Oxygen Man author sells scripts to Hollywood

Besides teaching creative writing, Yarbrough is a busy author. His latest work, The Oxygen Man, is both a screenplay and a novel.

by April Schulthies

Steve Yarbrough has the writing bug. The author of two collections of short stories and a professor of creative writing in the English Department, Yarbrough is about to release two books for publication. His work has also caught the attention of Hollywood producers.

Veneer, a collection of short stories, will be published by University of Missouri Press next fall. His novel The Oxygen Man is being published by MacMurray and Beck soon after; it has already been sold to Disney as a screenplay.

A Mississippi native, Yarbrough came to Fresno State 10 years ago. "Half my life has been spent outside the Deep South," Yarbrough said. "But it's material you can keep going back to forever."

Yarbrough believes he picked up his gift for writing by listening to the conversations around him in the Mississippi Delta.

"People have a peculiar way of speaking where I'm from," Yarbrough explained. "They've got a lot of expressions that people in other parts of the country typically haven't heard. They tend to be very good storytellers."

Fresno residents might not talk like the characters in Yarbrough's short stories ("I aim to go to town" and "I'm fixin' to do it"), but in Hollywood that kind of knack for dialogue has made Yarbrough in demand.

Film producers are looking at his material because of the way his characters speak. "If you can write dialogue well, the film industry will get interested in you," Yarbrough explained. "I think more than anything else, that's what drew producers to my work."

Yarbrough's work is gaining more attention in Hollywood. Disney has purchased two of Yarbrough's screenplays. The first one is based on The Oxygen Man - the screenplay rights were sold two years prior to the novel.

"It's about a brother and a sister who are in their 30s and who lived together all their lives. There's a deep, dark secret between them," Yarbrough said.

The second screenplay is untitled. Based on a real event, it tells of a secret basketball game between a white team and a black team. "It had to be secret because blacks and whites could not participate in any of the same events in 1944 in North Carolina," Yarbrough stated.

Yarbrough sold his first script two years ago, when producer Kathleen Kennedy brought his work to Disney's attention.

Although he never intended to be a film writer, Yarbrough finds it interesting. "Almost every week I talk to two or three people in Hollywood about possible screenwriting assignments," Yarbrough said. Currently he has plans to work on a project with a London producer.

Yarbrough's work won him a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts; he also has won a Pushcart Prize. He was shortlisted for Granta magazine's Best of the Young American Novelists award.

Yarbrough's first book, Family Men, was published in 1990. The second one, Mississippi History, was published in 1994. Both books received critical acclaim. Yarbrough has a non-fiction book that is nearing completion and he plans to write an original screenplay in the future.

Back to University Journal, 5/11/98 Issue