#15. Rock & roll hellfire, part 2. "The Rose," SHE LIVES!

#`15.  Rock & roll hellfire, part 2.  "The Rose,"  SHE LIVES!

Handing in a first draft is a butt-clenching process.  It happens quickly but feels like forever.

You've been with it, all alone for months; those characters living and dying on the page, rippling through your dreams, sucking up the air wherever you are.  It's a total takeover of trial and error.

I often worked ten hours a day, seven days a week, giving it everything I had.  And some I didn't.

This wasn't exactly work work, you know, like carrying sheetrock or slinging huge blocks of ice in a peach packing shed (both of which I'd done).  But it was so fulfilling, so concentrated that I had to leave notes for myself to vacuum, to water the houseplants, to change the cat litter...notes to remind myself to make more coffee, shower, and eat.   One one of my lists, it actually said "make list."  It seemed the only thing I could do on my own was write, pee, and smoke.

Almost every project I did in my thirty years, at some point seemed like a doomed good idea that had utterly consumed me on its way south.  Looking back on it, it's probably how I motivated myself until I wrote FADE OUT and then my two favorite words: THE END.

Finally, the first draft is over.  Suddenly all the blinds are torn open, the sunlight floods in from a dozen windows, and you are standing, pear-shaped and naked, in the middle of a strange room, filled with people who all turn and say sourly, "A hundred-and-fifty-one pages?"  Now the relief turns into Fear and its psycho twin, Panic.  Most scripts are a hundred-and-twenty pages.

In those pre-computer years, the idea of re-typing it to polish and cut, was completely overwhelming. I'm a 'touch typist' but slow,  s  l  o  w.  Most writer deals guarantee a first draft and two sets of revisions: I'd wait and get some perspective on this moose.  Hell with it, I'm handing in.  Plus which, I need to get paid.

I stopped at the Farmers Market to get some nerve-building coffee and everyone seemed to be eyeballing me sideways, even June, the weird coffee lady who puts her makeup on with a garden trowel.  Aren't scripts supposed to be shorter, she seemed to be asking.  And yours is how long?  "Do you want room for cream?"

My drive up Olympic Blvd to Fox seemed to take a week.  At this point the guards at the main gate knew me as the long haired writer in the old Woody who fed the backlot feral cats.  Normally, they waved me through.  Not this time.  One of the guards came to my window with a clipboard, checked me, checked the board, nodded.  "Handing in today, huh?"  Yeah.  "Good luck."

Now my heart was pounding, I had a headache, my mouth was dry, and my old car radio suddenly quit right in the middle of Rod Stewart's donut song.  "Every picture tells a story, donut," he wailed and then, silence.

In my short time as a screenwriter, I'd already had two Marvins, both at Fox, just down the hall from each other.  One was Marvin Schwartz, Good Marvin that I wrote about mostly in #12, a man I loved and admired.  This new one was clearly Bad Marvin...

Who, even though he knew I was coming in, was at a lunch meeting off the lot so I handed my script into his secretary.  This was before I learned never to do that.  She took it then weighed it in her hand and her eyes got big.  By this time, I was sweating in places I had never sweated.  That script had my sum total of rock and roll experience and imagination.  And I knew it was simultaneously not enough and WAY too much.

I started to take it back from her.  Her hand tightened.  I pulled, she pulled harder and snatched it away.  Quickly, she put in in one of her desk drawers, locked it, and dropped the little key down her secretarial showbiz cleavage.  "You'll get used to it," she said.  "In time."

But I never did.

                             ****

Back home, even my cats were looking at me suspiciously.  That cut it!

I sat down at my desk and went to work on the copy of the script I had made before I drove to Fox.  Earlier that year, I had bought my own copy machine!  It was absurdly expensive, orange and huge, and pulled so much juice, when you turned it on, the lights dimmed for a second.  It was like the electric chair in those prison movies: "They're fryin' Lefty," I said every single time.  But, baby, I loved that machine and I always had copies, one of which I mailed the next day to the Writers Guild script registration department.  Something I'd learned from my "Last American Hero" debacle.

Then, I started polishing, cutting, adding, re-arranging, cutting some more, correcting typos (stiffening one page with so much White-out, you could hold it out straight by the goddamn corner).  And for a while it actually seemed to get better.

