旅行终点 The End of the Tour Movie Script

LIPSKY:

Who are your readers? College kids?

DAVID:

The people who seem most enthusiastic are young men. Which I guess I canunderstand - it’s a fairly male book, a fairly nerdy book, about loneliness.

You can expect that somebody who'swilling to read and read hard a thousand-page book is gonna besomebody with some loneliness issues.

LIPSKY:

You think it’s about loneliness?

56.

DAVID:

I think if there is sort of a sadness for people under forty-five or something, it has to do with pleasure and achievement and entertainment.

And a kind of emptiness at heart of what they thought was going on, that maybe I can hope that parts of the book will speak to their nerve endings a little bit.

He presses stop on the tape recorder, surprising Lipsky.

DAVID (CONT’D) By the way, if you quote any of this, you’d do me a favor if you’d say that I’m talking about what I hope for the book, or what the book is tryin’ to do, I don’t pretend that it has. Okay?

LIPSKY:

That’s fine.

Lipsky presses play.

LIPSKY:

So:

the Walter Kirn review, in New York Magazine

DAVID:

Didn’t read it. I mean, I heard.

LIPSKY:

“Next year’s book awards have been decided” kind of thing? How’d it feel?

DAVID:

I applauded his taste and discernment.

What do you want me to say? How would you feel about it?

LIPSKY:

How would I feel? That I’d known all along it was good, and here was someone validating that.

DAVID:

All I know is, this is absolutely the best I could do between like 1992 and 1995. And if everybody hated it, I wouldn’t be thrilled, but I don’t think I’d be devastated, either.

57.

It’s like, if you’re used to doing heavy-duty literary stuff that doesn’t sell well, being human animals with egos, we find a way to accommodate that fact by the following equation: If it sells really well and gets a lot of attention, it must be sh*t. Then, of course, the ultimate irony is: if your thing gets a lot of attention and sells really well, then the very mechanism you’ve used to shore yourself up when your stuff didn’t sell well is now part of the Darkness Nexus when it does, so you’re screwed.

You can’t win.

Lipsky is laughing.

81 INT. MALL OF AMERICA/MULTIPLEX - MINNESOTA - 1996 - DAY 81 David and Lipsky stand outside. Julie and Betsy arrive. Adlibbed greetings all around.

BETSY:

Oh, my God, this place is insane!