‘Pinnacle of westerns’: Academy Award-winning writer Forrest Gump takes the stage at ‘Noon’ – with Springsteen songs | stage

eRick Roth laughs in his scraggly silver beard when I refer to him as the new kid on the block, but that doesn’t make it any less true. His first play, an adaptation of the 1952 Western High Noon, is about to receive its world premiere, and the fact that he turned 80 last year is neither here nor there. “Maybe I am old “A new kid on the block,” he admits from his home in Los Angeles. His baseball cap bears the image of a typewriter, as if there could be any doubt that he has writing on his brain.

Granted, Roth has more experience than the typical rookie. Behind it lies not so much a remote area of ​​the profession as a majestic mountain range, all in the movies. He won an Oscar in 1995 for Forrest Gump: He’s the guy you can credit (or blame) for lines like: “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”

His CV has something of a box of chocolates, mixing chewy candy – Michael Mann’s drama The Insider, Steven Spielberg’s thriller Mossad – with bonbons such as David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, in which an old Brad Pitt was born and aged backwards, and recent versions of A Star Is Born and Dune. All of which earned him Oscar nominations. Movie or play, the fun is the same. “I like to put one word in front of the other,” he says. “See if I can get the right one.”

His turn to the theater was prompted by his realization that non-musical Western films were rare on stage. “I thought: Is there a better way than this example?” The directors agreed: Ivo van Hove was attached at one point; Thea Sharrock is now in the saddle. Roth told me that most of the actors were wary of wearing the cowboy boots played by Gary Cooper, the film’s star. Cooper played Will Kane, a marshal who frantically tries to rally a group of people on his wedding day, after learning that a vengeful outlaw will be returning to town on the noon train. However, Billy Crudup was not so brave. Roth says his interpretation of Will is “a little more human. It’s not that Gary Cooper wasn’t human, but he kept that mask on. And now we learn more about Will and his fears.” Dennis Gough plays his wife, a Quaker pacifist who urges him to run away with her rather than stand firm.

The film was an allegory of life during the anti-communist witch hunts in the United States in the early 1950s. Screenwriter Carl Foreman was blacklisted for refusing to name names. “It’s about cowardice and courage,” Roth says. “There is a lot of cowardice in America right now, with people voting against their own interests. Primary racism is reinforced by the actions of our leaders. ‘Noon’ applies to that but also to other eras, like the people who had the courage to hide Jews during World War II.”

Roth often expressed a preference for adapting incomplete or mediocre source material. He described the original Forrest Gump novel as “burlesque”, dismissed Benjamin Button as one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s poorest works, and was bored by Dune when he read it as a teenager. He knows where I’m going with this. “That’s an unfair question,” he grumbled gently, acknowledging that noon was an exception. Adapting it was “1,000% a challenge. It’s the pinnacle of what a Western can be.”

He also found himself fulfilling the demands of theatre. “Movies are written roughly. In my first version of High Noon, I wrote the stage direction, ‘He’s shuffling his feet.’ The director asked me, ‘And how do we see this from the balcony?'” A few Bruce Springsteen songs would distinguish the play from the movie. “It’s archaic, which makes an interesting combination.”

Fortunately, the theatrical version retains the picture’s structural origins: it unfolds in real time as the townsfolk eagerly prepare for the noon showdown. In this sense, it continues the writer’s fascination with temporal pressure and flexibility. Forrest Gump and Benjamin Button span decades; The CGI-heavy film here, which reunites Ruth with the Gump gang (director Robert Zemeckis, stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright), travels across millions of years from prehistory to pandemic. Few cared. “We thought we had something special, but the critics were bad and no one showed up.”

One of Ruth’s not-yet-filmed ideas is about a widow who is given the opportunity to relive the last 24 hours of her late husband’s life. “As the day goes on, it gets more and more poignant, until finally he leaves his shoes downstairs and goes to bed — and you know he’s gone. Kevin Costner bought him, and every year I keep hoping he’ll make it.”

Will he trust Costner after the actor-director cooks the dog dinner in The Postman, one of Roth’s previous screenplays? “You really are a mouse, boy!” He says with a rueful laugh, then explains what happened: He wrote the script, about a postal worker wandering a dystopian America, as a vehicle for Tom Hanks — only for Costner to buy it and commission a rewrite. “I gave it a sarcastic spin. It was like Gulliver’s Travels. Kevin made it very serious and earnest.” It won five Golden Raspberry Awards, AKA Razzies, including, as Roth playfully reminds me, Worst Screenplay.

Rewriting comes with the territory but that doesn’t make it any easier to deal with. “It can be bruising,” Roth admits. His departure from The Horse Whisperer was particularly painful, and came after he moved in with the film’s director and star, Robert Redford, to work on the script. “We woke up at nine o’clock and he was like, ‘I think I’m going to go for a jog.’ Then he comes back at 10:30 and says, “I’m going to eat a little.” Then noon comes and he has calls to make. It will be 2:30 before we start work.

“I don’t want to talk bad about him because he’s gone now, but I wish he had been braver in the film. I loved working with him, and I found him wonderful. One of the loneliest men I’ve ever met. But I knew that one day he would look in the mirror and not want to see me there.” Sure enough, Ruth was replaced. “The other day, I was giving a keynote speech at the Austin Film Festival. I thought, ‘You fucking fraud. You’ve just been fired!'”

Swings and roundabouts. Roth has done more than his share of rewrites for other people, including uncredited work on everything from Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down to Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival. It would be remiss to spend time in his company and not offer his opinions on the authors who have requested his services. Word is that Mann is the toughest cookie in Hollywood.

“Michael gets upset when he thinks people are holding him back creatively,” he says. “He’s tough on the crew. I’m constantly telling him not to do that. He wants to be perfect. There’s no one tougher than David Fincher, but I would work with him until I died. Maybe his obsessive nature will make him a better director. In Mank, he was doing 40 takes of an actor walking across the room. I’d ask him, ‘Why are you doing so many takes?’ And he’d say, ‘He hasn’t gotten it right yet.’

This couldn’t be more different from Martin Scorsese, with whom Roth wrote Killers of the Flower Moon, a sad thriller about members of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the 1920s who are conned and murdered by oil discovered on their land. “Marty lets you do anything. If you say to him: ‘Why don’t we make this movie backwards?’, he’ll say: ‘Let’s try it!’ Keep writing!”

Roth is currently working on a Sydney Sweeney thriller (I Pretened to Be a Missing Girl) and a real-life Scorsese mafia drama (Midnight Vendetta), as well as being an executive producer on Mann’s Heat 2. “I haven’t written anything about it, but maybe I will,” he says, in the casual air of someone accustomed to helping friends with their crafts.

However, it is noon that brings the brightest sparkle to his eyes today. “It made me feel 22 again,” he says. “Theater is like this little village. Everyone is fighting for the most creative way to tell the story. I’m not used to being treated with such respect. They won’t say ‘no’ without asking me. Whereas in movies, they’ll say: ‘Who cares what Eric Roth thinks?’