Ted Tally's journey as a writer has taken him from the Antarctic wilderness of his first play, Terra Nova, to the innermost recesses of the psychotic mind of a vicious serial killer in his Oscar-winning screenplay for Silence of the Lambs. There have also been light comedies and a children's play along the way, and he's currently at work on three animated features for DreamWorks Studio. This all adds up to a versatile playwright/screenwriter who has forged an immensely successful career that started modestly with his initial student production of Terra Nova at Yale Drama School.
This epic adventure, which had its L.A. premiere at the Mark Taper Forum in 1977 and appeared Off Broadway in 1984, is frequently produced across the country. It charts the historic, ill-fated quest of Robert Falcon Scott and a team of explorers to be the first humans to reach the South Pole in 1911, slogging through the treacherous icy terrain to get there before Norwegian explorer Roald Amundson and his team. South Coast Repertory, in Costa Mesa, is currently renewing its association with Tally via its first mounting of Terra Nova. The company produced his comedy Coming Attractions in 1982. Tally spoke to Back Stage West by phone from his Pennsylvania home, describing his most popular play and his 1992 dance with Oscar glory.
"I started writing at age 13," Tally said, "and wrote my first plays during my high school years. I wrote Terra Nova while I was still a student at Yale. When I first started thinking about it, I was so naive that I didn't realize it had previously been dramatized. There was a movie, a rather famous one called Scott of the Antarctic, with John Mills. It was made in England just after World War II." He chuckled when he admitted, "I thought I was going to be the first person to dramatize it. I had seen an exhibit of photographs set in Antarctica, and that was the beginning of my interest in the story. Some of the photographs were of Scott's base camp the way it looks today, which is remarkably like the way it looked then. It's been preserved as a kind of museum. You could see the old tins of biscuits on the shelves and the equipment and everything hanging there, as if waiting for them to come back." Tally indicated that he found the photographs provocative and haunting, and they inspired him to learn more about the characters and the story. "Prior to that," he continued, "I just vaguely knew that Scott was an explorer and he died and had something to do with the North Pole or South Pole. When I decided to read about it, I saw that there were shelves and shelves of books dealing with that period, on Antarctic exploration, as well as on Scott and Amundson. The more I read, the more involved I got in it. It began to emerge in my mind as a play."
Tally feels that the long-lasting appeal of his play has to do with its timeless themes. He elaborated, "There's something kind of epic about it. It's not easy to realize an epic play onstage, like a movie where you have more resources to do that. There's something almost abstract about it. But it appeals to set designers and theatre companies and it helps that it's a relatively small cast. There's something basic in that story that still touches people--something about the courage with which people tackle the unknown and even face possible doom." He agreed that another resonant chord is struck when people reflect on unfulfilled dreams in their own lives. "Mankind is the animal who explores," he noted. "There's just something in us that makes us see over the horizon and points us toward the stars. I thought Scott's story captured that in a wonderful way. He was exploring at a time when the last blank spaces on the map were being filled in. And it began to seem to people of his stripe that history was going to leave them behind. There was no better place in the world for heroic exploration. In the journals and letters I read, I found a certain poignancy. I think I've been drawn, in some of my plays and movie scripts, to themes of people who dare to achieve some incredible goal, only to then discover that it's not what they thought it would be--or maybe they hadn't even known what they were really after."
Tally said Terra Nova is possibly the most frequently licensed of his five plays, though a close second might be Hooters, which is a staple in high school productions, a play the students can relate to as they get to play characters their own age. He's done occasional work in television, but his primary focus for several years has been on screenplays; he has penned approximately 25. Among the highlights are White Palace, All the Pretty Horses, and Red Dragon, the latter featuring the Hannibal Lecter character from Silence of the Lambs; it was a prequel of sorts to Lambs. An earlier film version of Red Dragon, called Manhunter, directed by Michael Mann in 1986, was made prior to the smashing success of the 1992 Lambs, long before Anthony Hopkins made the creepy Hannibal character a mythic antihero. The original novels of Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs were written by Thomas Harris, who had some previous professional connections with Tally's wife.
"Tom sent me a complimentary copy of Silence of the Lambs before it was published," Tally said, "and as I soon as I read it I thought, Oh, my gosh, this is the greatest story for a movie. It was horrific and dark and all these things, but it was just an incredible suspense engine with these great characters, and I started lobbying for the job. I probably only got it because others had turned it down; they thought the book was too dark. It wasn't a smooth path, but I eventually did finagle my way into getting that job. I didn't have a movie produced at that point, so I didn't have a track record. But I shamelessly played on my relationship with the author. I did a lot of fast talking." Certainly no one regrets that decision, as the film won five Academy Awards, including best screenplay, and shattered box office records. "It also helped that I coincidentally got another movie at the same time, White Palace," Tally added. "That one-two punch jump-started my career in films."
Tally indicated he wasn't interested in Hannibal, which was written by Harris as a follow-up book after the Lambs' film triumph, then parlayed into a film sequel, so he declined writing that adaptation. "I just didn't like it as much," he said. I didn't see how to make it an effective movie on my terms. But when Dino De Laurentiis decided to take another look at Red Dragon, which was actually the first book Tom had written with the Hannibal character, I was interested. The Manhunter film had not done very well commercially or critically but has since become sort of a cult favorite. In some ways, the material wasn't fully exploited, not fully brought to life. Parts of the book were dropped from that earlier movie. There was more to explore with this character, and I like Tom's writing, and I was happy to try to tackle that novel."
If there's a genre that has recurred most frequently in Tally's eclectic writing output, it would appear to be suspense thrillers. "I love the genre, and I like working in it once in a while, but don't want it to be a steady diet," he admitted. "I tend to adapt novels. That has been a big portion of my film career. And a good suspense novel usually has a sturdy framework and vivid characters. You're just well along on your journey if you start with those things. It's much harder to adapt something that's sort of introspective and amorphous, or more intellectual, although I've done that, too. The thriller genre is one I feel comfortable with, as do the studios. Growing up, I read a lot of stuff like Agatha Christie and Nero Wolfe, and I loved Hitchcock's movies."
Tally will not be attending the SCR production, explaining that he used to try to see most of the productions of his plays, but because of his family life and other current commitments, he travels less frequently these days. He also is no longer doing rewrites to the play. "I rewrote [Terra Nova] off and on for the first several professional productions, including some revisions for its West Coast premiere at the Taper. But you eventually reach the point, even if you are aware of some flaws, that you just let go of it." BSW
"Terra Nova" will be presented by and at South Coast Repertory, 655 Town Center Drive, Tue.-Sat. 8 p.m., Sun. 7:30 p.m., Sat.-Sun. 2:30 p.m. Oct. 18-Nov. 16. $40-49. (714) 708-5555.
