David Levien is nice Jewish boy who grew in Great Neck. So how did he get mixed with pornographers, high stakes gambling and the mob? The easy way, he writes about them. Levien's latest book in paperback is Swagbelly.
Swagbelly is the story of Elliot Grubman who seems to have a life any other man would envy. Unimaginable wealth, bachelor status, and his own magazine, Swagbelly - the magazine for today's gentleman. That provides him with the companionship of a never-ending succession of Amazonian models with blonde hair, big chests, and tremendous bone structure. Yet, happiness eludes him. His wife left him, his thirteen-year-old son refuses to be Bar Mitzvahed and is converting to Catholicism; his girlfriend may or may not be of legal age and worst of all, for the last several weeks, Eliot has been unable to "perform."
Swagbelly is the great American novel with the man high up in the tree with stones being thrown at him. Now he must get down and not hit as braches as possible.
Levien has had the kind of the life many aspiring creators envy as well. As DJ Levien he is a well known screenwriter, with filmmaking partner Brian Koppelman they have penned Rounders and the upcoming Runaway Jury. Most recently the pair has moved into directing with the mob movie Knockaround Guys starring Vin Diesel and Seth Green. They have also produced one of my favorite movies, Interview with the Assassin, about a man who believes he has found JFK's killer and wants to make a documentary with him.
Check out Levien's website and get Swagbelly at djlevien.com.
Daniel Robert Epstein: What's up with the DJ thing?
DJ Levien: It's something that I started doing when I first started doing screenplays. I wrote my name on my first screenplays. Then in my head DJ was a bit of literary alter ego.
DRE: So you don't spin at clubs?
DL: No not like DJ Premier.
DRE: A lot of your work seems to be about the gaining of wealth through unsavory means. That follows through with Swagbelly.
DL: Is there any other way?
DRE: [laughs] Does that work with writing?
DL: Some do say that screenwriting is unsavory work with Hollywood and all that. I haven't heard that analysis before but I guess you're right.
DRE: What fascinates you about that?
DL: For me it's any kind of world outside the main world that has rules and customs of its own becomes interesting to me. I like to jump in there and explore it. Money is sort of dirty so you have to do dirty things to get it.
DRE: All money is dirty?
DL: It can be. It makes you do things you didn't think you would do.
DRE: So do you think Elliott Grubman didn't want to do what he did to become rich?
DL: I don't know about that. I'm interested in this subgenre of famous pornographers in this country who made their big fortune by being purveyors. They get all this publicity and they seem to enjoy it. But my springboard was what if you had a guy like that who didn't want that kind of attention and actually might have a moral problem of his own with what he is doing. He can't stand the things that define him.
DRE: I found the book to be very moralistic amid all its griminess.
DL: That might have been my shortcoming.
DRE: Appealing to America's morals might not be the best idea.
DL: I wouldn't go that far but maybe it's my own Middle American values, even though I didn't grow up in Middle America, coming forth.
DRE: Are you Jewish?
DL: Yeah.
DRE: So you spell your name wrong?
DL: I guess so.
DRE: How does being Jewish influence your work?
DL: In Swagbelly it's a pretty big factor. Jews to some degree are always outsiders. I thought that on some level it would be a parallel to a guy that's a pornographer. There are certain hypocrisies that people respect and disrespect.
DRE: The book is very moral within its rules. The Mafia and poker are very similar in that respect.
DL: I like these denouements that have real structured rules that have nothing to do with the laws of outside society. It's like almost a tribal thing. People who have the same interests are drawn to these worlds; they set these things up in either a spoken or unspoken way.
DRE: What activities do you still do that have their own worlds?
DL: I played plenty of poker in my day. I've hardly played at all in the last couple of years because I reached maximum density through the making of Rounders. I played a lot of games in illegal clubs where you had to have a sensitive understanding of what you could and couldn't do because your health depended on it.
DRE: These are dangerous places. Are you an adventurer type?
DL: Yeah but it's only dangerous if you're kind of stupid. Anyone can step wrong but if you're careful and somewhat respectful you'll be fine. In fact my partner Brian Koppelman and I we were researching Knockaround Guys out in Montana. We walked into this bar filled with farmers, oil rigger guys and we really stood out as guys who weren't from this small town of 300 people. Those guys were nice enough to arrange a poker game around us that night. They had bottles of liquor on the table, were pouring from them freely hoping to get us drunk and take all our money.
