academic historians tend to take a dim view of it.

You're looking for story, you're looking for character embedded somewhere in history. And it's always bothered me that I work in a profession that has a negative in front of it. It's the only one I can think of. Derek Jeter is a non-basketball player. Why is it called nonfiction anyway? Shouldn't it be the opposite? You know, it basically, it's called nonfiction because it assumes, I think, that lying and making shit up is the...

is the default position of human nature, you know? So, I mean, you know, I don't know, I'm digressing here, but I think, you know... You sound somewhat troubled by this. Are you in therapy? That's what this is all about. No, let's get it out. So you're looking for character. You're looking for plot. You're looking for some kind of story. I don't write about topics. I wouldn't write about something like Jacksonian democracy or something. But I could see writing about Jackson.

You'll get Jacksonian democracy if you get into Jackson. So I think it is really important with narrative history to have very strong characters that you care about, that you follow, that have a kind of a...

arc to their life and that the story have some kind of discipline to it. You know, it's not just sprawling everywhere. It does have a... clear ending it has a very clear beginning so i think at least with my stuff that's what i'm looking for i think with your stories plot is is really even more important than character isn't it it's sort of both i guess to me plot is

far more important than character. I don't start unless I have the plot and the plot goes back to the story and the story is something that I'm always looking for and it's there every day in the headlines. It's there every day in the newspapers. I write about stuff. The current book, The Rooster Bar, is about the student debt crisis, which is an enormous crisis in this country. It's about that issue, and I'm really troubled by the...

Opioid crisis. There's some legal liability there somewhere. I'm not sure where. I don't have the story yet. Is that your next one? No, I don't think so. I mean, I'll start in January and I'm not writing now. But at this time of the year, I'm always kicking around a couple of ideas for the next... I've got two or three, and I've been working with those ideas for...

Some a long time, some not so long, but in January I'll pick the best idea and run with it and publish it a year from now. So that's kind of my schedule. I tend to write more about issues, legal issues, and I'm still, I get worked up more now over injustice and social injustice. and criminal injustice and penal injustice than I did 20 years ago. I mean, the problems are even greater, and I am extremely frustrated because we have all these things wrong with our systems that we can easily fix.

Not easily, but we could fix them, and we could save a lot of money, and we could save a lot of human suffering if we wouldn't convict innocent people, and if we would just clean up the mess we've made. uh with our criminal justice system and that's where my interest is all the time i mean i'm just always that's where i live because i'm a lawyer and do you ever stop and think about the injustice though that you you personally commit against trees everywhere

By publishing all these popular books, forests everywhere are leveled. Trees are America's renewable resource, okay? We can always print more trees.

Half my books are now sold as e-books. Oh, sorry. Didn't mean to bring that up. That's a terrible idea. So a question for you. What made you decide to invest in a bookstore? I mean, you're really bucking the trend, buddy, because, you know, in the past 15 years, we've lost 3,000 bookstores. We lost 700 one day with Borders. Barnes & Noble is, they've cut some stores.

When I started signing the firm in 1991, I signed at Berks. I signed at two or three other small independent stores in town. They're long gone. And then when your store closed, there was Berks. and nobody else will stand. So you're really bucking the trend. Why'd you do this? Everybody needs a good fool's errand from time to time.

I know the question cannot be answered. I'm just putting you on the spot. No, it does. Well, John Vergas, who wanted to be here tonight, and he was out of town, so he couldn't be. His position was that a city of this scale needed a substantial bookstore to anchor book culture And the investor group felt the same way I think that printed words will remain meaningful to a segment of the population ad infinitum.

And so despite the fact that there has been considerable attrition in bookstores across the country, that we're doing well so far, and I think we'll continue to. You don't get events like this through other distribution points for books. And so it's more than a box of niche retail. It's really a platform for culture and a culture that civilizes all of us that is needed. And, you know, to your point regarding issues.

