From the book to the screen, finally
Glenn Stout's biography of Trudy Ederle finds it way to the big screen
Writing a book isn’t easy.
It’s a solitary existence where the writer has to find themselves and produce something special. The path to publishing a book is even harder and longer. It takes years and then when it comes out, a book can disappear into the ether. Completed, but mostly forgotten. Publishers release thousands of original titles every year. It’s an impossibly crowded marketplace to get noticed, even for accomplished and experienced writers. And then to see your work make it from the page to the screen is even longer shot.
The process of having your work optioned and eventually turned into a movie or television show is similar to being struck by lightening. It involves near misses, lunches, emails and phone calls with “interested” parties. It’s exhilarating, but also deflating because until the project is finally projected, it’s seemingly always in development. But, every once in a while, it happens. The moment arrives and all of the pieces fall into place.
For Glenn Stout, the wait was something that happened over there, far from the work. It was a possibility, but not something he focused on because other work needed to be done. There were projects that needed finishing. More books. More editing. More writing. More yard work or snow to shovel. None of Stout’s books got the Hollywood treatment before so why would his 2009 book, Young Woman and the Sea, about swimmer Gertrude Ederle, be any different? Yes, there was interest and an option check that arrived every year, but it wasn’t a lot. And, yes, stars and directors were attached or interested, but they always flaked. The project looked dead more than once.
Then, something happened. The pieces fell into place: Daisy Ridley wanted the part and could do it; Joachim Rønning wanted to direct and was available. On top of that, and more importantly, Disney needed another movie for its streaming service and had a “Star Wars” star and experienced director it knew with a producer in Jerry Bruckheimer that could deliver.
Lightening struck Stout.
He joined the rarified air of writers who see their work translated on to the big screen. On May 31, “The Young Woman and the Sea” will be released on select theaters before landing on Disney+.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
When did you first come up with the idea for The Young Woman and the Sea? How many years or weeks or months before you wrote a book proposal with this idea and how did it come up?
I had the idea for this book back in 2001 when I was working on a book proposal with David Halberstam to do a collection of sports stories by women about women, and I encountered stories about Gertrude Ederle, and I was like, why haven't I heard of her? Then I did a book on the Yankees and was going through a lot of New York papers and also encountered all these stories, and I was like, why haven't I heard of her? I did a little bit of research and then enough to intrigue me, and I kind of set it aside.
I mentioned it to my agent and and my editor thought it was a good idea, but I was booked up then. So it was like another three or four years — probably 2005 — before I put a proposal together. Then it sold and to Houghton Mifflin, who had been my longtime publisher, and the book was supposed to come out in 2008, but there was another book about Ederle that was published in England, and they decided to delay my book a year. So it didn't come out until 2009, at which point the recession had happened and nobody was buying books. It was well received, good reviews, people who read it really liked it, but it didn't do very much. No books were doing very much in early 2009.
Did the Halberstam book about women and women's sports ever come out? I don't remember it.
It's still sitting in a box on a shelf in my office, and I'd really like to reconstitute that at some point because I thought it was a great idea for a book.
So for how long this book sit around before somebody was like, “Hey, I'd like to make this a movie.”
Well, from the time it was published until I got an email from Jeff Nathanson, who's a screenwriter, in the spring of 2015 asking me if it was available for option. I'd had a handful of queries, but nothing serious about other books before. I knew well enough to just forward his request to my agent and say, ‘talk to him; it's available.” But I also googled Jeff Nathanson and realized right away, like, oh, he's the real deal. He wrote “Catch Me If You Can.” He did a “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. He is a successful screenwriter, and my agent at the time was very savvy to this whole process, even though he had told me that your chances of any property getting made into a movie, even after its optioned, is about a thousand to one. His next phrase was, ‘but there are a lot of whales involved in this project,’ meaning big name people, ‘I think it's going to happen.’ And sure enough, Jerry Bruckheimer was interested in producing, and that moved it down the field pretty quick, and then Paramount picked it up and, for a long time, Jeff's emails to me were ‘we’re on the five yard line,’ ‘we're on the two yard line,’ but we were on the five yard line and the two yard line for about seven years because it went into turnaround, which means the studio dropped, which Paramount did. I don't know why. Then another studio had it and they dropped it. At one point we were within probably six weeks of starting to film with a director and a big star, and then the big star backed out.
We were at square one and then COVID thing happened, and at that point I'd given up, but in the long run it turned out that probably COVID is the reason the movie got made. Because of COVID, by that point, they had another studio interested: Disney. They knew they wanted Daisy Ridley to play Trudy, and they knew they wanted Joachim Rønning to be the director. He'd done one of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies. He did Kon-Tiki, so he knew how to work with water. But as it was put to me, ‘It never happens that the director we want and the star we want are both available at the same time.’ But because of the slowdowns for COVID, they were, and Disney green lit it. They said, ‘If you can make it for X amount of money, we'll do it.’
It was too expensive to do in Melbourne and too expensive to do in Liverpool, so they went to Bulgaria, which has one of the largest film studios in Europe and is also a very cheap place to do a film. They were able to make a movie that looks like they spent two or three times as much on as they did because it was done in Bulgaria.
Well, so up until this point, you've written enough books that you would think, I know how the process of book writing goes, it's similar, right?
All. Well, it was totally different in that the medium was alien, but it was similar in that, I've had book ideas that sometimes they want them, sometimes they don't. They take a long time. My last book, Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid, I pitched that initially in 2008, and that was just published three years ago. So that almost went through the same process, getting to be published as a book, as this film did. They didn't want it. I took it back, I pitched it again, stuff you're never supposed to do, but I did.
