#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.
                  

#13. Lunch with Bobby. And the wealth of charachters.

#13.  Lunch with Bobby.  The Cookie Jones.  And the wealth of flawed characters.

And God said, let there be producers!  So the poor screenwriters will have something to do after they get home from morning coffee at the Farmer's Market.

It was back in the mid-Seventies when ICM agents Mike Medavoy and John Ptak lined me and director Philip Kaufman up for a project-pitch lunch with Bobby.

These lunch (and sometimes breakfast) meetings are classic; the big shot producer or executive takes the hot(ish) writer and/or director out for a meal where he (or she) pulls up a stool and milks them for all they're worth.

The big shot writes off the lunches as development costs.  These used to be known as The Three Martini Lunch.  By the time we got there, they had morphed into The Two Bottles of Cheval Blanc Lunch.  The write off remained the same.

Bobby was the son of a famous art-collecting industrialist who will be headlined in ANY history of Pre War America.  Philip and I had been, as I recall, recruited by Hannah Weinstein, a golden era lefty producer who had come upon actual government documents laying bare the sordid details of U.S. Army PX fraud in Vietnam, perpetrated by four senior level Master Sergeants, sunk to the very top of their boots in ill-gotten everything.

My idea was to lay it out in a bittersweet story about Frank and Mindy Moon (I can't believe I remember this), a couple of first rate human beings, second rate entertainers, stuck in the third act of a career, doing PX shows for the troops in Saigon.  While their marriage is coming apart, their act is actually getting better as they fall headlong into the Master Sergeant scandal, beset by careerist government investigators and a sudden NVA attack.

Philip had already directed "The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid" and "The White Dawn" and was well on his way to a spectacular career.  And I was well on my way to lunch at The Palm, yum yum.

Bobby was late, so Philip and I got caught up on local gossip.  I'd just had that terrible walk-out lunch meeting at Le Dump with the two rock and roll millionaire geniuses and he'd just been fired off "The Outlaw Josey Wales."  I didn't know directors could even get fired: he said it happened while he was eating lunch.  He came back to the set and saw Clint Eastwood up on the Chapman crane rehearsing a shot.  In a half- joking manner, he called up to Clint, "Are you directing now?"  Clint didn't smile back.  He just nodded.  And that was it for Philip on Josey Wales.  Although he remained the lead credited screenwriter.

Bobby finally arrived and we set about to have lunch.  The Palm is noted for their steaks, so we all ordered them.  For many hot(ish) writers, these meals were sometimes the only grown up food they got, so chow down, puppies!

We had a nice lunch.  Philip and I told him our take on the Master Sergeant - Vietnam project; he seemed to like it.  Then, talking more show biz gossip, talking about Bobby's wife, a Grammy winning toast-of-two-continents type singer, beautiful and thin as a shoelace, who I had met when we were all prior versions.  Bobby said sourly she was always ragging him to lose weight as he forked another bite of ribeye into his mouth.  Philip and I thought it was great; we didn't care what he looked like coming out of the shower.  Bobby was a sweet guy, a scion-of, and would maybe produce our movie.  More Cabernet?

Then desert.  And coffee.  And a Sambuca or two.  And more stories.  I lock-jawed back a yawn.  But we weren't worried.  Until Philip looked at his watch.

It was four fifteen.  Jesus H!  We'd been there over three hours.  Most of these lunches last an hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half.  Bobby excused himself for the men's room.  I signaled our waiter and asked him if Bobby had paid the check.  Or had an account there?  He smiled and shook his head.  Hmmm.  What was going on?

Philip requested a phone.  Hillbilly that I am, I remember thinking, Jeez, can you do that?  So while Bobby was still in the men's room, it was brought to the table, plugged in, and he called Mike Medavoy, the fount of all knowledge in Showbiz.

Philip quickly explained the situation.  Mike told him that he had been in Bobby's Century City townhouse and it was filled, honest to God filled with art: Picassos, Monets, Pollocks, he even owned the Larry Rivers' Confederate General, the one on the cover of the Brautigan book.  You know who his father was.  Bobby was rich, he was 'good for it,' he was a player!

"That's as may be," said Philip.  "But apparently not today."  We didn't think Bobby should have to sell one of his Renoirs for our lunch.  But maybe he had an extra velvet Elvis in his garage.  "I gotta go," said Philip.  "Rose and I have a dinner."

