Fifty years ago, Richard Walter wrote a novel about a somewhat antisemitic West Virginia Buick dealer who wakes up one day to find himself transformed into the world’s most popular Jewish comedian, Richie Ritchie. It was a brilliantly humorous book, full of surprising twists — a real page-turner.
But Walter couldn’t find a publisher for it, so he let it go. Then one day, during the COVID pandemic, he received a phone call from someone who had read it. The caller asked, “Say, what happened to that book you wrote?”
“It occurred to me that if someone was thinking about it after so many years, decades after I had written it, I’d better take another look,” said Walter.
He pulled it out from where it had been stored all those years, reread it, and sat down to rewrite it.
Because the pandemic had just hit and most people were staying home, Walter had nothing better to do than pour his time and energy into writing. Still, after completing the revision and being satisfied with the result, he couldn’t find an agent to represent him.
Walter is no novice. He’s the author of six books, including “Essentials of Screenwriting: The Art, Craft and Business of Film and Television Writing” and “The Whole Picture.”
His third screenwriting book, published 15 years ago, was translated into Mandarin and continues to sell thousands of copies, providing him with royalties every month. A bestselling author in both fiction and nonfiction, Walter also led the screenwriting program at UCLA’s film school for four decades.
And yet, he still couldn’t get a book deal.
“I’ve had modest success as a writer. I’ve written scripts for major studios and television networks, lectured on screenwriting and storytelling and conducted master classes throughout North America and the world, but I couldn’t get a response from anyone. Some sent a polite turndown and rejection and the others didn’t respond at all.”
It soon became clear to him that, in today’s publishing climate, Jewish subject matter — no matter how satirical or comedic — makes people uncomfortable.
“There seems to be a plague of comfort. Everybody’s supposed to be comfortable,” he said. “I taught writing for over 40 years at UCLA, and I always believed good writing is supposed to make people uncomfortable. It should provoke them, upset them and make them think. Likewise with movies. The last thing you want to do is make people feel comfortable.”
“There seems to be a plague of comfort. Everybody’s supposed to be comfortable,” he said. “I taught writing for over 40 years at UCLA, and I always believed good writing is supposed to make people uncomfortable.“
Then he heard about Heresy Press and decided to give it a try. He sent them his novel, not expecting much. They contacted him two days later with an offer. That’s how, 50 years after he first started writing “Deadpan,” the book was finally published.
Walter grew up in New York in a family that had emigrated from Eastern Europe. Like many immigrants, he said, they wanted to assimilate and therefore abandoned any religious practice. Still, his neighborhood and the people he knew were all Jewish.
As such, his Jewish identity wasn’t particularly strong — except for the fact that he knew he was Jewish. The turning point, perhaps, came when he heard a Black student lecturing at Howard University to a group of Black students. Those were the years of the Black liberation movement and Martin Luther King. The student stood before them and said they should be proud of their Black heritage. “Repeat after me: My hair is curly, I am Black and I’m proud to be Black.”
“As I watched him,” Walter recalled, “I was thinking, ‘I’m a Jew. I don’t go to temple, I don’t keep all the traditions, I don’t keep kosher, but the way I use humor, the personality that I have, the style, is very much Jewish culturally. I realized at that moment that I don’t need to do all that paraphernalia to be Jewish — my identity is one.’”
Being surrounded by Jews and having them as part of the local background never made him think much about it. He was Jewish as much as he was a man and an American. The first time, however, he truly understood the concept of antisemitism was in 1973, after the Yom Kippur War.
“This led to the oil crisis in the U.S. because of the U.S. support of Israel. People lined up to get gasoline and there was an outpouring of antisemitism. I’d heard vaguely about antisemitism, but I’d never really encountered it. Then I started to notice it. People wrote on oil tanks and refineries, ‘Burn Jews, not Oil’ and ‘Dump Kissinger,’ because he was a Jew and the U.S. Secretary of State back then.”
Walter chose to set his book during that era of antisemitism, and he didn’t change the setting decades later when he sat down to rewrite it. He didn’t need to — history repeats itself and the story remains just as relevant today as it was back then.
“The idea came to me as I was thinking about Kafka’s story ‘Metamorphosis,’ of a man who is inexplicably transformed into an insect. I was thinking, what else can someone wake up as?” Walter said. “And then I thought, ‘Since so many comedians are Jews, why not make my book about a Jewish comedian? And why not let the person who is transformed into that comedian be somewhat of an antisemite?’” he said.
Even though his experience with publishing this book was not an easy one, Walter doesn’t regret his decision to make the story about a Jewish character and a subject that some publishers find “uncomfortable.”
“Writing is not about strategizing, it’s about feeling and emotions,” he said. “I used to tell my students, ‘You don’t have to make people feel good, you just have to make them feel. You scare them half to death, you outrage them, you make them sad—as long as it’s passionate and evokes emotions, you’re fine.’”
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