Margulies goes on the road with ‘End of the Tour’

The work of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and screenwriter Donald Margulies (“Dinner With Friends”) long has explored the struggles of the modern artist. After newspapers panned a couple of his early plays, and after the brisk closing of his Manhattan Theatre Club debut, “What’s Wrong With This Picture?” near the beginning of his career, Margulies penned his 1991 breakout play, “Sight Unseen,” about a superstar painter grappling with his Jewish identity as well as the trappings of his success. 

That play earned Margulies a Pulitzer Prize nomination, as did his ensuing play, “Collected Stories,” in which a student appropriates her Jewish mentor’s memories of a youthful love affair to write her own breakout novel. “Brooklyn Boy” revolves around an established novelist, Eric Weiss, who returns home to visit his dying father and to come to terms with the neighborhood that inspired much of his work.

Now Margulies, 60, has written the screenplay for James Ponsoldt’s film, “The End of the Tour,” based on David Lipsky’s 2010 book, “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself:  A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace,” an account of Lipsky’s five-day Rolling Stone interview with the scruffy but legendary novelist when both were in their 30s. The interview took place in the snowy Midwest as Wallace was finishing his 1996 publicity tour for his magnum opus, “Infinite Jest,” a sprawling, brilliant exploration of ennui among contemporary Americans.

“I seem to continually write about the role of the artist in the world,” Margulies said of one reason he was drawn to the project, during a recent interview in Beverly Hills. “That may hearken back to my having been an artistic kid in a lower-middle-class Jewish unintellectual household in Brooklyn, trying to figure out my place in the world.”

In 2008 — 12 years after being interviewed by Lipsky — Wallace committed suicide by hanging himself in his Claremont, Calif., home after battling severe depression that did not respond even to shock treatments. 

At the time of the Rolling Stone interview, Wallace was feeling relatively stable: “The conundrum dramatized in ‘The End of the Tour’ is his tortured ambivalence about his success,” Margulies said. “He says, ‘I don’t want to appear as someone who wants to be interviewed by Rolling Stone’ — while he’s being interviewed by Rolling Stone. He’s sort of tantalized by the limelight but also dreading it, and hating himself for it. He worries the attention might somehow diminish and taint his work.”

Jesse Eisenberg, who received an Oscar nomination for playing Facebook mogul Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network” and portrays Lipsky in “The End of the Tour,” sees Lipsky as an equally conflicted character.

“[He] is not just a writer who admires Wallace, but who actually has some ulterior motives — at worst as a kind of sniper, and at best as a kind of exposer,” Eisenberg, 31, said during a recent interview in Beverly Hills. “But then, of course, while playing the role, I found all these different layers in the character: not just jealousy and competitiveness but also admiration and love.”

During a Q-and-A following a recent screening of the movie in Beverly Hills, Michael Silverblatt, host of KCRW’s program “Bookworm” and a friend of Wallace’s, went so far as to refer to Lipsky as a “douchebag” whose envy of Wallace spurred his approach to the interview.

“But I wouldn’t make that judgment,” Margulies said. “Lipsky in the film is being coached by his editor, who accuses him of not wanting to ask the tough questions because he likes Wallace, and to ‘be a prick if you have to.’ Lipsky does envy Wallace, and he wants what Wallace has, but he also wants Wallace’s approval.”

Eventually, Lipsky does get Wallace to open up about his rumored past heroin addiction (false, Wallace insists) and also about his battles with alcohol and his eight-day suicide watch in a hospital when he was in his 20s. 

“At the time the movie takes place, he’s at a really good point in his journey, but at the back of his mind he knows that that other sensation exists, that it’s around any given corner, and that’s a terrifying thing to live with,” said Jason Segel, 35, who plays the novelist and participated in an interview with the Journal alongside Eisenberg.

Before Margulies wrote “The End of the Tour,” he said, he “couldn’t claim to be a fanboy” of Wallace’s. “I had tried to read ‘Infinite Jest’ 20 years ago, and I just didn’t get sucked into it.”

Fast forward to about four years ago, when Margulies’ longtime manager sent him a copy of Lipsky’s book, written after Wallace’s suicide and compiled from transcripts of the 1996 Rolling Stone interview. The article itself was never published in the magazine because Lipsky’s editors decided to nix the story.

Lipsky’s book came to Margulies with a note suggesting that it might be good fodder for a play. Instead, Margulies envisioned what he calls “a road picture.”

“I was very excited by the prospect of putting David Foster Wallace, one of the great chroniclers of American culture, on the American landscape — just seeing his iconic figure traversing the fast-food joints and the 7-Elevens and even the Mall of America [in Bloomington, Minn.]. … It was only when I read Lipsky’s book that I fully mourned the loss of David Foster Wallace and was drawn to read ‘Infinite Jest’ again, but with a new appreciation,” he said.

As part of his research for the film, Margulies met for hours with Lipsky, who recounted for him an anecdote he did not include in his book: the time that Wallace, incensed over what he perceived to be Lipsky hitting on his ex-girlfriend, aggressively confronted the reporter about the alleged flirting. The incident, which is included in the film, alludes to Wallace’s darker side; as Silverblatt noted during the Q-and-A, Wallace could get “ferociously upset” and had been known to hit some of his girlfriends. 

“I’m surprised that Lipsky didn’t get beaten up,” Silverblatt said.

Eisenberg said he grappled with how to understand Lipsky’s motives during that lengthy interview. As an actor, he is used to being the subject of reportage. In fact, “A few months prior to reading the script, I had done a three-day interview that I thought right at the offset was antagonistic,” Eisenberg said. “So this role pushed me to really think about why a journalist would want to be invasive. I had to learn to identify with the journalist.”

Segel, known for his comedic yet vulnerable performances in comedies such as “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” said he was drawn to his character because, “The material was in line with stuff I was thinking about at that point in my life, in terms of what was going to make me feel OK. It didn’t seem to be success or money or status. It’s: What happens when things are going as well as they could possibly go and you still feel less than, ‘I’m not there yet,’ and the sense of being part of a ranking system.”

The actors were surprised last year, when Wallace’s family released a statement that said they do not consider the film an “homage” to the late Wallace and that “David would never have agreed that [Lipsky’s] saved transcripts could later be repurposed as the basis for a movie.”

In response, Segel insisted, “Everyone who worked on the film had nothing but reverence for Wallace.”

“Wallace is not just theirs,” Margulies said of the author’s family. “He is a part of our culture [and someone] who has had an impact on a lot of people. And if Lipsky gave us this entrée into learning a little bit more about Wallace and introducing him to a new generation of potential readers, that’s the collateral benefit of all of this.” 

“The End of the Tour” opens in theaters on July 31.