William Monahan (pronounced /ˈwɪljəm ˈmɒnəhæn/) (born November 3, 1960) is an Academy Award-winning American screenwriter, literary novelist, and former journalist. After attending the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Monahan, already a professional writer while an undergraduate, as well as a musician in Northampton, Massachusetts, moved to New York City to pursue a career as a journalist, writer and critic. He wrote many satirical pieces for the New York Press, a few reviews for The New York Post, and contributed to the magazines Talk, Maxim, and Bookforum. He was also an editor at Spy magazine. He won a 1997 Pushcart Prize when the Amherst literary magazine Old Crow Review nominated one of his short stories. After Spy failed, he concentrated on writing films and published Light House: A Trifle, a novel which was critically praised and led to Monahan's move into film when in 1998, Warner Bros. bought the film rights to the novel and commissioned Monahan to adapt it to the screen for director Gore Verbinski.
In 2001, 20th Century Fox bought Monahan's spec script about the Barbary Wars called Tripoli, with Ridley Scott, who was to become Monahan's primary collaborator, attached to direct. Monahan has since worked with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, among other filmmakers. His first produced screenplay, Kingdom of Heaven was made into a film by Ridley Scott and released to theaters in 2005. His second produced screenplay was The Departed, a film which earned him a WGA award and an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. A second film Monahan has completed with Ridley Scott is Body of Lies, scheduled to be released in the United States on October 10, 2008.
In 2006, he started his own company, Henceforth, and negotiated a "first-look" producing deal with Warner Bros. Monahan resides in the United States with his wife and two children.
Monahan was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and spent his early years in the neighborhood of Roslindale, eventually moving to the suburbs of Boston at age six when his parents divorced. Over the years he continued to frequently move, living in many of the suburban communities on the North Shore of Massachusetts with his mother and sister. His father lived in the neighborhood of West Roxbury, working as an engineer. Monahan regularly visited, and often read from his father's extensive book collection—he particularly enjoyed Shakespeare's plays. He has described his upbringing as one in which he had "two households, two families, two homes": his father's family was "deeply Irish, deeply Catholic" and his mother's family was "Anglo-Saxon with an admixture of stuffy Scot". He recalls developing a keen interest in movies at age seven, when it occurred to him that a screenwriter was behind the story in Lawrence of Arabia. His first screenplay was written at age twelve.
Monahan spent a year moving boxes at a liquor store before he began attending classes at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama there, and chose the university mainly for its scholars, such as Normand Berlin. During these years, he began publishing fiction in small presses and zines. His earliest known published piece, a short story titled "At the Village Hall", appeared in 1991 in the Northampton zine Perkins Press. Two years later, his first novel Light House was published serially in the Amherst literary magazine Old Crow Review over five installments; it was eventually released as a book by Riverhead Books under the title Light House: A Trifle. When Kurt Vonnegut visited the campus as part of the university's Distinguished Visitors Program, Monahan attended the event as a writer for Old Crow Review and asked a few questions of Vonnegut; he later published an account of Vonnegut's visit in a New York Press piece titled "And Slow It Goes". In another one of his early literary efforts during university, he entered into a short-lived business partnership, involving bookmaking, with a lady whom he had first met when he crashed his motorcycle in front of her car and who had then driven him to the hospital; they decided to print a slate of 100 paperback copies of a novella he had written, yet, before any copies were sold, Monahan reconsidered the undertaking and bought out his partner, burning "all the copies but one".
In the late 1980s, Monahan was a musician playing guitar in a band called the Slags; they performed in and around Northampton, Massachusetts before breaking up. A few years later, he was a guitarist and a song-writer in another band called Foam. When Monahan was editor of Hamptons magazine he hired his friend Mike Ruffino as his assistant, a Northampton writer and a bassist for The Unband. In Ruffino's memoir Gentlemanly Repose, chronicling his rock career in The Unband, he includes a couple of short anecdotes about Monahan.
