If they made your life into a movie, who would you want to play you? Augusten Burroughs knew actor Joseph Cross was right the moment they met.
“He was 18 at the time, and he didn’t have that sort of shifty-eyed insecurity most 18-year-olds have,” says Burroughs. “He had this quality of self-assurance that would have enabled him to succeed in my childhood.”
And, as anyone who’s read Burroughs’ best-selling memoir, “Running with Scissors,” knows, just surviving his childhood was a remarkable feat.
After his mentally ill mother handed legal guardianship of 13-year-old Augusten over to her shrink, he went to live with the doctor and his family in a beyond-squalid household. There, playing with an ancient electroshock machine, popping random pharmaceutical samples and eating dog food were seen as completely normal.
The book was acclaimed for its darkly funny take on events that would have driven lesser men to despair. Obviously, Hollywood would be interested.
But Burroughs never thought he’d let anyone buy the screenplay rights – until “Nip/Tuck” creator Ryan Murphy kept calling and calling. Impressed with Murphy’s tenacity, the author planned to let him down easy over lunch.
“He shared stories about his own childhood,” Burroughs says. “There were some striking similarities between our mothers. He understood ‘Running with Scissors’ kind of like he’d written it himself. My gut told me to do it.”
Burroughs and Murphy threw together, in the author’s words, a “delusional dream cast”: Annette Bening, Alec Baldwin, Jill Clayburgh, Brian Cox, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Joseph Fiennes would play the characters who’d made Burroughs’ early years such a nightmare.
And holding it all together would be Joseph Cross, a young actor who’d already appeared on a number of TV shows and the movie “Strangers with Candy” (excellent prep work for the world of “Running with Scissors”).
The real and fictional Augustens agreed that minimal contact was best. “I wasn’t trying to mimic him,” says Cross. “The character was an interpretation of what I thought he would have been like at that age. I think it would have been counterproductive to spend a lot of time with him.”
But the author got called in to consult anyway. “I didn’t see the humor,” says Cross. “It all seemed too tragic. But when I talked to Augusten, he said what got him through it all was being able to make light of it, to step back and, rather than say ‘this is miserable,’ say, ‘this is crazy, I can’t believe this is happening!’ “And really,” Cross adds, “that’s the tone of this movie.”
Hence, situations like Burroughs’ sexual relationship, at 13, with a 35-year-old schizophrenic, and watching his mother go through one nervous breakdown after another, were filtered through Burroughs’ lens of incredulity.
“I wanted it to have same feel as the book,” says the author, “so you end up being taken on this sort of ride, not knowing if you should laugh or cry.”
Perhaps it’s the extremities of his past that have made Burroughs – who’s since published four other books – into such an even-keel adult.
“Last night was the L.A. premiere of the movie,” he says. “Afterwards, we went back to the hotel, and my friend said, ‘Augusten, how can you stand it? Are you just going crazy?’ “And I said, ‘I don’t know. I’m not going crazy. Actually, I can stand it.'”
