Author-Screenwriter Mark Richard, who grew up in Franklin and lives in Richmond, finally gets The Ice At The Bottom Of The World made into a movie in Coastal Virginia
By Butch Maier
A long, dazed journey into naught finally ended. For decades, Richmond resident and former Franklin kid Mark Richard’s screenplay adaptation of The Ice at the Bottom of the World, the title story in his award-winning book of short stories, languished in development hell. The project’s up-and-down updates were documented on IMDbPro, the professional version of the Internet Movie Database:
The process to the picture began with such promise.The Ice at the Bottom of the World is a 1989 collection of 10 Southern Gothic short stories that earned Richard the 1990 PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award. A friend was script supervisor for Robert Altman and introduced Richard to the legendary movie director. Altman, nominated for Oscars five times for Best Director and twice for Best Picture, was one of Richard’s heroes.
“Fortunately, one of his assistants had read The Ice at the Bottom of the World and told him the title story would make a good film for him,” Richard said. “When I went to meet him, he said, ‘I really like the story. Could you adapt it?’ And I had no idea how to write a script, so I said, ‘Sure.’ [My wife and I] were just married, we were broke, expecting a kid. So, I went to the library and found films that corresponded with scripts they had on hand, so I could read the scripts and watch the films at the same time. That’s kind of how I learned the craft. I went back and gave Altman a really overwritten script. I think it was 130-some pages, which is way too long. Most scripts are like 100 and change. And he said, ‘Mark, you need to leave something for the actors and the director to do.’” Still, Altman liked what he read. “He said, ‘I would love to make this as my next film,’” Richard said. “And I thought, ‘Well, damn, that was easy.’ Unfortunately, he passed away.” Altman died in 2006.
With the project stalled, Richard’s agent shopped the script around as a writing sample. TV producers saw it and offered him a job on a show. “I had to admit to them I had no idea how to write a TV show, either,” Richard said. “They said, ‘That’s fine. That’s good.’ It was sort of a sideways entrance into the industry.”
No matter how he got there, Richard proved he belonged. According to IMDbPro, he wrote: three episodes of Party of Five, 22 episodes of Chicago Hope, 16 episodes of Huff, 13 episodes of Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior, two episodes of Tyrant, 16 episodes of Fear the Walking Dead, 10 episodes of NOS4A2, 10 episodes of The Man in the High Castle, seven episodes of The Good Lord Bird, and seven episodes of The Sympathizer. He also was story editor for 22 episodes of Party of Five, co-executive producer for 10 other episodes of Tyrant, and consulted on 42 episodes of Hell on Wheels. In between, he wrote the war drama movie Stop-Loss. All the while, The Ice at the Bottom of the World was at the top of his mind.
“It’s been through so many incarnations,” Richard said. “Somewhere in that earlier mix, [Oscar-winning actor] Charlize Theron had bought the script. She and I went to some producers to get it set up. There were several different directors who came and went.” Let’s back up here. Oh, by the way, he was in meetings with Charlize Theron. The directors who met with Richard—even before Altman—included Alan Pakula, who was nominated for an Oscar for All the President’s Men. That movie’s theme is “Follow the Money,” which is also how Hollywood works. “I was not encouraged by my agency to make this movie on a low budget,” Richard said. “They wanted to see it be made with a larger budget. But those movies, those mid-level movies—$50 million to $60 million—just aren’t being made anymore. That’s not the model.” Without enough cold cash, The Ice at the Bottom of the World sat in cold storage.
“So, I would ask my agent, ‘We don’t want to do that low budget—what’s the next step?’ And there were not a lot of ideas about what the next step would be….It’s just not a good time to make feature films—if you can get one made, period.”
Director James Burke, who had been interested in the project for many years, came back into the mix. “Recently, he said, ‘I’ve got some money, and I’d like to take a swing at it.’ And I just thought, ‘I’m not getting any younger,’” said Richard, who turned 70 last year. “Here’s somebody who’s been passionate about it for 15, 20 years. He has some money. He has seed money. We can shoot it in Virginia. Maybe we can get some Virginia incentives because [executive producer-writer-actor] Ethan Hawke and I had just done Good Lord Bird here and gotten to know the film industry in Virginia, which is just astounding. And I just let James Burke run with the ball. I mean, otherwise, it would just go back on the shelf. So, I figured, ‘Let’s just see what he can do.’”
In the dark comedy The Ice at the Bottom of the World, shot with a production budget of $5 million plus incentives, a retired Navy captain returns to his home in the Chesapeake Bay, where his longtime absence has taken a huge toll on his family. “I had to really open the story up,” Richard said. “I always thought it was the least successful short story in the collection, even though the collection had won some praise and awards. And I thought it was interesting—at least to me—that going back in and adapting it to a screenplay, I was kind of able to solve some problems with the story itself that I had not seen before. And that was fun. So, the script is loosely based on the short story but not entirely—and not to the letter, either. I’ve made some pretty significant changes—mainly in developing some of the characters in the family and working with the point of view.”
The film stars Oscar nominee Virginia Madsen (Sideways), Jake Weber (Dawn of the Dead), Will Patton, (Horizon: An American Saga), Jon Tenney (The Green Lantern), and Wes Chatham (The Hunger Games: Mockingjay). Also featured are Seth Numrich (Under the Banner of Heaven), Emily DeForest (The Blind), and Elise Eberle (Shameless).
Production took place in Cobbs Creek, Gloucester, Hayes, and Newport News. “Our experience in Virginia was great,” said Richard, who grew up in Franklin for the last dozen years of his childhood before eventually returning to Virginia to settle in Richmond. “We had people opening everything up to us. I think the locals were really nice. Every time you go into a community, it’s going to be a challenge. Some people just go in, and go through it, and stop traffic. We really tried to work with the local administrations to make it have the least amount of stressful impact on the citizens as possible. I think, by and large, we were pretty successful with that.” The movie was still in postproduction as of our time of publication. A festival run was planned to find a distributor.
Richard is close to finishing a movie script based on another short story in The Ice collection, and it is set in the same area of Coastal Virginia. “I feel like this last movie, The Ice at the Bottom of the World,” he said, “I was just scouting for this next movie.” He also has written some spec scripts for TV shows, but…“I’m lazy,” Richard said, “and that’s hard work to get a TV show made. I know that I have not the energy to go out and make a TV show. I just, golly, that just exhausts me to think about it. I’d rather write film scripts. It’s much more satisfying. I’ve got a lot of work to do. I still have college tuitions to pay off. And I just can’t let the old man in.”
Butch Maier