DRE: Did you clean up?
DL: We took a little bit and left enough so they would let us leave. If we cleaned them out who knows what they would have done.
DRE: So like you were saying Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner seem pretty happy. Who knew that the life of a pornographer could be so hard? How much research did you do?
DL: Well if you call it research.
DRE: [laughs] So you've been researching this since you were 13.
DL: Exactly. I didn't talk to anyone in the pornography industry. My only experience with pornography is the final product. Since I've written the book I've seen a couple of documentaries on it. But for me porn was just a setting for this guy and it did define him a certain way. But he's a guy having a midlife crisis and it's totally separate from what he does for a living.
DRE: So it could have been about anyone who ran a large corporation and was having a midlife crisis.
DL: Right.
DRE: You're in your mid 30's. What's it like writing about a guy 20 years older than you going through that? Are you trying to avoid your own crisis?
DL: Well I guess I'm getting ahead of myself but there was something liberating about it because anyone at any age can envision might have had that might be beyond my years. But I didn't have the pressure of making this guy a complete sage because he was so trapped by his limitations.
DRE: Is Elliot kind of the grown up version of your movie characters?
DL: Not of a specific one but it's possible.
DRE: It's hard for a writer to be objective about their work.
DL: I can't tell if the characters from the movies would have ended up there.
DRE: How much of Swagbelly is autobiographical?
DL: None of it really other than that I bartended at a fancy Upper East Side Italian restaurant where a lot of the book takes place. I got a little bit of what it was like and the customers that were there.
DRE: This book is about sex, money and regret. Do you take part in those three things?
DL: I don't disdain any of it. But I think the hard thing to do is maintain a sense of liberation about those things and not get trapped in a cycle of them. But it's a part of life especially in this country.
DRE: Did you figure out what makes a man happy?
DL: In this book he clearly doesn't come up with all the answers but there is some redemption for him. As far me, some days I'm sure I know and other days it slips away. Like a slippery goldfish falling out of my hands.
I did have a son nine months ago so whenever I see his face that answers a lot of things for me.
DRE: What's it like writing a detailed sex scene for a book?
DL: It's a lot of fun. You have to embrace your work. Its definitely a lot more fun than executing it on a movie set. There's a joke on movie sets that when there is closed set for a nude scene you find out just how many teamsters are employed. They're all standing around the monitor.
DRE: Who is more powerful in America, men or women?
DL: I don't know if I can generalize. Jenna Jameson is a lot more powerful than a lot of men.
DRE: How did you get into movies?
DL: I loved movies growing up and I read a lot. I thought I could do both then I figured out how to do both. I worked in the business for a while and that was the setting for my first novel, Wormwood. Then after a couple of years I decided to do some fiction writing.
DRE: How many screenplays have you and Brian written?
DL: Rounders was the first one we wrote together. Probably 12.
DRE: You guys also wrote Runaway Jury. How was that?
DL: It was weird because in the past when we had done a movie we see it through from beginning to end. This one they bought and then made the movie pretty quickly. But we went on to our next project. It seems like it turned out really well.
DRE: Interview with the Assassin is one of my favorite movies.
DL: I'm so glad to hear because unfortunately that was a movie that was missed by the majority of filmgoers. [director] Neil [Burger] executed that movie to the highest level and it was a real privilege to be involved with that.
DRE: What did you do on that film as producers?
DL: Neil brought the script to us and we went out and raised the money together. Then we stayed involved as creative producers. Just to give him the support he needed to make the movie. We gave him notes and then went and got distribution.
DRE: Raymond Barry was terrifying in it. When he turns around and looks at the camera, wow.
DL: It was the creepiest look. With that movie Neil started with an amazing premise and he pulled it off.
DRE: Are you a conspiracy guy yourself?
DL: Not a huge real time conspiracy guy but I love conspiracy as a genre. I love American Tabloid by James Ellroy. I'm sure it didn't happen the way he presented it but he does it in such detail that it makes you believe it could have happened that way. It's a fascinating history presented in a trilogy. The first one takes you up to the Kennedy assassination. The second way to Robert Kennedy and the third one through Watergate. It's the way I want to imagine things happening in this country.
