Jim Harrison learns his money lesson
By Jay
MacDonald • Bankrate.com
Bankrate: You hit many people's radar screens
with "Legends of the Fall."
Jim Harrison: I wrote "Legends" when I was
37 and then the problem was access to money. That was the first
actual money. Hollywood bought all three of the novellas. It was
hard to figure out because I had lived on $10,000 a year for 10
years and then it all happened at once and I wasn't very graceful.
Bankrate: What did you do with it?
Jim Harrison: Just pissed it away, high living
and loaning it. I bought a personal car when I made the fortune
and it was a Subaru. I wasn't too extravagant. I just didn't know
how people did it. The point is not to make money, but to hold onto
it. That's where I didn't know what I was doing. And I certainly
wouldn't listen to anybody.
Bankrate: Do you remember much about those years?
Jim Harrison: (Laughs.) Oh, I remember them;
I never forget anything! Swedes are even drink counters; I don't
think I've ever in my life not known how many drinks I've had the
day before. We're as spontaneous as barbed wire.
Bankrate: Was that when you first dabbled in screenwriting?
Jim Harrison: Yes, I'd been into it a little
bit just to try to make some money. I wrote my first screenplay
for $5,000. They didn't get made; your real problem comes when they
start paying you big money and they get made. I went up quite rapidly;
I think I went from $5,000 to $150,000. Again, I didn't have a firm
sense of what to do.
Bankrate: You've mentioned your screenwriting years
as being life-threatening.
Jim Harrison: Yes, because the tendency is to turn
to alcohol and drugs to make yourself feel better because the money
didn't make you feel better so maybe this stuff will. It's nothing
very original as a story.
Bankrate: Was screenwriting fulfilling for you on
any level?
Jim Harrison: Oh yeah, I enjoyed it. The trouble
was, as Mike Ovitz, the head of Creative Artists Agency, once told
me on the phone, that if I had any sense, I would come out there
and just do a first draft and then get out of town. The first draft
is fun because you're just making up a story that you would like
to see on the screen. It was even fun when I quit. I was trying
to do a Western for Harrison Ford set in the 1920s and they didn't
get the point; it was still the Old West at some places in the '20s.
It was very pleasant; it's when you get into the third and fourth
and fifth drafts when it isn't. It's the meetings finally that kill
you. I remember some meetings that began at 8 a.m. and ran until
midnight. I mean, these are alpha predators -- they go for it. Six
years ago, I felt I had the choice to either quit or expire.
Bankrate: You wrote screenplays for nearly
25 years without moving to L.A.?
Jim Harrison: Yes, when I was writing novels, I would
go out there and get a screen job and make enough in two months
to support myself for a whole year of novel writing. I lived much
of that time way up north in Michigan, in a cabin.
Bankrate: Did you at some point emerge from the fog
and knuckle down to some financial planning?
Jim Harrison: Yeah, I had to when I was in
my 50s because I didn't have any retirement. So then I got pretty
smart. It was just this gradual feeling as I got older that I wanted
to make sure that my wife and two daughters had some sort of benefits
from the fruits of my labor. I got an adviser and entered one of
these plans, which is a bitch where you have to save so much every
year. Sort of like an inflated IRA. I had to meet this mark for
six years. It was ghastly, but I did it.
Bankrate: What were your major expenditures?
Jim Harrison: Oh, wine and food. Drugs for a while,
but I quit that almost 20 years ago, almost without thinking about
it. I'd lucked out and had been researching a film on Brazil for
a month. After being in Brazil, there was never any point to touching
American cocaine again, so I never did. But it was simply the sense
that you're aging and now is the time to save up for later.
Bankrate: Will you ever retire?
Jim Harrison: No. Writers don't retire. I don't have
to do the obnoxious work that I used to. I just write what I enjoy
now. It's a better life.
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