He Talks the Talk--Gaelic, That Is : Movies: Irish writer Roddy Doyle eschews Hollywood as corrupt, yet finds success in adapting two of his novels for the big screen.

By LAWRENCE CHRISTON

March 23, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

SAN FRANCISCO — Roddy Doyle stood by the window of his 12th-floor hotel room and peered through the hard gray afternoon light at what he assumed to be the general direction of Los Angeles, conjuring his mythic picture of what the city 379 miles south looked like.

“This is as close to L.A. as I want to get,” he said. An odd sentiment, coming from someone who had successfully adapted his first two novels--”The Commitments” and “The Snapper”--to the screen and was at work on the screenplay for his third work in the Barrytown trilogy, “The Van.” As is true with a lot of people, Los Angeles was synonymous with Hollywood, which Doyle considers intolerably corrupt.

“I have an aversion to L.A.,” he continued. “Maybe it’s because I disagree with the way movies are made, the star system and all.” He added cryptically: “I bet there are streets there with no pavements.”

Doyle was at the end of an arduous national tour to promote his Booker Prize-winning novel “Paddy Clark, Ha Ha Ha,” and the strain showed. For two weeks, he had been up at 5 for crack-of-dawn radio and TV interviews, and then evenings of staged public readings. Now his conversation skipped like a needle over a cracked disc. He was tired, and homesick for his wife and two young sons--mention of whom drew his gaze toward another imagined destination: Dublin.

But a sly, sotto-voce humor was irrepressibly evident as well. Doyle shares with his working-class Barrytown characters a chronic, low-frequency indignation, expressed in continuing “fancy tha’ ” quips and a certain piquant vulgarity. His motor is always running.

“Oh, I’ve come at a great time,” he said. “I’ve been listening all about the Menendez brothers, Tonya Harding, the Bobbitts.” He smiled, as if to say, “What a circus!”

“We get Oprah (Winfrey) over in Ireland,” he went on. “Sally Jessy Raphael too. Christ, you can’t escape ‘em. In Portland there were five of those shows on, all at once. I looked out the window to see if there was anyone left on the street.”

As for the hours, he was hanging tough. “If Margaret Thatcher can live on three hours of sleep, I can survive on five.”

At 35, Doyle occupies an unusual place in the cultural scheme of things, a serious novelist--some consider him Ireland’s best right now--who doesn’t look at screenwriting as a whore’s trade. An internationalist whose roots are thickly entangled with the life of Northern Dublin.

(In selling the idea for a soul band, one of the characters in “The Commitments” says, with touching absurdity, “The Irish are the blacks of Europe, the Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland, and the North Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. Say it loud, ‘I’m black and I’m proud.’ ”)

And after “Paddy Clark, Ha Ha Ha,” a masterwork of shadowed indirection that shows us how being a 10-year-old is a full-time job, Doyle has been compared to the James Joyce of “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.” The comparison makes Doyle uncomfortable: “Joyce was tuned into that state of being very well. But there’s a school of writing which, though it may be unfair to summarize this way, has a lot to do with writers showing us how big their brains are. Like Anthony Burgess, who wants to show us that he has the biggest vocabulary in the world.

“The type of writing I prefer is simple, straightforward and serves the characters. I like writers like Elmore Leonard, Anne Tyler, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, where you tend to forget you’re reading. With ‘Paddy Clark,’ I only hoped people could be conned into believing they were inside a 10- or 11-year-old.”

Besides, the very idea of setting out “to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of the race” is something that would make Doyle bolt for the nearest exit. He’s probably closer to Anton Chekhov, the good doctor who bore his characters’ ridiculous affectations and self-dramatized torments with grace and bemusement, because he knew that everyone’s body eventually breaks down in pain and dies, and that the enemy of life isn’t death, it’s futility.

