The good news for writer Daniel James Brown: He sold "The Boys in the Boat" to a movie producer the day after a publisher bought it.
The bad news? The producer was soon-to-be-disgraced Harvey Weinstein.
"Kenneth Branagh was going to direct and Weinstein was going to produce. But the company, for the next several years, was circling the drain, so the book got caught up in that," recalled Brown by phone from his Seattle home. "It bounced around a bit but once it got to MGM and George Clooney got involved, it picked up steam pretty quickly. It took about two years from that point to the actual movie," which opens in theaters Monday.
Brown had a good feeling about Clooney from the beginning. The actor/director (who does not appear in "Boys") called Brown before production began last year on the adaptation of his 2013 blockbuster book about a ragtag, against-the-odds Washington rowing team that went on to triumph at the 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin.
"He talked about how he had grown up fairly poor in Kentucky and scrambled to make it through school and how that helped him empathize with Joe Rantz, who's featured in the nonfiction book, and all the Depression kids. He was so genuine," said Brown, whose role in the film was just to give a few notes on the script. "He didn't have to talk to me at all. It was just a nice thing he did."
Clooney also invited Brown and his wife, Sharon, to an advance screening last August.
"I was surprised how touched I was," said Brown, who had enthusiastic chats with Clooney and his wife, Amal, before and after the screening. "There is a love story in the book between [rower] Joe and his girlfriend Joyce, but they make more of that in the movie and that was really touching. I was tearing up a few times and my wife was sniffling through the whole movie."
Brown thinks the movie captures the "feel-good, uplifting, proud-to-be-an-American" spirit of the book.
"One thing Clooney and I talked about is there are so many cynical movies out there these days that he felt it was time to make an old-fashioned, rah-rah, feel-good, heartwarming movie," said Brown. "The book has been really popular, way more popular than I ever dreamed [it has sold more than 3 million copies] and I think that's partly because people come away from it feeling good."
One of the trickiest parts of writing, Brown said, was capturing in words the excitement and grit of half a dozen big races. Eventually, his research led him to what was unique about those races — each of which seems tailor-made for the visual medium of cinema.
"A particular scene in the book I had really looked forward to writing was a race in Poughkeepsie, New York, the same year they went on to win the gold medal. It was a four-mile race and it was amazing. My guys came from way behind to sweep the field at the finish line," said Brown. "They did a really good job with it in the movie, but I think they did an even better job with the gold medal race in Berlin, which is just really dramatic."
Although Brown became a big name with "Boys in the Boat," many Minnesotans already knew his work because of his 2006 "Under a Flaming Sky," a gripping account of the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894. That book grew out of stories Brown's mother told him.
"My great-grandfather worked at the lumber mill in Hinckley. The day of the fire the millhands were told to go to the south end of town to try to fight the fire. He was one of those who died there, while they tried to evacuate the rest of the town," said Brown, who made several "Flaming" research trips to Minnesota. "My great-grandmother and their kids escaped on one of the trains, one that caught fire four or five miles out of town. So they all piled off the train and immersed themselves in a swamp and that's how they survived."
Brown has published another nonfiction book since "Boys in the Boat" — "Facing the Mountain" in 2021 — but he's contemplating a gear-shift next. He's not sure what will come of it, but is currently at work on a novel, which would be his first published work of fiction.
