26
2012
NORTH CAROLINA L ITE R A R Y RE V IE W O N L INE
Courtesy of James and wendy Dodson
After two unfruitful trips up the aisle with major studios, we formed a small independent film company and have quietly worked the past few years to raise the capital to make the movie the way it needs to be made – hand-crafted and faithful to the book, shot on location in North Carolina and Scotland where the story takes place. Because interest in this project has never waned – would-be producers still track me down at least four or five times a year – there’s plenty of reason to hope that someday, in some form or another, Final Rounds will finally make it to the screen. The question for us remains timing and chemistry. At his eightieth birthday party in Manhattan, a fete that included video tributes from Woody Allen and Norman Lear, guests like William Goldman and Harry Bellefonte, and several major studio heads whom David Picker had launched in the business, my beloved and extremely youthful partner wryly remarked, “I’m now officially old enough to play Opti the Mystic. But I have no doubt we’ll eventually get this project done the way it needs to be done – with love and passion – hopefully before Jim is old enough to play his own father!” That got a big laugh. The thing is, I believe him. As David pointed out to me on several occasions, it took him more than a decade to bring Midnight Cowboy to the big screen from a small book “nobody had ever read.” And other blockbusters he’s made, from Last Tango in Paris to The Crucible, had taken both patience and perseverance on Picker’s part before they became films.
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And so, for better or worse, I’m not really one of those authors who grumbles too intensely about the long and sometimes deflating road one must travel in order to see one’s book leap from page to screen. As I’ve learned from this complicated fifteen-year odyssey, the two media are related but by no means the same. Patience and a sense of humor are not just useful, but mandatory to retaining your sanity.
At the end of the day, I am a writer who writes books, and David – who is finally, with my encouragement, working on a delightful memoir of his phenomenal career in American film – is a movie man extraordinaire who will remain my artistic partner to the end. If Providence smiles on us and a film adaptation of Final Rounds gets made, we’ll raise our pints and thank the gods and Opti the Mystic himself for finally making it happen. If not, at least I’ve made a great friend in David and his indefatigable wife, Sandy – who, as we speak, is finagling to get our latest version of the screenplay into the hands of either Justin Timberlake or her heartthrob George Clooney. “They’re both mad for golf,” she insists, “and would be perfect for the father and son.” And so it goes. Who knows where this latest effort may yet lead. My old man always said the pleasure is in the journey, undoubtedly wisdom too. n
For two decades James Dodson was a contributing editor and regular columnist for Golf Magazine and Golf and Travel Correspondent for Departures magazine of American Express. He was also the award- winning Senior Writer for Yankee Magazine during the 1980s and early ’90s, prior to which he was Senior Writer for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution Sunday Magazine, the oldest Sunday magazine in the nation. He is currently Writer-in-Residence for The Pilot newspaper and Editor of PineStraw Magazine, both based in Southern Pines, NC. Beginning in summer 2011, he is also the editor of O. Henry Magazine in Greensboro, where he grew up and began his journalism career at the News & Record (and where his family goes back several generations). He is also the author of several books, and over the course of a thirty-yeargolfwriting career, his work has garnered more than a dozen awards from the Golf Writers of America and other industry organizations, including the Donald Ross Award for his lifetime contributions to the game and golf literature. Dodson recently served as Distinguished Charles Rubin Writer-in-Residence at Hollins University in Virginia. See the 2007 issue of NCLR for another James Dodson essay, “Driving Miss Molly Home,” featuring another of his beloved dogs.