Interview: Greg McGee on releasing Love & Money: The Writer’s Cut
Dionne Christian
Author:
Greg McGee
Publisher:
Upstart Press
ISBN:
9781776940172
Date published:
11 May 2023
Pages:
252
Format:
Paperback
RRP:
$37.99
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The year was 1987 and while there might have been an expensive account to take an investment analyst out to lunch, there certainly wasn’t any for a new kitchen.
Some 36 years later, Greg McGee – playwright, author, screenwriter, producer, script consultant, father and grandfather – sits in the lounge of his Auckland home where there’s a nice kitchen, lengthy family dining table, packed bookshelves, comfy chairs, well-positioned art and flowers fresh from a celebratory birthday.
With the family’s spaniel, Dolly, at his feet, McGee is recounting a story which, in a roundabout way, illustrates one step on the journey to his latest, but not newest, book. That book is Love & Money: The Writer’s Cut, a humorous novel about a collection of disparate people who are, in the end and whether they like it or not, whānau.
It was released in 2012 and for various reasons, McGee was unhappy with its publication – but not so much that he forgot all about it. A couple of years ago, he started to think about a sequel but discovered, when he re-read Love & Money, that it wasn’t as good as he thought it was.
Greg McGee
“I thought, ‘if I am going to approach the sequel then I should re-familiarise myself with the style and the characters,’ so I went back and I was quite disappointed with parts of it,” he explains. “I decided, ‘I’m not going to go on until I’ve fixed this and I was really lucky that I have a publisher [Upstart Press] who will indulge me. I think most publishers would have looked at me and gone, ‘oh, f*** off!’”
Film directors can re-release movies with the changes they wish they’d made as ‘The Director’s Cut.’ So, he decided why couldn’t he, as an author, do a similar thing? Hence, Love & Money: The Writer’s Cut.
But back to that lunch in ’87, those recently deregulated days when greed was good and everyone wanted to wheel and deal because the share market seemed like a sure bet. However, McGee and fellow writer Dean Parker (Parker died in 2020) weren’t so sure. They’d penned a screenplay which ended with a share market crash and the New Zealand Film Commission had told them that ending seemed … implausible, unrealistic, just not very believable.
“Dean and I got hold of [investment analyst and finance writer] Brian Gaynor and we took him to lunch at Rick’s Café Americano, I think,” McGee recalls, a wry smile ghosting across his face. “This was August 1987 and we said, ‘Brian, look we need an expert opinion because we’re getting this shit from the Film Commission – or whoever it was and maybe we were getting it from all angles – that a crash of the share market is not really realistic so could you tell us in your expert opinion, is a share market crash possible?’”
Armed with the Gaynor’s expert opinion that a crash was not only possible but probable, McGee went home and related the prediction to his partner, Mary. Back then, home was in John Street, Ponsonby – before the suburb gentrified – where there was sarking on the walls and a kitchen that had “must have been designed by a man in the 1930s.”
“We had f*** all money but with what little we did have, we’d been buying shares because people said to and some people we knew were furiously buying shares, even borrowing against their homes to do so,” he says.
“I said to Mary, ‘Brian Gaynor reckons the share market could crash…’ and she said, ‘ sell them, sell those shares now!’ and I was like, ‘but they’re worth $45,000 they’ve been great!’ and she said, ‘sell them, I want a new kitchen’ and she made me sell them.”
McGee remembers watching as share prices continued to climb, feeling disappointed that he hadn’t kept hold of the parcel. Then came 20 October 1987 – Black Tuesday – when the share market crashed and, in the subsequent days and weeks, billions of dollars were wiped off the value of New Zealand shares and investors – from captains of industry to ‘mum and dad’ investors - lost livelihoods and homes.
Suffice to say, Love & Money the movie was never made. Instead, McGee turned it into a novel – his first published under his own name – between crime stories written under the nom-de-plum Alix Bosco and the more serious The Antipodeans and Necessary Secrets. But McGee says the spectre of the screenplay hung over the 2012 novel.