DRE: Why did it take Knockaround Guys so long to come out?
DL: New Line was overextended because of the first Lord of the Rings. That was the problem with our timing. By the time we finished the movie they had to wait and see if Lord of the Rings was going to succeed. The future of the company was behind that. It gave our movie a bit of a black eye but luckily there were some reviewers who didn't bring that into it.
DRE: What was it like making Vin Diesel a big tough Jew?
DL: Vin is a guy who can play a multitude of races so that was great because there aren't that many.
DRE: Was it you or Brian who had 500 fights [a line from Knockaround Guys]?
DL: Neither one of us. It was a guy we both know who came up with that theory when he was young and as a result he became a pretty tough guy.
DRE: Is he Jewish?
DL: Yeah.
DRE: That's awesome. How autobiographical is Rounders?
DL: Rounders had some elements for sure. Brian went to law school. We both played a lot of cards but Brian played for higher stakes than me. So there were certainly elements of how much of time and money was worth devoting to cards.
DRE: Working with [Rounders director] John Dahl must have been pretty amazing.
DL: We were pretty closely involved with getting him to do the movie. We suggested John and the studio said they would definitely make the movie if he signed on. We had our agent get the script to him and we waited about a week in Los Angeles until he finished it. Then he signed on. Since we had so much insight into poker and underground clubs, Dahl kept us around every day of the shoot. We really learned filmmaking from him.
DRE: What's your favorite pornography?
DL: A particular title?
DRE: [laughs] If you have one that's great.
DL: The advent of porn on DVD is great because you can skip chapters and you don't have to mess around with the VHS anymore. Also maybe it's from my childhood but I'm still a sucker for magazines.
DRE: What did you think of Suicide Girls?
DL: I hadn't heard of it before but I think in the future I will definitely be spending time on it.
DRE: What's your favorite out of the punk, emo and Goth girls?
DL: I think I got to go with punk.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
Swagbelly is the story of Elliot Grubman who seems to have a life any other man would envy. Unimaginable wealth, bachelor status, and his own magazine, Swagbelly - the magazine for today's gentleman. That provides him with the companionship of a never-ending succession of Amazonian models with blonde hair, big chests, and tremendous bone structure. Yet, happiness eludes him. His wife left him, his thirteen-year-old son refuses to be Bar Mitzvahed and is converting to Catholicism; his girlfriend may or may not be of legal age and worst of all, for the last several weeks, Eliot has been unable to "perform."
Swagbelly is the great American novel with the man high up in the tree with stones being thrown at him. Now he must get down and not hit as braches as possible.
Levien has had the kind of the life many aspiring creators envy as well. As DJ Levien he is a well known screenwriter, with filmmaking partner Brian Koppelman they have penned Rounders and the upcoming Runaway Jury. Most recently the pair has moved into directing with the mob movie Knockaround Guys starring Vin Diesel and Seth Green. They have also produced one of my favorite movies, Interview with the Assassin, about a man who believes he has found JFK's killer and wants to make a documentary with him.
Check out Levien's website and get Swagbelly at djlevien.com.
Daniel Robert Epstein: What's up with the DJ thing?
DJ Levien: It's something that I started doing when I first started doing screenplays. I wrote my name on my first screenplays. Then in my head DJ was a bit of literary alter ego.
DRE: So you don't spin at clubs?
DL: No not like DJ Premier.
DRE: A lot of your work seems to be about the gaining of wealth through unsavory means. That follows through with Swagbelly.
DL: Is there any other way?
DRE: [laughs] Does that work with writing?
DL: Some do say that screenwriting is unsavory work with Hollywood and all that. I haven't heard that analysis before but I guess you're right.
DRE: What fascinates you about that?
DL: For me it's any kind of world outside the main world that has rules and customs of its own becomes interesting to me. I like to jump in there and explore it. Money is sort of dirty so you have to do dirty things to get it.
DRE: All money is dirty?
DL: It can be. It makes you do things you didn't think you would do.
DRE: So do you think Elliott Grubman didn't want to do what he did to become rich?
