I first spoke to Harley Peyton more than ten years ago, when I was working on my first book, Wrapped In Plastic: Twin Peaks. Harley was a writer and producer on the series, and was especially involved during the show’s second season. Prior to entering that surreal world, Peyton wrote the screenplay for the much-anticipated adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ debut novel, Less Than Zero, which arrived in theatres in 1987.

When I began City of Night: The Films of Los Angeles, Harley was the first person I wanted to talk to, and he was kind enough to get on the phone with me to discuss Less Than Zero.

Andy Burns: How did you end up getting involved in adopting Less Than Zero?

Harley Peyton: Well, it’s so crazy, and it’s something that wouldn’t happen today. The book was really a very well-publicized success story. It was culturally iconic, I think, and so everyone’s talking about it. At that point, I had one job, and I’d written three screenplays. One of the screenplays was obviously one I was paid to write. The first one was 180 pages, and I threw it out. But the second (screenplay) was really based on the time I spent in clubs in Los Angeles, rock and roll clubs. There’s a club called The Starwood, and there are all these great places. You’d see these insane, mostly ’80s bands, like The Motel. There were all these bands, so I basically just said, “Okay, what I’m going to do is, first of all, I’m moving to Newark for no apparent reason.” I set it in New York, based it on all that club living, and just said, “I’m just going to do Romeo and Juliet and see where things end up.” That script was sort of my calling card for quite some time, and it got a lot of attention. In particular because, then Jamie Foley, now James Foley, had just done a movie about young, doomed love (1984’s Reckless). And there was a lot of talk about, “Oh, if only that hadn’t been made, you’d be first in line.” Anyway, the producers of Less Than Zero read that script, Jon Avnet and Jordan Kerner, who became lifelong friends of mine now, and said, “Come in and meet with us and let’s talk about it.” Obviously, I’d read the book. I couldn’t have been more thrilled. So I went in, had the conversation with them, and at the end of the day, they said a script had been written by a playwright…

Andy Burns: Michael Cristofer.

Harley Peyton: Yes, Michael Cristofer had written a script that they were throwing out altogether. And so they said, “You don’t have to read it. We just want to talk about doing the book.” There started this extraordinary experience for me from start to finish.

Andy Burns: Is it intimidating at all to get tasked with adapting a book that is – you know, people were talking about it at the time. It was doing well.

Harley Peyton: I think I was too young and dumb to be intimidated. I was thrilled for the opportunity. I mean, particularly when you’re a young writer, either the worst question or the best question someone can ask is, “What are you doing now?” And when your answer gets to be adapting Less Than Zero, it’s like, Jesus Christ, I dined out on that for a year. Once I got into it, I had a slightly better idea about the stakes because there was a lot of pushback and kind of battles with Fox. At the start, it was just a kind of dream come true.

But don’t forget, it was also somehow ameliorated in a weird way by the fact that Bright Lights, Big City, another kind of iconic book of that era, was being made at the same time. So somewhere in some vault, there’s an audition tape with (Robert) Downey (Jr.) and Kiefer (Sutherland) as the two main characters in Less Than Zero. We were fighting over actors. We were fighting over DPs. It was sort of a weird, ridiculous battle between these two movies, so that almost became more of a story for me than anything else. But I never really felt intimidated by it. It was just so much fun, and it was actually a great experience from start to finish for me.

Andy Burns: The films is clearly different from the book. What direction from the producers were you initially given when you start to work on this?

Harley Peyton: People have said this about my writing for my whole career, so it’s not unfamiliar to me, but I think the idea was, “Look, you bring a sense of humour to what you write, and we want to find moments of humour in this movie. We thought Cristofer’s movie was a little too faithful to the book.” Because what they really wanted to do was have an audience come to this and go, “I wish I could live that life.” And then by the end of the movie go, “Well, maybe not.” And that was sort of their plan all the way through.

But the interesting thing was, almost from the very beginning, it was a very intensive process where I was doing draft after draft. I was writing on set. I would have notes in one margin of my draft from Barry Diller. I would have notes in the other margin from Scott Rudin, and that’s when Amy Pascal was working for Rudin. So it was just an insane group of people, obviously super smart, on some level fighting over what this movie was going to be. That included Avnet as a producer who wanted to be a director. He had very strong opinions on things as well as he should. And so I was sort of in the middle of that until the director, Marek Kanievska, came in and he really got in the middle of it. But for me, at one point, I think I said to Jordan Kerner, “Look, I can write Pretty in Pink standing on my head. If they want Pretty in Pink, let’s do that, but let’s not call it Less Than Zero.”