But longer; counting my A and B pages, I now had 164 pages.  Oh, no.

Too much dialogue, too many 'good lines,' too many funny but pointless stories.  I was making it worse by making it better!  And even though I had officially handed it in to Worth, I was dead flat afraid to show it to any of my friends, a chronic disease with me.

So I waited.

And waited.

Then somewhere, someone heard that 20th Century Fox's president's long-haired son had convinced the old man that "The Rose" was a cool worthwhile project and even though they were looking for a new writer (shit!), it seemed now to have what they call a flashing green light!  As my agent was putting me up for new jobs based on the (ha ha) success of this last one.  Someone heard that one of the writers Fox went out to was the legendary Frank Pierson.  Apparently he sent it back with a note that said while he would love to have their money, his advice was to shoot it exactly as written, it didn't need him or anyone else.

Umm, that was a pretty good day.

Then -- still no word of any kind from Worth -- I read in the trades, Fox had hired Mark Rydell, a director with actual credits, some of them impressive.  By now, for reasons best known to drunken Hollywood angels, my agent J.P. had gotten me another job and I was off and running down some new tangent.  Hollywood script development is a booming but wild hair business.

So they were now making their movie.  And, as my name occasionally appeared in their publicity, I kept getting new job offers which re-tracked my mind on those things and the little house I'd bought up in Laurel Canyon; I G.I.ed it for under fifty grand!  It only had one bathroom but it had a washer and a dryer!  My first house, formerly owned by a former porn star named Rick Cassidy.  And it had roses in he garden.  I took it as an omen.  Y'know...Roses?  Where do I sign, baby?!

Then, I got a phone call from my mother back in North Carolina.  She had just read in Bob Thomas' column in the Asheville Citizen Times that "somebody named Betty Midler is starring in Fox's 'The Rose.'  Is that your movie, Puppy?"  Yeah, Mom.  I think it is.

About four seconds after I'd hung up from my mother's call, I telephoned Worth at Fox.  And surprise, surprise --

He wouldn't take my call.

In fact I never heard from him again.  But after someone had passed me a copy of the script (as it now stood), oh my, how I wanted to.  I had gotten no farther than the rewritten title page to discover my name nowhere on it.

Nowhere.

As I recall, it said "A Marvin Worth film.  Written by Marvin Worth and Michael Cimino and Bo Goldman.  From an idea by Marvin Worth.  Producer -- Marvin Worth.  For Marvin Worth Films @ 20th Century Fox."  But no Chow Puppy.  Not anywhere?

No.

First of all, it's not unheard of for such a naked credit crab by a producer.  They've often been with the script in all it's incarnations for so long and they are so familiar with it, they begin to think it's theirs.  And in the beginning of his career, Worth had been a writer, so his water just sort of settled that way.  But there is NO SUCH THING as an "idea by" credit.  "Written by," "Story by," and "Screenplay by," that's pretty much it.

Man, I was steaming.

So I called my lawyer Barry.  Then, he was steaming.  After a very short and tightly focussed phone call he made to Worth the following day, Barry was messengered a new title page and a signed agreement that subsequently attached it to all scripts of "The Rose" on which "idea by" was eliminated, about half the other Worth credits disappeared and my name was added to the growing list of writers.

After I read the current "Rose" script, I thought it was pretty okay.  There was lots of my work still in it and some new stuff that was real good.  Later I found out most of it had come from Bo Goldman who has a cottage industry in Academy Awards.  Dude can write.  I say if you're going to get rewritten, please God, let it be by somebody great.  That way your friends might think it was you.

Then, shooting was finally over and cast and crew were coming home.

When it came time for the pre-release Writers Guild credit arbitration, I began to prepare my case.   This time I hired a friend named Cathleen Summers who drove a little red car and had cats and who was real pretty and so smart she had at least two brains, one of them purely for screenplays.  She guided my brief, chapter and verse, to what I considered a successful conclusion: Screenplay by Chow Puppy and Bo Goldman, Story by Chow Puppy.  And after a week it became official.

Aww-RIGHT!  And thank God for Cathleen Summers.

                         ****

As an invited bunch of us got off the plane in Dallas to see the sneak preview of "The Rose," we passed a electronic billboard that announced that the Dow Jones had just cracked 700!  THAT'S how long ago this was.

