Harvard Book Store; WGBH Forum Network; Bret Easton Ellis: Imperial Bedrooms

Mr also made a name for himself when he was only 21 with the publication of his debut novel less than zero which became a generational touchstone and continues to find new readers. Mr Ellis is the author of four other novels including American Psycho and Lunar Park and the short story collection the informers for his books have been adapted into film including the informers for which Mr. Earles co-wrote the screenplay and his writing has been translated into 27 languages. Imperial bedroom's is a sequel of sorts to less than zero who are reintroduced to Clay and his group of rich and dangerously leisured friends. Twenty five years after the events of less than zero. When Clay's successful screenwriter living in New York returns to Los Angeles to help cast his most recent movie he catches up with his old friends shacks up with a young want to be actress and starts receiving bizarre threatening text messages. People magazine called Imperial Bedrooms a hypnotic haunting vision of disillusionment 21st century style and Time Out New York called the book arresting Lee spare and continued imperial bedroom's will leave you feeling bruised guarded and a little nervous about noises at night. Thank you. Thank you guys for coming out tonight.

I'm going to read you very briefly from this book Imperial Bedrooms no more than 10 minutes and then I'd like to open it straight up to a Q&A and just to have a conversation. I don't know dialogue with the audience I think that's probably going to work best since I've got nothing else prepared. So yeah you know this is a sequel in a way to less than zero. The clay of this book maintains that the clay of Less Than Zero was misrepresented even though a lot of the stuff in Lesson zero happened in the clay of imperial bedroom's maintains that the writer of Less Than Zero just didn't like Clay very much and portrayed him as this kind of passive drift Dean do who didn't do anything to help anybody really and one Imperial Bedrooms becomes in a way is the quote unquote real Clay's attempt to.

Make a claim for himself which as you continue to read the novel you realize is kind of pointless on his part that maybe the writer of Less Than Zero did get it right. The brief section that I'm going to read has to do with how the clay of Imperial Bedrooms feels about the movie adaptation of that book about him. The movie adaptation of the book about him that the book that he didn't like even though everything in the book he said a lot of the stuff happened to him. He really just didn't like that book and he these are his thoughts about the movie version of that book about him that he didn't like. So. I remember my trepidation about the movie began on a warm October night three weeks prior to its the article release in a screening room on the 20th Century Fox lot. I was sitting between Trent burrows and Julian who wasn't clean yet and kept biting his nails

squirming in the plush black chair with anticipation. I saw Blair walk in with Alon and Kim and trailing rip M.R.. I ignored or the movie was very different from the book in that there was nothing from the book in the movie. Despite everything all the pain I felt the betrayal I couldn't help but recognize the truth while sitting in that screening room in the book everything about me had happened. The book was something I simply couldn't disavow. The book was blunt and had an honesty about it whereas the movie was just a beautiful lie. It was also a bummer. Very colorful and busy but also grim and expensive and it didn't recoup its cost when released that November in the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book. I wasn't blonde I wasn't tan and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie's moral compass spouting age jargon and castigating everyone's drug use and trying to save Julian. I'll sell my car I wore in the after plane Julian's deal or whatever it takes. This was slightly less true of the adaptation of Blair's

character played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group. Jittery sexually available easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself acted by a talented sad faced clown who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. Be good to her. Julian tells clay she really deserves it. The sheer hypocrisy of the scene must have made the author Blanche smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the after deliver that line. I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screen room. As the movie glided across the giant screen restlessness began to reverberate in the hushed auditorium. The audience the book's actual cast quickly realized what had happened. The reason the movie dropped everything that made the novel real was because there was no way the parents who ran the studio would ever expose their children in the same blacklight the book did. The movie was begging for sympathy whereas the book didn't give a shit and attitudes about drugs and sex had shifted

quickly from 1985 to 1987 and a regime change in the studio didn't help. So the source material surprisingly conservative despite its surface immorality had to be reshaped. The best way to look at the movie was as modern 80s more the cinematography was breathtaking. And I sighed as it kept streaming forward interested in only a few things. The new and gentle details of my parents mildly amused me as did Blair finding her divorced father with his girlfriend on Christmas Eve instead of with a boy named Jared Blair's father died of AIDS in 1992 while still married to Blair's mother. But the thing I remember most about that screening in October 20 years ago was the moment Julian grasped my hand at a gun on the armrest separating our seas. He did this because in the book Julian Wells lived. But in this new movie's scenario he had to die. He had to be punished for all of his sins. That's what the movie demanded later as a screenwriter I learned is what all movies demanded. When the scene occurred in the last 10 minutes Julian looked at me in the darkness stunned. I died he