Like Chekhov, Doyle’s forgiveness of just about everything and everyone filters into his characters. Jimmy Rabbitte Jr. can only shake his head at the explosive thickheadedness that tore the Commitments apart and go on polishing his answers to an imagined press interviewer. No sense in keeping a grudge.

When his sister, Sharon, gets pregnant and won’t divulge the name of the father in “The Snapper,” the Rabbitte family comically adjusts itself around her and the impending arrival. In “The Van,” Jimmy Sr. loses his job as a builder and warily takes up a second career selling fish and chips from a refurbished lunch truck.

Obviously, this is not the spiteful grim-lipped Dublin of “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,” where the heavy cargo of censure shifts against the troubled and the weak, and a 16-year-old housemaid is thrown into the street because she’s had the bad luck to be raped by a boarder.

“A lot of Europeans rushed through to Page 80 to see Rabbitte’s new adventure begin,” Doyle said of “The Van.” “Americans are more attuned to the beginning. A lot of the American middle class has never experienced unemployment before. I think the book struck a chord with this new condition they have to live with.

“It’s a generational thing too. Jimmy Sr.’s limited education hasn’t prepared him. Jimmy Jr. is more able to cope with the world as it is.”

Asked whether anybody’s education can prepare for a future in which all roads seem to lead through television to an electronic superhighway, Doyle replied: “As a writer, I think people will always enjoy the physicality of books. Television is aimed at the middle class, people too tired to go out. In Ireland, more people per capita are going out than ever before. I don’t think many people in Lagos will be tuning into the superhighway.”

Doyle showed a small, shy grin. His mouth tends to be drawn in a certain unrequited fastidiousness, but the voice is soft, full of small melodious surges and drops. His eyes float suspiciously behind thick spectacle lenses, like pale aquarium creatures. He wears a small golden earring in his left earlobe, and his black hair is shoe-brush stiff on one side, a tribute to Dublin’s cold, steady winds.

Unlike many writers who, with great justification, figure they can kiss their work goodby once it gets sausaged in movie or TV development, Doyle believes his characters can weather the change from page to screen.

For openers, they have language. To lose one’s temper is to “throw a wobbler.” To make a girl pregnant is to “send her up the pole.” If someone insults your friends, he’s “slaggin’ yer shower.” And they’re delivered with comic succinctness, as in this living room scene from “The Snapper”:

“What’s perception?” Sharon asked.

“Wha?”

“What’s perception?”

“Sweat,” Jimmy Sr. told her. “Why?”

Sharon whispered to Jimmy Sr.:

“It says my perception might be heightened when I’m pregnant.”

“Yeh smell all right from over here, love,” said Jimmy Sr. He leaned over.

“Wha’s the buke about?”

“Pregnancy.”

“Jaysis, d’yuh need a buke to be pregnant these days?”

“I didn’t have a book,” said Veronica.

“Shhh!” went Jimmy Sr.

“You wouldn’t have been able to read it, Ma,” said Darren.

The remote control hit his shoulder and bounced off his head.

“In most working-class cultures you’ll find a contempt for the Queen’s English,” Doyle said. “In Ireland you get a creative use of language because of the class divisions, and also because English was superimposed on Gaelic, which has its own symbols and phrases.”

At first Doyle didn’t think he’d write a screenplay, but after director Alan Parker became interested in “The Commitments” (which Doyle had published at his own expense), he realized he was more than halfway there. What was true of “The Commitments” was true of the entire Barrytown trilogy.

“They were written mostly through dialogue, the plots were simple, and there were no chapter divisions. Just breaks instead.”

And Doyle is of a generation that grew up with the movies: “I went a lot as a kid. ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ really scared me. I hid under the seat. I was remembering ‘The Vikings’ when I wrote ‘Paddy Clark.’ It was a trashy film, with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas. But brilliant.” (Doyle and his characters like to use brilliant as an all-purpose term of appreciation.)