It was the first time I had ever seen any part of the movie; my heart was hammering so loud, I thought surely they'd put me in the projection booth.  Calm down, breathe, in and out, as the lights came down and the movie started.

Holy suckaroonie: 35MM, color, Cinemascope, mag stereo sound, even the little effects like a limo door slamming seemed four dimensional!  And suddenly, there she was -- tiny Bette Midler staggering down the tour plane's stairs, half drunk, a little skimpy sixties dress clinging to her, a huge floppy hat bent low over her dark glasses as her manager, Alan Bates, looked at his rock and roll wreck with disgust.

It was everything I dreamed it would be.  And then the titles began.  Wow.  Look at all those names, all those people in this movie I wrote.  I was flying.  They save the last titles for Writer(s), Producer(s), and Director.  When the writer(s) titles came up --

       THEY HAD SPELLED MY NAME WRONG.
     
Both times!  My blood actually ran cold.  And I am embarrassed to say that it was like ten minutes until the power of Midler's cyclonic performance pulled me back into the story, into the sweep of the movie.

The preview audience seemed to like it, even with its sad ending, and the dreaded opinion cards were good enough so the trip back to L.A. was a happy relief for all.

In fact my relief was so happy, two days later I went out and leased a Cadillac Seville.  God, I loved my little house and Caddy; it's true, I'm a hillbilly.  But a by-God American one!

When my lawyer Barry brought it to their attention, Fox apologized all over the place about misspelling my name in the titles, changed it at no small cost to them and then sent a huge floral arrangement to my house in the shape of the corrected letter.  For a while, it looked like a Mafia funeral in my living room.  Until my cats zeroed in on it.  Then it looked more like the crime scene.

"The Rose" got some great reviews and some just meh.  And one from a former restaurant critic who absolutely hated it.  But Bette got the cover of "Rolling Stone" with an iconic shot by Annie Liebovitz and was universally praised for this courageous performance in her first film.  She still says it's her favorite.

It opened in Westwood and the lines went down the block.  I only drove by five or six times.  I swear.  For a long time (maybe even still) all its makers rode on the rocket coat-tails of Bette, the masterpiece song by Amanda McBroom, and its "dark" ending.

I happened to be in New York when "The Rose" opened there.  Bette had started in the NYC baths, was a Big Apple darling, so it was a huge deal.  My friend Jim Hart took me down to Times Square to see the campaign Fox had mounted.  It was epic.  The billboard took up what seemed like several buildings and the square itself.  It had everything but the Camel guy blowing smoke rings.  The display was so big, from down on the street, you could actually see my name as screenwriter.

And do you know, for about five minutes there, I was happy.

It was later that night I realized -- thank God -- that no matter how much praise I got, it would never really be enough.  Because, for me, it only lasts about five minutes.  Tops.  So I would have to let that go and take my joy from the work itself, from the actual doing of it.  And some of the people I would meet along the way.  The Farrellys, Tony Bill, Mark Waxman, Hannah Hempstead, Warren Miller, Gilda Stratton, the Dunne family...

Which changed everything.  I was finally out of that rock and roll hellfire.  But this was Hollywood, Jake.  And I'm me.

So of course, I immediately found a new one...which lasts until today.

Because I got sole story credit on "The Rose" when some people thought it'd possibly make an interesting Broadway type musical, I controlled the rights with Fox.  So who were we to argue with them?

This is where I first encountered manager Pamela Cooper, daughter of the legendary Frank Cooper, the guy who discovered Frank Sinatra!  She thought "The Rose" on Broadway was pretty good idea and signed on.

Still riding on Amanda McBroom and Bette's coattails, we fielded all kinds of offers: from London, from Sweden, from Australia, from Japan, from The Beatles' musical producer's son, from some actual track record folks who thought they might have famous unnamed pop star interested...right up until Ms. Unnamed broke up with her long term boyfriend and maybe saw the first draft script for the new "A Star Is Born" and got a good look at blue-eyed Bradley.

Hey, I never said her name.

But the one who put up some money to have me go to work on it, to develop it further was Karen, a whirlwind singer-florist who stuck with me through thick and thin, as we tarted our version around to every last human in America.  If we didn't contact you, check your unread emails.

Once that went south, Pamela found a well-known producer named Gail Berman.  She had a decades long relationship with Fox -- somewhere between helpful and crucial -- the check cleared and we got started all over again, this time without my so-called participation.  Which is where it rests now.

