In 2003 on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright talked his way into a berth with the elite Marine unit tasked with leading one of the charges up to Baghdad. Wright spent the next two months with a 23-man platoon from the First Reconnaissance Battalion, racing in Humvees ahead of the main invasion force and serving as ambush bait to locate Iraqi army positions. He observed the Marines’ exhilaration at surviving enemy attacks and at doling out as much as they got, their frustration at equipment that didn’t work and at the decisions of certain officers who sometimes seemed determined to get them killed, their desolation when their actions felled Iraqi civilians, and the intricacies of their relationships with each other, with the military, and with the war. The three-part series published in Rolling Stone the following summer, titled “The Killer Elite” and edited by the magazine’s current managing editor, Will Dana, won that year’s National Magazine Award for reporting.
In the summer of 2003, G.P. Putnam’s Sons commissioned Wright to pen a book about the experience. Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War, Wright’s first book, quickly became a bestseller. Over 200,000 copies have been sold so far, and the work has been compared to Dispatches, Michael Herr’s acclaimed grunt’s-eye view of the Vietnam War. The book was showered with awards, including the PEN USA award for best nonfiction book of 2004, Columbia’s Lukas Prize for nonfiction, and — perhaps the most meaningful to Wright — the Wallace Greene Award from the Marine Corps Heritage Society. The Christian Science Monitor called the book “exceptionally compelling,” the Financial Times called it “an adrenaline rush of intelligent prose,” and The New York Times called it “nuanced and grounded in details often overlooked in daily journalistic accounts.”
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HBO Films snapped up the movie rights to Generation Kill, tapping The Wire‘s David Simon and Ed Burns to produce, and hiring Wright help Simon and Burns craft what has become a seven-part miniseries. Billed as “the ultimate road trip,” the miniseries begins July 13.
Wright started his reporting career in the mid-90s manning longtime Hustlercolumn Beaver Hunt. Today he is a Vanity Fair contributing editor. His first-ever piece for that magazine, about a Hollywood agent turned right-wing documentary filmmaker, won this year’s National Magazine Award for profile writing, and Wright is currently adapting the piece for Fox Studios. mediabistro.com caught up with Wright to find out how he turned his Iraq assignment into writing’s triple crown — an award-winning article, an award-winning book, and now an HBO film.
How did you get a book contract for Generation Kill?
I arrived in the Middle East in January 2003 [two months before the invasion] and filed some stories for Rolling Stone. During that period, a book editor contacted me. He knew my work [from Afghanistan reporting Wright had done for Rolling Stone the previous year]. He said, “If anything interesting happens, keep me in mind because we might be looking for an Iraq War book.” When I got back and published the three Rolling Stone articles, I did contact him.
[In the meantime] I had a nominal relationship with a film agent — nominally an agent, no contract or anything — at ICM. ICM had no interest in the first “Killer Elite” article, which I had sent them. They were not interested until I sent a follow-up email saying that there’s a book editor who maybe wants to do a book with this. At that point, ICM said, “Oh yeah, this is great.”
They put me in touch with a book agent named Richard Abate [then at ICM, today at Endeavor]. As a lot of writers will testify, the agency did nothing until they figured out that I actually kind of already had interest. It’s not like they were out there pounding the streets for me. But Abate really kicked ass.
| “When I did my last phase of corrections, I spent a 14-hour phone call with the copy editor, manually reinserting the most vile passages that the editor wanted cut. He’s a great editor, but still to this day, I don’t know if he realizes that that’s the book that he published.” |
What did Abate do for you?
He had me write a book proposal to the publisher that was already interested. They made what Abate thought was a really low offer for the book. The reason was — this is an interesting fact for any writer who’s thinking about writing a book — my first contact with the publisher was a conference call with an editor and their head of marketing. It was to their marketing woman that I had to sell the worthiness of this book, not the editor. In my proposal, I pointed out that, at the end of the book, there were all these troubling things we encountered in Baghdad and that I would discuss the fact that the Iraqis I met in the first week of the occupation suggested that there might be a civil war between Sunni and Shi’a. And the marketing department of this publisher thought that my book seemed far too negative. I remember her saying back in July of 2003, “But the war is going really well. You’re being too negative.”
So what next?
My agent then went to Putnam, which came in with a higher offer. They really seemed interested in the book, and I didn’t talk to their marketing department. They just seemed really stoked. [We went with Putnam because] their offer was higher, but they also just seemed more interested in it.
Did you run into any challenges during the editing process?
My editor wanted me to remove some of the profanity and some of the more scatological references. He actually marked those to remove. When I did my last phase of corrections, I spent a 14-hour phone call with the copy editor, manually reinserting the most vile passages that the editor wanted cut. He’s a great editor, but still to this day, I don’t know if he realizes that that’s the book that he published.
Why were those passages so critical?
The scatological humor is critical, because that is the humor that prevailed. It’s also critical because, if you’re in a combat zone, on the front lines, or behind the lines, as we were, your life is reduced to these elemental things. One of them is: How can you go to the bathroom? Where can you go? So the humor itself speaks to the realities of these guys. To have removed that wouldn’t have just sanitized the book for aesthetic reasons, it would have sanitized the reality that these guys operated in.
