GoKawiilWhen Clarke Speicher (spike-er) asked how I liked the screen adaptation of Train Dreams, Denis Johnson’s novella following the solitary logger Robert Granier in the early 20th-century American West, he was actually asking whether it measured up to its source material. That is, after all, the question about adaptations. Still, it felt loaded. If it had been anyone else, I would’ve felt at liberty to prattle without worrying whether I’d arrived at any kind of thesis. That I love the book was beside the point. I felt caught out because it was Clarke doing the asking. But he isn’t an author, screenwriter, director, producer, critic, agent, or editor. He isn’t a journalist or influencer.
Clarke is something much more specific and much rarer: a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation. So after a few seconds of mealy-mouthed equivocation about Train Dreams, I came to my senses and flipped the question back on him. A few drinks later, we were talking about his profession, how it works, and what adaptation really means.
In his mid-40s and unassuming, Clarke is the rare interlocutor who seems to listen without waiting to speak, a far cry from people in the biz whose stock-in-trade is summed up by the very word: production. He has glasses, a solid build, a short gray beard. His thoughts tend to outpace his ability to articulate them in a first pass. He smiles a lot. There is something gentle and teddy-bear-ish about him, but it’s tempered by a New Yorker’s world-weariness. I’ve known him a long time, spent many nights talking (and drinking) with him into the small hours about books, movies, love, dreams, life. “The best adaptations take the basic idea and transform it into cinematic terms,” he says. “Which I’m realizing does sound very dumb saying it out loud,” he chuckles at himself.
An executive might walk into a meeting with an author, producer, potential directors, stars, prepared to discuss potential multi-million dollar deals armed only with Clarke’s synopsis.
His work forces a near-daily conversation between two halves of Clarke’s brain: the lifelong reader who devours books and the cinephile who dreams in celluloid. The nuts and bolts are this: an agent, executive, or producer sends Clarke a book or manuscript, blind. He reads it and writes a detailed beat-by-beat synopsis of the core scenes, settings, conflicts, and characters. Here, he quotes essential dialogue and, if any sentence-level writing stands out, includes excerpts. He then steps back to evaluate how the book might actually function on screen, that is, which elements are inherently cinematic, what can and can’t be rendered visually or dramatized, and what kind of movie or series the material wants to be. This is where the tension stretches tightest.
Clarke may love a book but, considering aesthetics, a conceptual budget, the likely target audience, possible star power attached, how similar projects have fared, and basic feasibility, his affection may only have so much bearing on the binary at which he must, finally, land: a recommendation to either pass and go no further, or consider and let it build momentum.
He calls this report “coverage.” It serves as reference for people in rarified air Clarke has never been invited to breathe. But he harbors no ambition to scale Hollywood heights. He is, if the arc of his career is any indication, happy to be something of a brain trust. “Not every executive can read every book,” he explains. “Everybody’s busy and they don’t have time to read everything.” An executive might walk into a meeting with an author, producer, potential directors, stars, prepared to discuss potential multi-million dollar deals armed only with Clarke’s synopsis. The pressure he feels comes from real stakes.
Still, he’s careful not to overstate things. “I don’t want to misconstrue how important I am to this process,” he says. “I actually don’t know.” He gives a good-natured shrug. His involvement begins and ends with his coverage. “I write this report and I email it and it goes into the ether,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody reads it or not… Then someone will tell me ‘your comments were really important to this executive. It was really helpful in explaining why this story works.’”
“I never imagined reading books and turning them into movies was a job.”
Growing up in Delaware, Clarke imagined a different career. He wanted to be an entertainment journalist, to review movies. “I thought I could do that for my local newspaper or something.” He tells me his highest aspiration was to write for Entertainment Weekly. “I never imagined reading books and turning them into movies was a job. I never really knew anything about that kind of job existing before.” In 2001, 20-year-old English major Clarke was reporting on a local film festival for his college newspaper. He met a film executive who offered him an internship. Clarke jumped.
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