And to yours regarding key people in history who have made a difference in the world we live in, without that element to support the culture, we all lose something. Can I say something, Jim? Yes. I agree 100% with what he just said. I will put this footnote to what John said.

When all the giants died, when all the Barnes & Noble started closings and the borders, what happened was some smart folks said, you can do that on a slightly smaller scale. And you had people like Ann Patchett in Nashville. when their Davis kid closed, opened a store that's from all accounts booming, she's had to expand. So I think there is a hunger.

for the printed word. Thank you all. Because printed books, yes, printed books are not going to die because they're a perfect object. They're a perfect object and they're not going to be bettered. And it is... It was important for us at Berks that Novel open because we're not that kind of store, and Memphis needed that kind of store. And I think... There's a place in every, especially a city this size, in every city for a bookstore like that. Thank you. And along those same lines, I've known...

Cory and Cheryl for 26 years, and we spent a lot of fun moments together signing books and talking about books. And when I said, you know, I'm publishing in October and I'll be in Memphis for an event. And, you know, like old times say, Corey and Cheryl said, let's include the new guys. Let's include Novel. So...

Hampton, have you been tempted to buy a bookstore? Never, never. It's kind of the trend among authors. Yeah, I know. Like Ann Patchett. No, I don't think so. It's not my cup of tea. I'm not a business person at all. That would be a horrible failure at it, I think. But it's a noble failure, I guess. It's retail. It's 24-7. Not 24-7, but seven days a week. It's got to be your lifeblood. It's got to be something that you'd...

Do it. Every fiber of your being. I'm not going to do it. Any movie talk? Movie talk. Well, this, my Martin Luther King book, Hellhound on His Trail. despite the fact that it's a difficult title for some people to pronounce, is moving forward as a feature film. Molly Smith Fred Smith's daughter who has a company called black label media is Financing it and there's a really interesting

young writer-director named Scott Cooper, who is writing the script. He did Black Mass, a movie called Black Mass recently. They're talking about starting to film it in April, which would be the 50th anniversary, of course, of the King assassination. And we'll see if it happens. In Hollywood, you never believe it until you're watching, you know...

Eating popcorn and watching the credits scroll up. You've watched a few times, though, so it's worked for you. You never believe it in Hollywood until they start filming. Because at that point, they're spending some serious money. And I've been through... I have not had a movie made in 15 years. And it's not because we haven't tried. But if you go back almost 25 years ago to the first several...

The Firm, Pelican Brief, Client, Chamber, which was not a good movie, but Rainmaker and Runaway Jury and Time to Kill. Those were big Hollywood movies with big casts, big budgets. big domestic and foreign box office grosses, and everybody made money. I mean, those were big movies. And they were made quickly after the books were published. And for some reason...

We can't convince Hollywood that that model should work today. And we just can't do it. Hollywood doesn't make smart adult dramas. They're making Spider-Man 5. And the action films, that's what they think about. and you can't get financing for it to put together a movie. And after a while, we just kind of stopped trying. If you could come up with like action figures or Halloween costumes that would go with...

One of your films would probably be more merchant. We've actually thought about that, you know, super lawyer and things like that, but it's just One to wonder lawyer Tort-wielding superheroes. Yeah, it's just not going to work. But I think the smart stuff that is getting made, more and more and more, the smart stuff is on television. It's streaming. It's being done in miniseries, in limited series.

And, you know, maybe that's what needs to happen. You know, write something that could kind of work for, in that sort of format, maybe a trilogy or something. Because I think that's really where the smart and interesting... Production work is all the talents going to television all the mother money's going to television all the talents there

The actors, the writers, the directors, it's all television now. Okay, but also that means that there are over 400 TV series being developed right now. And we have two or three of those. They have not started filming, so I don't believe it until they start filming. My book, The Innocent Man, non-fiction, is a Netflix series, a six-part series, I think two hours per episode.

that's almost finished so he filmed it that that's gonna that's gonna really happen and excited about that my agent goes to Hollywood once or twice a year to make the rounds to talk to everybody. And for years he would go to the studios. Now he doesn't bother with the studios. It's Netflix, Amazon, Google, even Facebook. That's where they have all the money.

