Jack Nicholson is Francis Phelan. Meryl Streep is Helen Archer. And IRONWEED, adapted by William Kennedy from his Pulitzer Prize-winning best-seller, is now on the screen.
Taft Entertainment Pictures/Keith Barish Productions presents through Tri-Star Pictures, Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep in IRONWEED. The film also stars Carroll Baker, Michael O'Keefe, Fred Gwynne, Diane Venora and Tom Waits. The music is by John Morris and the film is edited by Anne Goursaud. The production designer is Jeannine C. Oppewall and the director of photography is Lauro Escorel. The co-producers are Gene Kirkwood and C.O. Erickson, and executive producers are Joseph H. Kanter, Denis Blouin and Rob Cohen. The screenplay is by William Kennedy based on his novel. IRONWEED is produced by Keith Barish and Marcia Nasatir and directed by Hector Babenco.
After 23 years of fiction writing, William Kennedy is now enjoying one of the great success stories in the history of literature. The novel Ironweed has received enthusiastic reviews from virtually every major newspaper and magazine in the country and has sold over half a million copies.
In 1983 William Kennedy's national best-seller earned him the Pulitzer Prize for literature and the National Book Critics Award, as well as several other awards.
All three of Kennedy's Albany novels have been optioned for the screen. IRONWEED is the firts to be produced.
Despite the talent evident in the first two novels, getting Ironweed published was not easy. After 13 rejections, it was the strong endorsement of Nobel Prizewinning author Saul Bellow (Kennedy's writing teacher at the University of Puerto Rico) that was instrumental in getting Kennedy's publisher, The Viking Press, to go ahead with the novel. Viking's creative strategy of bringing out all three books simultaneously threw the full spotlight on Kennedy's literary achievement.
The main character of IRONWEED, Francis Phelan, evolved through Kennedy's writing over 23 years, first appearing as part of the Phelan family in Kennedy's first novel, The Angel in the Sparrows, which he wrote in Puerto Rico.
In that story, Francis was a drinker, but unmarried and not on the streets. "For me," says Kennedy, "he was the most memorable character in the book." When Kennedy revived the Phelan family in Billy Phelan's Greatest Game, Francis was the father of the protagonist, and his character was now influenced by Kennedy's newspaper profiles of street people.
"He came instantly to life for me," recalls Kennedy. "And I liked him so much that I thought to myself, "Now I'm going to give him his own book."
IRONWEED is directed by Argentinian Hector Babenco, the internationally acclaimed director of "Pixote" and "Kiss of the Spider Woman," the surprise hit which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Direction in 1985.
Babenco first read Ironweed on a beach in the north of Brazil. Six months later, Babenco recalls, although he wasn't looking for another project, "the book was still very much alive inside of me. The emotions it gave me when I read it were asking me to translate them into the film medium. I have always been fascinated by people who live outside the system," says Babenco, who sensitively depicted political prisoners in "Kiss of the Spider Woman" and children of the streets in the prizewinning "Pixote."
Babenco set out to contact William Kennedy. Their first meeting was arranged by a mutual friend. After seeing a pre-release screening of "Kiss of the Spider Woman," William Kennedy was convinced that he had found the right filmmaker to turn his novel into a film.
"I wasn't interested in just a movie for its own sake," says Kennedy. "I wanted a film that would bring the true essence of the book to the screen. And that's what Hector wanted to do."
"My attitude has always been that literature and movies have a dimension other than realism, a spiritual side, and that these two dimensions can't be separated," says the author. "The spiritual element in IRONWEED is really the essence of the book.
"In "Kiss of the Spider Wolan,' Hector was able to capture that second dimension and to tell a powerful story with very few sets.
"His Latin-American background helps him to express a wide range of emotions, from sorrow to humor," adds Kennedy. "He's deeply in touch with the universal elements of the story."
"This film," says the director, "is about American culture -- the importance of the home, the need for the road, and the use of alcohol to kill anguish. But it's also about a collective soul, anonymous vagabonds. About the courage and beauty of people who we don't usually think of as having deep and complex emotions."
