In January 1970, when Robin Swicord headed from her home in Panama City to
FSU, she didn't imagine herself headed also to Hollywood.
By Susan Bullington Katz
Special to the Florida State Times
In January 1970, when Robin Swicord headed from her home in Panama City to
FSU, she didn't imagine herself headed also to Hollywood.
But that's where she is now, collecting critical acclaim for her screenplay of Louisa May Alcott's book, Little Women. Slicord and her husband, Nicholas Kazan, made Hollywood headlines last year for the sale of their screenplay adaptation of Roald Dahl's children's book, Matilda.
The script for Matilda, which they set out to write primarily as a gift for their two young daughters, sparked a spirited bidding war among Hollywood studios, and will be a major 1996 TriStar release, starring and directed by Danny DeVito.
Her FSU years gave Swicord many of the skills she's using so successfully now, but she chose the school initially for purely pragmatic reasons. A Regents' scholar, she had her pick of any Florida state school and chose FSU because "it was a school where I could go without having a car," she says in all earnestness. "And I'd heard they had a really good English department."
Double majoring in English and theatre, Swicord worked full-time for three round-the-calendar years, including a stint as photographer and feature writer for Tallahassee's independent college newspaper, the Flambeau.
"They taught me photography skills," she says, "so I was able to eke out a living, working full-time and going to school."
The experience as a photographer would come in handy down the road, when Swicord visualized her scripts as she wrote, and later as she moved behind the camera to direct her own short feature, The Red Coat, for Disney last year. The Red Coat is currently on the film festival circuit.
When Swicord first went to FSU, she'd never seen any movies other than Disney movies.
"It's not that my parents were crazy or anything -- they didn't go to the movies themselves and thought it a real waste of time to go to the movies, especially since they would occasionally show them on TV. So when I got to college, I had a lot of catching up to do."
FSU's nightly two-movies- for-25-cents gave her just the chance she needed to put together her cinematic education.
"The Flambeau rented space very close to the auditorium at school, so I would put my prints up to dry, and I would drop in to see whatever was playing," she said. "I saw a lot of films! And sort of pieced together a history of film for myself. I saw a lot of silents, and movies like Don't Look Now, and all of Hitchcock. Now we can get that on video, but in those days..."
Another significant aspect of FSU for her were two of the library's collections: children's books and LIFE magazines.
"The library had a huge collection of children's books, and that had always been a love of mine," she said. "I would go in the basement and read children's books." She also read the entire collection of Life magazines, ducking into the library at every opportunity to read another.
After she graduated in 1973, her writing skills and curiosity took her to Bar Harbor, Maine, where she wrote and waited table, then back to Panama City, where she got a job shooting news footage and editing news copy for WJGH-TV. She also worked at Tallahassee's WFSU-TV, and then began making educational movies -- for the Florida Department of Education and then IBM. IBM moved her to New York.
There she hooked up with some other FSU grads and decided, instead of doing a movie, which would cost money, to produce one of her own plays. From her job, she saved a little at the end of each month until she had a couple of hundred dollars to rent a small theatre in the Ansonia Hotel. There she put on her first New York play: Last Days at the Dixie Girl Cafe.
"We put posters all over town -- very Mickey Rooney/Judy Garland," Swicord says, and soon the Dixie Girl Cafe generated enough buzz to land her a call from a Hollywood agent, asking if she'd ever thought about writing movies.
Sure had, she said. In fact, she had 30 pages of one she was working on: Stock Cars for Christ.
"Finish it," said the agent, "and send it to me." She did, the agent sold it, and as Swicord now notes, she hasn't been out of work a day since.
Merrily Kane is still Swicord's agent.
Now Swicord, her husband, Nick (who wrote the screenplay of Reversal of Fortune and wrote and directed Dream Lover), and their two daughters live in Santa Monica, Calif., where they work on projects individually and together.
Since Matilda, their first script collaboration, they've written another Roald Dahl adaptation, The BFG, which will be produced by Kennedy/Marshall.
Their secret for successful collaboration? Both adhere to a notion they arrived at independently, but shared with one another when the going once got rough.
"Our marriage," they say, "is more important than any screenplay."
Movies Swicord
has written:
Matilda
(with Nicholas Kazan,
due out Christmas '95)
ThePerez Family
(1995)
Little Women
(1994)
The Red Coat
(1994, also directed)
Shag
(1988, written with Lanier Laney & Terry Sweeney)
You Ruined My Life
(1987) (TV movie)