Karen is going to sell flowers and run for Mayor of Newark, Pamela's clients are working and she herself was nominated for a Tony for "Come From Away."  And I hope Gail will have a wild shot-in-the-dark success with "The Rose" somewhere, sometime in its new incarnation.  These are tough minded, dedicated women, my favorite kind.  But I would like to see it all happen before they have to wheel me down the aisle in an iron lung with a drool cup.

But now, I'm just here.  Hanging around, telling you these stories, loving my wife, grateful for my life and friends.  Much of which is fueled by the Writers Guild of America who kept everyone honest, and the men who recognized the car and filled the gas tank, Richard Moyer and Barry Beckerman.

Thanks again, guys.

#14. Rock & roll hellfire part 1. And words about dialogue

#14.  The Rose's rock & roll hellfire, part one.  And some words about dialogue.

                          "I ran the hellfire road
                   to chase the sweet smell of sin."

                 J. Mellencamp  'Troubled Man'

We were hippies once...and young.

We had pony tails.  And loved rock and roll.  And had been front row center for the entire  Monterey Pop Festival.  Netflix it; that's us four UCLA film schoolers in American flag shirts and black cowboy hats shooting my so-called thesis film.  We got half a page in color in Time Magazine's 1967 hippie issue!  My sister was thrilled, my southern small town parents were mortified.

Ten years later I was pinballing my way though Hollywood when agent John Ptak heard they were looking for a writer at 20th Century Fox for a Janis Joplin prototype rock and roll crash-and-burn story.  At this point, my hippie drag was wearing a little thin, even for me, but J.P. and I figured what the hell.  Once more into the breach!

So I threw my blue Bahne skateboard in the way-back, jumped in my '42 Ford woodie, and drove to Fox to meet producer Marvin Worth.

I think our simultaneous four word thought bubbles were "Are you shittin' me?!"  I was in a faded tie-dye shirt, skinny jeans, Fairchild moccasins, and my black cowboy hat with its American flag hatband.  I had a lit Winston clamped in my teeth.  I am cringing as I write this.

Marvin Worth was dressed in a beige cashmere turtleneck, a $300 pair of slacks, Italian loafers, and wore, around his neck what must have been a four pound silver Ankh, popular in those days with hep cat businessmen.

We probably should have just blown taps right then.  Neither of us could quite hide the look of disgust.  But neither could we hide the fact that both of us got, well, curiouser and curiouser.  So he half heartedly motioned me in and I barely made my way to a stuffed chair and we began our meeting.

They didn't have the data-urping internet in those dim days, so all we had to go on was reputation and rumor.

Worth seemed to be in his sixties with his perfectly done Prince Valiant long hair and his buffed and manicured nails.  I recently Googled him to discover he was only 12 years older than me!  In those days, I thought of myself as Young -- drinking, smoking dope, running around, no kids because I WAS THE KID!  I had two cats named Tector and Lyle and an empty refrigerator and a waterbed and a Mickey Mouse rug in the bathroom (still got it) and a skateboard, man.  The only thing I could cook from almost scratch was a Tater Tot omelet.

Is this not a kid?

Worth seemed so old.  And even though he'd had produced and managed the legendary Lenny Bruce (a complete hero of mine; I could do all his routines including Fatboy's Used Car Lot), I couldn't quite get past Worth's big shot bit.  To be fair, I'm pretty sure he felt the same way about me.

We looked at each other and slowly began to talk.  I found out what he wanted, he found out what he might be able to get.  And although we never became friendly, never lost the basic distrust from that first impression, we found a kind of peace with it, made the deal, and went to work.  Such are the sometime residents in that Hollywood Hotel.  In the end, with significant help, we put on a fairly successful party/movie down in the ballroom.  It was called "The Rose."

After my deal closed, Worth and Fox hired John Byrne Cooke (broadcast legend Alistair's son) a former bluegrass musician who had worked for the famous gonif manager Albert Grossman (Bob Dylan, The Band, Peter, Paul, and Mary, Odetta, Paul Butterfield, Janis Joplin).  During that period, John had been the road manager for Janis and had stories for days.

A good natured guy, he also had a four digit I.Q., made tri-lingual puns, could read upside down and backwards, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of music.  He was the first to notice that my parent's  zip code -- 28782 -- was a palindrome!  Over the next five months, he gave me much.

