Keeping Options Open, Novelist Tows Museum on Road to Dream
C. D. Payne, author of the “Youth in Revolt” novels, in front of a 1964 trailer, Eyelusion, that he has renovated as a museum of oddities and illusions.
SEBASTOPOL, Calif. As the rakish, love-struck, sex-obsessed teen hero of the 1993 cult novel “Youth in Revolt,” Nick Twisp encounters all manner of obstacles, including dysfunctional parents, jealous rivals, the Berkeley police and, of course, acne. …
Such a raft of challenges are not completely foreign to his creator, C. D. Payne, who has spent significant chunks of his own career struggling, working a series of lousy jobs, living in a trailer for four years and receiving a trail of rejection letters, professional and otherwise. Even with the critical success of “Youth in Revolt” which he self-published in 1993 and which subsequently became an underground hit Mr. Payne still couldn’t get a publisher for the book’s three sequels, which he ended up releasing himself.
But like Nick Twisp, Mr. Payne has been helped along by the passion of his fans, and has lately been enjoying a second surge of popularity, thanks to the well-received film version of the book, released this month. Mr. Payne’s list of admirers includes the producer David Permut, who worked for seven years and through three production companies to get the movie made, and Michael Cera, the adolescent specialist (see “Juno,” “Superbad,” “Nick and Nora’s Infinite Playlist”) who stars as Nick and his devilish alter ego, Francois in the film.
Mr. Cera said he was 16 when he read the book and instantly connected with Nick, a precocious and embarrassingly confessional teenager living in Oakland who has terrible skin, a persistent case of virginity and a sibilant surname. (”My last name, which I loathe, is Twisp,” Nick says on the book’s first page. “Even John Wayne on a horse would look effeminate pronouncing that name.”)
“It’s a very comforting book,” said Mr. Cera, 21. “You feel like the world makes sense when you’re reading it.”
Mr. Cera was the first actor to sign on for the project and worked on the screenplay with another veteran of the teen-angst genre, the screenwriter Gustin Nash Miguel Arteta (”Chuck & Buck”). The three helped condense the 500-page novel which includes adventures in arson, heavy petting and cross-dressing into a tidy 90 minutes.
“We tried to touch upon things that were important to the novel,” said Mr. Arteta. “But the most important thing was keeping the voice of C. D. Payne.”
All of which has pleasantly surprised Mr. Payne, a quiet, unassuming 60-year-old married with pet who lives in this rustic Sonoma County town, about 50 miles north of San Francisco.
Born into a blue-collar family in Akron, Ohio, Mr. Payne started writing because “it was the only thing I tried in life I didn’t find boring,” he said.
“And for years,” he continued, “I couldn’t make any money at it.”
After making his way to Harvard, where he earned a history degree, Mr. Payne decamped to California in the early 1970s, eventually living in a trailer in Santa Monica, while dabbling in short humor, screenplays and even cartoons, all to negligible success. “I did the standard thing,” he said. “And I got all the rejections.”
By the late 1980s, he was living in the Bay Area and commuting to the Sharper Image, the San Francisco retailer of consumer gadgetry (since bankrupted), working as a bored-senseless copywriter. Mr. Payne said he began writing “Youth in Revolt” as a kind of psychic safety valve.
“After you’ve written about 23 cordless phones, the novelty kind of wears off,” he said. “The nature of advertising is that you have to be enthusiastic and positive all the time. ‘Youth in Revolt’ was kind of the reverse of that.”
What emerged was the story of Nick and his great love, Sheenie, a pretty and pretentious young lady described in the book as “one of two intellectuals living in Ukiah, Calif.,” and the only one studying “French-language tapes.” Nick is instantly infatuated, soon abandoning both caution and his family.
“Nick has no filter between his impulse and his actions,” Mr. Payne said. “He’s really obsessed with Sheenie, and stories about obsessive characters are a good source of humor because they are so committed and deranged.”
Still, the book, which took three years to write, was rebuffed by publishers. So Mr. Payne used a small nest egg, designed a hand-drawn cover with plenty of d colletage, and printed 3,000 copies, which he distributed to libraries and bookstores in Berkeley, where he was living at the time. Once again, it was not a roaring success.
“Some put it out on the shelves,” he said, “and some threw them away.”
In 1994, however, Mr. Payne’s version of the book landed on the desk of Bruce Tracy, then an editor at Doubleday Books. “I thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever read,” he said. “And it had this fantastic cover, kind of Stan Mack R. Crumb.”
Doubleday published a hardcover version of the book in 1995, and after a rapturous review in The Los Angeles Times, “Youth in Revolt” was briefly considered as a television show for Fox and MTV. It was not picked up, but the recent movie version, released by Dimension Films, has once again aroused television interest, though it has performed modestly at the box office, with about $15 million in ticket sales since its Jan. 8 release.
The idea that the film might generate a whole new generation of Twisp fans pleases Mr. Cera, who calls the book and the movie a “true love story.”
Mr. Payne continues methodically writing a number of projects (he’s mulling a fourth sequel to “Youth”) and using his down time to tend to a series of campers, mobile homes and trailers, both miniature and full size, which he has collected over the years. (He and his wife, Joy, drove to the movie’s premiere in a truck topped with a camper shell and stayed in an RV park north of Hollywood.)
His most prized possession is a restored 1964 Airstream trailer, called Eyelusion, which Mr. Payne has turned into a traveling museum of oddities and handmade optical illusions. During the summers Mr. Payne still drives the Eyelusion to various county fairs, charging a dollar or two for tours, something he says helps pay for his writing habit.
“I have no faith that literature is going to pan out on a long-term basis, so I have to have a backup,” Mr. Payne said “It’s worked out pretty well so far, but I don’t know, you know? I could be a flash in the pan.”