Photo credit: Dan E. Moldea
“I always wanted to be a writer,” James Grady told Hollywood on the Potomac. “My parents were terrified by that and so they I would say they convinced me that I wanted to be a lawyer; so I thought that was what I should do – but I never really wanted to do that. I just wanted to write stories and movies and it seemed inescapable somehow. Oddly enough before I was five … I’m only going with what my mom told me …. I would tell her stories and make her write them down. She would take enough notes to be able to tell me where I’d left off and throw the rest away.”
Fortunately “Grady” – as he is known to his friends – went on to quite a prolific writing career that was topped off by Three Days of the Condor starring Robert Redford. He was 24 when he sold it.
Photo credit: Creative Commons
“I was born April 30, 1949, in Shelby, Montana, a tough oil field, railroad and farming town clinging to the prairie 60 miles east of the Rocky Mountains, a half hour drive south of Canada, and a million miles from everywhere else. For most of my youth, my father managed movie theaters and my mother was a county librarian. I was a bookish, movie-going kid who survived playing high school football. I went to public schools and worked: I was a grave digger, farm tractor jockey, rock picker, hay bucker, janitor, motion picture projectionist, and city road crew laborer – all before I graduated from the University of Montana with a degree in journalism.” Jim Grady
“My first job out of college, I was in Montana at a constitutional convention. They at the convention suddenly needed a guy who could write fast and quick and pretty much without supervision and suddenly I was working as a committee research analyst for them,” he reminisced, “and that was essentially a writing job. After that, I had another writing job – again mostly writing for state government and then I sold Condor. And by the time I was 24, I had sort of dodged the bullet of working in a factory or staying working on the road crew all year long.”
James Grady – Photo courtesy of Grady
“This is my actually the third Condor novel,” he told us referring to his latest novel Last Days of the Condor. “I had originally, 40 years ago, thought I was going to do five, but after I wrote the second one real quickly, the publisher said you’ve got to get this out. It wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t my best book. And after I saw what a wonderful job Redford and Pollack (director Sydney Pollack) did on the screen, that was just mind-boggling. I did not want to compete with that and I almost felt it would be artistically wrong to try and capitalize or dilute the great movie. So I just stayed away from Condor until now when I saw things were changing so fast in the intelligence world and that the only way to get into it was to use my iconic character from the old days.”
Every novelist claims that the characters are all fictional as well as the events, but we know better so we asked Grady: Where did you get the background? We know they have to be formed from some experiences or else how would you know how to write it? So, where did you get the intrigue and sense of Tom Clancy?
At Politics and Prose book signing
“It’s two-fold,” he explained. “The small town I grew up was on the surface trying very hard to be Father Knows Best, but it was more like a Noir movie from the ’50’s. We had the church ladies on Sunday and the whorehouses that were given police protection and my uncle who had some role in that was never explained to me. There was an academy of reality that I grew up with in Montana. But then the ’60’s happened and we all … I think John Kennedy’s assassination was really the start … had this sense that there was something out there that you should be very aware of and kind of afraid of. And there were secret forces that were changing your life.”
“I got a fellowship with journalism students when I was a senior in college and came back to Washington for three months,” he added. “In those days an internship was so novel that nobody knew what an internship was. Sears and Roebuck sponsored, actually. They were great. And I am walking around Capitol Hill, and I am completely out of it and completely not plugged into the scene. I kept walking by this house that had a plaque on it and it looked phony to me. And I thought, ‘Well, that has to be obviously a CIA front or something.’ So I was predisposed to that and the paranoia kicked in and I thought: ‘They send me out to lunch a lot and what if I come back and everyone has been murdered?’ I had this sense of paranoia and a sense of forces out for years.”
“After Condor, I worked on Jack Anderson’s column and there is nothing like working for an investigative reporter covering organized crime and the mafia. It increases paranoia.”
Author Kimba Dalferes; Greg Dalferes, president of Dalferes Enterprises, Inc. and Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) at Politics and Prose
“There were times when the tiniest thing I wrote about was in the middle of that which came after I had already imagined it. It was maybe better that way, because it wasn’t so unexpected to be in a room full of guys who normal citizens never come across and it was real … you have the sense sometimes of ‘Oh, we’re being followed.’ And maybe we were. I at least twice stumbled upon indications that I was of interest to forces beyond those I knew.”
On Grady’s writing style: In your writing, you are very, very, very descriptive, pin-point descriptive. Everything you write, I can see. Explain that a little.