whispered they killed me off. I waited a beat before sign. But you're still here. Julian turned back to the screen and soon the movie ended. The credits roll in over the palm trees as I improbably take Blair back to my college. Well Roy Orbison wails a song about how life fades away. But the real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry red convertible overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while the choir soared over the soundtrack. The real Julian Wells was murdered over 20 years later. His body dumped behind an abandoned apartment building in Los Feliz after he'd been tortured to death at another location. His head was crushed. His face struck with such force that it had partly folded in on itself and he had been stabbed so brutally that the L.A. Coroner's Office counted one hundred fifty nine wounds from three different knives. Many of them overlapping his body was discovered by a group of kids who went to Cal Arts and were cruising through the streets off of hill Hurst in a convertible BMW looking for a parking space when they saw the body. They thought the quote unquote thing lined by a trash can was

and I'm quoting the first Los Angeles Times article on the front page of the California section about the Julian Wells murder flag. I had to stop when I hit upon that word and start reading the article again from the beginning. The students who found Julian thought this because Julian was wearing a white tom ford suit it belonged to him but it wasn't something he was wearing the night he was abducted and the immediate reaction seemed halfway logical since the jacket and pants were streaked with red. Julian had been stripped before he was killed and then redressed. But I thought it was a flag. My immediate question was then where was the blue. If the body resembled the flag I kept wondering then where was the blue. And then I realized it was his head. The students thought it was a fly because Julian had lost so much blood and that his crumpled face was a blue so dark it was almost black. But then I should have realized this sooner because in my own way I had put Julian there and I had seen what had happened to him in another and very different movie. Thanks. He was cheery.

I don't know I was deciding what to read up on the train ride today and for some reason that was it. That was the kind of mood I was in I guess. I don't know but I'm going to open everything up to two questions if anyone has any questions or we can just like you know. DO IT DO IT LIKE THAT. The question is I guess if I pared it down as Why do you write the books that you write more laws. OK as the question is how do I think about being a writer as a career. It's not a choice. I never saw it as a choice. I said it was something that I wanted to do from very early on. I began writing when I was a kid and I think I began writing because I like books so much. I was there a lot of books around my house my parents house when I was reading books. And I think I loved reading so much that kind of as this kind of transporting experience that I wanted to write books myself. And so ultimately it never really felt like a choice to me it felt like something very natural something

very emotional something that I wanted to do it was never like a logical some kind of logical or pragmatic decision that was oh I like books I want to write books and that really has that how it has been ever since I wrote my first children's book when I was a kid up until you know this book. I mean so that's the only way that I know how to do it is theirs and I just don't wake up one day and say oh I'm going to write the sequel to less than zero and I want to start next Monday at 9:00 a.m. and that's his house going to be. I mean it's you know every book is comes from an emotional place and it's something that you feel and it's something that I think about for a long time before I'm absolutely sure that I want to sit down and write the book. So that's that is kind of my process in a way. I mean that's how it's at. It also is a slow process because it then means that I don't I haven't written as many books as I might have liked to have written but it's just you know you can't will a book you can't force a book out though. I think some people do but I just I'm not a kind of writer. Well the description of the movie

compared to how this character feels about the book pretty much exactly. Yeah it was it was the movie version of Less Than Zero really bears no resemblance to the book from for a million reasons I mean a lot of stuff happened when that movie was made that you know turn it into something that it wasn't supposed to be and. Because this is a book about Hollywood and it's a book about people involved the movie industry I thought it was be an interesting way to begin the book and also an interesting way to talk about how Julian Wells does die in the movie version of lesson 0. But I wanted to keep him around in this book because I thought once I figured out who Clay was and what Clay was doing back in L.A. I wanted Julian to kind of revolve around a little bit and so it was also a way for me to get Julian back into the picture. It worked in a lot of different levels for me. So the question is do I work on multiple things at one time.