In 1993, Monahan began contributing essays and short fiction to the alternative weekly New York Press, where editorial control was unusually permissive compared with most papers, allowing him to publish satirical pieces which were markedly erudite and heavily imbued with literary and historical references. At first, the letters from readers reacting to Monahan's satire were favorable, however, in 1995, he regularly courted controversy and reactions from readers became highly polarized: their discourse is best exemplified in the letters responding to the essays "The Angel Factory", "Heroin", and "Dr. Rosenthal, I Presume" (See Reception). His cover story "Ceci n'est pas une bombe" is singular for its novel theory about the Unabomber's targeting methodology, which, according to Alston Chase in his book Harvard and the Unabomber, was the only instance where the lexical clues left by the Unabomber were correctly identified prior to his capture. In his essay "Manhattan Samurai", Monahan sheds light on the type of journalism published by the New York Press with an exchange he recounts in which he was asked "How many reporters on your paper?", and remedially explained "We're all sort of essayists, actually." Years later, when Monahan was establishing himself as a screenwriter, his peers looked back on his journalism and offered their own characterizations: former New York Press colleague Dawn Eden recalled him "as charming, libertarian-leaning, with a razor-sharp wit that he used in print to anger as many people as possible" and Newsday's Jon Fine considered him to have been "an excellent and scabrous writer".
Throughout the summer season of 1995, Monahan wrote a weekly column for Hamptons magazine. He was hired on account of a scathing review of Manhattan File magazine he had written for the New York Press in 1994 titled "Filed Away". The publisher of Hamptons magazine (a publication which covers The Hamptons summer colony during the tourist season) had initially sought permission from Monahan to reprint his review with the objective of slandering Manhattan File for personal reasons, but Monahan had declined permission. Instead, Monahan accepted the publisher's offer to write a weekly column, and at the conclusion of its successful run he requested the position of editor at the magazine for the following year. This request was granted, yet his stint as editor of Hamptons in 1996 was brief. After editing only three issues he quit, and several weeks later he described his tenure at Hamptons in a New York Press cover story titled "The Burning Deck: My Brilliant Career at Hamptons", criticizing the workplace environment as chaotic and "ridiculously unworkable".
In the mid-1990s, Monahan resided in New York City, earning a living doing freelance work for the New York Press, and gradually for several other publications: he reviewed books for The New York Post, writing a review of Oliver Stone's first novel A Child's Night Dream in one instance, and contributed to the recently launched men's magazine Maxim, a tremendously successful publication in its first years. An early and avid user of the internet, Monahan frequently participated in discussions at EchoNYC, a distinctly New York online community. Before long, he won recognition for his short fiction. He was awarded a 1997 Pushcart Prize for his short story, "A Relation of Various Accidents Observable in Some Animals Included in Vacuo", following a nomination by Old Crow Review; and, in the following year's Pushcart volume, his Perkins Press short story "At the Village Hall", another nomination by Old Crow Review, garnered a special mention.
In 1997, Monahan was hired to work as an editor at Spy magazine, a satirical monthly, by the editor-in-chief Bruno Maddox. He later reminisced, in an interview with The Boston Globe, that he "had God's own job there". Unfortunately, in 1998, Spy magazine was shutdown; he had worked on the last four issues as a rewrite man and editor.
Portrait of Claude La Badarian by Antony Zito (www.ZitoGallery.com) from the original serial run in 2001.
In 1998, Monahan sold his first novel Light House: A Trifle to Riverhead Books, a Penguin Group imprint. He shortly became a working screenwriter when Warner Bros. optioned the film rights to his novel—still in manuscript—and contracted him to write the adaptation. He continued to occasionally contribute to the New York Press and even wrote an essay, on the depiction of Gloucester, Massachusetts in the movies, for Talk magazine's debut issue in August 1999. It wasn't until 2000 that Light House: A Trifle was finally published: it garnered critical acclaim but had lackluster sales. William Georgiades, in a review for The New York Times, called the novel "a sort of old English farce that allows Monahan to skewer whatever comes to mind: modern art, magazine writing, education, the young"; while BookPage Fiction's Bruce Tierney declared Monahan "a worthy successor to Kingsley Amis". However, Claire Dederer, in an editorial review for Amazon.com, cautioned that " is not a novel for the culturally illiterate", and criticized the occasional inside-jokes that " most sensible people very tired". The work intentionally references the satirical novels of the early 19th century British author Thomas Love Peacock and tells the story of an artist named Tim Picasso who runs afoul of a drug lord and seeks refuge at a New England inn in the middle of a nor'easter.
