The First Time's the Charm

In little more than a year, John Jeter has gone from freelance art director to author of a play that's being made into a movie with some of Hollywood's hottest names attached.

Dirty Tricks, the first play Jeter ever wrote, was produced last fall at the Public Theater. This summer the film rights were sold to Ryan Murphy, creator of cable buzz-magnet Nip/Tuck, who will adapt and direct the movie, to star Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow, Annette Bening and Jill Clayburgh (all Oscar winners or multiple nominees). Murphy is coproducing the film with Brad Pitt's production company, Plan B, for release by Paramount.

And this week an audio version of the play featuring its stage star, Judith Ivey, airs on BBC Radio 4. The radio broadcast was October 18, but you can listen to it until October 25 via the website www.bbc.co.uk/radio. Sir David Frost hosts.

International airplay, Hollywood dealmaking, all-star cast…and just 18 months ago Jeter—like Martha Mitchell (the subject of his play), a native of Pine Bluff, Arkansas—was working behind the scenes of kiddie shows and other B-list television fare filmed in Houston.

His play did seem to be blessed with "a guiding hand" throughout its development, Jeter said during an interview with BWW last month in Washington, D.C., where he now lives. That hand may have belonged to Mitchell herself. While writing Dirty Tricks, Jeter told the BBC, "I soon realized how I benefited tremendously from coming from Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Not only knowing family friends of Martha, but also the makeup of the region, the dialect and the sensitivities of Pine Bluff, I was able to craft my script with the authenticity of an insider. My Arkansas roots have guided me through this project, with Martha seemingly touching the process all along the way."

Martha Mitchell was the wife of Nixon attorney general John Mitchell, who served 19 months in prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up. She became a headline-maker in her own right thanks to some indiscreet ramblings to the Washington press corps as the Nixon administration was getting mired in scandal. After she claimed government agents had drugged her and held against her will in a California hotel room to keep her quiet, the White House smeared her as an alcoholic nutjob—and much of the public bought it. Watergate burglar James McCord later admitted her California allegations were true (Jeter originally titled his play Martha Was Right, the sentiment on one of the floral arrangements at her funeral).

For the movie of Dirty Tricks, Streep will take over the role of Mitchell. Bening will play journalist Helen Thomas; Paltrow will be Maureen Dean; and Clayburgh, Pat Nixon. (The latter three actresses also star in Murphy's film adaptation of Augusten Burroughs' best-selling memoir Running With Scissors, due out next year.) Mitchell was the only character in the play, but Jeter says the movie will be about "the women of Watergate." Though Jeter expects Murphy to seek his comments on the film script (as he's done with Burroughs), it's pretty much out of his hands. But Jeter isn't too concerned about Murphy's tinkering. "I think because he does have these strong women players that he liked the idea of all of this coming up around feminism's rebirth," Jeter said in the BWW interview, "and he liked the idea of these women against the old guard, the good ol' boys."

Murphy, who saw the play at the Public and was so enthusiastic he put up his own money for the screen rights, told Variety in August: "John loved my idea for the movie, the focus on a period in the country when both feminism and political corruption exploded in Washington." Filming is set to begin next spring.

Jeter knew Murphy had Streep in mind for Mitchell but learned of the other actresses involved through that Variety article announcing the deal. He's been thrilled with the talent associated with Dirty Tricks since it was on stage: "From Judith Ivey to Margaret Whitton directing to George Wolfe [then artistic director of the Public]—you have all these names. For my first time out, I was very fortunate to be in that sort of company."

Another name who figured in the play's development was Edward Albee. Jeter began writing Dirty Tricks as a prerequisite for enrolling in a class taught by Albee at the University of Houston. At the time Jeter was living in Houston and working as a freelance art director for TV and film (his credits include a children's show hosted by Mary Lou Retton and the TBS home-remodeling reality program House Rules). "I never took Edward's class," Jeter says, "because I spent over a year from then on researching, doing interviews, going back to Pine Bluff." Someone Jeter knew at Houston's Alley Theatre put him in touch with Albee, who attended the Alley reading of Dirty Tricks and gave feedback on the play.

By February 2004, Jeter had forsaken art direction to work full time on his play. Within six months, it was running at the Public—an election-season warning about presidential corruption and suppression of dissent masquerading as patriotism. The play concluded with Mitchell (Ivey) announcing, as Ray Charles' "America the Beautiful" swelled in the background: "We can't play the role of the blind patriot anymore. It is your duty to question authority, as sovereign as it may be. That's how this country came to be in the first place!"

Jeter, 45, is currently working on his second play, set in the South in 1964. In it, a young black man starts to question an incident 20 years earlier in which a black man was brain-damaged in what was labeled a hit-and-run. Unlike the solo Dirty Tricks, this play (tentatively titled Coon) has 10 characters, and Jeter says it's not just about race but "prejudice and acceptance in general." He adds, "Another thing I wanted to look at was relationships between whites and blacks where on a one-to-one basis, a personal level, people are people, and then separately dealing with race as a whole there's total racism from the same person."

Photos, from top: Judith Ivey in Dirty Tricks at the Public; Meryl Streep in her last movie based on a play, 2003's Angels in America; playwright John Jeter.