Like his notes he'd made over the years, access to his recollections and stories, and a New York introduction to Janis' band, producer John Simon, together again in the studio to work the tracks of her memorial 'final album.'

However thanks to my substance abuse and being swept away by time and events, here the memory begins to shake and cough.  So I will just say I learned some things thrilling, boring, even unpleasant about the record business.  From sung and unsung rock and roll heroes.

Over the years, I have come to spend some time with rock and rollers: Jim Morrison of The Doors, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, to name three.  Here is what I learned.  They are brilliant, gifted, and utterly damaged.  When they are at their zenith, very, very few say "no" to them.

They end up as children who throw spectacular autonomy tantrums to get their way.  After a while, just the threat of this is usually enough.  It becomes habituated behavior whose wheels are lubed by staggering amounts of money.  The music can be great but make no mistake, fame is a kind of stage four cancer.  With occasional fun.

Here is an illustrative (and perhaps apocryphal) story.  When San Francisco's Jefferson Airplane hit it big, I mean real big, "White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love" had been on the charts for months, Grace Slick and Marty Balin were in Los Angeles doing business when they got their first massive check.  Wowee wow, look at all them zeros!  They were taken forthwith to a Beverly Hills exotic car dealership down on Wilshire.

Where not a single one of the car salesmen would come over to help them.  And Grace was gorgeous!  But this was 1967 and to the staff, they were just a couple of no account hippies off the street.

Grace fumed.  She steamed.  And then she exploded.  Grabbing a cast iron base from one of the Aston Martin signs, she began to beat the steel grey DB-5 in a fury.  The first blows froze everyone cold.  They they all lept into action, running for her screaming "STOP!  What the hell are doing?!"

Grace calmly dropped the cast iron base the concrete floor and smiled sweetly.  "My name is Grace Slick, motherfucker and I want this car."  With that she pulled the RCA check out of her purse and showed it to them.  "All fixed up.  By tomorrow at five."

This story widely made the rounds: no clue if it's true.  But the underlying message is clear.  Fair is fair.  Money is money.  And I want what I want when I want it.  One pill makes you larger...

So with a whole raft of these kinds of stories and some vaguer ideas, I went to work on an outline, a kind of information dump, to see what I had.

A few years earlier, in the barely imaginable Time Before Computers, I had bought an IBM Correcting Selectric II typewriter, and it had become the new star of my life.  There was something mystical about its hum when you turned on; it painlessly opened a vein for me every time and suddenly my fingers were flying over the keys and the little silver printing 'golf ball' was chattering away, page after page.

May Rose Foster was going to be a glorious, out of control southern girl rock and roll singer at the top of her career.  She had been, as they say, rode hard and put up wet.  And now she was completely exhausted, worn out by the non stop tours, endless hours in the studio, the business she didn't really understand, interview after interview where they never quoted you right, the booze and drugs, the parade of nameless men...and women, and very little normal human contact.  She was always hustled from place to place by a phalanx of well-intentioned robots who treated her like a diseased queen.

She wanted a year off.  On her own.  To get well, to read, and to write new songs.  To recharge the batteries.  To find her creative center again.  Maybe in a little mountain cabin by a creek...

No one wanted any part of this.

Her millionaire manager Rudge Campbell (a British Albert Grossman type) had a plan to kill all of it.  He would guilt trip her, wear her down, threaten to replace her band, and cause her friends to betray her.  Then he would move to cancel the one concert venue she wanted, her "homecoming," all to turn her back into the golden-egg-laying goose.  He would make it all right again.  He would save the day.  He would save her.

It was always assumed that we were modeling our star after Janis Joplin.  True to some extent.  But to an old drama-junkie jazzbo like me, first there was Billie Holiday, Chet Baker, Peggy Lee,  Anita O'day, and even the short career and lost anguish of Johnny Ray.  I saw the Rose in all of them.

So I had my protagonist and my antagonist.  I had two clear characters (at least to me) and, most importantly, I had conflict.  And, of course, they had history.  Now it was time for me to invent the other characters, the every day events, scenes, and some kind of resolution.  Now the fun would start.  Runners take your marks...