And then there is more of the question but I can answer it without repeating the rest of the question because I don't work in multiple books at all and every book that I've had an idea for I published. I don't have anything laying around I don't have half written manuscripts I don't have. There were ideas that I wished I had pursued that I didn't it. No every every beverage idea I've had for a novel I've written and that I've published and I think part of why I don't have anything like half written or partly written is because again the process is I think about the book a lot and I think do I want to spend this long with the book and do I really want to write this book and I make a lot of notes before I even begin writing the book and I make a very long outline before I even begin writing the book and in some way that outline resembles a first draft a very long sloppy first draft. And by that time I'm completely excited and by the book and I I mean gauged by it and it's gripping me and and then I'm writing the book and I want to write the

book and I'm finishing the book and so that's the best way I know a lot of people who like writers say oh I was going to let the novel take a world where it's going to take me on this in to start with you know Steve then Cheryl went to the cafe and they had a drink and they saw this dog that they liked and began to rain or whatever and then we have thousands of novels that stop at page 120 and the person just doesn't know. You know they kind of lose their enthusiasm for it and because they they didn't figure out where it's going to go when it's you know can be at the present situation. So that's why that's the question was Do you ever want to go back to the multiple multiple narrator style I did in the rules of attraction and the informers. You know it's not. Well you know I actually did think about it very briefly when I was thinking about imperial better so I thought about doing that and then discarded it very quickly. But no I haven't and I don't know why. I don't

know. The question is WHY AM I SO TALENTED. I come up with all of this. That's really the question isn't it. Right. Why am I God. The question really is how do I come up with all of these funny lines as one she was asking. I think a lot of the a lot of things happened I think that once I figure out who the narrator of the book is and that takes a long time to and when I figure out what he will notice and what he will hear and what he wants to present to the reader which is me basically because I'm That's how I work then you know a certain kind of humor can you know announce itself and. So I think it's I think it's a bit. That's that's why I don't know.

I mean but that's a very complementary question. And it's it's much appreciated. It really is. That's a that's another really wonderful question. That's a lot of it I was so nice. I wrote a novel the first novel I wrote was when I was 14 and it was I thought I had had an extremely interesting summer. And I wrote the novel about my extremely interesting summer and then after I read the novel I realized it wasn't an extremely interesting summer at all. And that was a huge learning experience for me. And after that novel that's when I began I guess I don't know what to call I guess the Less Than Zero project in a way because there are many drafts that book Between the time I was 16 and 21. I think a lot of people seem to think that I wrote that book in like eight weeks got a huge fat publishing deal I got a totally overhyped and boom you know there was that didn't work that way at all it was a very long process and. You know looking back I mean I guess no one's really asked me that before I mean looking back I guess you

have to have a certain kind I guess I didn't second guess myself at all. I guess I did have a lot of confidence in it or I wasn't even thinking along the lines of having confidence just that I wanted to do it and that I was enjoying doing it. I didn't I didn't step into that realm of starting to second guess myself. And I really don't do that I mean some of my critics tell me I should be doing that. But I know I know work that way is not how I work I don't see the novel writing out to be like I don't know how to be this like consortium or to be like a business in a way where you know you have to show it to like 10 people to make sure it's good or you have to write it in a way see it so you want to get like good reviews or whatever I mean it's just a really personal means of expression. And it's not that you know so that's how I always saw it. I don't see it as well I guess what I'm saying is I'm saying it one doesn't have to be good. I just sort of has to be you know and you know what. Actually that comes out of my mouth and was mostly kind of a joke. But yes there are beautifully written novels that are

dead completely dead and there are novels of a kind of sloppy and punchy and but they have a pulse to them and they feel alive in a way that Ed beautifully manicured novel can feel utterly dead. So to get back to your your question no I guess I didn't second guess myself and I guess that I just you know kept moving forward and I was I didn't even think along those lines. OK in reality I would rather. I mean you know they're made up of people. They're made of characters are not it's not a they're not real books or they're not real stories or anything but I would rather hang out with clay probably not a lot of effort not a lot of energy has to be expended there would be very easy to just like deal with them. And Patrick Bateman would be a little bit different I got a glimpse of actually hanging out with Patrick Bateman when I was doing some kind of research. The initial research that I did on American Psycho where I was hanging out with young guys were working on Wall Street

and that wasn't fun. It wasn't fun at all. And then I and then I well the other example was that one Christian Bale was about what he had the role but he didn't want to do it without my approval which is was look in retrospect I think crazy but I get it he's an actor and he just needed the writer to approve. And I think he would have done it regardless. So I don't know why. But he I had never met him before and he did. And I suppose I mean in a restaurant in Los Angeles and I was at the bar having a drink and someone tapped me on the shoulder and said I brought Pat Bateman and I completely dressed like Patrick Bateman his hair was slicked back and he stayed in character for like 10 minutes and it was the most unnerving. Creepy thing that I've ever experience when I actually told me after 10 minutes we were at a table in my hand was shaking a little bit as he got to stop this you can act like this. Is like getting really out of this out of control. So OK that's an easy thing now

thinking that through. Yes I would rather sit with Clay who was the more most reliable of those narrators. You know what I think the kind of pretty there pretty much both reliable. I think I really do I mean I know all this. Everyone says that. Well they're up and well I was going in like say something stupid like who both reliable in their on the liability but I'm not in that opens it up to a whole other thing though. We don't want to go too but. And I the question is do I read my reviews and do they have any impact on me at all. I read all of my reviews I read all the reviews that are written about me I regardless of how good or how bad they are they have little to no impact at all on what I'm working on or what I want to write about. And. I've found the whole you know the whole idea of I mean and I like a lot of reviewers I like I like a lot of writers who have written about me who haven't been particularly favorable I mean I think I read like there are other

opinions on books and stuff. So no I would say for them for night 99 percent of the time it doesn't matter. I don't really feel much of anything when I'm reading the reviews though every now and then in the lasts whatever during my career there have been those moments where a writer that I've admired has given me a bad review and that has stung a little bit not enough to distract me from my day but it's like that's the kind of socks. But overall no they don't. The question is why do they use characters from one book in another book and why do white deserve seem to be this floating cast of characters in all the books. You know there's no plan. There's not any kind of secret code of anything that's. That's what it's just some is a feeling this is something that I like to do and every now and then you know it happens I think oh that would be really interesting to use that character from that book as the narrator for this book like for example in rules of attraction that's when Patrick Bateman first makes his appearance and

I had had a vague idea for American Psycho but. But when I wrote the trashing Patrick Bateman was not at all going to be the narrator. And then as I began the year or so of thinking about American Psycho what that book was going to be about I kept going back to him for some reason and I wanted to use and I can explain why there was not like this. Again this is not a it's not a logical thing. You know this is it's a feeling the have been so and it happens all the time I mean I remember when I was working on Lunar Park and I wanted I knew I wanted these neighbors to live you know next to the pretty snowless character and his wife and I was thinking OK I want the neighbor to be like this and like this and they probably would be like this and that would set her and then for some reason I flashed on a peripheral character in the rules of attraction called Michel Allen and then when I thought about that and using him it just gave this opportunity to have the bridles character talk about his sexual past and being at Camden because I went to Camden college together Michel Aoun and the bridles character and

it's things like that but there's no grand plan to any of that. As the question is Was I happy with the informers the movie version of it. And if someone made Luna Park into a movie how would I want to see that done. Well little park is being turned into a movie I have really nothing to do with it. I have been there as fill all the ROBINSON I think is a director now attached and I think he may feel the dreams and he's made. And there were a lot of directors attached to this movie for a long time. You get the father son thing the whole that's what the producers were thinking it's fine it's fine I mean who knows it'll get made I don't know. I've been a lot of actors attached to it and I don't even know they'll Toro was attached to play the lead for a long time and then I think Jude Law was attached at one point and I would rather see Jude Law play me than the U.S. adult world songs. Being on time and the informers the movie version of that was a

it's I had to laugh I'm sorry because you asked me if I was happy with how it turned out. And I'm I was not happy with how the information out it was a very painful situation and it was the first time that I had stepped forward to assist in the adaptation of a book of mine and I wrote a really great script. I will. It was pretty good. I really was. And because of this great script we got like a ton of actors to be in it and we got a ton of money to make the movie. And then you know you know like shit happened and I just didn't. But the director of sensibility there was a producer involved to kind of bow down to the director. They cut out the vampires you know there was like a lot of bad decisions were made and I was not in I mean even if you're a producer on the movie and you were you were the co-writer of the script you're not a money man. You know and they make a lot of the decisions a lot of the creative decisions too and so by the time that movie was done it was kind of.

I wouldn't say completely unrecognizable from the script that was written but I would have to say that there's about 40 percent of the Miss scene and about 80 percent of the movie itself is kind of totally off from what I had planned. So you know I'm not going to. I've complained about it a lot but you know it's it's whatever it is the experience of what I mean is that of being told I'm being not. But. Yeah I mean what is there to say about it it was so. Yeah. Well you know people like I was beginning to tell that story a little bit and answering one of the questions about what happened like with less than zero where as you know the myth that I wrote it very quickly and that it was published and it was an immediate success and that you know I was on the cover boys magazines and stuff and really that's not true at all. Again I

