http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline/20010906/3606449s.htm
6th September, 2001
Writer Michael Blake's last job --
the kind with a boss and hourly wages -- was washing dishes at a Chinese
restaurant in Bisbee, Ariz.
''I was in professional exile,''
he says. He had failed as a Hollywood screenwriter, his first novel was
''dead in the water,'' and he was tired of ''mooching off my friends.''
That's when he was fired in a dispute
over paying for rubber gloves out of his $3.35-an-hour salary. Two days
later, Kevin Costner called.
Blake and Costner had become friends
in 1983 working on a forgettable low-budget movie, Stacy's Knights. It
was Costner's first leading role, Blake's first screenplay.
Five years later, Costner was calling
to say he wanted to make a movie out of Blake's novel and wanted Blake
to do the screenplay. An hour later, Blake recalls, he was driving to Los
Angeles, off to work on Dances With Wolves.
The 1991 movie, which won seven Oscars,
including one for Blake's screenplay, gave the book a second life. It was
first published as a romance paperback that, he says, ''was dumped in airports
and convenience stores'' and sold 30,000 copies. Now, more than 2 million
copies are in print.
Its sequel, The Holy Road (Villard,
$24.95), out next week, resumes the story 11 years after Lt. John Dunbar
(Costner's character) left the white man's world to start a new life and
family (he's married to Stands With A Fist) as the Comanche warrior Dances
With Wolves. (The Holy Road refers to the developing railroad.)
''I wrote it because I had to,''
Blake says. ''The story wasn't over.''
Neither is his, an improbable drama
about second chances, professional and personal.
At 56, Blake attributes part of the
sequel's delay to his health problems, which include Hodgkin's disease
and multiple sclerosis. ''My wife says the most inspiring thing about me
is that I'm still alive,'' or as he puts it, ''Life is bittersweet. There's
never a free lunch.''
The sequel, he says, ''has a harder
edge to it. The stakes are higher -- for me and the people who inhabit
my mind as characters.''
He worries that ''book people consider
me a Hollywood guy, but in Hollywood I'm a book guy. And I don't know how
much the public will embrace this book.''
Most of the early reviews are good.
Publishers Weekly favorably compares it with Dances With Wolves as ''a
more powerful historical novel.''
Blake says his goal is similar: to
portray the Comanche (changed to Lakota Sioux in the movie) as ''real people
. . . thoughtful, sensitive people who knew what was happening to them
but were ultimately powerless to stop it.''
He has finished the screenplay for
the sequel and says ''nothing would please me more than if Kevin Costner
came back and reprised his role.''
He also has plans to complete the
saga as a trilogy. But, he adds, ''there's no telling what will happen.''
Blake never expected to become a father at 51, or, five years later, have
three kids and be living on an 80-acre ranch near Tucson. ''My golden years
are booked.''
© Copyright 2001 USA TODAY
By Bob Minzesheimer
USA TODAY