Moral Schiff

A former Phoenix writer brings Lolita to the screen

The obvious question -- what's the number of your agent? -- I never asked. Stephen Schiff, former film editor of the Boston Phoenix and screenwriter for Adrian Lyne's new adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, still had plenty to talk about. Being on the receiving end of moralistic attacks, for example -- not just for his role in bringing to the screen one of the most controversial films in Hollywood history, but for reviewing such films.

"Feminist groups picketed the Phoenix for my review of Brian De Palma's Dressed To Kill," he recalls. "They also graffiti'd my name somewhere. I remember all that -- going on the talk shows and having angry women call me. In your archives, probably, there's this follow-up article about how I became an enemy of the people. I was pretty surprised about the reaction. I've been more surprised about Lolita, though."

And well he might be. A high-budgeted studio adaptation of a prestigious work of literature by a major director with big stars and positive reviews, it's been kept from the big screen by the subtlest and most insidious kind of censorship -- self-imposed commercial cowardice. "Nothing like this has ever happened before. There has been all sorts of governmental censorship, often with movies of a much smaller scale, but for a movie of this dimension and high profile, not to mention budget, to be given an R rating with no problem and then de facto banned by the industry itself is a unique event.

"I think it happened for a number of reasons. The broad one is that at this moment we seem to have a shrinking culture, and for my entire adulthood we've had an expanding culture. In a way the two Lolitas to me are like bookends of a cultural moment. The Kubrick Lolita happens in 1962, when things are just beginning to loosen up and be liberated. That's the sensibility of that movie, this kind of wink and smirk, naughty glee -- oh look at what we can get away with -- even though there's nothing more salacious in it than a peck on the cheek.

"And now, the other Lolita comes at a moment when suddenly the culture seems to be getting smaller. And that which has been brought out from under the rug, we're being told, must go back under. When we began showing Lolita to the movie studios, it was March 1997. December 1996, three months before, was when JonBenet Ramsey was murdered -- the air was full of that, and full of the Belgian sex murders and a dawning awareness of how much pedophilia was a problem, as it had always been.

"There are lots of other factors. We got these raves from studio heads, but when it came time to step up to the plate and distribute the thing, the doors closed. It began to become a de facto banning. They were worried about what had happened when feminists went after The People vs. Larry Flynt. It was felt it crippled the film's box office and its chances for awards at the end of the year. They were cowardly, but not cowardly without reason in the current atmosphere."

Schiff notes the irony that the same people who would condemn his film are responsible for polluting the media with the far more graphic and demoralizing details of the Monica Lewinsky case. "The so-called spokespeople for the culture, when the Monica Lewinsky story broke, thought, `This is the most shocking thing in the world! They'll hound him out of office in a week.' Finally, they had the brilliance to turn to the culture and poll them, and the culture came back and said, `Shut up and let him do his work.' "

Schiff wants those "spokespeople" to let him do his work, too, which is to subject the extremes of human behavior to the clarifying and redeeming power of art.

"Of course Humbert's a monster, but it was very important to me to make him a sympathetic monster. I think one of the great things that art can do and literature can do is put you deeply inside someone whom you would never otherwise be inside of. It expands us by making us understand that which we cannot understand even though we condemn it."
-- P.K.

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