Home // January.2.2017 // Jon Maniscalco

In La-La-Land, telling the stories of Boston crime

Chuck MacLean is now living in Los Angeles but was raised in Quincy, Massachusetts. Accordingly, the Boston area is the setting for many of his stories, including his most recently published piece, "Lips", appearing in Clarion magazine (Issue 20, 2017). His 2014 Black List screenplay, Boston Strangler, has been set up at Warner Brothers with Casey Affleck set to star.

Our interviewer Jonathan Maniscalco shares MacLean's fascination with crime fiction, and is working his way through an extensive list of authors writing in the thriller, crime, detective and noir genres. Wanting another notch on his belt, he reached out to Maclean to learn more about his background, his literary influences, and the dual life of an LA writer developing material for both the page and the screen.


Interviewer Jon Maniscalco asked Maclean to send the editors a photograph to accompany this interview. Maclean told us how he replied to Jon: "I asked him if you guys were just real eager to lose subscribers or something, but he said it was the usual thing to do. Anyway, here you go."

Jon Maniscalco: When did you decide to become a writer?

Chuck Maclean: When I was like nine. My grandfather died. They asked me to write a eulogy for him. I realize now it wasn’t the eulogy—it was some cute-shit they wanted from one of the grandkids to be read at the funeral. But I thought it was the eulogy. My grandfather pretty much raised me as a kid. My parents both worked 80 hours a week. He was sick. And there was no one to watch me. So from the time I could remember all he and I did was make sure the other didn’t die during the day. So essentially, I felt I had to write the thing—the eulogy, or whatever you want to call it. And I did. Everyone seemed really impressed by it. It wasn’t very good. I still have it. But at the time I felt it was something I could do better than the adults, because the way my mother put the task to me, everyone else was too upset to write something. I mean, I probably still wanted to play right wing for the Bruins at nine years old. But the writing thing, I always knew I could do. When it became apparent, years later, that I wasn’t really fit do much else, I chased it. It was something I knew I could do.

JM: What attracted you to the Boston Strangler’s story?

Mac: Casey Affleck got me on it. Someone in LA put us together when I was a rookie screenwriter. I had a couple of good scripts out then—nothing that ever got made. But I pretty much banked a career off the fact that The Town had just come out and everyone wanted their version of it, and here I was this new writer from Boston who came cheap. So I met Casey. He mentioned how he wanted to adapt Sebastian Junger’s Death in Belmont. So I read that. I didn’t see a movie in it, but it got me interested in the Strangler in general.

DeSalvo’s what ended up hooking me to it. Regardless of whether or not you think he killed all thirteen women—which is suspect—he did some awful shit. But in everything I read about him, Albert DeSalvo seemed like this guy’d that always been tortured by this thing he knew was wrong with him. That he wanted help and just didn’t know how to get it. I built the whole script around that. It’s a good script. Probably never gets made. But it’s a good script.

JM: When did you decide to become a writer?

Mac: When I was like nine. My grandfather died. They asked me to write a eulogy for him. I realize now it wasn’t the eulogy—it was some cute-shit they wanted from one of the grandkids to be read at the funeral. But I thought it was the eulogy. My grandfather pretty much raised me as a kid. My parents both wo

JM: The ‘60s movie about the Boston Strangler ended with a PSA about mental illness. Is that a direction or an important factor in your retelling?

Mac: It definitely informed how I wrote it. I mean, DeSalvo’s an empathetic character in the way I wrote him, because you feel like he hates himself for what he’s done. And that’s what interested me about him in the first place—the psychological bent that made him feel he had to do these things (definitely rape, maybe kill?), and how he hated himself for it. A bigger influence though was an ‘American Experience’ documentary I saw on PBS, about the 1919 Flu epidemic. Best documentary I’ve ever seen. Just ends on this haunting note about how no one really knows what stopped the flu, “bad things happen and there’s nothing you can do about it.” The Strangler script grew out of combining that idea with the idea of DeSalvo’s obsessiveness.

DeSalvo’s foil in the script was a Boston cop who’s obsessed with catching him because, as the story goes on, the Strangler comes to personify the “bad things” that you can’t do anything about it.

JM: Are there other classic Boston crime stories that you have interest in giving a modern rendition?

Mac: There’s a lot of them. I’m a geek over it. If you came to my house it’s full of old Boston crime and political memorabilia, and like Howie Carr once said, in Boston “there’s not much difference between those two things.”

I have this show I sold to Showtime with Ben Affleck that’s all about early ‘90s Boston in the wake of the Charles Stuart killings. The pilot of it is probably the best thing I’ve ever written. It mentions, off-handedly, like ten or twelve different great Boston stories that influenced the conception of the show.

If I could spend the rest of my life writing true-to-life Boston crime stories, I would do that. That’s my dream. I just want to be George V. Higgins.

