How Margulies Mined A Hit

Donald Margulies knew right away that Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself , a book about five days’ worth of conversations between Rolling Stone journalist David Lipsky and novelist David Foster Wallace, contained a story that he wanted to tell.

A Pulitzer Prize winning playwright and Theater Studies professor with years of experience writing movie screenplays for hire, Margulies saw in this book two characters with unique voices, powerful anxieties, and a complex relationship predicated on admiration and mistrust.

“It seemed like a two-hander on the page,” Margulies said in an interview on WNHH’s ​“Deep Focus,” thinking back to 2011 when his longtime manager David Kantor first encouraged him to adapt the book into a play.

“But when I began reading it, I became very excited at the prospect of it being a road picture. It didn’t seem that the stage would really let it breathe properly. For me, there was something very exciting about the prospect of putting these two intensely smart guys on the road. To see David Foster Wallace, one of the great chroniclers of our popular culture, on the American landscape, literally, visually, iconically. That’s when I began to see this as a small independent feature.”

These tentative thoughts and conversations would eventually lead to The End of the Tour, the popular new independent movie starring Jason Segel as David Foster Wallace and Jesse Eisenberg as David Lipsky. The screenplay was written by Margulies and directed by Yale grad James Ponsoldt, who rose to fame with The Spectacular Now.

Not a ​“David Foster Wallace fan boy” at the beginning of the project, Margulies was drawn into this story by the character of David Lipsky, the real-life journalist who longed for the fame and success that Wallace had achieved — and was more than ambivalent about — at the tender age of 34.

“Lipsky’s agenda is so complex,” Margulies noted, ​“because he wants the approval of this guy he admires; he wants to show that he is worth the respect of this man; he wants to show him up; and he needs a story from him. There are all these things operating at once, which I find really interesting. And sometimes there are shifts of objective from one beat to the next during the course of a two-minute scene, which for me as a playwright is part of the joy of subtext.”

As the screenwriter and adapter of this story, Margulies saw his responsibilities as twofold: to take the raw material of this book (that is, the lengthy, meandering, sometimes trivial, sometimes profound conversations between Lipsky and Wallace), and create something new and compelling for the screen. The first part was easy, or at least familiar. Margulies, who started out as a visual arts student at Pratt before transferring to SUNY Purchase to pursue playwriting, has long approached literary adaptation from the perspective of a visual artist.

It required required time, effort, and narrative acumen to turn this into a compelling story defined not just by character, but by dramatic stakes. To help bring to life the story that would ultimately comprise the plot of the film, Margulies drew not just from the conversations between Lipsky and Wallace as related in the book, but also from his own conversations with Lipsky about what took place when the tape recorder wasn’t running.

“Some pesky bloggers out there have taken me to task for inventing these Hollywood plot points. In fact, they are not invented Hollywood plot points. They are information that was given to me by David Lipsky that he did not include in his book. There’s a key moment, a key schism that occurs between the men, which is not recounted in David Lipsky’s book [spoiler alert: it involves a feud over an ex-girlfriend]. From the adapter/screenwriter’s point of view, it was a very crucial piece of information that helped propel the final act of the story.”

Ultimately, that is the true wonder of this film: the conversations, and the tangled relationships that arise therefrom. Lipsky and Wallace talk through the temptations of mindless entertainment, the hollowness of achievement, and what it means to lead a good, satisfying, healthy life. To listen to the full episode, which also includes a passionate repudiation of the film from NHI writer Allan Appel, click on the audio file at the top of the story or find the episode in iTunes or any podcast app under ​“WNHH Community Radio.”