Of Francis Phelan, Babenco says, "A man at the bottom of the world is still a man." To create the unique world of IRONWEED, Babenco blended Kennedy's deeply researched vision of historic Albany with the director's own impressions of America and the countless images he retained from hundreds of American movies.
"Geography is just the beginning," says Babenco. "It helps you to dive into the life you are portraying and squeeze the interesting qualities out of it."
In transforming this novel into a film, it became apparent to the moviemakers that certain aspects of Francis's rich interiior world would have to disappear, and that some of the book's finely-wrought narrative poetry would be hard to translate into a motion picture.
But Kennedy was fascinated and gratified to see these delicate nuances come to life in the performances of Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep, under Hector Babenco's direction.
"Jack and Meryl had the ability to draw on elements of the book, to use throw-away lines," Kennedy observed. "With a look, a few words, a way of living in the past and the present at the same time ... they were able to retain the interior life of the characters."
Describing Nicholson's work, Kennedy has also said, "It's really a kind of miracle to see a person from the page come to such precise life, displaying the accuracy of the wit, the failure in the face, yet the unmistakable resiliency of this man's character."
IRONWEED, which began principal photography on February 23, 1987, was filmede on location in and around Albany, William Kennedy's hometown and the richly-drawn setting of his three novels known as the Albany cycle.
Kennedy's mythic re-creation of Albany made the historic city his literary territory, compared by many to William Faulkner's Mississippi and James Joyce's Dublin. "Filming in Albany was essential to telling this story in the right style and doing it justice," says producer Keith Barish. "No amount of money or production design could have duplicated this atmosphere or given the story its deeply-felt environment."
The movie ranges from the lovely shelter of classically comfortable homes to the flophouses, soup kitchens, freezing streets, and abandoned cars where people like Francis and Helen seek refuge. The tense action of the strike scene, where men in need of work are pitted against each other, is later echoed in a vicious surprise attack on the hobo jungle.
The film's art department, under production designer Jeannine C. Oppewall, transformed the contemporary state capital into the Albany of 1938, during Halloween and All Saint's Day.
Because so much of the story takes place in streets and alleys, an extraordinary number of contemporary edifices and modern renovations had to be covered or redecorated, in some cases by protective rolling facades.
The Gilded Cage, the colorful bar where Helen sings her song, was the popular Boulevard Cafeteria in the Thirties, and the local citizens, including William Kennedy, were pleased to see the spot restored to some of its original look and spirit. In the touching scene where Meryl Streep as Helen sings her rendition of "He's Me Pal," Kennedy and his wife Dana are among the crowd of extras in the saloon.
To restage the action-charged trolley strike of 1901, the filmmakers closed down a three-block section of Lark Street. They installed a period electrical system and covered the street with 1,100 tons of dirt and gravel.
Into this vintage thoroughfare, the production company brought operational antique cars and a turn-of-the-century 42-foot, 41,500 pound trolley car, obtained from a local museum. This is the fateful vehicle where a "scab" worker is beaned and killed by the stone tossed by Francis. To dramatize the historic strike, 400 citizens of Albany worked as extras for three days, in woolen costumes in 95-degree heat.
The filming was well attended by the citizens of Albany, where novel laureate Kennedy is as big a star as Nicholson and Streep.
The city provided every form of cooperation and support required by the film company. Thousands of applications were received for the coveted jobs as production personnel and extras in the movie version of the book that gave Albany a high place in literary history.

CREDITS
Direct by Hector Babenco
Screenplay by William Kennedy
Director of Photography: Lauro Escorel
Music by John Morris
Produced by Keith Barish and Marcia Nasatir

Francis Phelan - Jack Nicholson
Helen - Meryl Streep
Annie Phelan - Carroll Baker
Billy - Michael O'Keefe
Peg - Diane Venora
Oscar Reo - Fred Gwynne
Katrina - Margaret Whitton
Rudy - Tom Waits
Pee Wee - Jake Dengel
Harold Allen - Nathan Lane


Films and Awards