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Stewart Stern is a storyteller. I'm not just referring to his screenplays. When he speaks to you in his measured, deliberate manner, quietly but powerfully reaching back into his past, he is spellbinding. Whether in interview or simply in conversation, it's impossible not be moved, not just by the story, but the compassion, the fear, the joy, and the horror he brings to his life stories.

Two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter (for Teresa and Rachel, Rachel), Emmy-winner for the acclaimed TV movie Sybil, and writer of the groundbreaking drama of teenage crisis and alienation, Rebel Without a Cause, Stewart Stern is the nephew of famed old Hollywood mogul Adolph Zukor and cousin to theater chain mogul Marcus Loew. A career in Hollywood may have been fated, but he took his own unique route to get there, a journey that gave him his voice and the anxiety that plagued him until he dropped out of Hollywood over 25 years ago. He moved to Seattle, started teaching screenwriting courses at the University of Washington, and became a volunteer at Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo. He has also taught courses at USC, the AFI, the Sundance Institute, and most recently at Seattle's The Film School.

His story is told in the recent documentary Going Through Splat: The Life and Work of Stewart Stern by Jon Ward (still making the film festival rounds) and Stern holds the center of that production with his stories and remembrances. It's a story of becoming an artist, but it's also a profound portrait of an artist so plagued by anxiety - and so aware of it - that he had to leave his career to free his life from depression. We only talked for an hour, but in that time, he talked about his life - both his social/professional life and his inner life - with the same naked honesty that you see in his best screenwriting.

Going Through Splat: The Life and Work of Stewart Stern

In the documentary Going Through Splat, you never talked about how you made the transition from art school to writing, and especially from writing stories and then writing screenplays. Had you been taking writing classes, were you writing for yourself at the time, or were you even writing at all?

I loved writing in high school. I went to a wonderful private school in New York called the Ethical Culture School. Our English teacher was, I think, head of English at The New School as well as at our high school. I never got to read in college the required things that I did in high school. He had an amazing sensibility about the students he wanted in his seminar class, and we had an outstanding bunch, all of whom could have been writers including [photographer] Diane Arbus, who could very well have been a writer. He really encouraged me; he said he had a feeling I could do it, but it was the last thing I wanted to do.

I went to the University of Iowa because Grant Wood was there, teaching painting, and when I went out there, I found that he was on sabbatical and he had been replaced by what turned out to be an extraordinary artist, a German named Emilio Ganzo who used the oldest traditional way of making lithographs from stone surfaces. So I just was fascinated by that, but my whole concentration was on art, and he was going to spend that summer, he and his wife, at their little place at Woodstock, New York, and he asked me whether I would come as his apprentice. It was like getting a gift from heaven.

And then he was carrying one of these very heavy lithograph stones to the sink in order to run water on it and grind the surface, which you had to do if you wanted to erase the image. You used carborundum, which was a very heavy grit, and ran this other stone over it by a handle and it gradually ground down that surface so you could then use a lighter grit and then prepare if for taking the crayon again. In the process of carrying that stone, he dropped dead of a heart attack, and the next day and we all dragged ourselves to art class and they had substituted another very famous painter of that time called Fletcher Martin, but he had no sensitivity. A very sensitive man, but he had no sensitivity to students, so it was very, very hard to communicate with them. So I just stopped. I just lost my interest in art. And that summer, it was going to be another summer with my parents and my sister in some rented house in Connecticut, and I just couldn't.

In the wake of Ganzo's death and that experience with Fletcher Martin, I went back New York and I just wanted to get a job doing something. I had just turned 19 at the end of my freshman year and I wanted to not spend that summer without a car or not knowing how to drive or needing Mom to take us to the beach. So I looked in the New York Times to see what jobs there were, and I got stopped on the theater page because I got much more interested in seeing what matinee I could go to, and there was an ad saying that the John Drew Memorial Theater at East Hampton, Long Island, was offering a scholarship to a boy and a scholarship to a girl to attend the Rollins School of the Theater, which I had never heard of. It was an open audition being held at the Fulton Theater in New York, where Arsenic and Old Lace had just opened with Boris Karloff and Josephine Hull.

I loved acting too, so I went to see my acting teacher from high school and I told her about it and I said, "What can I do as an audition?" And she said, "There's a wonderful soliloquy in Ah, Wilderness by Eugene O'Neill. Why don't you look at that and then come up and do it with me?" And I did, and then I went down to the audition and it was incredible. There were, I think, 300 boys and girls auditioning and they had tied up the theater for two days, non-matinee days, and they were selling tickets to the public to come and watch these kids audition, as some kind of terrible barbarian Roman festival of death [laughs], but the tickets went to the benefit of something called Bundles For Britain, because we were not yet in the war but we were trying to help Britain fight their war. So with the money they got for Bundles For Britain, the things Britain needed were bought and sent there as a gift from the United States.

