The Man Who Reads Books For a Living (One Every Two Days)

When Clarke Speicher (spike-er) asked how I liked the screen adaptation of Train Dreams, Denis Johnson’s novella following the solitary logger Robert Granier in the early 20th-century American West, he was actually asking whether it measured up to its source material. That is, after all, the question about adaptations. Still, it felt loaded. If it had been anyone else, I would’ve felt at liberty to prattle without worrying whether I’d arrived at any kind of thesis. That I love the book was beside the point. I felt caught out because it was Clarke doing the asking. But he isn’t an author, screenwriter, director, producer, critic, agent, or editor. He isn’t a journalist or influencer. Clarke is something much more specific and much rarer: a professional book reader who evaluates literature specifically for screen adaptation. So after a few seconds of mealy-mouthed equivocation about Train Dreams, I came to my senses and flipped the question back on him. A few drinks later, we were talking about his profession, how it works, and what adaptation really means. In his mid-40s and unassuming, Clarke is the rare interlocutor who seems to listen without waiting to speak, a far cry from people in the biz whose stock-in-trade is summed up by the very word: production. He has glasses, a solid build, a short gray beard. His thoughts tend to outpace his ability to articulate them in a first pass. He smiles a lot. There is something gentle and teddy-bear-ish about him, but it’s tempered by a New Yorker’s world-weariness. I’ve known him a long time, spent many nights talking (and drinking) with him into the small hours about books, movies, love, dreams, life. “The best adaptations take the basic idea and transform it into cinematic terms,” he says. “Which I’m realizing does sound very dumb saying it out loud,” he chuckles at himself. An executive might walk into a meeting with an author, producer, potential directors, stars, prepared to discuss potential multi-million dollar deals armed only with Clarke’s synopsis. His work forces a near-daily conversation between two halves of Clarke’s brain: the lifelong reader who devours books and the cinephile who dreams in celluloid.

The nuts and bolts are this: an agent, executive, or producer sends Clarke a book or manuscript, blind. He reads it and writes a detailed beat-by-beat synopsis of the core scenes, settings, conflicts, and characters. Here, he quotes essential dialogue and, if any sentence-level writing stands out, includes excerpts. He then steps back to evaluate how the book might actually function on screen, that is, which elements are inherently cinematic, what can and can’t be rendered visually or dramatized, and what kind of movie or series the material wants to be. This is where the tension stretches tightest. Clarke may love a book but, considering aesthetics, a conceptual budget, the likely target audience, possible star power attached, how similar projects have fared, and basic feasibility, his affection may only have so much bearing on the binary at which he must, finally, land: a recommendation to either pass and go no further, or consider and let it build momentum. He calls this report “coverage.” It serves as reference for people in rarified air Clarke has never been invited to breathe. But he harbors no ambition to scale Hollywood heights. He is, if the arc of his career is any indication, happy to be something of a brain trust. “Not every executive can read every book,” he explains. “Everybody’s busy and they don’t have time to read everything.” An executive might walk into a meeting with an author, producer, potential directors, stars, prepared to discuss potential multi-million dollar deals armed only with Clarke’s synopsis. The pressure he feels comes from real stakes. Still, he’s careful not to overstate things. “I don’t want to misconstrue how important I am to this process,” he says. “I actually don’t know.” He gives a good-natured shrug. His involvement begins and ends with his coverage. “I write this report and I email it and it goes into the ether,” he says. “I don’t know if anybody reads it or not… Then someone will tell me ‘your comments were really important to this executive. It was really helpful in explaining why this story works.’” “I never imagined reading books and turning them into movies was a job.” Growing up in Delaware, Clarke imagined a different career. He wanted to be an entertainment journalist, to review movies. “I thought I could do that for my local newspaper or something.”

