The Storyteller
The Departed became the talk of Hollywood because screenwriter William Monahan nailed the talk of Boston.
Hollywood butchered Boston until William Monahan came along. It mangled our words and manhandled our culture. What Monahan did in his acclaimed screenplay of the recent Martin Scorsese hit The Departed was to get Boston right for the first time on the big screen.
It takes a local to know a local. Mon-ahan, 46, was born in Dorchester and spent his early years in Roslindale. He luxuriates in Boston accents as the Arabist St. John Philby did in Bedouin tongues. The favored means of communication between Cambridge native Matt Damon and Monahan during the filming of The Departed were spirited exchanges in unalloyed Southie argot. The writer notes, correctly, that there really is no such thing as a Boston accent but rather a slew of them, and he mourns their thinning over time: "The full, unconscious war cry doesn’t really exist anymore as I remember it," he notes. What Monahan captured in The Departed is the blur of blue-collar speech in Boston. The high-speed exchanges - brutal, corrosive, and unassailably funny – that tattoo places like Southie and Dorchester. It worked. The movie has made more than $118 million and is director Scorsese’s biggest box-office success.
After high school, Monahan tossed boxes at Blanchards in West Roxbury until his Shakespeare addiction got the better of him and he pursued the Bard as an undergraduate at UMass-Amherst. He then fought the good fight for years as a novelist and struggling journalist before scoring with screenplays. Today, he has his own production company on the Warner Bros. lot and a bunch of scripts stacked up for filming like planes at Logan on a Friday afternoon. He’s Hollywood hot now – there’s Oscar buzz for The Departed – and he spends as much time in LA working on new projects as at his home on the North Shore, where he lives with his wife and two children. This is crazy time, glitter time, and, in the face of all this, he knows he needs to keep his eggs in the basket of family.
What Monahan adores is history. Right now, he is fixated on King Philip’s War, the 17th-century mayhem in these parts between Native Americans and settlers that was, per capita, the bloodiest war in American history. We smell a screenplay down the road.
Through stints in Manhattan, LA, and London, Monahan has bestowed most-favored-nation status on Boston. It remained his epicenter after his parents split and he ended up in the suburbs as a teenager. He always returned to town, whatever his feelings for the place. The Boston he has loved is historic Boston, where great things happened. "I would have loved it if Boston was still a place where you could jump on a ship and head to the far corners of the world and do business or blow the hell out of Barbary pirates," he maintains, "but it definitely wasn’t that when I was growing up. It was pretty hidebound and senile as well as economically depressed, deeply confused about itself socially, and entirely corrupt politically."
But the boy came home: "Of course, the first thing I did after I had made a career specifically by getting out of Boston was to get back to eastern Massachusetts to subject my kids to the same upbringing, because it really is the best in the world."
Welcome back, Bill.
Sam Allis is a member of the Globe staff and writes a weekly column, "The Observer." E-mail comments to allis@globe.com. 