JM: Are there any stories that you believe are interesting and should be represented on screen or print but have been buried under the weight of all the other crime drama going through the pipeline?

Mac: I’ve got like a dozen unpublished screenplays about that kind of thing. There are a million of those types of stories. It’s why I never got the Whitey Bulger thing. People love that story. One time, out here [in LA], there were like five competing Bulger movies or TV shows. I never got it! Even when I was a kid and it was happening. They tried to hire me to re-write Black Mass. It didn’t happen because they cheaped out on the offered , and because I didn’t like their version of it. I told them the thing should be like Goodfellas, with the John Connolly character as the lead—that the more fascinating story wasn’t the psychopath that pulled out women’s teeth, but the Boston FBI. They didn’t listen to me, but that’s one story that’s never been told: the Boston FBI.

Anyway, that’s what’s great about Boston—there’s so much history there that some of the stories get lost. For instance, I went to high school in Plymouth, Plymouth South High. The largest cash robbery in American history, at the time, happened in 1964 at Exit 3 off Route 3. Which is, like, right field on the Plymouth South baseball diamond. I didn’t know that until I moved out here and found Big Bucks by Ernest Tidyman in a used bookstore. I wrote it up and sold it as a movie. Didn’t get made though.

JM: It sounds like you’re always writing. Let me ask, what’s your writing schedule? Are you an early or late writer?

Mac: I can write any time now. I used to do it at night. But for the last eight years, this is all I’ve done—write, a 100 hours a week or more. I’ve been fortunate enough to break through that necessity of routine, where I have to get the mindset to write at a certain time. For years, I wrote at night . Now, I just write until I want to stop. Still edit at night though. Feel like editing is just easier at night.

JM: How about that—how do you feel a piece of writing has been properly edited?

Mac: When I can get through it—whatever it is: script, pilot, short story—without stopping. When I can read through it without thinking I could make it better or clearer. But I’m the worst proofreader in the world. People bitch at me about that all the time out here. I figure they pay other people to worry about that shit.

JM: The big question now: Who have been your greatest literary influences?

Mac: Lincoln Steffens. George V. Higgins, like I mentioned earlier. Steinbeck. Those are the names I lean on now. But if I’m honest, the biggest influences early on were Robert B. Parker and Richard Price. Price’s The Wanderers was the first time I read a book where the people talked like people I knew. Up until that point, when I was in school, I’d write a story and people would read it and feel one way. Then I’d read it aloud and they’d feel completely different about it. There was something about how my writing sounded in a Boston accent that changed how it came off. After reading Price, I felt really emboldened to just write like how I talked. Vonnegut actually helped with that a lot, too.

Parker’s Spenser stories were a huge influence. Back when I found them, I mostly just read the big names. Then I wanted to do this private eye type movie, so picked up Parker. The first Spenser novel is called The Godwulf Manuscript. It’s not very good. The plot’s ridiculous. But Spenser is just this fucking amazing character. I read that book at the same time that I was reading Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Updike, and the only thing I wanted to talk to people about was Spenser.

It was a huge lesson: that if you could write a really good character, the rest didn’t matter that much. And if you look at most of the things I’ve written, the concept isn’t the selling point. It’s always the character. If the rest works, it’s all the better. But the character is what hooks people through the cheek.

JM: What made you decide to write a screenplay, and how did you put it out into the world?

Mac: The biggest thing was I sucked at being a journalist. I worked at the Herald and the Patriot Ledger when I got out of college. I think I worked at both those places a grand total of three months. I hated being a journalist. So I sucked at it. And when I get shitcanned from the Patriot Ledger, one of my editors was like: “Just get as far away from me as you fucking can.” That’s what got me thinking about LA.

I’d always wanted to write. But I don’t come from money, and it’s hard to write books if you’re not independently wealthy. Takes too much time and focus. So I figured, why not go to a place where they actually have an industry that pays writers? I got a loan, went to film school in LA, and the story from there is I basically just worked. When I went to film school, I’d already been through a liberal arts degree. I knew the school wasn’t going to help me out with a job—that it was basically just an opportunity to write for free. So I wrote my guts out. Started working 100-hour weeks. I came out of there with a ton of work. And because people saw me doing that, saw me breaking my own balls? I started getting introduced to managers. Then when I met a good manager, and he was like, “You wrote a good script, what else do you have?,” I could throw three or four other scripts at him. He signed me right away. I got popped less than two years after I moved here.

JM: What’s up next for you?

Mac: I decided to write a book.That’s where that story “Lips” came from, a collection of short stories I put together last year. And that basically was just me working up the balls to write an actual novel. When I was a kid that’s what I wanted to do: write books. Like I said, I just want to be George V. Higgins.

Banner graphic source: A photo (cropped) by Jacqueline M. Hadel of the Modica Way graffiti wall in Cambridge, Mass., around the corner from the Red Line T station in Central Square.