A Wild, Happy Ride For Sherman Alexie -- A Literary Phenom Is Breaking New Ground With The First Film Made By Indians

This is what it means to be Sherman Alexie.

It's a warm, late-summer morning and Alexie walks into a near-empty Madrona cafe. He is affable, gamely ready for an interview, but he's tired.

His exhaustion stems, in part, from being a new father; he and his wife had recently had their first child.

And then there's the breakneck trajectory of his career, and a constant stream of writing projects. But with both fatherhood and writing, Alexie is happily immersed: too busy to care, loving every frantic minute.

From the moment he first began to draw national attention in 1992 with his first book of poetry, "The Business of Fancydancing," and the following year with his first collection of short stories, "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," Alexie's career has been on head-spinning overdrive.

Those works were quickly succeeded by eight others: A series of chapbooks. His first novel, "Reservation Blues." His first bestseller, "Indian Killer." Each a step up the ladder of literary stardom. From obscure poet, the 31-year-old Alexie became a literary phenom. One of Granta magazine's 20 best American novelists under age 40. Unofficial spokesman of Native Americans. Voice of a generation.

This year, another first: a screenplay, which has now become a movie, the enigmatically titled "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona."

"My career has been like a rocket ride," said Alexie, a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian. Tall and laid back, in person he betrays none of the manic pace of his life. He seems astonished by his own success.

"I've done in five years what would normally take someone 40 years to do. I'm surprised, happy and nervous."

Nervous because rockets, after all, eventually return to Earth or burn up in the atmosphere.

"When things go so well, you're always waiting for things to drop off," Alexie said. "You can't keep up the winning streak."

But he hopes his golden touch will extend to his movie, a four-year labor of love that carries the heavy weight of cinematic history: It is the first to be written, directed and co-produced by Native Americans.

"Eventually I'll write something horrible," Alexie said, pausing to flash a wry smile. "Some people probably think I already have. But in my opinion, it's not this movie."

From short stories to film

The idea for an all-Indian movie goes back to 1993 when Chris Eyre, then a grad student at New York University's film school, read Alexie's collection of short stories about life on the Spokane tribe reservation.

Eyre, a Cheyenne/Arapaho filmmaker from Klamath Falls, Ore., was moved by the stories. He especially liked the biting humor and anger: qualities absent in most cinematic representations of Indians. He also liked the visual quality of the storytelling, and quickly recognized the book's film potential.

"I knew that if there was ever a first movie that I wanted to make, that this would be it," Eyre recalled.

Through a mutual friend, he reached Alexie and suggested a collaboration. They commiserated about Hollywood's sorry record, which reduced Native Americans to two stereotypes: noble savages and down-and-outers.

Alexie, a longtime movie fan, didn't require much convincing.

"We wanted to show Indians as they've never been seen before, as complicated human beings," Alexie said. "We've been romanticized one way or the other."

For six months, Alexie threw himself into the task of turning a slight story from the "Lone Ranger" collection into a full-length feature film. Screenwriting, he learned, was nothing like writing short stories and novels.

"I found that writing screenplays was more like poetry," Alexie said. "It was about images and moments rather than narratives. It's entirely about pictures, and I just think that way anyway. The first images in my novels are usually pictures, images that are in my head. Writing my first screenplay was a lot easier than writing my first novel."

Through 1994, Eyre and Alexie kept working the script, laying the groundwork for their project. Eventually, from the thin frame of a nine-page short story, Alexie built a 105-page screenplay.

What emerged was the story of Victor Joseph, a 21-year-old Coeur d'Alene Indian coming to terms with the unexpected death of his estranged father. Along with his childhood friend, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Joseph travels to Arizona to retrieve his father's body. Alexie half-jokingly calls the movie a buddy road film.

The following year, Eyre and Alexie took their script to the Sundance Film Institute's labs for screenwriters and filmmakers. There they directed four of the scenes for their movie, some of which ended up in the final cut. They also won a $500,000 filmmaking grant.

Last fall, after making little progress with big studios, and getting only unwelcome suggestions for script overhauls, Alexie approached ShadowCatcher Entertainment, a Seattle-based production company founded by Hollywood veterans.

ShadowCatcher, which has mostly concentrated on interactive media, has recently shifted its focus to producing independent feature films.

ShadowCatcher co-founder Scott Rosenfelt, whose Hollywood credentials include producing work on films ranging from the indie classic "Mystic Pizza" to the studio blockbuster "Home Alone," said that it was the universal nature of Alexie's story that caught his eye.

After more refinement on the script, ShadowCatcher signed on as co-producers. They also agreed to give directing duties to Eyre, who had won several awards for his student work but was otherwise short on directing experience.

The overall budget of the film, a figure that ShadowCatcher declines to get too specific about, is between $1 million to $5 million, modest by Hollywood standards, but enough to get a film done.

The arrangement they worked out was a black and white division of responsibilities, but the actual process of moviemaking was rarely that simple.

"We had the creative control and they have business control," Eyre said. "Of course, as in any good relationship, there really aren't any lines. But it was like a prenuptial. We never want to use it, but you have to have it."

In May, filming began on the Coeur d'Alene reservation, and then moved to Soap Lake, Idaho, which stood in for Arizona. Cast in the lead roles were Adam Beach, who starred in "Squanto: A Warrior's Tale" and Evan Adams, who was in "Black Stallion." Also in the cast are Elaine Miles, who played Marilyn on "Northern Exposure," Tantoo Cardinal of "Legends of the Fall" and, in cameo roles, Tom Skerritt and another "Northern Exposure" alum, Cynthia Geary.

Even when filming began, Alexie was still tweaking the script. The week before filming wrapped up in Soap Lake, the crew decided that a key scene lacked drama.