worked on the book for about five years. It was published when I was 21 and people tend to forget that I was paid the least amount of money you can possibly be paid for a book it was like in the like the low lowest you know or figures that you could you get. 5000 bucks. Got 5000 bucks for the book. And no no advertising money at all. And I was happy to have a book published I mean I didn't really intend on getting lessons or publish it was something that I wanted to do and then when one of my teachers at Bennington read it as well that someone passed on to major matter a message. Sure whatever and it didn't really strike me as one that was going to happen. And then when it did it all happen in slow motion and it happened over a very long period of time. It was there was no prince there was and there was no money for advertising because half of the publishing house hated half the editorial board really hated it. And the younger part of the editorial board really pushed for the book and so part of the editorial board that was in

power in terms of like you know promoting books said OK you can publish the damn thing but we're not going to promote it. And so it didn't really become a success until five or six months later and I was in school and I suddenly noticed I was getting more calls for my publishing house in my agency. Byrne You know that's how it happened and then when it did become a success I was still in school and if anybody's ever been up to Bennington I don't know why anyone would have been up there. It's very far away from anything it's very small. And I think that year my senior year when the book really kind of took off I was you know I was kind of protected I was still I want to finish college and I was still this very small school that was very hard to reach and it wasn't dumb. I mean you know everyone said all Muslims a while the must've been so crazy it really wasn't. And then when I got out of school and I went and I moved to New York I mean everyone seems to think that I was part of this like crazy Brat Pack thing that was going on. And I mean I made fun of this whole thing in Lunar Park in the first like 30 or 40 pages of Lunar Park I kind of wrote this like mock memoir of what people I think

thought my life was like at that point when in fact I was just like you know most 23 year olds hanging out with his friends everyone likes to think that I was hanging out with Jay McInerney and they were doing tons of blow all the time and they were passing out at night clubs and I might have been doing all of that but it was my friend so it wasn't much imagine. And so you know it's it's really it's so interesting to see how the myth takes over. And I'm concerned constantly amused by it I mean that this myth the Bret Easton Ellis and I think part of the reason why I felt the urge to write Lunar Park stemmed from that. You know and to write that opening that opening chapter of the book stemmed from I don't know in a way wanting to set the record straight I don't know. Or will it really not. Kind of like avoiding setting the record straight but I don't know giving whatever I did so I had. So yeah it was and the I was also really really fun. I had a really good time being hot and young

and socks it was awesome awesome. I love. I love that question more losses like do I with what is it again. It's sort of like does the writing change while I'm being inspired by other writers. Is that kind of what you're getting at. No not really. No I don't think so I think the idea for the novel has already been influenced by certain writers by the time I'm writing it. And I knew like for example with Luna Park I always I wanted to write a Stephen King book and I just I love Stephen King when I was an adolescent and I had my own ideas to how to do a Stephen King book. And so that's kind of where that came from but I didn't I wasn't really reading Stephen King while I was working on Lunar Park I mean I already kind of knew his style I wanted to replicate it because it was fun. You know it was something I wanted to do it. And it's ironic that really to get to the last third of that book which is the Stephen King Armada I had I thought that I had to do all this other stuff that while interesting and fun I had to build it up to get there and

it's very ironic that most people hate the last third of Luna Park and really like the first two thirds which I always thought were not as much fun to write as the last third So you know maybe I should take those people into consideration. But people who as you know people I maybe I should show my to them to more people and give more feedback I don't know. Been a while and I was also thinking a lot about Philip Roth in the beginning of Luna Park. I was thinking and I was thinking a lot of it down the low when I was working on glamour and I totally ripped off Joan Didion for less than zero so I've always been. And Raymond Chandler was a big part of until better him so there is always some sort of author hovering in the back of my head that I'm referencing. It just seems to be the way that I like to work you know. So that's that's good. The question is Where do I get my inspiration from and pain pain. That's where the inspiration comes from and I know my own pain.

A lot of it is a lot of it is stems from confusion and being upset by something and trying to figure out why I am upset by this and why is is bothering me and why am I obsessed with that. And. Yeah I mean that's where it all comes from. It comes from confusion and stress and pain and you know it's it's weird I really you know for the longest time I did not want to talk about because of the controversy over American Psycho I really never. I thought. I did a very defensive. Mode when the book came out and I said Oh yes but no one is being to completely misread as it is it is a grand sweeping statement on Wall Street greed and yet the materialism you know understand and it's not massage innocent nature blah blah blah blah blah. You know what in fact that novel was about me and it was about my loneliness and my pain and my isolation and my alienation during that period of my life and moving to New York and being introduced into the world of adults and being hugely disappointed by this world by their values by what was expected of me as

an adult and by a kind of you know yuppie them is it's always just that was the trendy you know. You know the tagline for this consumerism in general and basically how.