My turn came and I began to shake so hard that I could literally not stand up. I went out on stage and there was a work light, and I could not do it, so I asked for a chair and they slid this chair in and I sat on the chair. I was falling apart and finally laid down on the stage and held my head and looked straight into the eyes of Boris Karloff, who was sitting on the other side of the footlights wondering what the hell this kid was doing, and I did my soliloquy that way. After many more hours and many more candidates had gone by, they had a little conference and Karloff stood up and said my name. So I won one of the scholarships and went out to this amazing summer theater. It was run by a man named Leighton Rollins who was mentor to I can't even tell you how many budding actors who really became something, and a man of the highest principle. Boston-born and bred of the old school, and he had a staff that also came out of the old school, the classic theater, people whose names meant something back then and mean nothing now, and body movement way ahead of its time.

But in addition to that, I decided that I would write a musical and, not ever having written anything at that point except compositions in high school, I figured it shouldn't take any longer to write one than to see one. I was so amazed that three hours sitting in the dunes at East Hampton had gone by and I had only written two numbers. But I kept at for about a week and I finished this musical. It used other people's songs, but it used my words and I wrote all the sketches and we did it. It was the worst piece of shit you've ever seen in your life, but people came. I guess in the summer you forgive anything because, you know, the beach is there.

So that was the first. And then I did an adaptation that summer of Uncle Tom's Cabin, too, and loved writing. Then I switched my major at Iowa from fine arts to the theater and went back for my sophomore year and majored in acting and scene design, and not writing, but I was taking English there. It wasn't until the third year, when our ROTC unit had already been activated, that, in my final three months of school, I had a playwriting course from a woman named Marian Galloway, who had been Tennessee Williams's teacher when he had gone to the University of Iowa. She was an extraordinary being, way beyond her time.

I was suicidal, you know, when I was 18 or 19, because I was going through changes. I didn't know who I was, and I thought about suicide a lot, and I knew about the poet Thomas Chatterton who had killed himself when he was 18 in London because he was unrecognized as a poet. And I wrote this scene about the death of Chatterton and this teacher saw it and she said, "Stewart, you're a playwright." But she said, "The thing about playwrights is they have to write plays, just not last scenes, so I would like you write everything that goes ahead of that and I want you to give me an outline next week." So I burnt the midnight oil and I came in with a full outline and gave it to her and she handed it out to the class and she cast every role and made them go home and study the outline of this thing and come in the next day and we spent the entire afternoon improvising the entire play. This was unheard of then. I was taking notes and I ended up writing that play.

And then came the war. I wrote one poetic article while we were on maneuvers in Tennessee that my art teacher from the Ethical Culture School, who had become head of education for the Museum of Modern Art, asked me to do in a magazine called Design. and I still have it and it's an amazing article because I had justified war, which I was so dead against, but I said: We have to destroy in order to have the privilege of creating because everything was being destroyed by Hitler. All culture was being destroyed. And so that was my personal rationale. So I was a pacifist in the front-line trenches of the Battle of the Bulge, singing pacifist songs to keep the anger of my associates down because I didn't think that it was a matter of anger - this was something else that we were fighting for and you couldn't do it in a blind rage at anybody. Because these kids that we were facing were our age, they had gone through a different conditioning, a horrible conditioning, but they were us with a different language and in different uniforms and we had to kill them, but that was not a matter for... I was nuts, but that's what I did.

And then right after the war, when I was shipped back on the Queen Elizabeth I, which had been outfitted as a hospital ship, and we were in bunks, I couldn't use my feet, I couldn't use my hands at all, because the fingers were frost bitten. They were like glass, you could practically see through them. So I dictated while we were making that Atlantic crossing to a boy in the bunk below me, who had a body wound, but he could use his hands and he took notes of everything I had told him. So by the time we had gotten to the hospital on Staten Island, and I was working on my hands and finally gotten them to come back, I had a play written about the Battle of the Bulge, and then other shorter radio plays and things and then short stories. It was this absolute splurge of stuff that came out of me, all as a result of the war and the relationships I had. My buddies, my close buddies and the love we had for each other and the nightmare of that battle which was just beyond description, and I didn't stay for the worst of it. I was evacuated while we were still retreating and fighting as we went. But then they had to turn around and drive the Germans back and that's when the casualties just went crazy. So I had to keep doing that, I just had to keep doing that.

And that just went on and then I became an actor in New York and did a play on Broadway and wrote another play about the war which John Gasner, who at that time was the head of the literary department at, I think it was Columbia, and he was a great theater historian who wrote book after book about the best films of each year. He read my play through a mutual friend and he said, "You have got to go through the experience of having actors read this." So he made an arrangement with a great actor named Herbert Berghof, who was married to Uta Hagen and they had a studio together, and he had his students do a rehearsed reading. They rehearsed for two weeks and then did a reading of the play and the leading role was played by Maureen Stapleton, who was one of his students and who was on scholarship. And then an agent saw the play and said, "You've got to be a writer." So I didn't become a writer, but I became a dialogue director at a little new studio in town that's now gone called Eagle-Lion where they did all the film noir.

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