“There was too much novelisation of the screenplay there; I hadn’t really grappled with the fact that they are actually two different beasts,” he acknowledges. “I found parts where I had slavishly adhered to a screenplay, in terms of its structuring, so it was sort of schematic and unsatisfying.
“It’s no criticism of what Dean and I had done in the screenplay but it’s very different to a book. A screenplay is a blueprint and a lot of other talent and money have to be brought to bear on that screenplay to produce ‘the thing’ whereas the novel has to be ‘the thing.’ It’s your intimate relationship with one another person, who is the reader.”
For The Writer’s Cut, McGee thinks he cut at least the first 50 pages, reduced the story down by about 20,000 words and was more comfortable switching between characters and scenarios. He knows some of those switches may be abrupt and will test some readers, but says he enjoys jumping into an immersive point of view and there is continuity through the main character.
That is the largely unemployed, homeless actor Mike, father to at least three children to three (very) different women who’s starting to realise that he may have to make some far-reaching lifestyle changes. Mike’s oldest, son Hendrix, is the responsible one who is mother and father to a brood of more unruly and easily influenced kids.
Ever since McGee burst upon the scene with the 1981 play Foreskin’s Lament, a searing indictment of New Zealand’s sports-obsessed masculine culture, there’s been a strong thread through his writing of men, often damaged by social conventions around masculinity, unable to express themselves or make authentic and emotional connections. Love & Money is more humorous, more satirical, than McGee’s other novels but that thread still runs throughout.
“In your twenties, when we, perhaps, don’t have any money, we drift around and are looking for a satisfying…,” McGee pauses, starts again. “I left law and became a writer and I ended up at 30 with nothing, absolutely nothing. I had been overseas for three years and to get back to see my family, I had to borrow money from my brother.
“I was lucky that I had the play [Foreskin’s Lament] under my arm but I’ve often thought, ‘it’s okay being artistic and having no money in your twenties but I think it gets a wee bit more difficult to sustain in your thirties…’ In my twenties, I was able to do a whole lot of things but I had the feeling, as I approached my thirties, that a whole lot of chickens were coming home to roost and I needed to do something but Mike’s the guy who kept going.”
There’s also a timely debate premised around Katherine Mansfield, who died 100 years ago yet is the subject of new books and academic study and is, on Sunday, this year’s honoured NZ writer at the Auckland Writers Festival. Mansfield’s legacy, and indeed a wider exploration of what our literary past has bequeathed us, is a small but intriguing part of Love & Money.
One character, the vacillating university English professor Roland, leads a campaign against the adoration of Mansfield (and Barry Crump) but does an about-turn to propose an altogether more interesting and possibly more accurate ‘woman alone’ thesis about local literature. For 1987, it would have been a marked contrast to the veneration of, for example, John Mulgan and his 1939 novel Man Alone.
“Obviously, Roland’s theory on that came from me,” McGee admits, adding that given he was the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellow in 2013 he’s got quite a lot to thank her for.
“I think there’s a much greater strain of woman alone and it’s much more interesting. I found Mulgan very boring; the women writers were far more interesting - and fiercely independent! I was just fortunate that Keri Hulme was published by 1987 and was going to be the next big thing but Robin Hyde and Katherine Mansfield all had that tragically alone kind of arc in their lives.”
So, what about the sequel? After all, McGee says he’s had “enormous fun” with the writer’s cut and has come to love the characters, moving well past the sections he “hated” in the original?
“It’s really fascinating to think about where these characters would be now. Who’s still alive? What are the kids doing? What happened to Hendrix? There’s a part of me that thinks, ‘well, Hendrix had to do so much parenting of the other kids, would he have had children of his own?’ Where is he? What’s he doing? He would have changed his name for sure! The daunting thing is that it is such a canvas of characters so who do focus on?”
But he stops short of saying there will be a sequel, saying it’s dangerous to speculate any further because so many elements have to come together to add up to a novel.
“I think it would be a wonderful challenging thing to do but I’m not get into specifics because I am a wee bit superstitious about talking about stuff that might happen because there are so many ways in which they can crash.”
By Dionne Christian
