A FEW MINUTES WITH BOOK WRITER
RICK ELICE

Rick Elice is the co-author of the book (script) of JERSEY BOYS.

BB: What was it like writing about a real-life group like The Four Seasons? What was involved in the process?

RE: It was a great experience and it was a hard experience. Great because I could go right to the source! I could meet with these guys or just pick up the phone to call Frankie [Valli] and ask “What was it like in your family at dinner?” Marshall [Brickman, co-author of the book] and I had complete accesss to Frankie, Bob [Gaudio] and Tommy [DeVito], and whenever we wanted to talk they were amenable to the idea. Again, it was great because our times together helped us earn their trust, get their defenses down – allowing us to hear (and write) about things they had never disclosed before. The Mafia connections, the petty crimes – these were things that enabled us to write how the pop “perfection” of The Four Seasons wasn’t really perfect. We were able to tell a story that had never been told.

BB: But what made it a hard experience?

RE: When you’re dealing with living people, they start to question: “What about this? What about that detail? You’re making me look too much this, or him that!”
They would contradict each other; sometimes they’d contradict themselves. Three different guys would sometimes give us three completely different stories about the same event, descriptions of lives, etc., which then made the process not exactly easy, but obvious: we wouldn’t “take sides” in writing their story, we’d tell four different stories in one, then let the audiences decide. The details make it interesting.

BB: Does the writing process change much when you co-author a script? How does that work?

RE: Well, I like talking things into existence, and I like talking to the very funny Marshall Brickman. He has a huge brain and a great big heart. Writing with him is like playing tennis with Roger Federer. It’s a gift. We talk. And talk. And talk some more. Jotting things down. The process is always different, depending on what you’re writing about. But after several meetings with Frankie, Bob and Tommy, we realize we’re writing a story that hadn’t really been heard. It was the archetypal American rags-to-riches story but now we’re writing with some stuff nobody knew. We came up with an outline – each contributing bits and pieces – and once we began assembling the pieces, the script began evolving as a biography, not a retrofitting of songs to a preconceived plot. We came to the conclusion that it was all those conversations, the different ways people remembered things, the different angles, that showed us how to present the story: not just presenting it according to the seasons, but showing different perspectives.

BB: Does this process apply to just script writing – or writing in general?

RE: The process is different for everything I write. Right now Marshall and I are working on several musicals, but they’re not the JERSEY BOYS style. They’re more of the traditional musical, so we’re concentrating on the story – creating a story with plot points that are mostly musicalized; plot points that are larger than just a line a character speaks. So we outline, we write the story, we write the lines – I write some, he writes some, we write some. Composers, lyricists, orchestrators will join us at some point – usually after the book is pretty well finished.

BB: Can you give us any hints about these future works?

RE: One will be a sweet little musical comedy at the Goodman in Chicago this year, directed by Tommy Tune, and the other is a musical version of The Addams Family, hopefully out in 2009.

BB: You’ve written straight plays and musicals. Any real differences?

RE: Actually, JERSEY BOYS is just a play with music! Either way, you write a story. All their music becomes a perfect soundtrack, and as the story turns, the music changes according to the plot points we’ve developed. JERSEY BOYS is a special case – we didn’t write in the usual musical theater style. We wrote a play.

BB: What do you want people to “get” from JERSEY BOYS and the story you wrote?

RE: I want them to meet someone – Frankie Valli – a real American hero. Not a hero in the perfect way, but a scrappy guy, a Roman Catholic, blue-collar dropout who wanted something so badly! But maybe, even more, I want people watching to learn to appreciate the people in their own lives more, get to know them better, especially in ways that maybe they weren’t aware of.