Edgar James talks about his latest novel based on an unproduced screenplay by THE BET cowriters, Michael Dunn and Chris Smith.

It’s not uncommon for a novel to be adapted into a screenplay or for a film to have a novelization tie-in. It is, however, somewhat unique for an unproduced screenplay to be adapted into a a novel. Uncommon as it may be, that’s exactly what Edgar James did with the screenplay cowritten by Michael Dunn and Chris Smith.

How did you come across the screenplay?

Michael and I had worked on Beautiful together, and over that process, the script for DETOX came up. He and Chris had spent a couple of years writing the script, and there was some interest, but it never got the traction needed and sat around. I read it over a weekend and loved how simple it was. After BEAUTIFUL, the idea of a small, contained story was refreshing.

What is DETOX about?

The back of the book says it’s a story of boy meets girl, boy falls in love, boy loses girl, but in DETOX, the boy is bi-polar and off his meds, the girl is a heroin addict and the plan to get her back involves kidnapping and ketamine.

That sounds pretty dark.

It’s really not. Not compared to some of the other stuff I’ve done. It definitely has some intense moments in it, but there’s quite a bit of humor.

So, boy kidnaps girl to get her off heroin?

He does. Mat and Julia, the main characters, broke up, but Mat wasn’t ready to let go. He’s been spying on her—even though there’s a restraining order against him—and discovers she’s doing heroin. He freaks. Somewhat naively he thinks he can detox her on his own and hopes she’ll be so grateful, she’ll fall in love with him again. It’s a love story at its core.

What made you decide to turn the script into a novel?

A screenplay is just part of making a film; it’s not the end product. A novel is an end product. Shooting a film costs a lot of money, but you can write a novel for free. I mentioned taking a run at adapting it, and Michael was onboard with that. When I was writing BEAUTIFUL, the characters wouldn’t leave me alone, and after reading this screenplay, the characters took up residence in my head, so the only way to get rid of them was to tell their story.

How long did it take to write?

I was overconfident because BEAUTIFUL only took about six months to write. DETOX took about a year. But that’s nothing considering the script took about six years.

Why did the script take so long?

Chris and Michael wrote it together, but it wasn’t like they were sitting next to each other hashing it out. Michael wrote a draft and send it to Chris. He’d read it, add/change/etc. and send it back, and they’d talk about it before repeating the process. There were about eleven drafts that way, sometimes months between drafts.

What was the most challenging part of the adaptation?

Not just translating what was happening in the script into paragraphs. To really let the words flow, and, when it gets going, new things come up, and I’ll go off on tangents, and twenty pages go like that! But most of the time, I’m sitting there trying to get the words to flow. Or trying to think of just the right word or way of describing something. I’ll have something simple in the script like “Mat pops some peanuts into his mouth,” which, if filmed, is just a throwaway bit to show he’s eating something, but in a novel I feel like there needs to be more justification and will go on about how he’s hungry, but doesn’t want to eat, and what he’s craving. A lot of times what I’m doing at the moment leaks in there. If I’m craving a cheeseburger, the character’s going to be craving a cheeseburger. Then later, I’ll wonder why I went on and on about him wanting a cheeseburger.

What was the inspiration for the story?

When Michael finished THE BET, he said he realized that it wasn’t as much of a horror film as he thought it’d be and wanted to write something that would be more traditional horror. But it had to be cheap. So he went to that cliché: a cabin in the woods—’cause that’s how you do low budget horror, right—and something’s happening there. He told me that he had a photoshoot with Francis George who had a huge horse syringe on his shelf from an ad he’d shot a few years before—it’s the one on the cover of the book—and he said, “You should use that for a movie poster.” That night, while Michael was trying to fall asleep, all he could think about was what would the movie be about that had a huge syringe for a poster? Then, BAM! DETOX. About a guy forcing his girlfriend—no, ex-girlfriend cos that’s more conflict—to detox, and then something happens to them. He said there were a lot of false starts. Then Chris got involved and it went through a number of major changes: locations—from cabin, to motel, to his brother’s house, to Northrup’s. And characters: Chris was Mat’s brother, then his sister. The trying to figure out what the “something” was that was happening to them. First there was a killer in the woods, then Matt was the killer, then Chris was trying to make Mat go mad to get him out of the picture to be with Julia, to what it is there now. There was a crazy showdown where Julia had a sword—Michael had been watching Kill Bill. No wonder it went through so many drafts.

How different is the novel from the script?

It’s actually pretty close. There’s a lot of new stuff to flesh out the characters, flashbacks or memories. When you can show what’s going on inside the characters’ heads, you have a lot more freedom than you do with a script which is such a constrained medium. No fluff. Just action and dialogue. With the book, I could really go a lot deeper than what they coud do in the screenplay.

It seems bondage is a common theme in Michael’s work.

We actually laughed about that. In THE BET, you’ve got a woman tied up. In MONEY SHOT, it’s a guy who’s nailed to the floor. Now, in DETOX, it’s a woman again, and she’s bound and gagged. I get why people labelled his work misogynistic, but it’s really not. The bad things aren’t happening because of gender, like how MONEY SHOT puts a guy in the same position. But that was one of the challenges, especially with the format change, to go deeper and get past the superficial bondage aspects.

Are you afraid of being pegged as a misogynist?

He’s been called a misogynist. Iv’e been called a misogynist. It’s silly, really. Courtney, who played The Girl in THE BET would argue I’m not. My wife would argue I’m not. But it’s also part of why I made MONEY SHOT, to put a man in the same situation.

Yet that film still objectified women in a way.

If you mean because she’s doing a striptease, a little, yeah. But she’s also the one in power. It’s still kind of sexist though. There were worries with DETOX that no actress would want to play a character tied to a bed the entire film, and that was something Chris and Michael said they were always working on, to find a balance. In the novel, though, I really wanted to give Julia more depth.

Spreads from the novel DETOX

There are bits of unique typography, why?

The passages where Julia is on ketamine? That’s something unique to the book, but something Michael came up with and actually laid out the pages in the book. I did a lot of research on drugs and am probably on a bunch of watch lists for what I Google. I was fascinated by what people said it was like to be on ketamine and wanted to incorporate it somehow. I’m a fan of House of Leaves which is a totally wonky read the way it’s done with the type going all over the place and in spirals and whatnot, so it just seemed like an interesting way to do that and to give the book a nod to its visual roots.

Why ketamine?

Again, a lot of Googling and why I’m probably being monitored, I was looking for ways to knock someone out. Chloroform in a rag is a myth. Doesn’t work that way, apparently, and that’s what they had in the script. The best thing I could find that would be relatively safe and able to be injected was ketamine.

What’s next?

Michael and I have been discussing a few things, one that’s been trying to get off the ground for a while, nothing solid at the moment. Maybe Michael and Chris will write another script I can adapt.