I think Netflix wants to spend 8 zillion bucks this year with new content. And so that's where all the action is. Truthfully, I don't understand that world. I don't make movies. I don't want to learn how to make movies. I've learned that one thing I can do is go write the next story. Publish it like Rooster Bar, and it came out Tuesday, and the phone will ring off the wall for the next two weeks, and it'll stop ringing, and then it'll go away.

And if one, you know, maybe two years from now, somebody will read the book and say, hey, I'd like to do a movie or a TV series, then we'll talk to them. But I can't do anything today to make that. movie or TV series work. If I gave the film rights away, which I'm not going to do, if I wrote the screenplay for free, which I'm not going to do, but I can't force anything to get filmed.

And once I realized that years ago, I said, this is not my world. It's just too frustrating. I'll say a little something. John and I were talking about this earlier today. I had a... very minor brush with someone interested in filming one of my novels. Stupidly, I decided to be involved in it in the process. It was so painful.

I had to lie down for about six weeks. But I remembered afterwards, I remembered too late what John told me long ago when they were making every one of his books was becoming a movie. He said, tell them.

Give me a check. Don't call me again. That's what Stephen King told me many years ago. He said there are two groups of writers, those who don't deal with Hollywood for whatever reason. It's a very small group. The second group consists of those of us who do. And if you're in the second group, a couple rules, get all your money up front, kiss it goodbye, and expect it to be something different. And if you don't like that, go join the first group.

That's good advice. I think it was Hemingway who said you're supposed to drive to the Nevada-California border at midnight and take out your manuscript and hurl it over the border. They take out their money and hurl it over the border.

You turn around and you go your separate ways. Probably a smart way to do it. Probably a smart way to do it. One of our American writers, and I wish I could remember which, it would make a better story, said in talking about... his books being transferred to film, he said he couldn't care about it because the plot is what they take out to make the movie.

In other words, this organic thing that he worked with for years and with the character and everything, they extracted the plot and made a movie. Well, Corey, I can't say that because I was here... In 1992 when they filmed The Firm, and it was the first film, and it was a lot of fun. Memphis was, you know, we were all here, and we enjoyed it immensely. And when I saw the movie...

I didn't hang out much on the set because there's nothing in the world more boring than watching a movie being filmed. You just sit there in pure tedium for days and you realize how it ever gets done. So we didn't hang out. So they invited us to see the film for the first time at a fancy black tie fundraiser in New York City. And we're sitting there with 5,000 of our closest friends. Everybody's wearing tuxedos, and I'm watching The Firm on the big screen.

And it was a big moment. It was really important to me and to Renee. And we got to the end of it, and I'm thinking, who the hell wrote that? That's not my story. I didn't write that. But the excitement of being there outweighed the reservations I had about the movie itself. I came back. The client was here, and Joel Schumacher did that, and it was a lot of fun. Susan Sarandon and Tommy Lee Jones. But the one I really enjoyed was Rainmaker, because Francis Ford Coppola loves writers.

And he wanted me, for some reason, here all the time on the set just to sip cappuccino with him and watch him direct the movie. And when we got here to start, there was some old warehouse in downtown Memphis. And he believed in rehearsing and he believed in a complete read-through of the script for the entire cast. And I'm in the room with Jon Voight and Danny DeVito. and Matt Damon and Claire Danes and the whole cast, and DeVito is smoking a black cigar about that long.

And there are no windows open. It's 1975. I guess smoked back then. Matt Damon was terrified about his southern accent. He kept listening to me and said, how do you do that? I don't have an accent. What accent? And I said, I said, Matt, the thing you cannot fake a southern accent. It cannot be done. So don't do it. Just be yourself. He said, seriously, I don't need one.