"I hope it's more real than this one," I said hauling out my brand new credit card.  He took his out, too.  "Splitzies?"

We paid, wrote a big tip for the long afternoon's service, and were on our way out the door when Bobby came back, an embarrassed but friendly smile lopsided across his face.  "Thanks, guys!  It was a great meeting, a great lunch.  If you see my wife, mention that I just had a salad.  I'll call your agent, we'll set something up.  And thanks."

We never heard from him again.  And the project, like so very many, disappeared in its own smoke.  Thank God the Monet and that velvet Elvis are safe.  Somewhere.

                      ****

JAMIE AND HER FRIENDS GET CONTROL OF THEIR COOKIE JONES

I have known Jamie Diamond for years.  We met in the mid-70s when I went to visit her bosses, producers Mitch Brower and David Foster at Warners to pitch them yet another exciting project that mercifully faded away half way through the meeting.  But on the way out, I stopped to talk to Jamie; she was tall, striking, and had a great sudden laugh.  We hit it off.

For about a week we tried to be...something, I don't know.  But that clearly wasn't going to work for reasons best known to the Baby Jesus, so we decided to just be girlfriends.  It stood us in good stead for the next forty years.

Jamie grew up in showbiz: her mother (now a certified scholar with a PhD) had been a showgirl/ dancer in Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe in New York.  Jamie's father was a Hollywood press agent when he met and married Mamma Diamond.  Humphrey Bogart was their best man.  One of Jamie's first memories was standing in Bogey's lap while they all laughed and smoked and drank.

One day, Jamie showed me a piece she had written about a first date with a well known screenwriter/playwright.  I must have read it three or four times.  It was good.  I mean real good.  God, where does this talent come from; there she was working as a secretary/assistant to a couple of producers and she could write better than most of the scripts that came across her desk.  From 'good' writers.

Time passes and now she has written for the L.A. Times, the N.Y. Times, and God knows where else.  She also writes fiction and over the years, she's gotten even better.  And yet, not published; one of the great mysteries of life.

Down deep in her heart, I believe the following Cookie Jones story illustrates how and who she is.

Years ago in L.A., maybe still in high school or home from college, Jamie went out riding with two or three of her girlfriends.  They were hungry and nearly broke, so like many kids at that intersection, they stopped at a Ralph's Market.  Trooping inside and pooling their money, they bought a large flimsy plastic tray of chocolate chip cookies, the big ones, and went back out to the car.  Where each one had one.  Then, all watching their weight, they chunked the package of cookies into the dumpster and drove away.

They cruised a while, 'bumpin' on Sunset,' you know.  Pretty soon, one of them got hungry again.  Then, they all did.  Only now they were completely broke.  So they drove back to that same Ralph's, pulled in next to the dumpster, one of them boosted another one in, and THERE WERE THE COOKIES!  Untouched, still in the package.  Mostly.

Back in the car, they each had one -- okay, maybe two.  But that's it, swear to God!  Then, Jamie got out of the car and lined the remaining cookies up under the path of their car's left rear tire, got back in the car, put it in reverse and backed over them.  Okay, took care of that.  Wanna go to Westwood?

                     ****

A few more words about the screenplay.

Here are some of the smartest I've heard; spoken by Ben Afleck on The Charlie Rose Show, attributed to T.S. Eliot.  "When you're trying to break into your audience's subconscious, plot is the meat you throw to the guard dogs."

And to drive the plot, you use CHARACTERS.

Somebody smart (hell, maybe it was T.S. Eliot, too) said character is destiny.  And I believe that it's true.  Destiny not only for the Hero but for those around him.  Forces, both good and bad, follow him on his journey and often sweep everyone else to heaven or hell.  The Hero is kind of a destiny magnet.

Citizen Kane ends up a gazillionaire who destroys everything he loves: Jedidiah, Susan, Mr. Bernstein, the newspapers, even a priceless but ignored treasure house of the world's great art (and sled).  All gone because the only safe way he knew to love was to buy things and then choke them to death.  His destiny.

Dreaming up and writing characters is a difficult amalgam of showing how they behave, how they dress, how they speak, what they do.  As Freud pointed out "We are who we were" so we have to understand their past even if they don't.  It always helps to know what your characters love most, hate most, and crucially, as Robert Towne pointed out, what they fear most.  So much of our lives are run and ruined by this motor.

