Standing at the corner of Shakespeare and Scorsese

To Hollywood types , Bostonians are rather like the Stone Age tribes that mad Englishmen in pith helmets used to come upon in strange places.

They have no idea what to do with us. They can't replicate our talk. They can't plumb our thoughts. Boston accents by non-natives on the big screen are almost always ghastly. Movie scripts miss our song and cadence, our insular jokes and tribal self-flagellation.

What it takes is a native to get it right. Someone who knows that we say ``So don't I" but mean the opposite. Someone who can distinguish a Medford accent. Someone who recognizes that the male-to-male insult of ``homo" was spot-on in blue-collar Boston not so long ago.

Someone like William J. Monahan, who puts it on parade as the screenwriter of Martin Scorsese's turbo-charged new mob opus, `` The Departed," opening Friday.

Monahan, 45, made his bones at the opening bell. He was born in St. Margaret's hospital in Dorchester and spent the first seven years of his life on Washington Street in Roslindale. His parents divorced and he then lived all over the North Shore with his mother and sister but visited his father regularly in West Roxbury.

``I think of myself very much as a Boston kid," he says. ``When I was outside Boston, I was waiting to get back to Boston. Boston was the center of everything."

Monahan has uncorked a rich, knowing screenplay about an Irish-American gang in Boston and the law enforcement types out to destroy it. What it is is very smart and very funny when it's not very scary.

What Monahan has is both the ear for our linguistic truth and the ability to put it on paper. His script is as delightful as it is brutal. It presents the high-velocity, scatological, verbal ping-pong between Boston characters as well as you'll hear in movies. At its best, his phrasing and structure rival the music of the late, great novelist George V. Higgins.

Monahan, who will introduce the movie at a screening for Boston-based cast and crew tonight, looks like a guy who checks your brake pads. There is the long, lank hair that falls in his eyes, which are small and distant behind red prescription lenses. The thick body made more so by years of hotel room service on location. The baggy jeans and old T-shirt. All masking a writing junkie with an acute sense of the absurd shaped by a huge, life long reading habit.

He was consuming Shakespeare at 13 in his father's big library in West Roxbury and attended the University of Massachusetts-Amherst largely because of scholars there such as Normand Berlin. Monahan later considered teaching Shakespeare there and writing fiction on the side. But then he asked himself: ``Do I want to be an ornithologist or do I want to be a bird?"

The book that floored him as a teenager was Alan Sillitoe's ``The Loneliness of The Long- Distance Runner." It showcased an underachiever, a profile he finds rampant among the Irish.

``Irish people in particular have difficulty with ambition," he says. ``You have an I Q of 190 and you're working for the phone company."

`` The Departed" is based on a Hong Kong cult movie with a fabulous plot called ``Infernal Affairs" that came Monahan's way in part because Brad Pitt's production company had the rights to a remake. In ``Infernal Affairs," a crime family and the police each send a mole into the other organization and let him rise through the ranks. Eventually, each camp realizes it has an informer in its midst, and things get interesting.

Pitt offered Monahan the assignment over breakfast in L A. But he wanted to know where in the United States the screenwriter would set the movie. Monahan said Boston. ``The Italian mob has been done to death," he reasoned. ``I don't know anything about the Russian mob and I don't want to live in Brighton Beach for six months to figure it out.

`` Boston is what I knew. This was always going to be a character piece, a tone piece as well as a thriller, and I wanted to use the people I knew about. I was thinking about the past, the people I'd lost, and what it was a like for me as a kid in Boston, being angry and not knowing where to go or what to do. I was thinking about the mysteries of an Irish Catholic upbringing I hadn't solved yet."

He wrote his first draft in less than a month in 2004. Leonardo DiCaprio and Scorsese got his script at the same time and both wanted to do it immediately. Monahan, Scorsese, and DiCaprio all traipsed up to Jack Nicholson's house to convince him to take the part of the crime boss. He bit. From there things moved fast.

So how much of his script is ``Infernal Affairs"?

``Anything that worked," Monahan says. ``The spine of the plot is more or less the same, but I shortened the time line and added some new bones to the skeleton. I generally hate high- concept stuff, but this one was great. You could do anything."

And how much of Whitey Bulger is in Nicholson's gang leader? ``People are saying Nicholson is playing Bulger, but anyone who's from around here knows that's ridiculous."

After years of scrimmage as a struggling novelist and fairly successful journalist, the earth moved for Monahan in 2001. He got married -- he and his wife have two kids and live on the North Shore -- and Ridley Scott read his screenplay for ``Tripoli" about the Barbary Wars. Two weeks later, Scott told Monahan he wanted to make it. Also: ``Have you ever thought ab o ut doing anything with knights?"

This led to ``Kingdom of Heaven," the critical and domestic commercial bomb whose three-hour version, Monahan steadfastly maintains, is far better than the theatrical release. (Three hours is one tough sell.) His trajectory has been up since then.

He wrote a script for ``Jurassic Park IV" that was taken over by John Sayles because Monahan was tied up writing ``Heaven." (``It was my first year as a screenwriter and I didn't know if I wanted to do it," he recalls. ``Then I imagined what it would be like to walk into the kitchen and say, `Hi honey, I just turned down Jurassic Park because I'm such a [expletive] genius.' ")

He has his own production company, Henceforth, on the Warner lot, and has acquired the rights to ``The Gamblers," a book about the louche group of London high rollers during the '60s and '70s known as the Clermont Set.

Producer George Nolfi had only one name on his list to write the screenplay for ``The Venetians," a Marco Polo biopic slated to star Matt Damon.

``Bill is probably the best writer working in Hollywood today at creating a sense of time and place in the past," says Nolfi. ``And he writes some of the best dialogue I've ever read."

Before the script gods smiled upon him, Monahan had two novels in the drawer. He won a Pushcart Prize for short fiction in 1997 and sold a novel to Warner Brothers, which in turn paid him to write its screenplay. He also wrote for New York Press when it was hot in the mid-'90s and magazines from Maxim to the late lamented Spy.

His brief experience at Spy was sweet. ``I had God's own job there," he says. ``I'd come in for the close of the magazine. I was the rewrite man and the joke puncher. I spent two weeks in New York and two weeks in Massachusetts writing fiction. Spy failed four issues after I started."

Monahan is unamused by the idea he has sold out by writing scripts. ``I don't think drama is a lesser art form," he says. `` Shakespeare's job was to fill seats and that's what he did. `Hamlet' is still making money. And if you think about pop music -- who's the best? Why , it's the Beatles, who also made the most money.

`` So that's where the little art boys and girls should be taking a look before talking about selling out to the man. If you do the best you can do it, the man comes to you."

Sam Allis can be reached at allis@globe.com.