I said, Matt, just, you know, who am I? Just don't try it. You can't do it. We can spot them a fake a mile away, okay? And we hate it. It sounds awful to us when somebody fakes it. You're in Memphis. But not everybody in Memphis is from here, so just be yourself. And he was greatly relieved. And we did the entire read-through of the script. DeVito does not believe in following a script.

He wants to ad-lib everything, and it just got hilarious. And Coppola would yell at him, and he would yell back, and we were going to smoke a cigar, and everybody was choking. And this goes on for like three hours, and I thought, what am I doing here? This is not... I wrote this stuff, but what am I doing here? And Coppola was, he asked me, when he started filming, he said, what do you want to see out of the film? And I said, okay, two things.

After the firm, I would love it if you would stick to the story, you know, the basic plot without major changes. And I want a PG-13 rating. The book is PG-13. I want books of PG-13 rating. It means a lot to me. you know stick with pg-13 he said done i asked i asked all of them to do that he's the only one that guaranteed it and we we he filmed the movie i was here way too much

He took the movie back to his winery in California where he has a workshop, editing room, film room. He worked on it for months and months. He's so obsessive. And he said, he finally called, and he said, okay, the movie's finished. Rainmaker. I want you to come see it. Well, I said, sure, but we have Little League Baseball this weekend. And he said,

When can you be here? And we flew out from Virginia after a Little League baseball game on Friday night, flew all night, got there. And what he does in his screening room, he likes to invite his neighbors to come watch the movie for the first time. So George Lucas comes over with his kids, and we're in this big room. We watch The Rainmaker for the first time.

I thought it was great. And so the movie ends and it turns on the lights and we go around the room and everybody comments on it. And Lucas had a couple of great things to say about it and change this. I didn't get that, whatever. He's a Star Wars guy. What are you talking about? What does he know about the law? And so Coppola had some changes. It was a great, he went back, edited some more, edited some more. Finally, they had to pull the movie away from him to get it released.

One week before Titanic. And it just tanked. I mean, it went nowhere. But I thought it was by far the best adaptation of any of my stuff. It took about 14 years for it to get into black. I get a check every six months for about $37. That's how much money the movies make for it. I remember you used to bristle.

when someone would come up to you in one of our lines at the bookstore and say, you wrote that movie, The Client. Well, my favorite is, hey man, I don't know about your books, but I love your movies. And I just smile and keep going, you know, at least he does something. Thank you for the $37. Yeah, at the most. How about a question from the floor?

The question is, once you finish the book for the first time, how do you get it published? Do you go through an agent? Do you go through an editor? What are your next few steps? You want to help us out? It certainly helps to have a good agent. Agents, you know, kind of like filters, and they just help you pitch the thing. They help you distill and sharpen and refine the book.

Editors, you know, get bombarded with so many manuscripts that they cannot and they just simply don't have the time to field stuff that comes in over the transom. So they rely on agents to... winnow that huge number of manuscripts that's one thing I think and listening you know to the kind of critique that you get from an agent or from if you can you know there are now a lot of people who will edit your book for freelance editors.

Because a lot of times professional editors simply don't have the time to do a whole lot of editing. Even after the book has actually been signed up. it's really they're very very busy and the line by line that close line by line editing is a really rare thing it can be very difficult to find an editor who has the time to do it so

Who was your first rejection? I met your first boss tonight, the first guy who paid you for a story. Memphis Magazine, right? Memphis Magazine. Ken Neal, I think he's here tonight. He really did. Did he show up? He said he was coming. There he is. Ken Neal, yes. I didn't think he'd show up after we met. for drinks he he published my first story and you know it's really important it's so important to have people that you know take a chance on you and

whether it's at a local newspaper or a local magazine or a book publisher. And, you know, it's a risky thing to recognize a new person, a young person who has never published before. I think that's really important. I think it's also really important to have people that you aspire to.