‘The good news for me is that in my very strange childhood, my father managed movie theaters and my mom was a county librarian, so that was where I was really going to school. Whatever happened in the public institutions, I don’t know because I grew up watching movies and that of course really heightened my visual sense and really made me aware of how things look and how description could be very very important. I think that I had a cinematic education. It’s funny. A few other pretty astute interviewers have also hit on that and said, ‘You write much more visually than a lot of authors.’ And I now know sort of on an intellectual basis what I always had felt on an unconscious level, which is that you have to be able to put the reader in the scene and show it to them rather than tell them. And I love doing that. Those are the kind of books I like to read too.”
Mother Jones’ David Corn at Politics and Prose
Lets talk about Watergate and how that influenced your writing……the trickery, the intrigue, the circumstances, all things that add to conspiracy and visualization and a perfect feeding ground for both investigative reporting and content for novels.
“Watergate was a collision of conspiracies. There was the official one we know. There were things that Dean (John Dean, Counsel to the President) was doing and Magruder (Jeb Magruder, Dep. to Nixon re-election committee)…. all these people. There were so many conspiracies going on at that time that when Watergate happened, when those guys got caught by three really good D.C. policemen, all the overlapping conspiracies went under the umbrella of Watergate. There was the affair going on at the same time when the Pentagon was spying on the White House. Any one of the things that later got swept under the umbrella of Watergate in anther time would have been a year-long scandal, but there were just so many of them during that really two-year period of Watergate. It was astonishing. The night Richard Nixon gave his last State of the Union speech in January of ’74, there was a huge allegedly-pro-Nixon demonstration on the grounds of the Capitol and I went to see it. It was one of the first incursions of Sun Myung Moon’s people. I was talking to all these people who were Korean and I’m speaking English and they were saying we support the President. So there were all these things going on in that era. But it was just, wow… Mind-boggling.”
The Olshakers at Politics and Prose
Explain the process of going from book to film…..how does that happen and will it happen again with Last Days of The Condor?
“I wish I could claim a whole lot more credit for that but the publisher, W. W. Norton, made a business decision to try and sell three of the books that they picked out of a slush pile for the movies. They hired William Morris back when William Morris in the 70s was so powerful that Woody Allen could make a joke about it and everybody got it in Nebraska. But William Morris got it as did Dino de Laurentiis and Dino told me he read four pages and knew he was going to make a great movie. And all this happened when they told me, ‘We’d like to publish your book, and we think we could sell it to the movies.’ I thought they were crazy. Sell my book to the movies? That only happens in movies. So, they represented the book. I didn’t have an agent. I had no agent until after the Condor book and movie had been sold.”
“In The Last Days, I merge both the Condor that Redford created into an icon and the character that I created for prose fiction. And I use him as a lens from yesterday to look at what is going on today and tomorrow in the intelligence community. It’s a completely different environment out there. I don’t know if you saw the news on Friday, but Friday or Saturday, the CIA is undergoing their first major reorganization since they were created. And I saw this stuff developing starting with 9/11 and accelerating with technology. And I needed a way into this whole different world. And I thought, why not Condor. And the moment I thought that, he came to life in my head, and I play it straight. He’s not the ageless hero like James Bond. He’s a guy who’s lived through the history of his times.”
Photo credit: Creative Commons
So, are we going to see an elder Condor movie with Robert Redford?
“I don’t know. I just realized that I have yet to do the respectful thing and send him a copy of the book. I think Redford would be great in the movie. I sure hope so. MGM Paramount have the rights for an auction on it that they have exercised. It has been auctioned. I have a lot of interest from other parties from other directors and writers. But that’s up to MGM Paramount, at least for the term of the auction. I saw his last movie, All is Lost and I thought, ‘What an amazing tour de force.’ I thought he was going to get an Oscar nomination for it. The thing of it was you had to really appreciate the acting craft and the storytelling and the big risk he took doing that. That was a huge. We talk about Michael Keaton’s risk in Birdman, but I think Redford in All is Lost took as big a risk. I would love to see them do “Last Days” because in part, like the Post said, I was trying to do a look at America that was important for people to think about. I think that fiction allows us to approach public policy issues in an easy way and in some degree a more honest way. And certainly more interesting.”
“I have been blown away by the wonderful reception that “Last Days” has gotten. You want to talk about a moment that makes an artist’s career? Imagine me a week ago today, Monday morning, I pick up the Washington Post and in the review for Last Days of the Condor I’m compared to Bob Dylan and George Orwell. It’s like I felt I should stop everything right there. It was just great. So I am really lucky that I will get to do what I love and I get to try to get better at it every year, which is just a wonderful situation for anybody to be in.”
