“I didn’t even start writing until I was in graduate school,” says Mark Poirier, “and it took me a really long time to call myself a writer. I thought it sounded pretentious.” Poirier, who has published two novels and two short story collections, says that he'd now best like to think of himself as a short story writer. But when he wrote the script for Smart People, a new movie starring Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Thomas Haden Church, what he mainly was, was hungry. Poirier had received the Chesterfield Screenwriting Fellowship at Paramount Pictures, but
“I kind of applied out of desperation, not out of any passion to write screenplays. I’d been teaching at Portland State, in Oregon, and my contract didn’t get renewed, and I was, like: ‘What am I going to do? How am I going to eat?’ ” The movie, a story about a stalled, middle-aged academic (Quaid) in which, as its author puts it, "nothing really happens," didn't even begin as a movie. It "had been living in my head for a couple of years as the novel I was going to write next. And when I couldn’t think of anything to write for a screenplay, I figured, what the hell, let’s try this.”
Now Poirier, who studied writing at the Iowa Writers' Workship, and at John Hopkins, Georgetown, and Stanford Universities, is working on film treatments based on both of his published novels, as well as a story by Alice Munro and a novel by Douglas Copeland, among other projects. The suggestion that he may presently be closer to being a working screenwriter than anything else does make him wince. But a lot of people who've labored long and hard and struggled to make connections with the idea of being able to call themselves "screenwriters" with a straight face must wish that they could run him over with a semi. I don't care how professorial you are by nature, that ought to feel kind of good.