You view as a model for the kind of writing that you're doing. For me, that writer probably was, I didn't know it at the time, but he was the first writer that I ever met. And he lived about 100 yards from here. And his name was Shelby Foote. His son, yeah, let's hear it for Shelby Foote. Harry was, a narrative historian, doing this thing of narrative history before it really had much of a name for itself. And he was great at it. And, of course, he had this amazing beard and this amazing accent.

And his son, Huggy, and I were good friends, and we were in a rock band together, and we pretty much did everything we could to prevent Shelby from finishing his trilogy of the Civil War. You know, cranking up the Hendrix and, you know, Pink Floyd. I remember a lot of Pink Floyd. And there may or may not have been smoke in the room. And he would come up and Shelby would say, you know, hug him. Turn that racket down.

I'm working on Appomattox. But to have somebody like that, that you aspire to, and you realize later on, I began to realize what he was doing. He was sitting in that room for 25 years, writing this... 3,000-page trilogy of the Civil War, the discipline that that took and the idea of just following it through to the bitter end, I think gave me some real...

powerful ideas about what narrative history could be. Did you actually see him work? A couple of times. We'd go back there and watch him. He wrote in longhand. Longhand, in big, thick notebooks that he bound, right? Yeah. So every book was bound with his original handwriting. Yeah, yeah, and he wrote 500 words a day in this sort of Cyrillic script that was kind of odd-looking to read. Would he edit on the page? Yeah.

I mean, we scratch through stuff and edit it right there on the page? Yeah, yeah. But, you know, when my first book came out, Ghost Soldiers, which was a World War II story, he was a World War II vet, and I knew him, and, you know, I thought maybe I'd get him to write a little... blurb for me. He should have. I'm sure he did, right? So I wrote him and said, would you please consider, you know, I didn't expect anything. He wrote me this like five or six or seven page.

handwritten letter, beautiful letter, explaining all the various reasons why he could not... I could not possibly blub your book because Hampton, I've only written... in three blubs in my entire career. One was for the young Cormac McCarthy. One was for my dear friend Walker Percy.

And I can't remember what the other one was. But, you know, I was like, I get it. You know, I'm not in their league. But the time he took to write that beautiful letter, he could have blurred. He could have written 10 blurbs. I know, I know. Would have been great, too.

But he was a dear guy and a very interesting, somewhat eccentric, but wonderful kind of... And it's just so important to have these sorts of people that you look up to and figure out, how am I different from them, but how can I kind of carry on that tradition in some way?

When A Time to Kill was published in 1989, I was in the state legislature in Mississippi. And a buddy of mine from Oxford was close friends with Willie Morris. And Willie was living in Oxford. He was the writer-in-residence at Ole Miss. And I was young and stupid and naive.

Yeah. And so I had it in my mind, I needed Willie Morris to blur my brilliant first novel. And so my friend, we kind of had a dinner date one night, and Willie was there with some other guys, and Willie knew why I was stalking him. And finally, late in the evening, and it was a very late evening, Willie said, boy, I'm going to tell you what Sherwin Anderson told William Faulkner. I'll blurb your damn book if I don't have to read it. And then he said, I said, okay. And he said,

He said, in fact, I'm going one step further. You write the blurb and I'll sign it. And he was... trying to write, and he was drinking heavily, and his life was undisciplined. And so I left there that night and never thought about going back. So when A Time to Kill came out, it had a powerful courtroom drama, Willie Morris. A stunning debut by Willie Morris. You know, blah, blah, blah, Willie Morris. All these quotes all over the place. And Willie never saw them. He didn't even.

He didn't read the book. He just wanted some credit. Yes, ma'am. Who do you read for pleasure? Besides each other. Nobody else on stage. Who do you read? Besides John Grisham, I read...