How did the HBO miniseries come about?
In July of 2003, I went into HBO and I pitched them. I’d sold my book, but I hadn’t written it.
How did the pitch go?
HBO had my three-part Rolling Stone series, and they had my book proposal. HBO had everything, but here’s the irony: When you go in to pitch your own article, the first thing they ask you is, “Well, what’s the movie?” And you want to say, “You’re holding the articles on your desk. You’re the moviemaker. I’m just the lowly reporter.”
But I had already figured this out. I’d already figured out my answer. They really like short, pithy answers. I said, “My movie would be the ultimate road trip. It’s really not about the war. It’s about these guys going from Kuwait to Baghdad.” And then the second level of my pitch was, “It’ll be like ‘Jackass Goes to War.’ ” And they loved that.
I understood that you just have to say something that they like, because marketing departments rule. In the movie industry, people want to be able to see the poster. They don’t want to see the movie; they want to see the poster.
| “What really improved my reporting was being unplugged from the 24-hour news cycle and not knowing what I was supposed to be thinking about. It was a lack of awareness of other reporting that improved my reporting.” |
How did you get the idea to pitch HBO?
For years I would publish an article and get calls from people in Hollywood who were interested in maybe having a discussion about turning it into a film. Nothing had ever happened, but I’d had many of these meetings in the past.
So you met with HBO. What happened next?
The project didn’t really go very far. It wasn’t until a year later that an HBO executive called my agent and then had a meeting with me. He said, “We had trouble figuring out what to do with this. We have a new idea,” which was to have me meet with David Simon and Ed Burns. This was about January 2005. They were then doing The Wire. But they had previously done The Corner, a miniseries based on the book they wrote of the same title, about a drug corner in Baltimore. The idea was these guys had already adapted reporting into a miniseries, and they had this awesome show.
I flew out to Baltimore, sat down with David Simon, and asked him, “What do you want to do?” And he said, “We want to make your book.” I was kind of stunned. Several people had called me after I sold the book to HBO — suddenly all these other people wanted it even though I couldn’t sell it, really, but I had all these meetings with people, and they wanted to take it and do their own thing. Everybody wanted to use the book as source material but then create a new story. David Simon said, “We just want to make your book.” And then he said, “I don’t really want to do this unless you’re going to be very involved in the process.”
How involved were you in creating the miniseries?
First I was just going to be a consultant, but as it turned out, I worked as a co-writer on the scripts. I spent about 15 weeks living in Baltimore and writing with David and Ed. I would meet with one of them every day. We wrote some of it, literally, in a trailer on the set of The Wire.
What did you learn from working with the creators of The Wire?
What I really learned from David and Ed is believing in the primacy of your source material when adapting it into a miniseries. They both had so much confidence in the material, and they both had a cocky, sort of “fuck-you” attitude to the idea that we would have to alter our narrative of the war to conform to people’s expectations of it.
For example, in the book, in one of the later chapters, we were leaving a town called Baqubah, and we got ambushed on the way back, a small minor ambush, and Colbert [the team leader in Wright’s Humvee] opened up on the ambushers and was very confident that he’d killed the guy that shot at us. When I wrote that in the book, I almost started to write something like how it disturbed me that I’d probably just witnessed a human being being killed. But the truth was that, at that moment, I was so tired, and I was so sort of pissed off that we’d just been shot at, that I couldn’t care less that there was probably some guy dead or bleeding to death in a ditch by our Humvee — because he just shot at us.
In writing that passage, I probably did start to type the first half of a sentence softening the fact that I felt nothing, or maybe hiding that fact. But I remember that moment of writing that passage, and I was like, “Fuck it, I’m going to write what I felt. Nothing.” When I wrote the book, I almost stopped myself from revising. I decided to go with my first instinct. Because my first instinct in writing about this war was often more honest than my later instinct.
I think that David and Ed had the exact same methodology in dramatizing this. For instance, when the guys use racist language, we didn’t go back and try to explain to the audience, “Actually these guys probably are not really racist because they get along really well.” We just decided to use the language and depict them, and hopefully people in the audience will understand that maybe their language is at variance with who they really are and how they relate to each other.
What surprised you the most about the whole process, from magazine article to book to HBO miniseries?
I have to say, I really thought I was going to die in Iraq. I became convinced that I was going to get shot. Sounds a little crazy, but that’s the truth. Having just lived through those three weeks, that was a big surprise.
There was a lot of reporting on the invasion of Iraq. Your Rolling Stone series distinguished itself by winning the National Magazine Award for reporting, and Generation Kill has been one of the more successful books about the invasion — and certainly the first to be made into a movie. What was different about your reporting?
People have always said, ‘Your reporting on Iraq was different.’ I’ve always said, ‘Well, I was a magazine guy, and I was with this small unit, and I stayed with them for two months, and I took really good notes.’ It was very intimate, and it was a great unit to be with.
