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Hold the car chases Sally Field's novelist son stirs up his own literary excitement in debut novel Thursday, September 03, 1998 Barbara Vancheri, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Talk about a broad background that would come in handy later on. Peter Craig was a bookish boy who read William Faulkner and spent time on the set of movies like "Smokey and the Bandit" with his mother, Sally Field. "I wasn't around as much for things like 'Norma Rae,' because she didn't want to be distracted too much.
"Growing up, my view of it was very circus-like, like it was just a big party all the time," Craig, 28, says of the car-chase comedies that earned Field fans but not Oscars. "Those kinds of movies are a lot of fun. I don't know if it turns out the way people always want. 'Smokey and the Bandit' did. I was around a lot of those sets and then the other half of the time, I lived with my father, who had a very different kind of life."
His father, Steve Craig, was Field's high school sweetheart and first husband, who dabbled in screenwriting but made his early living as a carpenter. Peter Craig, who inherited his father's love of reading and counts F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving, T.C. Boyle, V.S. Naipaul, Max Frisch and Vladimir Nabokov among his favorite authors, has carved out a life for himself as a novelist.
William Morrow and Co. has just published his first book, "The Martini Shot," a comic novel about a teen-ager from a small town in Washington who goes to Los Angeles to find his father, an aging, alcoholic action star, and meets his older half-sister, who lives with her 3-year-old son and her mother. The half-sister, Ava, is a struggling set designer, and her mother, Camilla, a onetime actress who specialized in horror films.
"She eventually became one of the city's most reliable screamers. She screamed at giant mice, swarms of insects and a mass of run-of-the-mill psychopaths. She also spent long afternoons dubbing over the halfhearted screams of other actresses," Craig writes.
"Sometimes every scream in a movie was hers: the taken-by-surprise screams, the worst-fears-confirmed screams, and even the screams of terrified disbelief. Every year she lost a bit of her voice until she was permanently hoarse."
Although Craig's book is dotted with crisp Hollywood snapshots - the parade of production assistants hired because of their parents' work on a film, the infomercial peddler of protein shakes, the chilly press junket for a film that doesn't "test well" - "The Martini Shot" is really the story of a fractured family that revolves around Charlie West.
He had been an infant model and then child star who managed to avoid learning anything from incompetent set tutors and periodic forays into school. Charlie, a master of malaprops, steadies himself at the premiere of his latest movie with Valium and a half-pint of bourbon hidden in his coat pocket. After a while, he goes bonkers and boozy and starts heckling himself on the screen.
"I think fairly early on, I had an idea that I wanted it to actually be kind of subtly more about the siblings than it was going to be about the father," Craig says over the phone from his home in L.A. Even as young Matt searches for his father and Ava tries to reacquaint herself with the same man, they find each other and develop a better sense of who they are.
"I wanted it to be satirical in tone, but I didn't want to be disrespectful to the characters, the way a satire can sometimes be," says Craig, who majored in philosophy at Syracuse University and went to graduate school at the University of Iowa with its famous Writers' Workshop.
Craig's wife is a published poet-pastry chef named Amy Scattergood, and they're the parents of a 7-month-old daughter, Isabel, who's keeping them both very busy. Yes, his famous mother has seen the book.
"She read it kind of early on. She was really supportive. She's just such a mom about that kind of stuff; she's a really supportive person about anything we do. I probably wouldn't go to her to get any really tough criticism because she tends to see everything through kind of rosy glasses a little bit, but she's really great when I'm overly insecure about all this. She'll talk me off the ledge, tells me it's always about the next project."
Does Craig worry that readers might think that it's Field, instead of Ava or Camilla, he's writing about? "I didn't even know if it would be published or anything, I didn't even think about it. I hadn't done it before. I just kind of put my head down and said, 'I'm going to try to do the best I can.'
"Recently, in the past month or so, I've thought maybe somebody would think that. I don't know. If somebody thought my mother had anything in common with, say, the character of Camilla, I think that would be OK. She's actually a character I kind of liked a lot. ... My only fear was that people would think Charlie West was directly one of the men I knew in my life. He really wasn't. He was just sort of a composite of lots of different kinds of people."
Craig, who will be in Pittsburgh Sept. 23 to participate in the Post-Gazette Book & Author Dinner, asked the publisher not to mention Field by name on the book jacket. "As a member of a high-profile Hollywood family, he grew up with unique access to movie culture and society," the flap reads.
"I definitely get the benefit of getting some publicity because of it, which is great. But I felt there was something kind of too much about actually putting it on the book. It was like I was asking for something maybe I haven't done yet with my own career. At least try to earn some kind of readership, not go straight for her fan club."
With luck and good reviews, this won't be his martini shot - a term for a final shot. He's already at work on a second, more ambitious novel and last week embarked on a book tour that started in L.A. and will take him to Portland, Seattle, New York, Boston, Iowa City, Pittsburgh and Coronado, Calif.
"I'm really glad to finally get rolling," he says. "I have a tendency to build up worst-case scenarios in my head when nothing's happening and now that it's happening, I'm feeling pretty good about it. I'm ready to go, to get out there and do something."
Craig will join novelists Francesca Marciano, Mary-Ann Tirone Smith, Lester Goran and memoir writer Homer Hickam Jr. at the Sept. 23 dinner. Tickets are $30 each. Call 412-263-1427 for more information.
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