I think because I have been doing this long enough, I knew not to get too excited not to put too many eggs in one basket. I never really depended on this happening. Believe me, it was nice to get the option renewed every so often and get a few extra thousand dollars, but you don't bet on the triple bank shot dropping in. Fan Duel would not accept this bet, let's put it that way.
Oh, they might. They think they're taking your money.
They might accept the bet they might never pay off on
As a writer, you do all this research, you do all this work, and then your work is kind of taken out of your hands. So how did you adapt to that life or did you feel it at all? Were you nervous?
I knew the process. I knew that once they bought it, and I said this for years, they could turn Trudy Ederle into a cartoon duck and have her swim across the mud puddle and there would be nothing I could do about it. Unless you're Stephen King or J.K. Rowling, there's nothing you can do about it. I was aware from the beginning of the nature of going from one medium to another means that changes are made. In the book, you might have to do something in a film in a scene of five seconds that takes 10 pages in a book to explain. So that was fine. What I was most concerned about is her essential character stay the same, is this the person I wrote about? The other part that I thought was really important for the movie is the relationships, with her family and her sister in particular. I was very concerned. I wanted that preserved because I thought that was key and that's all there.
Certainly things that have been compressed and composite characters and all that stuff. She came from a large family and not every family member's in the book, not every character in the book is in the movie. You just can't do that. That's how the process goes, and so as long as they were respectful towards the essential character, do what you want. It didn't bother me. I was consulted a lot and they hit me up with a lot of questions.
But, after going through the experience and becoming aware of how many people put their fingers in the pie along the way, it's amazing any movie gets made. It's amazing anything gets made.
But that being said, I'm pretty happy with the final product.
It's far from the 1970s auteur period in American cinema now, where you're as far from that as possible.
Pretty much I think, although I give Joachim Rønning and Jeff Nathanson a lot of credit for a lot of the things that they did because it looks great. The feel is great. It fits into the time period very, very well, and it has the texture to it. It doesn't come off like a made for TV film, that's for sure.
A biopic is also kind of scary when you're selling it because there's just so many cliches to a biopic movie.
Well, particularly I think for a sports film, it's going to end with either winning or losing or I am going to fight all the odds and that's in there, but even in Trudy's life, I make the point in the book and say, she was no feminist. She didn't do this to make a point about what women could do. She was certainly aware of that, but she did what she did for her own reasons: to please her sister and to show her family what she could do and making that point to them was an ancillary benefit. It certainly showed what women could do, but that she didn't start out with that goal. It was internally driven.
Which I think makes this story more interesting as a movie, right? Because when you try to get too many outside forces, it just becomes too big and too grandiose and it feels forced.
It's easy to fall into cliches and, while it's certainly mentioned in there, of course she's the first woman and that men don't think a woman can do this. I really don't think that's the driver in it. I think it's the relationships.
You said you'd had some other stories come close. What was different about this as opposed to those other stories coming close? Why were people reaching out before?
Yeah, I don't think any of the others came close. They were kicking tires and like Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid, the tires have been kicked. They're probably flat at this point, but what made the difference is that you had people who had stature.
I was wondering about the getting close for so long. A lot of writers have hopes and dreams of this kind of thing happening. We all hope someone buys something we write. I've had people reach out on about stories I've written and it was like, ‘Oh, this is great. This is going to be awesome.’ And then you're like, ‘That's the end of that.’ And you don't know what it means. You don't know why they reached out. Your hopes and dreams in this field are so high and they get crushed so often…
I think I was crush proof by the time this happened. My dreams had long ago been crushed, so I was like, whatever.
Is that partially why you think it's succeeded, though? When you have lower expectations something almost always happens?
Well, I think that's part of it. I mean, it got optioned and I just kept doing what I was doing. I didn't change anything.
The interesting thing is that maybe because this has been done now, maybe someone right now has interest in Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid. So can we have a bank shot off the rail twice? I don't know. Once I ran the table playing pool and I'm the worst pool pool player in the world, but sometimes it works and there's no rhyme or reason for it.
I don't think you can sit, and I know there's people that try to do it. I don't think you can sit and write a book or even a story and say, ‘Oh, I'm writing this for film, and it won't succeed unless it's made into a film.’ You can do that maybe to get something optioned, and there's certainly business models out there with some media companies and some individual writers that do that, but I don't think that necessarily gets it closer to it actually being done than just pure chance. There's so many factors involved. I didn't write Young Woman in the Sea with like, ‘Oh, this is going to be a film. I'm going to make it a three act story.’ I had no thoughts about that, and my brain doesn't work that way. I just try to write a good book and if someone wants to do something with it, great.
I think you can be distracted. If your goal is to, ‘I'm going to write a book, but I want it to be this,’ I would find that very distracting.
And also, does it do the book any service, if you're already thinking about the next project, you have to do your subject.
Exactly. If you're trying to gauge it already, like, ‘Oh, I'm going to leave this character out. I'm going to try to make this character a little more interesting.’ It's hard enough to get the story down. It's hard enough to pick the right words rather than trying to massage everything and try to get this square peg in a round hole. Books are not films. It would be like you're writing a book and you're trying to think, ‘Well, what's the painting of this book going to look like?’ What?
There's a narrative element to both books and film, but they're radically different. I think it's just really difficult to try to guess how that relationship's going to work in advance.