Q. How did you come to be an executive producer of "There Will Be Blood" and to own the movie rights to "Oil!"? Had you already read a lot of Upton Sinclair before writing "Fast Food Nation," which was compared to "The Jungle," the only Sinclair book most of us are familiar with?
A. When "Fast Food Nation" was published, I was constantly asked questions about Upton Sinclair, I guess because he wrote about meatpacking and I wrote about meatpacking. But I didn't really know a lot about him. I'd read "The Jungle," but I didn't know much more than that. So I decided to sit down and read as many of his books as I could — the man wrote about 90 — and I found many of them compelling. Sinclair looked at almost every aspect of American culture and the American economy and wrote an exposé about it. He wrote an exposé of evangelical Christianity and religion in general, called "The Profits of Religion." He wrote an exposé of the banking industry and a wonderful exposé about corporate control of journalism in the United States.
And he wrote a novel called "Oil!" that I read and absolutely loved. It's a flawed novel but it hit deeply and stayed with me. And I was immediately struck by the idea that it would make a great film: it had a great setting and characters and set of issues — the corruption of government by oil money, the rise of the car culture, the birth of Los Angeles — which seemed fascinating and cinematic.
Now, this isn't something I normally do, but I contacted the estate of Upton Sinclair and bought the film rights to the book. Before I became a journalist I worked for an independent film company in New York, and I thought that when I finished the book I was writing I would try to get "Oil!" made into a movie. What I really wanted to do was find a director who felt as passionately about the book as I did. Oddly enough, what happened was the director found me. It turned out that Paul Thomas Anderson had found a copy of the novel in a used bookstore in London, and become obsessed with it and its themes, much the same way I had. He got in touch with me and told me he really wanted to do a film inspired by the book.
To be honest, at first, I wasn't sure he was the right guy for the job, which shows how smart I am. But then he came up to see me, and we spent a couple of days together, and I realized that he was the real deal, absolutely brilliant, a real artist. He had a bold and original vision of how to tell this story. He felt intensely passionate about the material. So I decided he should do it. That's how I became executive producer.
'Los Angeles Was the Kuwait of the Jazz Age'
Q. "Oil!" takes place about a decade or so later than the movie and, at 548 pages, sprawls over practically every social and economic trend of the era, from California's new car-crazed culture to face lifts to the factional battles of America's "reds." But the heart of it is a detailed chronicle of the Southern California oil boom. How would you summarize how all these themes fit together?
A. The novel is epic in scope, and it's really about the day and age in which Sinclair was living, the society of Southern California in the 1920s. George Bernard Shaw regarded Sinclair as the great historian of his era, who managed to capture the essence of the times in his novels.
Los Angeles during the 1920s was a laboratory of the future. It was the first city created to serve the needs of the automobile — it's where the car culture was born. And for a brief period, it was the center of world oil production. A handful of major discoveries — at Huntington Beach, at Signal Hill near Long Beach, at Telegraph Hill and Santa Fe Springs in Orange County— made Southern California the world's biggest oil producer. The oil industry became the leading sector of the California economy, and the state was soon responsible for about a quarter of the world's supply.
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