In late 2001, Monahan wrote a comic serial narrative for the New York Press titled Dining Late with Claude La Badarian, published over thirteen weeks under the pseudonym Claude La Badarian, a fictional restaurant critic of The Aristocrat magazine. These short stories made satirical reference to his first novel and literary career. The "Dining Late with Claude La Badarian" column was described by a fictional Monahan, who entered the narrative occasionally, as "a blackmailed dining column written by a delusional media scumbag" intended as "a small yet integral part" of a forthcoming second novel. Each of the twelve columns that followed the initial proposal for the column contained a portrait of Claude La Badarian drawn by Antony Zito, a New York portrait painter and curator as well as Monahan's former band-mate in the Slags. At the conclusion of the serial, Monahan and Bruno Maddox went on a joint book tour that was interrupted by the 9/11 attacks. Shortly afterward he sold his spec script Tripoli to 20th Century Fox, and was commissioned to write Kingdom of Heaven by Ridley Scott.
Monahan's first film commission was the adaptation of his own novel in 1998, with Gore Verbinski attached as director. Warner Bros. optioned the film rights to his satirical novel Light House: A Trifle. Penguin Putnam then wanted to delay publishing the novel; they were interested in releasing it concurrent with the anticipated film release. Monahan continued working as a journalist, editing for Details magazine, and reviewing books for Bookforum magazine, but had committed to film writing. When Light House: A Trifle was finally released in 2000, Monahan had divested himself of any immediate interest in being a novelist. After less than four years in publication, Light House was taken off the market by Monahan while he was on location in Spain for the production of Kingdom of Heaven; he bought back the rights from the Penguin Group, later lamenting that it was "an empty, damaging gesture". Light House was available in a German edition translated by Ulrike Seeberger.
In 1990, Monahan wrote a script titled Tripoli, about William Eaton's epic march on Tripoli during the Barbary Wars, registering it with the WGA with the alternate title of "Captain Eaton", and later set out the opening of Tripoli in prose form under the title of "Romantic" in 1997, published in Old Crow Review. While working at Spy magazine, Monahan routinely spent two weeks working in Manhattan followed by two weeks writing his own material in Massachusetts; during this period he took the Tripoli script out of a drawer and placed it with an agent. In 2001, shortly after he got married, Tripoli sold to 20th Century Fox, in a deal worth mid-six figures in American dollars with Mark Gordon attached as the producer. The historical epic follows Eaton's campaign against Yusuf Bashaw to restore Yusuf's brother, the exiled heir Hamet Karamanli, to the throne of the Barbary Coast nation of Tripoli, and features a French mercenary named Joubert. Ridley Scott signed to direct. Monahan met with Scott to discuss Tripoli and Scott mentioned his desire to direct a film about knights. Monahan suggested the fall of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem as a setting, and Ridley Scott and Fox commissioned Monahan to write the original screenplay which became Kingdom of Heaven.
Before the start of production on Kingdom of Heaven in January 2004, Monahan was hired to write several scripts for big-budget films, beginning in 2002 when it was reported that Universal Pictures had hired him to write the screenplay for Jurassic Park IV. Columbia Pictures then hired him to write a script based on a manuscript, later published as The Horse Soldiers: A True Story of Modern War, by journalist Doug Stanton, which recounted the bloody uprising in the Afghan city Mazari Sharif following the American incursion against the Taliban. Subsequently, Brad Pitt's production company Plan B hired him to adapt the Hong Kong action film Infernal Affairs, which Martin Scorsese directed under the title The Departed for Warner Bros.; the film won Monahan two Best Adapted Screenplay awards, from the Writers Guild of America and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. John Sayles was later hired to write a subsequent draft for Jurassic Park IV when Monahan became indisposed: he had entered into a production write-through contract for Kingdom of Heaven, requiring him to be on location to potentially modify its shooting script.
