Big college football game tonight between Oklahoma and Florida. That eventually got me thinking about the writer S.E. Hinton. She’s from Oklahoma and pals around with hoods like Mickey Rourke, Matt Dillion, and Dennis Hopper. At least she did back in 1983 when Francis Ford Coppola made her book Rumble Fish into a movie.
The cast also included Diane Lane, Nicolas Cage, Laurence Fishburne, Tom Waits and Sofia Coppola. Hinton herself picked up a little money on the side playing a hooker in the movie, as well as writing the screenplay with Coppola.
Her other books The Outsiders, Tex, That Was Then…This is Now not only became movies but virtually were training grounds for a generation of actors including the above actors as well as Tom Cruise, Patrick Swayze, Rob Lowe, Ralph Macchio, Meg Tilly and Emilio Estevez. (I didn’t realize until I looked on IMDB that Morgan Freeman was also in That was Then…This is Now.)
So Hinton, who started writing The Outsiders when she was 15, has done well considering that it was reported that her first royalty check was only $10 and that the book almost went out of print before going on to sell more than 13 million copies.
Our quote today comes from Hinton and it’s a reminder to all writers to get the words written and to take advantage of every networking opportunity (especially if you live in fly-over country);
At school one day I mentioned to a friend that I wrote, and she mentioned to me that her mother wrote children’s books. She said, “Why don’t you let my mother read your stuff?” I gave her a copy of The Outsiders, and this woman showed it to a friend of hers who had a New York agent. She said, “Send this to my agent. Maybe she can get it published for you.” I didn’t believe that was going to happen, but I mailed it to her. She has been my agent ever since.
S.E. Hinton
A Conversation at Penguin.com
S.E. Hinton lives in Tulsa and has a horse, a dog, and her own website — www.sehinton.com.
[…] Big college football game tonight between Oklahoma and Florida. That eventually got me thinking about the writer S.E. Hinton. She’s from Oklahoma and pals around with hoods like Mickey Rourke, Matt Dillion, and Dennis Hopper. At least she did back in 1983 when Francis Ford Coppola made her book Rumble Fish into a movie. The cast […] Original Source… […]