Books can be like blockbusters, epic in scope. Books can also be like quiet, little indie films. Ed Burns knows a bit about both.
Born in Queens and raised on Long Island, Burns has made 14 feature films as a writer-director-actor-producer. That includes The Brothers McMullen, his debut, a low-budget indie that won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance in 1995. A role in Saving Private Ryan followed, as did a ton of TV and movie roles, ranging from a three-episode character arc on Will & Grace to playing Bugsy Siegel on TNT. He even wrote a book about making indie films, Independent Ed, that came out in 2015.
Now, he’s written a novel. Published in August, A Kid from Marlboro Road, is based on the colorful, raucous, Irish-Catholic community he knew as a child in the 1970s. We talked about the book over Zoom, in advance of his visit to Kansas City for a reading at Unity Temple Oct. 3, via Rainy Day books. He wore a faded black t-shirt and neatly-trimmed beard, his black and gray-streaked hair swept back.
“It’s a look at that moment in a kid’s life where innocence ends and he’s stepping into his adolescent life,” Burns told me.
The book has been described as semi-autobiographical. “What’s the semi part?” I asked.
He smiled. “Well, the semi part is I drew from the world that I come from and a lot of the characters — the bigger things that happened to them or let’s say their bios — I pulled from my family.
He described the novel’s opening scene “It’s at a wake where this young kid is forced by his father to give a speech in front of everyone and tell a story about his grandfather. And the grandfather was a sandhog who came from Ireland in the 30s, lost his wife when his third child died, put the kids in an orphanage, went back to Ireland to find another wife, and helped build the Lincoln Tunnel. All of those things happened to my grandfather. So let’s say that’s the biographical part.”
And the semi?
“While telling a story at the wake the kid realizes, oh, he might have a little gift for storytelling, right? So that never happened,” Burns laughed. “People ask ‘Why didn’t you write a memoir?’ It’s because I made up most of it, quite honestly. All of my favorite parts of the book are pure fiction.”
“What about writing a novel versus screenplays?” I asked. “Is it difficult to think in a more literary way?”
“For me, writing the novel was freeing,” he said. “Being an independent filmmaker, everytime I sit down to write a screenplay. I’m thinking about budget, budget. I’m thinking about how am I possibly going to shoot this scene and how can I possibly afford to shoot this scene at that location?”
With fiction, though, none of those constraints apply.
“Writing this novel freed me up to not have to worry about that. And once those handcuffs were gone, I was off to the races.”
It’s a huge change from acting, too, where the handcuffs seemed to accrue.
At the start of his career, he was getting interesting roles. But, “as you get older and if you don’t turn into the guy then suddenly you’re just playing the dad or the cop who is the fourth banana in the story who’s got some dopey cop language. And it just stopped being fun. That wasn’t why I got into the movie business. I got into the movie business initially as a writer and, you know, I wanted to be a storyteller.”
Looks like he found a great way to do it.