There’s another factor in why my reporting was different. I didn’t have a sat-phone, and I didn’t have Internet. [Marine officers required Wright to give up his sat-phone as a pre-condition to embedding with the unit, to ensure their location would not be divulged.] While I was doing all my primary reporting, I had no idea what the dominant stories were. What really improved my reporting was being unplugged from the 24-hour news cycle and not knowing what I was supposed to be thinking about. It was a lack of awareness of other reporting that improved my reporting.
What did you learn from that experience?
It’s led me to wonder if perhaps that’s a problem with the current 24-hour news cycle reporting that everybody’s locked into, where every reporter is constantly having to look over their shoulder to make sure they’re getting — or creating — the dominant news story of the day.
It’s not just [a problem with reporting a particular] story, but [with generating] the dominant take on the war. That dominant take is often totally wrong. It negates the instincts and work and perceptions of the reporter who’s on the ground.
Years later, I do suspect that our impressions of the war are increasingly being driven by editors and producers who are back home and not doing the reporting, and their perceptions of the war are often shaping what reporters are saying.
Your book stood out because you wrote very intimately about the people in the unit you were with — the dramatic, the mundane, but also stuff they might have preferred “stayed in the family,” as it were. And yet, you still have good relations with those individual Marines. How do you reveal, as you did about one Marine, for example, that they have a David Spade-like nasal whine and are partial to Barry Manilow and Air Supply, and not have them want to punch you in the face the next time they see you?
If you’re accurate, it’s much harder for people to react negatively. They can be unhappy with it, but they have to agree, “It is true, I did sing ‘Copacabana’ while we were rolling up past the Gharraf canal that day.”
What’s interesting in that example is that [the Marine in question] was okay with [what was written in the book]. But later on, I gave some interview, and I paraphrased that and said he had terrible taste in music. I editorialized, and he’s always been pissed off by that. So I’ve found that it’s best to describe people in details without characterizing it, without saying what you think it is, and just say what it is. And you know when you’re writing it, some people will think [Barry Manilow] is ridiculously bad music, but as soon as you say what you think of it, you’re in more dangerous territory.
If a budding reporter were starting out on an assignment to do exactly what you did, what would you tell them about how to report on the ground, going from Kuwait to Baghdad with a platoon of Marines?
Get as close to one person as you can. Don’t worry about the big story. Just find one person who will let you follow them around and who will be your guide into this world.
Don’t let your editor tell you what the story is, but also try to understand that your editor ultimately has to sell the story to his boss.
Also, I told the guys, “This whole ‘on the record, off the record’ thing? The truth is anything that you say or I see is going to be hard for me not to use if it’s really good. So if you really don’t want me to write something, don’t tell me.” And it’s actually the truth. Because, as much as I have affection for these guys, at the end of the day, my loyalty was to the story, not to them. And I had to tell them that right up front.
One other thing: reporters often want to show off how smart they are. So when we reporters go into an alien culture like the military, and someone is like, “This is an M77-K2. Do you know what this is,” a lot of reporters like to show their subjects that they’re knowledgeable: “Well actually I do know what that is, because I wrote an article about it.” What I find is always better is, even if you think you know, let your sources tell you what the situation is. Don’t try to impress them with your knowledge. It’s better to be ignorant and let them educate you.
Finally, when I disagree with my subjects, I often tell them. A lot reporters, faced with the military, assume they’re conservative and Republican and pro-war. They’ll try to act like they sympathize with the troops and agree with them. If I disagree with my subjects, I’ll actually exaggerate the disagreements openly. I’ll be like, “Well, I’m actually like a communist.” They respect that more. It also leads to debate. It’s always healthy to debate with your subjects.
So how do you like how you’re portrayed in the miniseries?
[Actor] Lee Tergesen does a great job, because he’s comic. In the book, when I go into the first person, it tends to be a little bit comic. I wanted to have the first-person narrative to validate that I was an eyewitness to what I was reporting on, but I didn’t want to be the pompous reporter. The things that happen to [the character in the miniseries] — he has to swallow his chewing tobacco, he gets tied up in his MOP [chemical warfare] suit — that’s from the book. Lee does it in the film, probably with more slapstick than I did it, but to great effect. I thought he was dead on.
Tips on how to get your article turned into a book and a movie:
1. Get a foothold at an agency. Even if you can’t get an official contract with an agent, an informal relationship can create the opening you’ll need down the line.
2. Get popular. If your agent isn’t already rustling the bushes on your behalf, scrounge up some interest — any interest — to whet their appetite.
3. Pitch early and often. Before Generation Kill, Wright had had a number of meetings with Hollywood folks about potentially turning other articles into movies. Though those projects went nowhere, the meetings taught him how the game was played, and he was ready when it came time to pitch HBO.
4. Know your tagline. When pitching a movie studio, realize that marketing reigns supreme. Have a one-sentence summary of what the movie will be about and know what your movie poster tagline is going to say.
5. Trust your gut. To have something to sell to book publishers and movie producers, you first have to have a compelling story. Listen to your editors, but at the end of the day, trust your own instincts about what you’ve seen and heard, and write your story as it was, not as you — or anyone else — think it should be.
E.B. Boyd is a freelance writer based in San Francisco.
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