You know, honestly, I got to say this. I don't read much for pleasure anymore. And this is because, like when I'm working on a book especially, I'm reading so much stuff that I would dare you to read. It's just, you know, like... war narratives and after action reports and lots of documents and you know your eyes are shot by the end of the day and and you know all you really want to watch is you know spongebob square pants or something um but it

When I read that stuff, I'm not reading for, you know, necessarily in a linear fashion. I'm mining. I call it mining. I'm looking for that one little nugget, that one little detail. that maybe is on page 300 of a self-published novel by a guy who was at this battle and so that's the way i've sort of trained myself to read and so when i read for pleasure it's really hard for me to um

you know, get out of that habit of looking for the nugget, looking for the little thing that I'm trying to mine, and just lay back and just let a great novel flow all over me. The last great novel I read was... All the Light We Cannot See by Tony Doerr, who I got to meet, and he's a really great guy. Success could not have had a better person. Wonderful novel, but I don't know. What about you?

Enjoyed that book a couple years ago. In the last year I've enjoyed Coast and Whitehead, the Underground Railroad. I just finished The Gentleman of Moscow by Amor Tolles and met him Tuesday night. We did something similar Tuesday night in Brooklyn, and he was a real treat to be with.

On the nightstand, I've got John LeCarré's latest book, The Legacy of Spies. Under that, I've got Scott Turow, who's a buddy, and I always enjoy his books. His book is Testimony. It came out a couple months ago, and I haven't... I haven't got there yet. I'm halfway through James Lee Burke, who's a real favorite. The advanced reading copy for his next book is Robshaw. I'm about halfway through that, and I'll get back to it soon. So those are...

There's no rhyme or reason. I tend to read less when I'm writing because I have to read a lot of technical stuff, legal stuff, you know, researching when I have to research. But also, I catch myself when I'm writing, we all want to read great books by great writers. You know, who wants to read a bad book? So we try to read the good stuff, and if I'm reading a really great book while I'm writing...

I'll catch myself doing things that I wouldn't normally do. Mimicking them subconsciously? Yeah, or using words that I've never seen before, but I stole from somebody else. Or maybe my sentences get longer or shorter or whatever. You know, the dialogue is... I catch myself and say, why are you doing this? Well, you're doing it because you're reading Sophie's Choice, you know, or something.

The Grapes of Wrath or some great book that I enjoy. So I tend to stay away from fiction while I'm writing fiction and read the technical stuff. There's a lot of great non-fiction books. They're more technical and academic about. problems that I write about. Corey, what are you writing? I'm sorry, what? What are you reading? One time, Corey said, next year is my 50th birthday, and I've been saving up for years to read Crime and Punishment.

And I said, seriously, Corey, that's the way you celebrate your 50th birthday? Did you read it? Of course. Of course. What I'm reading right now is Thomas Mallon's novel, Watergate. Anybody? No? Thomas Malin? It's good. Although he's a Republican. I'm sure there's some Republicans here tonight. Perhaps. And he's an outspoken Republican, and the Watergate story fascinates me.

And he's telling it rather than the movie, which tells it from the reporter's point of view, he's telling it from Dick Nixon and Pat Nixon and John Mitchell and that point of view. So it's fascinating. It's fascinating. And he obviously knows his stuff. Sounds riveting. I'm just joking, okay? He has a very eclectic reading taste, as I learned many years ago. He reads books I've never heard of. Question? Yes, ma'am.

Do I ever start a book and it doesn't work and I throw it out? No. By the time I start the book, I have outlined the book. And one of my rules of writing popular fiction is you never write the first scene until you know the last scene. And when you know the last scene, it's hard to get lost. But to get to that point, you have to...

You have to really think about the whole story and plot, and the outline takes a lot of work. Hey, listen, y'all, we're out of time. Thank y'all for coming. Thank you, Hampton. Thanks to CBU. Thank you all for being here. Good night. See you. Thanks to my guests, Hampton Sides, Corey Messler, and Matt Crowe. If you enjoyed this conversation,

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