Poltergeist screenwriter Michael Grais at Writer’s Conference
By Eva Hunter February 15, 2008 San Miguel de Allende

He’s a guy who writes horror films, but is sometimes too frightened to watch them on screen after they’re released. He’s a writer and producer of movies whose revenues have exceeded half a billion dollars; a writer who ranges from romantic comedies to thrillers, and whose movies have won numerous awards, including that big one: the Oscar.

Michael Grais’s films include Poltergeist, Great Balls of Fire, Death Hunt, Cool World and others. Anticipating his screenwriting presentation at this year’s San Miguel Writer’s Conference, Grais talks about Stephen Spielberg, horror films and Southern California. 

Eva Hunter: As a collaborator with Stephen Spielberg on Poltergeist (1982), you undoubtedly helped introduce that word to the general public. What lasting impression do you think the film has had?

Michael Grais: I’m not sure any fictional film has a lasting impression, as our information/tech world is moving so fast. That film was a millennium ago in public consciousness. Michael Moore’s films 911 and Fast Food Nation as well as Al Gore’s environmental documentary had a much greater effect on people. But people say they were scared out of their wits when they saw Poltergeist, and also that they loved it. I don’t go to horror films. Poltergeist even scared me! It is one thing to write it, and another to see it. I ran out of the first screening. I’m a chicken.

EH: Sleepwalkers (1992) had a nearly classic Stephen King horror plot: consensually incestuous mother and son shape-shifting vampires terrorize a small town. What made you want to produce this film?

MG: I produced Sleepwalkers for the money. It was Stephen King’s only original screenplay and it was pretty good. The director, to go unnamed, was the epitome of someone who should, instead, be selling cars or insurance. The special effects weren’t great, because the director hired his wife and insisted on creating the “cat suits” himself. When the stunt doubles came out in the cat suits, not only was it impossible for them to move—let alone move like cats—they couldn’t breathe. Some revisions were made to the suits, but they were still bad. 

EH: Did you watch horror films as a child?

MG: They scared the heck out of me. I watched Frankenstein, The Mummy, Dracula and others. I had a love-hate relationship with these films. It’s like a car crash you can’t take your eyes off. Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s 1968 original, along with The Texas Chainsaw Massacre are two of the scariest films ever made. I consider them classics—although I never stayed all the way through either of them because I was so scared! 

EH: Death Hunt, a chase movie loosely derived from an actual story that took place in the Yukon Territory, is also a classic. Do you feel any pressure from the weight of your own success? 

MG: As it was a true story, Death Hunt was one of my favorites to write, but I had to read almost all of Jack London to get the feeling right. We almost got Sam Peckinpaw to direct. He loved the screenplay, but he couldn’t be insured in the harsh weather conditions because he had a pacemaker. Making a film with Charles Bronson, Lee Marvin, Angie Dickenson and Carl Weathers was a thrill. It was the first screenplay I wrote as a professional and the first to get produced. 

The biggest “weight” I feel is self-imposed. And it is heavy. I want to make everything I write/produce a hit commercially or critically. Or both! When I’m hired to write or produce, that’s what they expect and that’s why they’re hiring me for the project.

EH: You were included in Lorian Tamara Elbert’s book, Why We Write: Personal Statements and Photographic Portraits of 25 Top Screenwriters. What came from that? 

MG: Lorian contacted me when I was particularly depressed. I’d lost my fancy house in Brentwood; I was living in a rental duplex on the outskirts of Beverly Hills. In Hollywood terms, I might as well have been in Kuwait. One agent didn’t believe I actually lived there, but thought I was just using it as an office and wouldn’t tell him where I really lived. So in the book, I decided to damn the torpedoes and tell the truth. I think it’s some of my best writing. A screenplay about my youth and my dysfunctional family—is there any other kind—came out of it. 

EH: Variety ran a piece last July on your pending adaptation of the book, Home Before Daylight, about The Grateful Dead. What’s happening with this project?