This was in the days before Syd Field, before I really knew what structure was.  But let's be honest; it was also more fun.  The old Twain/Gottlieb writers' koan -- if you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there -- had never been more true.  But mamma mia, I saw lots of wondrous stuff wandering on my Any Road, my rock and roll midnight freeway to hell.

I took off ramps, on ramps, overpasses, underpasses, rest areas; I even took runaway truck pull-offs!  Because I had left town with no map, and to flog the metaphor further, I tried to stay within sight of my freeway but it didn't always work.

You get happy and tranced, writing some scene that has absolutely no business in your story but the wasted time and effort is so enjoyable.  And my Selectric II printer ball couldn't have cared less.  He was just happy to be jumpin'.  I named him Russell Dehon and through the hypnotic hum, I could often hear him singing bebop a'lula, you mah baby!

So, lots of blind alleys.

But in some of those I found Sarah, an old lover of Rose's.  And Houston Dyer, an AWOL Silver Star winning Army combat vet on the run from Vietnam.  I found Dennis, Rose's road manager who was most like John Cooke.  I found Tiny and Mal, young soldiers on leave before their posting to Southeast Asia, rabid Rose fans, thrilled to get on the Tour plane with her.  I found her band, wild boogying horn dogs and all last named after former U.C.L.A. quarterbacks.  Hey, be true to your school.

Since I seemed to have most of my characters, I thought well, it'll be smooth sailing now.  I guess I can start.  Just see how and where it wanted to go.  You know, like novelists, real writers.  I'll let my characters talk for a while.  They'll show me where they want to go.
 
B.F.M.  Big fucking mistake.

Because like children left to their own devices, they're so happy to be up and running, they'll say anything.  Endlessly.  And here, for a bit, we are going back to THE SCREENPLAY.  Because where we left off if you recall was -- tah dah --

                 DIALOGUE

Many people think that dialogue is all that screenwriters write.  Until they read their first script (no easy task, believe me).  There is where they discover the whole movie; the story, the motivation, the  characters, the costumes, the way things look, the action sequences, and -- yes -- the dialogue.  In other words, the whole nine.

In a good script, it's nearly all there.  Or arrows that clearly point to it.

Someone who can write good dialogue has an odd gift that settles somewhere between the ear and the typing fingers.  It's fairly important but not crucial.  There are very good writers who have a tin ear for talk.  But if you can do it, you will find a niche in Hollywood.  Because characters tell who they are and what they think by what they say...or don't say.

As dialogue seemed to be a comparative long suit, I gratefully accepted its gift and turned my concerns toward structure, an area more troubling for me.  And it was my first attempts on "The Rose" that made this clear.  My peeps wouldn't stop talking!  Just blah blah blah.  After I had a stack of pages of this mess, I stopped typing, nearly out of breath myself.  

Going back through it, I uncovered about three lines that had some actual meaning, that revealed something, that I would keep.  One of them was the shortest sentence in the English language, just two letters long.  It was a woman saying "no."  I figured at this rate, it would take me about six years for a first draft instead of the projected six weeks.

About here is where the 3X5 scene cards began to look good.

Fortunately, I knew where the story started, I knew some of the stuff in the middle, and I knew where it ended.  Although then, I was not sure where SHE ended.  That came later.

Once I had a collection of possible scenes, I numbered them (as you recall) in pencil and push-pinned them to a bulletin board.  After I had rewritten the cards many times and switched them around and around and around, even though Sid Field hadn't written his book yet (come on, Syd, get busy!) I knew I had something up there that looked like a movie.  God, what a feeling.

It was that joyousness that propelled me into

FADE IN:

EXT. DALTON, GEORGIA - DAY

Your carpet probably came from this sleepy midsize town.  It has a well-defined class system -- race, money, and the railroad tracks -- with cotillions, cockfights, stock car hero Cotton Ravan, bankers in their sweat through seersucker suits, and The Rose.

It's a hot smokey day in late summer.

                  ****

I spent the next month and a half alone with my cats in my home office in the most exhilarating creative free flight I had ever known.  I believe if you are doing something you love, reach out with both hands.  My face hurt from smiling.

But, as bad times come to an end, so do good times.  Turned out that was what my script was about.  And keeping that balance was about to become a mess.  For both of us.  Because I had finally finished my first draft: standing there on the edge of the Hellfire Highway.

Where we'll start next time in Part 2.