By ROBERT WARD
Sebastian Junger was living in Gloucester, Massachusetts, when the perfect storm smashed the New England coast in 1991.
He was a struggling writer selling the occasional magazine article but making his living as a climber for tree companies, scaling 30m trees to cut them down, section by section, with a chainsaw and ropes.
Just before the storm he had hit his leg with the chainsaw and almost cut the Achilles tendon. "So I was sort of limping around town when the storm hit," he says, "and it was just an incredible event. These massive waves were slamming into the coast and destroying these mansions on the other side of town."
The next day he learned that a Gloucester swordfishing boat, the 22m Andrea Gail, was lost at sea. His injury had set him thinking about writing a book on dangerous jobs as a possible way of escaping the one he was doing, and it struck him that the Andrea Gail could provide him with a chapter on commercial fishing.
Six years later, after countless hours of interviews with the family and friends of the Andrea Gail crew, Gloucester fishermen, meteorologists, rescue service personnel, marine surveyors and other specialists who could help him show exactly what the missing boat had been up against, the chapter had grown into a book of its own.
The Perfect Storm has spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list, made Junger a millionaire, and given rise to what publishers like to call a major motion picture, directed by Wolfgang Petersen and starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. Junger, now aged 38, reportedly got $US1.2 million ($2.57 million) for the paperback rights and $US500,000 for the film rights, which seems a modest sum against the movie's budget of just under $US120 million.
But the money wasn't his main concern. As an outsider he'd had to work hard to gain the trust of the working people of Gloucester and especially the family and friends of the six men on the Andrea Gail. He didn't want to see that undermined by Hollywood. He was concerned that the film respected the blue-collar town and stayed true to the real events, especially the fact that, in the end, all the crewmen die. Letting Clooney's character, for example, survive would have been a travesty that Junger wanted no part of.
Petersen told him he wouldn't even think of changing the ending, so Junger signed on the dotted line. The film-makers asked him if he wanted to write the screenplay, but he says, "I absolutely did not. I'm not a screenwriter, it's just not my specialty and it didn't interest me. There are other ways I want to spend my time."
The job was given to Bill Wittliff, who adapted the novel Lonesome Dove into the television miniseries and also wrote the screenplay for Legends of the Fall.
When Wittliff finished the Perfect Storm script, it was sent to Junger to read and critique, and he had his say. In the original script the Andrea Gail skipper, Billy Tyne, played by Clooney, shared character traits with Moby Dick's Captain Ahab, shaking his fist at the storm. Says Junger, "I said, 'Look, those guys were terrified. He wasn't shaking his fist at anything. He was desperately wishing it would go away.'
"In the movie, as it is now, they do a little bit of that but it's more a celebration of having pulled something off, like when they turn the boat around. I don't know if guys really do that or not, but the situations I've been in where I felt tremendous danger and then I got out of it, I wasn't whooping. I was very subdued and quiet. So they took out the bit with him sort of railing at the heavens."
A nightmare he had while writing the book gave Junger his perception of how the crew must have felt when the Andrea Gail was being pounded by waves more than 30m high and winds exceeding 190 km/h.
In the nightmare he was in the wheelhouse with Tyne. "And I remember thinking, 'Oh, I never realised how scared these guys must have been.' They were names in the newspaper clipping, they were characters in the book I was writing, they were everything but real people. And in my dream it suddenly hit me that these were real guys, just like me - some of them were younger than me - and they were just scared out of their minds."
Junger says he likes the film a lot. "I was amazed at the storm sequences. I liked that they were respectful of the town." When he saw the film, he took along Mary Anne Shatford, the sister of Andrea Gail crewman Bobby Shatford, and was relieved afterwards when she told him she liked it.
But he gives Boys Don't Cry as an example of the kind of movie he likes most. "Almost invariably they are pretty small-scale, alternative productions; they're not big Hollywood action movies. But I realise there's no way to produce a storm at sea with a budget like The Blair Witch Project's.
Variety has described Junger as an extreme journalist. He's reported on war crimes in Kosovo, terrorist training in Afghanistan, an American taken hostage in Kashmir, and given freelance radio reports from the Bosnian war. Vanity Fair now lists him as a contributing editor, and he was named Sexiest Author in People magazine's Sexiest Man Alive 1997 issue (coincidentally, Clooney was chosen as the overall SMA that same year).
Although magazine editors like running photos of Junger with his shirt off to highlight his hunky good looks, he doesn't feel too over-exposed and doubts the movie will crank up his celebrity quotient.
"Things are going well. I don't need any more help - I don't know where I'd put it," he says with a laugh. "It's not like suddenly people are going to recognise me when I walk down the street. They'll recognise Clooney, obviously, but not me. Writers are a little invisible, even the well-known ones."
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