After production on Kingdom of Heaven completed, Monahan was hired to collaborate once again with director Ridley Scott on an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's ultra-violent Western novel Blood Meridian for producer Scott Rudin. In post-production on Kingdom of Heaven, Scott edited a 3-hour long cut but decided to pare it down after it was discovered at a preview screening that the audience felt the film was too long; Scott was gradually convinced as well and settled on a 145-minute cut.
The months leading up to Kingdom of Heaven's theatrical release were troubled when author James Reston Jr. claimed that Monahan's Kingdom of Heaven script violated the copyright of his 2001 novel Warriors of God: Richard the Lionheart and Saladin in the Third Crusade. Reston claimed that a producer had previously offered Ridley Scott the book for a movie deal but was turned down. He alleged that the entire second half of Monahan's shooting script was based on the first 105 pages of his book, and noted that "Kingdom of Heaven" is the title of the second chapter. 20th Century Fox denied all of Reston's claims and Monahan, in an e-mail, commented, "There was no infringement, period. I've been familiar with the fall of the Latin Kingdom for thirty-odd years." Reston did not pursue the matter and never filed a lawsuit.
In the meantime, it was reported that Monahan had secured work on two Warner Bros. projects. He was hired to adapt Louis Begley's novel Wartime Lies for Warner Independent Pictures, previously in development as a Stanley Kubrick project called Aryan Papers. A second script was to be based on Marco Polo's autobiography Travels, as a star vehicle for actor Matt Damon, titled The Venetian, and set during Polo's Far East explorations.
Kingdom of Heaven was released theatrically in May 2005. Peter Canavese of Groucho Reviews described Kingdom as a "confusing compromise at best and a dull obfuscation of history at worst" and Jeffrey M. Anderson of Combustible Celluloid wrote that Kingdom "has at its center a bold story, and yet it sits there like a stone pillar". Ridley Scott later remarked that he got carried away with cutting the film in the editing room and learned that "the enemy is previews" because these test screenings are tantamount to asking an inexperienced group of people to be film critics. Kingdom was reappraised by critics when it was released on DVD in the form of a director's cut, containing an additional 45 minutes of footage previously shot from Monahan's shooting script. Critics were pleased with the extended version of the film and James Berardinelli of ReelViews remarked how "now that the director's cut is available, there's no reason for anyone to watch the neutered theatrical edition".
The Departed, Monahan's second produced screenplay
While Monahan was on the set of The Departed his wife gave birth to a daughter. He was already a step-father to his wife's son. Monahan managed to get two days off to spend with them. In the run-up to The Departed's theatrical release, Monahan was hired by Warner Bros. to adapt David Ignatius' novel Body of Lies into a film of the same title, about a CIA operative who goes to Jordan to track a high-ranking terrorist, with Ridley Scott directing. He also started his own company on the Warner Bros. lot called Henceforth and negotiated a first-look producing deal that gave the studio the first right of first refusal on any films produced by Henceforth. In return Monahan and producer Quentin Curtis received from Warner Bros. the film rights to produce John Pearson's true crime novel The Gamblers; reportedly Monahan will write the adaptation.
When Martin Scorsese's The Departed was released to theaters in October 2006, Monahan received considerable praise from critics and was applauded for his depiction of the city of Boston. Monahan had chosen not to watch Infernal Affairs so that he could create an original interpretation of the Hong Kong action film, and instead worked from an English translation of the Chinese script. He used his intimate knowledge of the way Bostonians talk and act, learned from his youth spent in the many neighborhoods of Boston, to create characters that The Boston Globe described as distinctly indigenous to the city.
The Departed won many critics' prizes. The Los Angeles Times reported that Monahan had hired a publicist to run a campaign promoting his screenplay during the awards season, although he had in fact hired the publicity firm to manage relations with the studio involved, and had respectfully refused most publicity offers during the awards season, including an appearance on The Charlie Rose Show; he rarely does in-person interviews. He was honored by the US-Ireland Alliance for his writing in film and ended up winning two Best Adapted Screenplay awards for The Departed, from the Writers Guild of America and from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was later invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. As of 2007, he is working on a film treatment for a follow-up to The Departed, which may be either a prequel or a sequel.