MG: I’ll proceed with Home Before Daylight by longtime Grateful Dead roadie Steve Parish when the screenwriter’s strike is over. I didn’t love the Grateful Dead or their music. It’s Steve’s personal story, a love story really, that is compelling and tragic and uplifting. I was working at The Fillmore East in New York as an usher while I attended NYU film school when The Grateful Dead played there. I disliked them immensely: they dosed the water coolers with LSD and played all night. I didn’t get paid by the hour, but by the gig. But they were truly an iconic band that attracted some of the wildest people in the hippie generation. It’s an amazing story and will make a great movie.

EH: What’s your advice to prospective screenwriters?

MG: Keep your day job. Living in Southern California, as you must to get into the biz, is hell. If you aren’t in your twenties or—at most, your thirties—you won’t be able to put up with all the crap that flows your way. So here is my advice: If you can do something else—do it. If you can’t—vaya con dios—and watch your back.

And the questions you didn’t ask, but I will answer anyway: Is Steven Spielberg a good guy, and good to work with? And my answer to both is an unqualified yes.

Eva Hunter teaches writing workshops throughout the year in San Miguel. Her book, Lord of the Dolls: Voyage In Xochimilco, a collaboration with photographer Jo Brenzo, is available at La Tienda in the Biblioteca Pública.

Book Fever
By Marcia Loy

Biographies/Memoirs

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

—Samuel Johnson

Since this column is short, I thought I’d let readers know the library is adding books to the large-print section, which has recently moved to the Gloria Grant room with the quality paperbacks and travel sections. There are large-print books in fiction, history, memoir and biography, with more coming in every month. Take a look when you have a chance.

All the biographies and memoirs mentioned here are in the library.



Paris to the Moon by Adam Gopnik

‘Oh, to be in Paris,’ we’ve all thought. Well, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and baby son decide to do just that for the last five years of the twentieth century. “We went to Paris for a sentimental re-education...,” he said of his utterly fascinating daily life there. This book, broken down into easy to read essays, is filled with gourmet food, high fashion, and quirky cultural differences. The book is exhilarating and fun—but the surprise of Paris to the Moon is its understated, moral intelligence.

Submitted by Jackie Brende. This was the only submission Book Fever received on this topic so here are two more I enjoyed.

The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion, 2005. Didion was married to writer John Gregory Dunne for forty years. Their daughter, Quintana, was seriously ill and on life-support in a hospital. One night after they visited her, Dunne suffered a fatal coronary. Didion saved his shoes in case he came back and needed them. She wrote this book hoping to make sense of what happened.

Excerpt: I see now that my insistence on spending that first night alone was more complicated than it seemed, a primitive instinct. Of course I knew John was dead. Of course I had already delivered the definitive news to his brother and to my brother and to Quintana’s husband. The New York Times knew. The Los Angeles Times know. Yet I was myself in no way prepared to accept this news as final: there was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible. That was why I needed to be alone.


American Brutus: John Wilkes Booth and the Lincoln Conspiracies, Michael W. Kauffman, 2004. This is a fascinating account of the young American actor and southern sympathizer who thought killing Abraham Lincoln would help the south. Instead, he put Tennessean Andrew Johnson in the White House, who felt compelled to punish the south to prove his loyalty to the Union. The book recounts the events leading up to the assassination, the pursuit and arrest of the perpetrators and their trial.

Excerpt from the Introduction: On the night of April 14, 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was shot by an assassin as he sat in a Washington theater. At the same time, his secretary of state was savagely attacked in his home a few blocks away. Investigation revealed that other men had also been targeted: the vice president, secretary of war, and general in chief of the army. There were subsequent reports of germ warfare, of plans to burn ships and cities, and of a proposal to poison the New York City water supply. The prospect of further attacks kept the nation on edge, and every citizen was on the alert for any sign that terrorists were in their midst.

Have you read an interesting biography or memoir? Would you like to share it with Atención readers? Please send the title, author, date of publication, 3-4 lines and a short quote to marciabookfever@hotmail.com.  Happy reading.

Marcia Loy is a member of the steering committee of the Authors’ Sala and a volunteer at the Biblioteca Pública.

