Sam's Club

Writer/lawyer Sam Magavern gets by with a lttle help from his rock-star friends
by Adam Wahlberg - Reprinted with permission of MINNESOTA LAW & POLITICS (April/May 2003)

Sam Magavern is not a guy with a lot of free time on his hands. During the day, he keeps a hectic schedule as a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Minneapolis. At night, he and his wife attend to the myriad needs of their two young daughters. He is a man in full. Yet amidst the whirlwind that can be his everyday life, he has still managed to crank out a novel, a screenplay and dozens of poems in recent years. Please, Sam, for all of us who labor under the weight of writing anything longer that a thank-you note, what is your secret?

"Oh, I don't do anything special. I've just always wanted to make time for writing," the soft-spoken 39-year-old says over coffee. "Plus it's nice when you can work with your friends."

As someone who often writes about rock music, the fact that those friends are local heroes Matt Wilson and John Munson is quite a plus. Wilson and Munson quite literally provide the music to his words. And thanks in part to their help, Magavern now has a multimedia book in stores and a movie about to hit the local Cineplex.

A NOVEL IDEA

Magavern is what people in advertising might call a concepter. Creative energy radiates from him. Yet what sets him apart from other original thinkers is his determination to realize his vision.

"Sam is a constant fountain of ideas," says Munson, who is one-third of the Grammy-nominated band Semisonic. "At first you think, OK, that's just Sam being Sam, but he always brings the ideas to fruition."

It's that mix of inspiration and perspiration that led to his innovative CD-ROM novel Ooh La La. The inspiration came six years ago. Magavern was noodling with a story about a guy struggling with relationship problems who goes on the road with a rock band - not exactly new literary terrain - when something fresh came to him.

I figured if I'm going to write about music, why shouldn't [the book] come with a soundtrack? I thought the optimal experience would be if music kept coming on while you scroll through the novel on your computer," he says.

Next came the perspiration. He had to write the thing. There was only one problem: He didn't have a clue what it was like to be a musician on tour. "My only band experience was in high school with a group called Brutus and the Senators," he says with a smile. But he knew he could Malkovich Munson's brain for material.

"John really helped me get a sense of the rock 'n' roll life by telling me stories about what he'd experienced," he says.

He spent a year on the writing before turning to the soundtrack. For that, he recruited Wilson, who was the lead singer in Trip Shakespeare and now performs around town with Munson. Wilson was skeptical at first.

"Sam has a much stronger belief that computers and technology can be used to do something cool like this than I do," says Wilson, whom Magavern knows from their days as freshman year roommates at Harvard. "I don't have a lot of faith in that, but I do have a lot of faith in Sam."

Magavern searched Wilson's catalog for songs that would augment the text. He found the process of blending his prose with Wilson's lyrics to be a snap, "I found a bunch that have parallels and connections with my characters ... it all came together really well," he says.

Finally, he enlisted students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design to program and design the interactive CD-ROM. The result is a dynamic and user-friendly combination of prose, music and images. It was released in December and is selling well, mostly through independent record stores and Internet sites.

INVENTING THE FLOPS

Magavern couldn't bask for long in the success of Ooh La La, however, since the independent film that he wrote, The Last Word, was being edited at the same time.

The film revolves around a female attorney, played by radio personality Mary Lucia, who quits her day job as a prosecutor to defend a college professor accused of possessing child pornography. There is a relationship angle and plenty of music, of course, as the character struggles to find equilibrium with her singer boyfriend, who performs in a two-man group called The Flops. Let's see, any ideas on who could play the guys in the band?

"Actually, I didn't think of Matt and John right away," Magavern says, "but once they were cast, it only made sense to let them sing their own songs." (Wilson and Munson have since kept the band name from the movie, which they use when they perform together.)

Magavern raised "about $100,000" before turning over the project to local filmmaker Tim McCusker, whom he knew from Legal Aid. "Tim had made videos for us ... How To Get A Landlord To Make Repairs and How To Find Housing, two classics of the genre."

The shooting took place in May 2002, and by all accounts went smoothly. "It was the most fun I've ever had on a project," Wilson says. Munson feels the same way. "Right as I got done, I thought, 'Damn, I would like to do this again as soon as possible.'"

Magavern expects the film to be screened locally this spring.

MORE THAN JUST A DAY JOB

It would be natural to think that Magavern is praying that either Ooh La La or The Last Word will explode nationally so he can quit his job and write full-time. But that doesn't appear to be his motivation. A 1998 Humphrey Institute Policy Fellow who keeps a portrait of Martin Luther King behind his desk, he seems as passionate about pursuing social justice as he is literary fame.

"I'm very happy at Legal Aid," he says. He has worked on housing issues, directed community legal education and served as a policy analyst during his 11-year tenure with the organization. "My current role is to advocate with city council members, working through the different boards and commissions that affect policy ... I find the work rewarding."

He certainly has the pedigree for this type of career. He grew up in Buffalo, N.Y., helping his father, a lawyer, work for progressive causes. "When I was in college I assisted him as he represented a group of African-American police officers in a discrimination suit," he says. "It led to him being named NAACP man of the year. He's one of my heroes."

A WRITER WRITES, ALWAYS

OK, so the guy has a book for sale and a movie coming out, and he also dabbles in poetry (he has been published in The Paris Review, among other places). What, no time for non-fiction? "As a matter of fact I am finishing a non-fiction book," he says. "It's called Ten Words. It looks at what are the most important values and how they interact with each other."

And, yes, he has an idea for a future collaboration with The Flops. "It would be another movie that would involve getting Matt and John together and incorporating a lot of music."

It is obvious that writing and music are as essential to Magavern as plasma and that he derives the most artistic satisfaction when he can combine the two. When asked about his favorite piece of writing, he names Walt Whitman's poem "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking." (I like that the word rocking is in the title.") A section of it describes the roles that he surely sees himself playing in his collaborations with his rock-star pals:

O you singer solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you,
ever more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what
there in the night, By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there arous'd, the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.

-Reprinted with permission of MINNESOTA LAW & POLITICS (April/May 2003)