William Monahan, awarded a 2007 Ischia Global Award, standing beside Franco Nero at the Ischia Film and Music Global Festival in Italy (photo by photographer Pietro Coccia).
After winning the 2007 Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for The Departed, it was announced that Monahan had been hired to work on two film projects: an adaptation of the Hong Kong film Confession of Pain and an original Rock and Roll film titled The Long Play. Monahan signed to both executive produce and write the adaptation of the Hong Kong film Confession of Pain for Warner Bros. Pictures, later given the title Nothing in the World; it would be his second adaptation of a Media Asia Films production created by directors Andrew Lau and Alan Mak and screenwriter Felix Chong. Monahan's other commission was to rewrite a script about the history of the rock music business titled The Long Play (Rolling Stone writer Rich Cohen, commissioned in 1999 by Mick Jagger and Martin Scorsese, completed the original drafts and Matthew Weiss wrote the subsequent drafts).
In 2007, the movie rights to Robert Graves' novel I, Claudius, previously held by the BBC and Jim Sheridan, were expired and consequently brought back into the marketplace on behalf of the author's estate. I, Claudius is the first of two books Graves wrote that form the fictional autobiography of the Roman Emperor Claudius, who ruled from 41–54 A.D. The movie rights were contested by several studios, including Warner Bros., but producer Scott Rudin outbid them, reportedly leasing the rights to I, Claudius in a two million dollar deal. The companies of Monahan and Leonardo DiCaprio (Henceforth and Appian Way, respectively) both had first look deals with Warner Bros., but despite their studio's losing bid, they were reported to be attached to Rudin's intended I, Claudius feature film with Monahan adapting the novel and DiCaprio starring. However, the rights to the Graves novels proved compromised: Rudin did not complete the deal. Monahan and DiCaprio are not attached to I, Claudius.
In the weeks following the end of the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike, it was reported that Monahan had been hired by Warner Bros. to adapt the South Korean action film The Chaser. He shortly thereafter entered into a first look deal with GK films, the production company of Graham King, a producer on The Departed, who had hired Monahan in 2007 to write a feature film adaptation of the six-hour 1985 BBC mini-series Edge of Darkness; as part of this deal, Monahan was enlisted to write a script about drug dealer Jim Keene, based on Hillel Levin's Playboy article, "The Strange Redemption of James Keene". Monahan, already acting in producing capacities on several films, was then reported to have acquired, in conjunction with producer Quentin Curtis, the rights to Ken Bruen's novel London Boulevard (a novel which pays homage to the film noir classic Sunset Boulevard and has some plot points in common with the film, although it is set in London's criminal underworld); Monahan has written the screenplay and will direct the film.
Monahan prefers that screenplays be written by one author and does not support the collaborative model in which multiple screenwriters write competing drafts. His interest in motion pictures began at an early age, but he admittedly steered clear of the film industry because he mistakenly surmised that the collaborative model was a de facto practice for creating screenplays. However, in his mid 30s, he went to Hollywood to adapt his first novel into a film and later discovered that if you produce exceptional work, you can "stick to your own model of work, instead of caving in to industry expectations", however, he acknowledged that the writer does need to have the backing of a powerful film director who will protect his vision. Since then, he has generally been the sole writer on his screenplays, except for Jurassic Park IV, which was taken over by John Sayles and rewritten when Monahan had to go on location for Kingdom of Heaven.
Monahan has quipped that, having studied English drama for over 30 years, he is "post-conscious about craft". When doing historical fiction he reads the available primary sources and will not look at a contemporary book. He is critical of the instruction given by people running screenwriting courses, and has said that "classes and books on screenwriting do far more harm than good, because writing drama is intuitional and case-by-case". He has stated a couple of times that he believes there are no general rules to writing, and, in a Collider.com interview, he further elaborated that he has come to realize that "ach work has its own inherent rules. You discover them. You don’t import them."
In his experience he has found that "when you’re writing a character, you are that character", musing that "It’s probably no joke that Shakespeare was an actor."
Monahan has said that he would prefer to work on an old Olivetti Praxis typewriter in many instances because there are too many distractions on a modern computer.