He tells me his highest aspiration was to write for Entertainment Weekly. “I never imagined reading books and turning them into movies was a job. I never really knew anything about that kind of job existing before.” In 2001, 20-year-old English major Clarke was reporting on a local film festival for his college newspaper. He met a film executive who offered him an internship. Clarke jumped. By 2002 he was in New York, reading scripts for one of the big indie studios. Part of every production assistant’s job is to help their boss thin the screenplay slush pile. But “because I can read books fast, I started doing that,” Clarke says. By his own calculation, he could read a hundred pages an hour. “I was always a big reader,” he says. “I loved books but movies are the thing I loved more.” Reading books also paid better than scripts. “At that time it was just a bunch of bad horror novels. Dean Koontz, that kind of thing.” It turned out that speed, a cinephile’s fluency, and an anxious temperament that prohibits laziness made him more valuable than your run-of-the-mill PA. “It just happened that I was suited to it.” Smash cut to 25 years later. Clarke is a freelancer staying afloat in the gig economy. He still reads potboilers, YA novels, and the like but capital-L literature remains his wheelhouse. Name the season’s hot novel or some totemic masterwork and he’s probably read it. “Sometimes I’ll get sent a new book by a major author,” he says, adding that it is not unusual to receive a first-draft Word document, typos and all. “I’m probably one of the first people who’s gotten to read [a new major book], and that’s exciting to me.” Solicitations can come from anywhere, including newer power players like Apple and Netflix. “Somebody will contact me who said that I was recommended by somebody I have not spoken to in ten years,” he says. The implication is clear: this is a specific problem to which Clarke is a reliable solution. “That’s part of the reason why I still have a Yahoo email address. Because that’s what I’ve had this whole time.” To make his nut, Clarke completes about six books a week.

He mentions, offhandedly, that he has read “literally thousands of books,” so I do the rough math: even allowing for time off, that works out to roughly 300 books a year, or well over 6,000 across two decades. And that is just the professional tally. One summer a few years ago, for pleasure, he read all of In Search of Lost Time. Clarke is about as close to a Hollywood insider as someone who never dips a toe into production gets. His name doesn’t appear in credits, but he still feels pride when something that he championed winds up in theaters. Books will remain books, and movies based on books will keep getting made, but the pipeline between publishing and film has changed almost beyond recognition. For years, he was the principal reader for a certain EGOT-winning, since-disgraced mega-producer who, it was rumored, kept a cache of cell phones in his desk because he so often threw and broke them. At a social function, someone who worked in development for this producer told Clarke that he was “secretly one of the most powerful men in Hollywood because [this producer’s] opinion mattered the most and [Clarke] was one that was giving him the opinion.” Production partners would approach producer-X enthusiastic about a book, and the producer would ask, “‘But what did Clarke think about it?’ If I didn’t like something, often neither did he. And if he didn’t like something it could be dead in the water. That was why I was, secretly, very powerful and didn’t know it despite being a person who could barely pay his credit card bills.” Surviving two and a half decades in any industry means being nimble when the ground inevitably shifts. Books will remain books, and movies based on books will keep getting made, but the pipeline between publishing and film has changed almost beyond recognition during Clarke’s tenure. “It used to be that every production company or film studio had a New York office specifically to work with the publishing industry,” he says. Those days are gone. “When I first started I had to go into an office and pick up a physical copy of a book or a manuscript.” Now everything arrives by email, and he hasn’t set foot in an office in about seven years. “I know that every company has somebody who does [this same work],” he says. “

I guess a lot of people who do this are based in LA, maybe.” I ask whether that makes it harder to compare notes with contemporaries. He smiles and very matter-of-factly tells me that, a few years ago, at a brunch hosted by a major production company, “There were two other readers there. That’s the first time I ever met anybody in person.” Shocked, I make him repeat himself, and again he says: “I’ve never met anybody else who does this.” * We all have a book or two whose unmade movie plays in our mind at IMAX scale. Every scene is shot on location, the soundtrack is wall-to-wall bangers, and the cast is perfect with a few key roles filled by actors in their bygone prime and maybe one or two from beyond the grave. But, within the constraints of reality, what would actually make that vision work? Where would you even begin? “If you can’t summarize the basic idea of a book in a sentence, it’s probably gonna be harder to adapt.” “The kernel—the idea. That’s the first thing that grabs me,” Clarke says. “What’s different and interesting. Is it the setting, the setup?” What he calls a book’s “hook” is the aspect of its central conceit with enough gravity to pull the reader in. He gives Karen Russell’s recent novel The Antidote as an example. “I thought that was very compelling, a really original idea. It’s a detective novel about, like, psychics during the dustbowl. That’s really captivating.” Another, more pointed example is Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life. Clarke says that book “is just a series of terrible things happening to a person… I don’t want to see a movie about that.” Whereas, “Hamnet is a story about grief and something terrible happening to a person but it has the hook: it’s Shakespeare.” And that hook, he says, can’t be added on—it has to be baked-in. “If you can’t summarize the basic idea of a book in a sentence, it’s probably gonna be harder to adapt.” Within that larger framework, Clarke looks for characters who “are interesting or unique—sympathetic in some interesting way or have unique attributes or a point of view.” But because film is visual, characters cannot merely feel, react, or reflect on the page.