Hot Plastic Burns Bright

Back in the 1970s and '80s -- when there seemed to be more young people going to the movies than reading books, film schools were apparently more popular than writing programs, and the goal of an increasing number of creative twenty-somethings was not to write the Great American Novel but to craft the next hot screenplay -- a chorus of dismayed voices was sometimes heard to ask, "But where will the new authors come from?"

Now, in a new millennium well stocked with fresh young fiction-writers, we can see that another generation of wordsmiths grew from all the usual, and a few unusual, places -- including the movie community -- which some thought seemed poised to smother the written word.

Consider, for instance, Peter Craig: author of the neo-noir Hot Plastic (Hyperion trade paper), a March/April Book Sense 76 pick, which Emery Pinter of Atlanta's Chapter 11 found "hip, funny, painful, intriguing, and filled with dry wit" and which Publishers Weekly termed "fascinating, funny, (and) beautifully written."

Craig, born in 1969, grew up in Southern California's San Fernando Valley, son of the Academy Award-winning actress Sally Field and Steven Craig. His first exposure to memorable dialogue and vivid action (two characteristics of Hot Plastic) -- and his first impulse to write -- came on childhood visits to his mother's movie sets.

"I was kind of a quiet, mousy kid," Peter Craig said by telephone from his farmhouse in Iowa, where, now a divorced single parent, he lives with his two young daughters. "When I would go on location with my mother, or go along when she worked on the set, I'd sit backstage and kind of memorize all the dialogue. I really felt there was a writer hovering somewhere in the background of everything -- and I kind of wanted to do that, at six or seven, even."

Craig wrote all sorts of tales as a youngster. "I'd do stories, and comics -- graphic-novel kinds of things," he explained. "I did some kind of fantasy book when I was in sixth grade, longhand." He was encouraged to write and to read by his father, Steven, of whom he said, "My dad was kind of a frustrated writer himself, and read a lot."

More literary encouragement came from Sally Field's second husband, movie producer Alan Greisman. "He's sort of like another father (to me)," Craig said. "I've known him since I was an early teen. Extremely literate guy ... really into Nabokov; and I got into Nabokov when I was a teenager.... And Max Frisch, I liked a lot. And then Jim Thompson, and the kind of crime stuff that my father was really into."

Craig spent a fair amount of his early years, he said, on his father Steven's communal enclave in Oregon, where the various other residents sound like they might have fit right into a Jim Thompson tale -- or into Hot Plastic.

"It wasn't a true commune," Craig recalled. "It was kind of a commune-like lifestyle ... a lot of land, a lot of shacks all over the place.... We had a lot of squatters, people popping in and out: an infusion of characters. Nobody particularly dangerous, just interesting folk: Hells Angels, boxers from Bed-Stuy, struggling actors. It was sort of like a circus."

Craig left that circus eventually to attend Syracuse University, where he took undergraduate writing classes with Tobias Wolff. "He was really encouraging to me," said Craig, "and that's sort of part of the reason, I think, I went on to Iowa," and the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

By then, Craig knew he wanted to be a writer. When it came time, at last, to commit to writing a novel, he followed the old adage (which may or may not be taught at Iowa) to "write what you know."

The result was 1998's The Martini Shot, a Hollywood satire that won the Michener-Copernicus Award for best first novel. "It was not really autobiographical," Craig said, "but in the landscape of where I'd grown up, more of a dysfunctional-family [story].... It had some good reviews. I think they just expected it to sell better than a first novel normally would ... due to the fact that I had famous parentage.... And it's my impression that people might be mildly interested if your parents are famous, but I don't think they're actually going to fork over $20 unless the book is really superb. I definitely learned that, and I think that angle's kind of played out.... So I took a little time to regroup, realized the kind of stuff I'm going to be writing."

That turned out to be Hot Plastic, a work that led to a two-book deal with Hyperion -- and the long-deferred belief that Peter Craig might after all be able to make a decent living doing solely what he'd wanted to do since he was a kid.

Craig said he's already finished his next book for Hyperion, due to be published in 2005. Like Hot Plastic, it too is a tale that "could be considered a thriller, but there's a lot of attention paid to the prose."

And where do the characters in such stories ("heavily armed and just a little bit dangerous") come from?

"They're probably an impression of all kinds of people I've met over my 34 years," Craig guessed, "a mixture definitely of all those people I grew up with on my father's place. And the funny thing is, I remember a lot of characters too from the movie sets, when I'd go to work with my mother ...

"You know, Hollywood is definitely not an entirely honest business!" --Tom Nolan