Mark Boal looked more apprehensive at
Sunday night waiting to talk about the writing life than he did accepting an Oscar for best original screenplay at the Academy Awards last March.
Perhaps it was the venerable, soaring interior of Finney Chapel -- where Toni Morrison, Newt Gingrich and Stevie Wonder have held forth -- but Boal's eyebrows shot up as Oberlin College President Marvin Krislov introduced him with a line borrowed from Rene Descartes.
Before Boal's convocation talk, Krislov presented him with a framed photograph of the marquee of the town's only movie theater, the Apollo.
" 'Hurt Locker' played in 500 theaters and I can guarantee that this is the only time the writer's name was on the marquee," Boal said, smiling. He told the Finney Chapel audience that he had taken his first walk around campus in 15 years, met with a group of students, and that "Oberlin still produces a uniquely wide-ranging and curious sensibility."
"Hurt Locker," which also won Oscars for best picture and best director, began as a 2005 Playboy magazine report that Boal wrote about American soldiers assigned to defuse bombs in Iraq. Boal said he was imbedded in Baghdad for two weeks.
Playboy paid his expenses -- which included $20,000 in kidnapping insurance -- and the reporter confessed he felt terror in Iraq.
"No matter how many war movies you've seen or video games you've played, there is no substitute for standing in a war zone where bombs can actually go off, and blood can actually be shed, especially if it's your own blood," Boal said.
He described himself ten years earlier as a rudderless senior with "a low GPA" who attended one of then-president S. Frederick Starr's frequent, large parties, where he asked for advice.
"President Starr told me to look out in the world and see if there was a gap and go out and fill it," Boal said. The graduate sold his car and bought a one-way ticket to Eastern Europe, where he eventually landed work as a copy editor at an English language newspaper in Budapest.
Back in New York, Boal said he started writing for small circulars, the kind of newspaper distributed in laundromats.
"You have to be willing to get your teeth kicked in repeatedly to get a modicum of success," said Boal, who eventually worked his way onto The Village Voice. He said the cliched advice of not taking no for an answer was valid.
He described himself asleep in bed Sept. 11, 2001 while a few blocks away, a former classmate was charging up the stairs of the second World Trade Center tower. A former Marine who became a fire fighter, this friend --whom Boal identified as "Christian" -- was the cool kid who listened to Guns and Roses and could maneuver his Zippo lighter with one hand. Boal, meanwhile, concentrated on excelling at debate for the Bronx High School of Science.
The classmate died in the conflagration. Boal said he turned to reporting on the military, a topic that hadn't entered his head before the attacks.
Becoming a fiction writer was harrowing, Boal said, noting that he worked on the screenplay for "Hurt Locker" for nine months without success. Director Kathryn Bigelow finally asked a friend to intervene with this advice: "Mark, you need to get a knife and stab yourself in the chest and kill the journalist in yourself."
Boal said he substituted three days of Jameson whiskey for the knife, and later, after a serious motorcycle accident knocked him unconscious, he began yet another draft. This time, he adding two supporting characters to play off his central figure, bomb squad Sgt. William James. The new soldiers, Boal said, allowed him to better explore his own responses to the courage and recklessness of his anti-hero.
The screenwriter did not mention the federal lawsuit brought by Sgt. Jeffery S. Sarver, filed five days before the Academy Awards. Sarver alleged "Hurt Locker" was a rip-off of his life, and that he was the model for Sgt. James, played by Jeremy Renner.
Bigelow and Boal have stressed that their movie is fictional.
As he finished his remarks, Boal described watching the film's opening scene, in which "Jeremy Renner flips open his Zippo lighter and says something cool. At that moment, I realized that Jeremy had brought my friend Christian back to life."