The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Geddy’s.
BAR HARBOR—One of the main things that Ernest Thompson did the last time he was in Bar Harbor for a film showing was ask strangers to make a heart with their hands.
They did.
They came down to the Village Green. They stood beside a guitar case. They juggled by the town’s gazebo. They made hearts. Some knew what they had been invited to do and planned ahead.
Others, Thompson said, simply happened upon the filming and wanted to be part of it. It’s pretty hard to not want to be part of what Thompson—writer, director, actor, creator, intellectual force—is doing.
Back in 2014, he had come to Bar Harbor for a film festival, but he left with something else: something that required connection and heart and the underlying truth about art.
He had a song he’d written years before. The song was a love song, but not quite the kind of love song people usually write.
It didn’t say I love you.
It said: You are loved.
And that? That’s the difference in the art Thompson creates, the images he chooses, and the stories that he tells. He brought that video back with him for another film festival at Reel Pizza in 2015. Justin Jaymes, a New England based singer/songwriter, sang it. It was Jaymes’ debut single.
Ernest Thompson has spent nearly five decades writing stories that other people eventually make their own. On Aug. 13, he will come to Jesup Memorial Library in Bar Harbor to talk about his newest novel, Out Clause, a 545-page story built around a deceptively simple question: What if you could change your life?
“Out Clause is a sprawling 545-page saga, and so I want people to come with an open mind and just listen to the possibilities, because, as I said five minutes ago, ultimately, every story can become universal,” Thompson said earlier this week in an interview.
Thompson, who has never been pigeon holed in just one form of storytelling has already proven that you can reimagine your life, change it, and that specific stories can have universal resonance.
Thompson’s work has always been less interested in telling people what to think than in giving them someplace to go. A play becomes a memory. A movie becomes a family story. A song becomes a message strangers recognize as their own. And sometimes, as happened when Thompson filmed You Are Loved in Bar Harbor, a story becomes a community of people who simply want to be part of it.
Thompson is the man who wrote On Golden Pond. That would be enough of an accomplishment for most of us, but Thompson has done a lot more than that, too. He’s written more than 35 plays, so many songs, directed, created novels. With his wife, Kerrin Thompson, he’s begun Rescind Recidivism, which is, according to his website, “a prison writing program giving inmates a chance to feel creative as well as human, capable, and worthy.”
He’s a person who has spent decades watching strangers take possession of things he created. He likes that.
“I truly believe that there’s a compact between an artist and the recipient of the work,” he said.
Thompson isn’t particularly interested in being “Ernest Thompson, Oscar winner” though he has an Oscar that he’s glad to have.
He seems much more interested in the exchange that happens after he makes something.
People come up at book events and tell him their stories. People tell him what On Golden Pond meant to them. People want to read the On Golden Pond script in their own voices rather than Henry Fonda’s or Katharine Hepburn’s.
The people who appeared in his Y”ou are Loved” video weren’t famous actors though he’s worked with a lot of those. They were people who lived here, visited here, or happened to be here.
They became part of his story.
Next week, he’s coming back to Bar Harbor, specifically the Jesup Memorial Library — another place where stories are literally passed from one person to another — to invite people into another tale that revolves around a question.
What if you could change your life?
Though the novel is large, Thompson’s answer isn’t prescriptive. He wants readers to bring their own fears, dreams, memories, and experiences to the story.
“To me it’s an invitation to readers, audience members, listeners to supply their own belief system, their own dreams or fantasies or fears onto what I’ve written,” he said of the contract that happens between storyteller and listener or reader. “So I’m very conscious of that as I’m creating something that people are going to see this and they’re going to think, ‘Whoa, he’s talking about me. How did he know that about me? You know, how did he know that about my uncle and aunt with the library? How did he know about my grandfather?’”
The storyteller creates the door. The audience decides where it leads.
Thompson’s connection with Maine is strong.
His grandfather bought property on Great Pond in 1908. He spent summers between Maine and New Hampshire and he was born just across the New Hampshire border in Vermont. On Golden Pond was set in Maine, as was The Constituent, although both were filmed in New Hampshire. The Constituent is currently having screenings throughout the country and won Best Short Film at the Mill City Film Festival.
Bar Harbor isn’t simply another stop on a book tour. Maine is part of Thompson’s imaginative geography and so are its people.
During his 1982 acceptance speech for Best Adapted Screen for On Golden Pond, Thompson said, “I wrote On Golden Pond as a play four years ago for two reasons first I was out of work as an actor and second ‘cause I believe that I had something to say and a burning need to say it.”
After giving thanks to many, he ended with his characteristic wit and insuppressible joy.
“I want to thank the academy for this great great honor I am so proud and if you would all see me later I would love to suck face with you all, thank you,” he said before bounding off the stage.
Thompson travels with his Oscar.
He lets people hold it. That’s not because he needs them to admire him, but for something entirely different.
“I never leave home without the Oscars, so if folks like taking a photo with it, I always avail that possibility, and they’ve lent the thing out to thousands of people through charities, and really, it’s been handled by so many people that it’s tarnished already, but I love that because it gives people a moment to hold the thing and dream the dream of what would it be like,” he said.
When they hold that Oscar, people get to imagine, to think, to connect, to build a dream and a possibility.
They have a moment.
He says he likes giving people that moment — letting them imagine what it would be like.
Those moments—the dreams and goals, the cause and effect, the plot lines and hopes of a life—all come together in wild, poignant, humorous and sometimes hard ways. Thompson’s work—be it in acting, directing, writing novels or screenplays or plays or simply an article or an interview—is all about those moments.
One of those moments in his own life, he said, was when his wife, Kerrin—also a writer—saw via a Google Alert that a Irish racehorse was named On Golden Pond.
It is a moment that shows that some stories stop belonging to just their creators; they become bigger things, tales that bring readers or viewers into possibilities and create connections.
“Who needs an Oscar when you have a horse named after something you wrote?” he said with a laugh.
The Academy Award-winning writer of the iconic film On Golden Pond, Ernest Thompson, will make an appearance at the Jesup Memorial Library at 5:30 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 13 to present his new literary thriller, Out Clause. Thompson’s sprawling epic is a gripping page turner that asks a probing question: What if you could leave your life? Every year, 500,000 Americans go missing, and 1,500 never return. Where are they and is there a connection? Yes. Out Clause.
Thompson will be joined in conversation with New York Times bestselling author Caroline Alexander, whose translation of The Odyssey is forthcoming next year. Books courtesy of Sherman’s Maine Coast Book Shops will be available for purchase and signing by the author. This event is free and open to the public. And you can take photos with Oscar.
The Jesup Memorial Library is located at 34 Mount Desert St. This event is available in-person only. Registration is encouraged at jesuplibrary.org/events.
The library will play “You Will Be Loved” during the talk.
Ernest Thompson’s work has won an Academy Award, two Golden Globes, Writers Guild and Broadway Drama Guild Awards and been nominated for a Tony, an Emmy and a British Academy Award. His plays have been seen in theatres around the world, his most enduring, On Golden Pond, translated into 30 languages and presented in more than 40 countries. Current projects include an On Golden Pond Broadway revival, directed by and starring the author; true also of his new one-man play, Archie Parish’s Parting Words, now on tour; his newest play Grand Time; the short film The Constituent; and the movie sequel, Home On Golden Pond.
His novel Out Clause is now available.
A prolific lyricist, his song with Carly Simon, “The Father Daughter Dance,” will soon be playing at a wedding near you.
With his writer wife Kerrin Thompson, he established Rescind Recidivism, a prison writing program giving inmates a chance to feel creative as well as human, capable and worthy.
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