Alexie was called to write a new scene. He came through with a flashback sequence in which Victor's dead father delivers an extended monologue about basketball. That same day, he faxed the new scene to Idaho.

"I think it's the best scene in the movie," Alexie said. "It was the best day for me. The movie was depending on me and I came up with a three-pointer from the corner and scored."

Throughout the project, their ShadowCatcher co-producers offered support and advice, but deferred to their choices, Alexie said.

"The producers took a back seat to Chris and I," Alexie said. "It was our story to tell and they were there to enhance what we were trying to say. Working with these people has been great. It's a pretty atypical experience for a writer."

Still, Alexie admits that the collaborative nature of filmmaking required some adjustment.

"With a novel, I'm it," he said. "I'm the beginning and end. The alpha and omega. That's just not the case with movies."

Polishing the product

It's in the post-production that movies are made, declares Roger Baerwolf, ShadowCatcher's vice president in charge of development.

And after wrapping up shooting in early summer, the "Phoenix, Arizona" team continues their collaborative work, burrowing in editing rooms, to polish their final product.

In late August, Baerwolf, along with Rosenfelt, joins Eyre and Alexie at Clatter and Din, a sound facility near Pike Place Market, to do dubbing work. In another week they'll wrap up their Seattle post-production work and go to Los Angeles for the few jobs they can't do in Seattle's facilities. Then the film will be done.

This afternoon's work centers on cleaning up audio in a scene shot on a bus. The loud hum of the bus motor nearly drowns out the dialogue and Geary, who figures prominently in the scene, was asked to redo her lines.

In the scene, Geary plays a gymnast who meets the two main characters on the bus. In the sound booth, she begins to practice her lines, tentatively slipping into the Southern accent she adopted for the character.

"I like the added lines!" she says into the microphone. Her amplified voice floats into the adjacent room where director Eyre and his companions have sunk into plush leather chairs.

As Geary repeats her lines, the men watch the bus scene on a monitor, assessing the sync between the new readings and filmed footage.

On the screen, the gymnast has struck up a conversation with the two main characters. She talks about being an alternate on the Olympic gymnastics team. Thomas is entranced, but Victor, annoyed, ignores her, eventually snapping at her when he catches her in a lie.

But in later reviewing the scene, Alexie and the others have realized that Victor's attack seems out of proportion to the gymnast's harmless prattle.

"I knew we needed something there," Alexie says. "Every time I saw it, I felt a speed bump. It just didn't feel right. We wanted Victor to be mean, but not that mean."

With Baerwolf's help, some lines were added to make the gymnast less sympathetic, having her joke about Mary Lou Retton and small people.

Geary reads the Retton line, which is laid over footage of the bus seen from a distance. But the reading is flat, and Eyre asks her to do it again.

"It needs more energy," Baerwolf whispers, and Eyre, who is directing the session, asks Geary to pump it up. They do it a few more times. Before choosing the reading he likes, Eyre consults the others. They agree it was good.

"That's the one," he tells Geary. "That was a perfect 10, Mary Lou."

Although Alexie jokingly grumbles that his only contribution to the new lines are a verb and a noun, he says later that he was just happy that the scene's problem was solved.

"That was an example of when the screenplay failed," he says. "They came up with that solution and I was very grateful."

Waiting for Sundance

Any day now, the Sundance Film Festival should call.

After wrapping up post-production work earlier this month, the film was submitted to Sundance, the mecca for independent filmmakers, with the hope of securing a world premiere at the festival. The competition is stiff, but a premiere at the Colorado festival could be the sort of launch that could make a modestly budgeted independent film. It's what separates a "Sling Blade" from a production no one ever sees.

The production team has now turned its attention to finding a distributor. This past week, ShadowCatcher's executives were in New York City, hoping to land national release for the film sometime next year. It was screened for Los Angeles distributors earlier in the year. So far the buzz has been good, and there's been some high-level interest.

Already, Alexie feels a responsibility beyond his personal stake in the project.

If the movie does well, Alexie knows that the studio doors will be opened to other Indians.

"This is the first real chance that Indians have gotten," he said. "No Indians have ever gotten the budget and attention that we had. It's been an incredible opportunity, but it's a lot of pressure. This can really open things up for Indian directors."

But even good films can flounder and languish. He knows that selling an Indian movie to mainstream audience won't be easy.

"All in all, white people want to see movies about white people, which makes sense," he said. "We always want to see movies about the things we are."

Eyre, who has returned to New York and is trying to line up his next film assignment, is pleased with the final product.

"Even now every time I see the film it's different again," he said before leaving Seattle. "It's the greatest thing. When I see it all together it has its own life, it's a marriage of all these creative people, a concentration of all their energies."

Alexie, meanwhile, already has his next writing projects lined up.

This summer, ShadowCatcher agreed to produce "Indian Killer," a movie based on Alexie's bestseller about a Seattle serial killer who stalks and scalps white men. This time Alexie is also going to do the screenplay and direct.

But he hasn't given up on writing books. He has already started work on his next novel, which he calls a radical departure from his previous book. It's a science-fiction story set in the 1950s.

He sees a model in another director who alternates work on critically acclaimed movies books.

"I want to have the career that John Sayles has," Alexie said. "But instead of writing one novel every 10 years, I want to write one every three years. Artists are essentially lazy and I'm not. Artists can get a lot more done if they weren't so lazy."

The rocket, pulling away from Earth's gravity, shows no sign of slowing down. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Alexie at Bookfest

ShadowCatcher founder Scott Rosenfelt and author Sherman Alexie will be the Northwest Bookfest from 1:45 p.m. to 3 p.m. today to discuss the process of turning a book into a movie and to preview "This Is What It Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona."