If the length and breadth of a CV are anything to go by, County Down native Ron Hutchinson has had a more interesting and varied writing career than most. He's an Emmy-award-winning screenwriter, an Olivier-nominated playwright, he's taught at the American Film Institute and worked as writer-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Now, he's published a book exploring the colourful and often bizarre world of a writer for hire in Hollywood. Ron spoke to Seán Rocks on Monday's Arena. 

"If you start off writing a book knowing what you're going to say, then you're done for."

Ron decided to write the book, he said, as a way for him to make sense of his life and career to date. He told Seán that he may have caught a bit of it, but the whole meaning remains elusive. "I understand the world through words and their sound and their clatter and their rush."

"I think if you're privileged enough to be able to work as an artist, especially as a writer, you live in a state of suspended animation from the real world for the hours a day that you're actually writing, which is your real world and there's a kind of practical ecstasy involved in that."

Some of the experiences Ron had before he became a professional writer are recounted in his book and he told Seán a particularly vivid true-life tale about the time he worked as a fraud investigator in England.

"Patrick Joyce was found in a Coventry pedestrian underpass at three in the morning with a rusty hacksaw blade, sawing the head off another man, who turned out to be called Patrick Joyce."

This is not a fictional crime story – this is from Ron's previous life as a fraud investigator. And boy, is it vivid… It's one of many anecdotes from his book that emerged on Arena, together with the extraordinary experience of working with Marlon Brando on The Island of Dr Moreau. It was not a happy experience:

"They'd sent me some footage. All they'd been able to get so far was Marlon sitting in a hammock, weighing 400lbs, with a – I have to use the word midget – on his chest."

The situation on location when Ron arrived looked like this: Brando had thrown the script out, declaring that they were not making a movie, but a pageant. He then decided that the entire film would be about his relationship with this "very, very small human being".  The level of concern on the production meant that, when Ron, on his first night in the hotel, broke a glass and cut his wrist and was taken to hospital for some stitches: 

"The next day rumours swept the set that the new writer had taken one look at what he was up against and tried to kill himself."

Clinging To The Iceberg: Writing for a Living on the Stage and in Hollywood by Ron Hutchinson is published by Oberon Books.

You can hear the full discussion with Ron, and listen back to the rest of Arena here: