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Michael Malone

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Hillsborough, NC is one of the nation’s foremost locations known for its gathering of renowned writers. Boom! Magazine is pleased to present this interview with Michael Malone, author of nine novels and short stories included in Red Clay, Blue Cadillac: Stories of Twelve Southern Women. Red Clay was the recipient of the 1997 Edgar Award for Best Short Story. His novel The Killing Club rose to # 11 on the NY Times best seller list and was tied into the daytime show One Life to Live for which he was head writer beginning in 1991. Mr. Malone was nominated for four Emmys; one of which he won in 1994 for One Life to Live.

Mr. Malone, along with his wife Maureen, chair of the English department at Duke University live in Hillsborough on the historic Burnside property. The site contains the historic law office of Thomas Ruffin, Chief Justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court. Ruffin is famous for his written opinions establishing the ability of NC to claim eminent domain, and in State-vs-Mann, affirming the rights of slave owners.

Q. Thank you for showing me around historic Burnside. What are you working on at the present time?

A. I’m working on a lecture entitled American Dreams, American Movies. It is a course on popular culture and why this nation has loved the movies it has loved. What does it say about America, and what does it say about those movies? We’re currently discussing Casablanca and we will also study the movies you might expect: Gone with the Wind; Birth of a Nation; and Dr. Strangelove.

I have worked in television since we lived in Philadelphia where Maureen taught at the University of Pennsylvania. I went into television writing in sort of a bizarre set of circumstances. A movie producer, Linda Gottleib had tried to purchase a novel of mine for a movie and it hadn’t worked out. When she was asked to produce One Life to Live on ABC (because she had made the movie Dirty Dancing), they said, “Oh, you understand romance.” She came to me and asked me if I would be interested. She very cleverly said, “If you’re not interested let’s just talk about it... If we were telling this kind of story what would you do?” I found myself so intrigued by how you would solve this kind of problem or that kind of problem, and I started writing at One Life. I had a wonderful time. It really was like writing for a repertory theater. The actors were right there in the building; the costume people and sets were there. It was like the movie studio system of the 30s-50s.

Q. So was it a collaborative process? Did you go to the actors and ask them what they thought the character would do?

A. Oh believe me it wasn’t so much you going to the actor, it was the actor coming to you and saying, “This is what the character is going to do… I have been playing this character for 28 years. So don’t tell me what I’ll say, I’ll tell you.”
It was wonderful because they had the sense of the character history. I loved the collaboration... it was more like writing a novel than a play or a movie, because it is a large canvas with a big, interlaced plot and a huge variety of economic, racial, and generational diversity. I loved that.

I am very struck by how prime-time, cable television has learned how to do essentially soap opera. The Sopranos, The Wire, all those shows are great gifts that soap opera gave to narrative television. I loved that. We did that for a number of years.

Then Maureen, who’s a Renaissance scholar, was made an offer came to chair the Duke English Dept. We were very happy at University of Pennsylvania, but we thought well, since we had relatives in the area we would come and she would give a talk. Well, we got here and it just was so appealing. Everyone at Duke was wonderful, the neighborhood here in Hillsborough was so welcoming, we found ourselves saying, “Well, lets give this a try.” Here we are.

Q. You mention the importance of silence while you write, allowing you to “hear” the voice of your characters. I find that interesting.

A. That’s why she [Maureen] always said, “He works best from 9 to 5, 9pm to 5am” because it is quieter. I really believe my mother’s deafness is connected to my being a writer, because she would ask me to listen for her. So I am always listening. Maureen says, “Just shut out other people’s talking,” but I can’t do it. And listening to characters, I never make any changes in dialog, because I heard it. The script is changed, I‘ll change it a thousand times. Dialog I will hear.

I was fascinated working with actors. You not only listen to what you hear but then you actually have that live human being say it. One of the first things I learned was that you do not need as much dialog [in script writing] because the actors will be doing things with their face, their hands, and body language.

I love to write for actors and I love to write plays. The vast majority of my career has been writing novels and short stories. I hope I have enough years left to really spend more time working in drama.

Q. What experiences did you have when you were growing up that led you to be a writer, a Southern writer. I loved your descriptions of small Southern towns and the people in Fast Love, Red Clay, Blue Cadillac.

A. Of course no one calls himself a Northern writer, and there is a way that Southerners have always mythologized their home, the landscape of the South. Everyone in the South tells stories. I don’t know whether it’s the heat or the porches. So you grow up hearing what Lee Smith calls “Oral History” of family, relations and friends. If you get a group of Southern writers together they’re going to A) say their Southern writers and B) talk each other into the ground! When Maureen came here to North Carolina, I said, “Its like you have to speak French in Paris, you have to speak Southern in the Piedmont of North Carolina. If you go into the hardware store and say, ‘Do you have any irons?’ they won’t respond. You have to say, ‘What a beautiful day this is, look at that Carolina blue sky and didn’t those Tar Hells do great, and that blue is the color of my cousin’s eyes ‘til he got his eye shot out! I am sorry, I don’t mean to trouble you but do you happen to have an iron?’” Until you speak that language they think, “Oh…hummm.”

A. It is on the corner of Union and Churton where the writer Lee Smith’s house is. It was a very well known pre-Civil War female seminary, from way back in the early 19th century. When we first mentioned we were moving to Hillsborough a colleague of Maureen’s, who was a historian at Dartmouth said, “Oooooh, Hillsborough, that’s where the Burwell School is.” Whereas Maureen was saying, “Ooooooh that’s where Montrose Gardens are.” The school has been restored. Both Maureen and I have sat on its board to work on that restoration. There is an exhibit there now. Every Christmas, the writer Alan Gurganus and I perform Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, to help the restoration. He plays “Scrooge” and I play all the other characters. I have all these caps I keep changing, and wigs and all. Quite worn out by the end of it all.