Screenwriting 101: Roger Simon

“Richard Dreyfuss, who had always wanted to play the Moses Wine character, said, well let’s do it together. So we got a deal at Universal, and went off to a New York hotel suite. Dreyfuss said Spielberg used to tell him the way to adapt books was to throw the book away and start writing what he remembered. That’s when I realized most of what I wrote in detective fiction I had to throw away to write the screenplay. In a book, we have to be real to the emotional intelligence of the protagonists, and to the central intelligence of the book. In a movie, we have to be real to the events themselves.”

— Roger Simon (Enemies: A Love Story, Love in a Mall)

Writer’s Guild Journal, November 1992