Even our President had said, more than once, that power is born out of fear.  And not coincidentally, it's the title of Bob Woodward's book about the 2016 Trump election.

Once you know these things, you add them in tiny little brush strokes, blending, even hiding, so it's not obvious and simplistic.  It's a good idea to salt the script with lots of cool details, factoids, behavioral tics, and throw-away moments.  So that everywhere you look, the sweep of the story is reflecting the myriad faces of the main character.  Remember: it's on the hero's back the whole thing rides.

Simpler, paint-by-numbers movies always go down easier for a mass audience.  You know, movies with lovable lead characters who generate oodles of what executives call "rooting interest."

I came to hate those two words.  Because even though it's the polar opposite of the exec's daily life, in this case they want their hearts engaged, not their brains.

However...

There are times when this is not dramatically possible.  Ideally, you want both heart and brain alive and working and above all, ABOVE ALL your main character has to be interesting.

You're not supposed to get an emotional woody over Hannibal Lecter but you still can't take your eyes off him.

You don't want to grow up to be Walter White in the legendary "Breaking Bad," but you follow his story wherever it goes because deep in our black little hearts, we know that could be us on our darkest day.

Even in comedies like "Tootsie," Dustin Hoffman's stubborn self-obsessed actor is not our ideal best friend or next door neighbor.  Can you imagine the meetings the studio had about "softening him up" so they could "expand the brand."  Thank god Hoffman and director Sydney Pollack held out.  It ain't easy when a bunch of tanned, handsome, well-dressed execs whose money you are playing with, all want you to just make these Few Little Changes.  And these are the same men (and a few women) who will hire or not hire you ever again because you might become known as "inflexible" or "difficult."

But, hey, there are good days, too!  The perfectly named "Bad Santa" got made, reviewed well, and did good business.  Steven Hunter, the smart, tough-minded critic for the Washington Post said the two most memorable Santas in film history are Edmund Gwen and Billy Bob Thornton.  Haven't seen it?  Netflix.

This balance between a lovable and a flawed main character is one of the hardest things to strike in screenwriting.

Orion Films originally paid a lot of money for the book "Silence of the Lambs" for Gene Hackman to direct and star in as Lecter.  But when Hackman saw what Ted Tally had written, he chickened out.  He'd won an Academy Award for playing Popeye Doyle in "The French Connection" but Hannibal Lecter was fucking EATING PEOPLE, man!  There is an old adage in Hollywood: They can kill ya, but they can't eat ya.  I guess Hannibal finished that.  Especially for Mr. Hackman.

For a while the project was as dead as Monty Python's parrot.  Then Orion's president (and my ex-agent) Mike Medavoy sent the script to his old pal and former client Jonathan Demme and the rest is box-office and Academy history.

All great dramatic characters have a fatal flaw.

It is simply a blind spot.  Because of who they are, how they were raised, what they became, they are unable to see the one thing that could save them.  Their glorious struggle to survive is what makes for great drama.

Take a look at James Stewart, driven by revenge and guilt in the Anthony Mann directed westerns of the early Fifties.  Or "Lawrence of Arabia." Or "Raging Bull."  Or "The Hustler."

Robert De Niro and Paul Newman gambled their careers on 'unpleasant' characters like these.  So did Bogart, Brando, Lee Marvin, Barbara Stanwyk, Joan Crawford, Jack Nicholson, Woody Allen, Faye Dunaway, Al Pacino and more recently, John Cusack, Sean Penn, Seth Rogan, and Matt Damon.  Hell, even Vin Diesel (is that a butch name or what?).

How these lead characters reveal themselves to us comes primarily though DIALOGUE.  What they say or don't say.

So that is where we will start next time.  And remember the wise words of actor Jake Gyllenhaal, "Freedom is just on the other side of discipline."

So keep going.  You'll find it.

#12. Marvin, undone by appetites, saved by Dalai Lama

#12.  Marvin, undone by time and appetites, saved by the Dalai Lama.

Marvin Schwartz was a complete original.