“So much of the stuff we watched was British and American. The British was for the head, and the American was for entertainment. We sat around the telly and believed everything we saw. We weren’t into criticizing everything then. There was a certain atmosphere of belief you don’t have anymore.”

Doyle is Dublin born. His father is a printer-compositor, and after their four children (two brothers, two sisters) grew up, Doyle’s mother went to work as a solicitor’s secretary. Doyle majored in English and geography at University College in Dublin and then went into teaching, which, after some early misgivings, he loved (“The spirit of the children, their humor, their sheer differences--I’d never experienced anything like it”).

He didn’t begin writing for three years, and then only because he had time on his hands during a summer break when all his friends were working.

“It took years to get the self-consciousness out of my system,” he recalled. “My first book was called ‘Your Granny’s a Hunger Striker.’ It went bloody downhill after the title.”

Doyle’s students inspired “The Commitments”; he wanted to write something that would reflect their ebullience. Shortly after finishing the book, he wrote a couple of plays for a Dublin theater group. One was called “Brownbread” and dealt with three young thugs who kidnap a bishop. The other was called “War” and focused on a popular pub game in which large groups of people compete in quiz games. Neither play lived long, which only confirmed Doyle’s suspicion that he wasn’t a natural playwright.

The movies, which Doyle considers “a halfway house between novels and the stage,” are another matter. Besides, he wanted to protect as much of his work for as long as he could, fearing, for example, that “The Commitments” might turn up someday as a vehicle for Michael J. Fox. “The Snapper,” directed by Stephen Frears, aired on the BBC last April before it was released as a feature film in the United States. The Beeb’s smaller budget for “The Snapper” ($2 million, as opposed to $20 million for “The Commitments”) meant that it wouldn’t be overrun by industry heavy-hitters.

“The problem with American movies is that Hollywood always underestimates the audience’s intelligence,” Doyle said. “The studio system is inherently corrupt. Say you want to do a good film about a bad man. You need a $6-million actor to sell it. But the $6-million actor decides he wants to make the bad man a charming bad man. Then he decides he wants to change the ending, because he doesn’t want to hurt his image.

“I think agents have too much power in Hollywood. They want to package three stars, seven co-stars, a writer and a director--all clients, of course. Some people can thrive in that environment, like Steven Spielberg and Alan Parker. But too often you get the ‘Oscar-winning performance.’ It’s good for Al Pacino, but all the ingredients aren’t there. And it’s too bloody expensive as well.”

Doyle has formed his own production company, called Deadly Films. For “The Van,” which he is co-producing with partner Lynda Myles, he favors the approach of directors like Bernardo Bertolucci, who draw their funding from sources in different countries.

“Whatever we do, I like us to be doing it,” Doyle said. “It wouldn’t be ‘on’ for two working-class men in Dublin with a fish-and-chips van to wind up being played by Mel Gibson and Kevin Costner.”

Stephen Frears expects that he’ll soon be back in the Doyle fold. “I’ll probably direct ‘The Van,’ ” he said on the telephone from London. “We’ll do it this time as a feature film. When I was sent the script for ‘The Snapper,’ I jumped on it right away. Roddy’s a deceptive writer. On the surface the work seems simple, but it’s really very sophisticated, and very funny. He creates an entire world. He’s the only Irish writer I know of who’s actually read by the kids he writes about in Dublin. You don’t see them walking around with ‘Ulysses.’ ”

Doyle still feels too close to “Paddy Clark” to think of making a film of it just yet. Besides, its meandering density makes it less amenable to a movie script than the Barrytown trilogy (though a spokesman reports that virtually every major independent production company in England and the United States is interested).

Doyle is at work, however, on a new script for the BBC called “The Family,” which deals with a familial breakup as seen through the eyes of its four members. The four-episode series, filmed in Ireland and using an Elvis Costello soundtrack, airs May 8.

“It won’t be the Rabbittes,” said Doyle. “There are no more Rabbittes. I’ve eaten them.”