DL: I don't know about that. I'm interested in this subgenre of famous pornographers in this country who made their big fortune by being purveyors. They get all this publicity and they seem to enjoy it. But my springboard was what if you had a guy like that who didn't want that kind of attention and actually might have a moral problem of his own with what he is doing. He can't stand the things that define him.
DRE: I found the book to be very moralistic amid all its griminess.
DL: That might have been my shortcoming.
DRE: Appealing to America's morals might not be the best idea.
DL: I wouldn't go that far but maybe it's my own Middle American values, even though I didn't grow up in Middle America, coming forth.
DRE: Are you Jewish?
DL: Yeah.
DRE: So you spell your name wrong?
DL: I guess so.
DRE: How does being Jewish influence your work?
DL: In Swagbelly it's a pretty big factor. Jews to some degree are always outsiders. I thought that on some level it would be a parallel to a guy that's a pornographer. There are certain hypocrisies that people respect and disrespect.
DRE: The book is very moral within its rules. The Mafia and poker are very similar in that respect.
DL: I like these denouements that have real structured rules that have nothing to do with the laws of outside society. It's like almost a tribal thing. People who have the same interests are drawn to these worlds; they set these things up in either a spoken or unspoken way.
DRE: What activities do you still do that have their own worlds?
DL: I played plenty of poker in my day. I've hardly played at all in the last couple of years because I reached maximum density through the making of Rounders. I played a lot of games in illegal clubs where you had to have a sensitive understanding of what you could and couldn't do because your health depended on it.
DRE: These are dangerous places. Are you an adventurer type?
DL: Yeah but it's only dangerous if you're kind of stupid. Anyone can step wrong but if you're careful and somewhat respectful you'll be fine. In fact my partner Brian Koppelman and I we were researching Knockaround Guys out in Montana. We walked into this bar filled with farmers, oil rigger guys and we really stood out as guys who weren't from this small town of 300 people. Those guys were nice enough to arrange a poker game around us that night. They had bottles of liquor on the table, were pouring from them freely hoping to get us drunk and take all our money.
DRE: Did you clean up?
DL: We took a little bit and left enough so they would let us leave. If we cleaned them out who knows what they would have done.
DRE: So like you were saying Larry Flynt and Hugh Hefner seem pretty happy. Who knew that the life of a pornographer could be so hard? How much research did you do?
DL: Well if you call it research.
DRE: [laughs] So you've been researching this since you were 13.
DL: Exactly. I didn't talk to anyone in the pornography industry. My only experience with pornography is the final product. Since I've written the book I've seen a couple of documentaries on it. But for me porn was just a setting for this guy and it did define him a certain way. But he's a guy having a midlife crisis and it's totally separate from what he does for a living.
DRE: So it could have been about anyone who ran a large corporation and was having a midlife crisis.
DL: Right.
DRE: You're in your mid 30's. What's it like writing about a guy 20 years older than you going through that? Are you trying to avoid your own crisis?
DL: Well I guess I'm getting ahead of myself but there was something liberating about it because anyone at any age can envision might have had that might be beyond my years. But I didn't have the pressure of making this guy a complete sage because he was so trapped by his limitations.
DRE: Is Elliot kind of the grown up version of your movie characters?
DL: Not of a specific one but it's possible.
DRE: It's hard for a writer to be objective about their work.
DL: I can't tell if the characters from the movies would have ended up there.
DRE: How much of Swagbelly is autobiographical?
DL: None of it really other than that I bartended at a fancy Upper East Side Italian restaurant where a lot of the book takes place. I got a little bit of what it was like and the customers that were there.
DRE: This book is about sex, money and regret. Do you take part in those three things?
DL: I don't disdain any of it. But I think the hard thing to do is maintain a sense of liberation about those things and not get trapped in a cycle of them. But it's a part of life especially in this country.
DRE: Did you figure out what makes a man happy?
DL: In this book he clearly doesn't come up with all the answers but there is some redemption for him. As far me, some days I'm sure I know and other days it slips away. Like a slippery goldfish falling out of my hands.
I did have a son nine months ago so whenever I see his face that answers a lot of things for me.
DRE: What's it like writing a detailed sex scene for a book?
