Revolutionary Work

JOSÉ RIVERA ‘77 HAS BEEN RUNNING LIKE CRAZY SINCE HIS phone rang at 5:30 the morning of January 25, but at that time he was, well, quite still. “I was so sleepy, my first reaction was, ‘My bloodstream isn’t going yet to my brain!’” However, the news that he had been nominated for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for The Motorcycle Diaries certainly woke him up.

“I knew I had a chance – everyone talked about it, and though you sort of try to blot it out and be cool you can’t help but think about it. Most of my good friends and family actually downplayed it for me, which was nice.

But my daughter’s friends at school were going on Oscar watch Web sites trying to find out what my chances were,” he says with a laugh.

The announcement capped a year of success for The Motorcycle Diaries, which adapts the memoir chronicling 23-year-old Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s journey through South America, years before his legendary involvement in the Cuban revolution. For Rivera, an Obie Award-winning playwright, it was his .rst feature script to be produced and the process took some getting used to. Director Walter Salles eased the transition by inviting Rivera to rehearse with him and the two principle actors in Buenos Aires. “Because so many of the scenes are two-character scenes, he could rehearse it almost like a play,” recalls Rivera. “[It] was a lot like the process that I know from the theater, which is you have some actors, you do the scenes, they ask questions, you go back home that night, you rewrite scenes, come back with a new draft, and you do the whole thing over and over again for two weeks.”

Working with Guevara’s weighty legend meant careful handling of the material, but Rivera was determined not to let the story’s integrity be compromised. “One of the big challenges was that we weren’t going to bow to the dei.cation of Che,” says Rivera. “This is a movie about Ernesto Guevara, long before Che Guevara ever existed. So we could not pay great homage or pander to the legendary person that everyone believes they know and very few people actually do. I think our challenge was, how do we tell the story of an adolescent coming of age into manhood on the road?”

Much of that required fleshing out certain elements of Guevara’s journey, including scenes with his girlfriend or dialogue with natives met along the way. “A lot of it is from my theater training, which is if you have a basic situation, what is it that two people say based on what they want from each other? That was our challenge. Within that, I think I particularly was very faithful to what might have taken place at that time between the two people.”

Rivera had participated in a Sundance Institute fellowship and it was through that connection with Diaries executive producer Robert Redford and his organization that he came into the project. “A lot of my work is political, and I am Latin American and old enough to actually have grown up with images of Che, and I’m sure that was all appealing [to them],” he says.

Rivera was so inspired by his research on Diaries that he later wrote the play School of the Americas, based on the last 48 hours of Guevara’s life after being captured in Bolivia by the army. School was written speci.cally for acclaimed actor John Ortiz and his Labyrinth Theater Company in New York – which is staging another Rivera production, Massacre, in May.

At this moment, Rivera is trying not to think too much about the Oscar nomination. He’s already sweated out noms from Spain (he won the Goya in January for Diaries) and the U.K. (the British Academy of Film & Television Arts gave the film seven nominations, including one for Rivera). “The momentum in my career really started with the opening of the movie at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival,” Rivera recalls. “From that point on, offers were coming in and as the movie gained in momentum and critical mass, more things started happening.”

One development is Rivera’s feature film directorial debut, which will be an adaptation of his play Cloud Tectonics. Rivera and Salles are also teaming up on another adaptation of a classic journey – Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. “Right now we’re in the research phase. Walter would like to take some road trips in March…then he wants to create a parallel documentary where we’ll interview people who were Beats or influenced strongly by the Beats, like Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Joan Baez, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, and Carolyn Cassady.”

Additionally, Rivera was recruited by mega-producer Roland Emmerich (The Day After Tomorrow,Independence Day) to write a low-budget film focusing on a New York Times article that reported on young girls from around the world being forced into sexual slavery in the U.S. The article and the film are called The Girls Next Door.

Rivera credits his time at Denison with teaching him valuable lessons of perseverence. “I learned a lot in a kind of entrepreneurial way – what it’s like to make something out of nothing with very little money and how you whip up enthusiasm with other people who are already overloaded with work,” recalls Rivera. “It began a lifelong kind of love for actors; from that point until now, I’ve had a very strong bond with actors. That all started at Denison.”

While he acknowledges that it would be “fantastic” to win the Oscar, Rivera is quick to reiterate what’s most important to him about the whole process. “I think that in a way, given the importance of what it means to be nominated in the .rst place and how competitive it is to get to that point, it’s almost irrelevant who the winner is. It’s a one in .ve chance – not that it’s arbitrary but I could look at every single person and say, ‘Yeah, you could win it.’ The difference between us is so, I think, so minor. Unfortunately in this society, to win is so – it is everything, and it shouldn’t be. I was with three of the writers yesterday, and we all said it would be really nice if we could just win a group award,” he says with a grin.

“The irony is that I turn 50 in March and I had actually said to myself at one point, ‘You know, when I turn 50 I’m just going to take the year off – I’m not going to do anything!’ I’m just going to read and play the bongo drums, I don’t know.” He laughs and continues, “But that’s not gonna happen.”

Lisa Y. Garibay is a Los Angeles-based writer and editor of the online arts magazine thenitmustbetrue.com.