Word Watch
By Bill Gallacher

actual (adj) Misleading, if interpreted as “actual,” for the true meaning of actual is present, or current. For “actual,” a word used loosely in both languages, the appropriate word would be real or verdadero.

adecuado (adj) It is more likely to mean “appropriate” than “adequate,” which in English implies “enough,” but only just enough; even damned by faint praise, in certain contexts. Suficiente is more appropriate for getting the English idea of adequate across.

adepto (noun m.) Looks as if it should be an adjective, and it can be, but adepto is mostly used as a noun, and as such is distinctly misleading. It signifies supporter, or follower. If “adept” is called for, the translation would be hábil or experto.

Day of the Dead: Ethno-history in Photos
By Lucina Kathmann

PEN Winter Lecture Series Lars Svanstroem Tue, Feb 19, 6pm Auditorio Miguel Malo Bellas Artes Hernández Macías 75 50 pesos

On February 19, find out what a serious Swedish photographer named Lars was doing with his camera year after year in places like Tsurumútaro, Cucuchucho, Milpa Alta and even San Miguel de Allende. 

Lars Svanstroem will present the results in a slide lecture (in English) about his Day of the Dead book, his photos and the activities of a Swedish nonprofit organization created to celebrate Mexican culture.

Svanstroem and his co-author Steffan Brunius have documented the Day of the Dead tradition all over Mexico, from events in the capital and in San Miguel to remote areas of the Huasteca, to the Yucatán, to Michoacán, Oaxaca and Puebla. Part of the book was even written by an elder of an indigenous group in the Huasteca. 

The Swedes have a long history of special interest in Mexico. In the thirties, the Stockholm Museum of Ethnography sent out two archeological and ethnographic expeditions. One of them resulted in a book which included a testimonial from the Day of the Dead in Milpa Alta.

In the fifties, Dr. Anna-Britta Hellbom, then curator of the museum, who had done field work in the Valley of Mexico, started the museum’s tradition of making an ofrenda (commemorative altar) on the Day of the Dead, which continues to this day. 

By the late eighties the tradition of Day of the Dead at the Ethnography Museum had grown into a fiesta with folk dancing, music, talks and slide shows.

Lars Svanstroem and his friends founded the Asociación Amigos de México, a nonprofit group interested in promoting Mexican culture, and soon Day of the Dead in Stockholm turned into a two-day fiesta which has become the museum’s most popular event. 

Inspired by media and public interest in this event, Steffan Brunius, present curator of the Museum of Ethnography, and Svanstroem got together to produce Día de muertos:

de dödas dag i Mexiko, with Brunius responsible for the text and Svanstroem responsible for the stunning photographs. Originally they thought the project would take about six months, but it turned into four years, finally culminating with the book’s publication in autumn 2006.

Though he was trained as an engineer, Lars Svanstroem lived in Mexico for 18 years, where he first worked with studio photography in large formats. He and his Mexican wife (who has made some stunning ofrendas) have been steady visitors to San Miguel since 1976, where Lars continues to do photography, more frequently in small formats now.

Proceeds from the Winter Lecture Series fund San Miguel PEN activities and help support International PEN. For more information: lucina.kathmann@gmail.com  or 152-0614.

Lucina Kathmann is a vice-president of International PEN and a 30-year resident of San Miguel.

Lecture Series

PEN Writers Aloud
Judith Jenya
Thu, Feb 21, 4pm
Sala Quetzal
Biblioteca Pública
Insurgentes 25
50 pesos

Hamilton Stone Review recently published Judith Jenya’s story collection from her 10 years in the Balkans as director of Global Children’s Organization during the wars in Bosnia. She also has been published in Camping magazine, Time, the Jerusalem Post and the Los Angeles Times.

She is increasingly writing about her travels and will read some current work. She has won many awards for her groundbreaking work with children in war, including International Humanist of the Year, Temple Award for Creative Altruism, the Giraffe Award, University of California Alumna of the Year and has been featured in Biography magazine. She has taught at UC Berkeley and the University of Hawaii, practiced law in Hawaii, had a therapy and art therapy practice, and had one-woman shows of her photography and paintings.