And the interesting thing is, at the time, and a lot of this came from Marek, but we all felt like, to a certain extent, we were selling out the book a little bit, that we were shaving off some of the rougher edges. But the fact of the matter is, if you look at that movie now, it’s pretty intense. It’s actually aged really well. So in truth, while that’s what we all felt at the time, in the long run, I actually found myself having a different opinion about it.

Andy Burns; One of the things that I liked about the film is your take on Clay. And I liked Andrew McCarthy’s delivery of Clay. It’s not the Clay that was in the book. It’s a very different Clay. But once I accept that this is Clay of the film Less Than Zero, I thought Andrew McCarthy’s really good in this. The character is still interesting. He’s more likeable than the character in the book. How did you find your way into writing the Clay that is in the screenplay?

Harley Peyton: If memory serves, I think the question was, who’s our point of view character? Who’s the Nick Carraway? That was something I thought a lot about then, Nick Carraway being the point of view character who takes you into the world of The Great Gatsby. Here’s this character who’s going into this world of obscene wealth and all of these interesting things. So my feeling was, let’s do that with Clay. I think that I even felt that that required a certain amount of sympathy for him, and that meant changing what his character was. Needless to say, the studio was way on board with that, because you already had the kind of unpredictable chaos theory character in Julian. So I think they really wanted those two characters and then the Jamie Gertz character, Blair, being caught in between them. They loved that dynamic, and they really wanted to see the three of them in that opening high school graduation moment and really kind of break some hearts along the way, and it would have been harder to break those hearts if Clay hadn’t been sympathetic. And I agree with you about Andrew, by the way. I thought he did a wonderful job. He was so smart and he worked so hard.

Andy Burns: Correct me if I’m wrong, and I had read that you did something like three drafts of the script. Does that sound right?

Harley Peyton: Oh, I think at least. Yeah. Because I was writing on set as well. The rewrites I was doing were, it wasn’t like there were massive changes happening. We knew what the beginning, middle, and end of the story was going to be all along. But there was just a lot of attention paid to it by the studio and also by the producers. And then the performers, too, would weigh in, and it was such an amazing cast, so there was a certain amount of rewriting done pedantically. Jamie Gertz is so fucking hilarious, so I tried to find moments of humour for her to play.

There’s a great thing with (James) Spader. Marek Kanievska wanted the actors to really get a sense of what it was like to be in a club. So every rehearsal, he would have these huge speakers blaring music, right? And he would say, “So you’ve got to speak over the music,” so all the actors in the movie at times are shouting. Spader, because he’s so malevolently smart, went, “I’m not going to shout. I’m just going to speak in my normal voice, and I’m going to be different than everybody else.” So you literally will have these scenes where someone’s going, “Rip, what’s happening?” He’s like, “I’m cool.” It was such a smart thing.

Marek Kanievska was this extraordinarily talented director who was really hired because of a series of Pirelli tire commercials he’d done. He had made this wonderful movie about private school boys in England that was just amazing (. But that was it. So you’ve got a writer who’s writing his third script, a director who’s directing basically his second movie, but based on these Pirelli commercials. And the movie looks fucking gorgeous. It really does. But I think it was the most difficult experience for Marek, who left the business not long after that.

Andy Burns: I read that.

Harley Peyton: I think he had one more movie in development that was in Columbia, but I think he just went back to commercials. I think he just went, “Yeah, fuck it.”

It was really difficult for him in particular because he was an ardent supporter of the book, as we all were, but he felt, for whatever reason, and I have no idea what he feels like now, but then he certainly felt like he was betraying his art.

I’m frankly on set going, “Oh my God, I’m having so much fun.” I’m not really worrying about art at the moment. I get to watch Ed Lockman light this thing, one of the great cinematographers of that generation. Barbara Ling’s production design was so incredible. It was such a treat to work on it, and it was a thrill, quite frankly, to be part of it, in that I was writing on set every day because I got to know all the actors so well. I mean, James Spader was the best man at both of my weddings, so we started our friendship there, and also Downey was extraordinary.

One thing that happened, which is very strange, was we finished production in Palm Springs. I was out there writing, we finished production except for one shot, and that was the helicopter shot of basically Downey, dead in the car and that beautiful shot in the desert. We had to shoot that the next morning. That was the last thing that we were going to shoot, but we were having a party the night before, and so Jordan Kerner said to me, “Look, I need you to stay with Downey to make sure he gets there tomorrow morning.” So now I’m trying to keep up with Robert, and everyone was living pretty hard back then; that’s no secret. But we got him there on time, and the ending was, of course, not in the book. I always thought it was pretty extraordinary. I thought when I saw the movie again, and it wasn’t recent, but it was probably within the last five or ten years, I was extraordinarily moved by it. It’s like I forgot just how beautifully done it was.