DL: It's a lot of fun. You have to embrace your work. Its definitely a lot more fun than executing it on a movie set. There's a joke on movie sets that when there is closed set for a nude scene you find out just how many teamsters are employed. They're all standing around the monitor.
DRE: Who is more powerful in America, men or women?
DL: I don't know if I can generalize. Jenna Jameson is a lot more powerful than a lot of men.
DRE: How did you get into movies?
DL: I loved movies growing up and I read a lot. I thought I could do both then I figured out how to do both. I worked in the business for a while and that was the setting for my first novel, Wormwood. Then after a couple of years I decided to do some fiction writing.
DRE: How many screenplays have you and Brian written?
DL: Rounders was the first one we wrote together. Probably 12.
DRE: You guys also wrote Runaway Jury. How was that?
DL: It was weird because in the past when we had done a movie we see it through from beginning to end. This one they bought and then made the movie pretty quickly. But we went on to our next project. It seems like it turned out really well.
DRE: Interview with the Assassin is one of my favorite movies.
DL: I'm so glad to hear because unfortunately that was a movie that was missed by the majority of filmgoers. [director] Neil [Burger] executed that movie to the highest level and it was a real privilege to be involved with that.
DRE: What did you do on that film as producers?
DL: Neil brought the script to us and we went out and raised the money together. Then we stayed involved as creative producers. Just to give him the support he needed to make the movie. We gave him notes and then went and got distribution.
DRE: Raymond Barry was terrifying in it. When he turns around and looks at the camera, wow.
DL: It was the creepiest look. With that movie Neil started with an amazing premise and he pulled it off.
DRE: Are you a conspiracy guy yourself?
DL: Not a huge real time conspiracy guy but I love conspiracy as a genre. I love American Tabloid by James Ellroy. I'm sure it didn't happen the way he presented it but he does it in such detail that it makes you believe it could have happened that way. It's a fascinating history presented in a trilogy. The first one takes you up to the Kennedy assassination. The second way to Robert Kennedy and the third one through Watergate. It's the way I want to imagine things happening in this country.
DRE: Why did it take Knockaround Guys so long to come out?
DL: New Line was overextended because of the first Lord of the Rings. That was the problem with our timing. By the time we finished the movie they had to wait and see if Lord of the Rings was going to succeed. The future of the company was behind that. It gave our movie a bit of a black eye but luckily there were some reviewers who didn't bring that into it.
DRE: What was it like making Vin Diesel a big tough Jew?
DL: Vin is a guy who can play a multitude of races so that was great because there aren't that many.
DRE: Was it you or Brian who had 500 fights [a line from Knockaround Guys]?
DL: Neither one of us. It was a guy we both know who came up with that theory when he was young and as a result he became a pretty tough guy.
DRE: Is he Jewish?
DL: Yeah.
DRE: That's awesome. How autobiographical is Rounders?
DL: Rounders had some elements for sure. Brian went to law school. We both played a lot of cards but Brian played for higher stakes than me. So there were certainly elements of how much of time and money was worth devoting to cards.
DRE: Working with [Rounders director] John Dahl must have been pretty amazing.
DL: We were pretty closely involved with getting him to do the movie. We suggested John and the studio said they would definitely make the movie if he signed on. We had our agent get the script to him and we waited about a week in Los Angeles until he finished it. Then he signed on. Since we had so much insight into poker and underground clubs, Dahl kept us around every day of the shoot. We really learned filmmaking from him.
DRE: What's your favorite pornography?
DL: A particular title?
DRE: [laughs] If you have one that's great.
DL: The advent of porn on DVD is great because you can skip chapters and you don't have to mess around with the VHS anymore. Also maybe it's from my childhood but I'm still a sucker for magazines.
DRE: What did you think of Suicide Girls?
DL: I hadn't heard of it before but I think in the future I will definitely be spending time on it.
DRE: What's your favorite out of the punk, emo and Goth girls?
DL: I think I got to go with punk.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
missy:
David Levien is nice Jewish boy who grew in Great Neck. So how did he get mixed with pornographers, high stakes gambling and the mob? The easy way, he writes about them. Levien's latest book in paperback is Swagbelly...
bridget:
Great Neck? North or South?