In the course of twenty years, his oddly wonderful path went from movie producer friend of John Wayne's to dope-smoking Emmy winning writer to and even bigger producer at 20th Century Fox and Texas party dog to hard traveling spirit seeker to Buddhist monk working for the Dalai Lama in Nepal.  Like I said, a complete original; now sadly departed for brighter shores and richer fields of service.

As a young man, Marvin had been a press agent.  For a while he worked for the jazz impresario Norman Granz, on the road with the mid-50s Jazz at the Philharmonic tours, mostly with Ella Fitzgerald and her husband, bassist Ray Brown.

Marvin said these jazzbos were a wild horse crew; in the main, they were adult pros, so they knew how to get in trouble.  Narcotics were a problem, mostly benzedrine.  They'd all get cranked after the show, move all the furniture to the center of the hotel room, then repaint everything with brushes, masking tape, drop-cloths, edgers.  When they were done, they'd drag the furniture back in place revealing a perfect job except for the new colors; bruise purple, dayglo orange, turkey turd tan, you get the drift.

Marvin's mission was to keep the tour going while putting out these kinds of metaphorical (and some, not so) fires.  Heroin has to be cooked and addicts are not the most steady-handed, fully concentrating people.

The guys were forever losing and leaving things at the hotel; watches, their road pillows, eye glasses, Buck Clayton was reputed to have left his favorite trumpet mouthpiece in his hotel bathroom where he'd been practicing.  He loved the echoey sound.  Marvin had to deal with all this.  And, oddly, he was good at it.  I think this is where he learned to love being a producer.

To break into the film world as a press agent, one of his first movie jobs was working for the film company that brought Britain's "This Sporting Life" to the United States.  Directed by the weird and great Lindsey Anderson, starring the even weirder and even greater Richard Harris, it was a hard core look at the brutal life of a professional rugby football player surrounded by thieves and thugs.

When they released the movie in America, it became a smash hit.  Marvin worked on getting an Academy Award campaign started for Harris and his co-star Rachel Roberts which ended by seeing them both nominated.  Watching Harris in that film is like being in the presence of a young Brando.  Marvin said the chiseled Irish actor turned out to be an Olympian drinker who could talk the birds out of the trees and the girls out of everything else.  Apparently it was in these lost wild nights where Marvin learned that when in doubt, order another round.

As he told me these stories and some others about his early days with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas on "The War Wagon,"  I think this is where I learned to love him.

I first encountered Marvin at 20th Century Fox.  He was producing "Welcome Home Soldier Boys," a low budget movie about Vietnam vets going berserk when they got home (a media mania back then) directed by my pal Richard Compton.  I met Richard and Marvin at the Fox commissary for lunch.  There was the usual complement of film and TV stars, producers and assorted execs, and other above-the-line genius presumptives.

We had just sat down when suddenly, every eye in the place turned to the main door and the hubbub sound died instantly.  There, walking in with studio head Dick Zanuck, was a UCLA film school acquaintance, Carroll Ballard.  He was wearing tight pink suede hot pants.  For those who do not remember hot pants, they were cut reeeaalll high, like at the belly button.  They were that generation's thong.  I had never seen anything remotely like it, especially on a guy.  Suddenly everyone started talking again.  I looked over at Marvin and Richard.  Marvin just put his head on the table; his shoulders shaking in laughter.  A few years later, Ballard would go on to make "The Black Stallion," one of my all-time favorites, pink hot pants notwithstanding.

Marvin was the first Hollywood producer I knew to wear full cowboy civvies; stove-pipe Levis, H-bar snap button rodeo shirts, Lucchese boots with full riding heel and a beautifully blocked flat brim Stetson.  He presented quite a picture folding himself into the cab of his red Ford Ranchero pickup truck amidst the Porches, Jaguars, and Mercedes in the Fox parking lot.  Once, when he came down to his truck, he was shocked to see that some joker had dumped a huge wire bound bale of hay in the pickup's bed.  He drove with it proudly until the last straws had blown out the back.

It was around here, Marvin introduced me to his friend Barry, one of the premier entertainment lawyers in L.A.  I loved and trusted the way those two were together so I signed up with Barry and have been with his legal armada now for over four decades.

Earlier that year, Marvin had won an Emmy for co-writing "Tribes," a highly rated TV movie about a drafted surfer hippie in Marine Corps bootcamp.  At the televised ceremony, in front of millions, with a big loopy grin, Marvin thanked his bartender and his weed dealer.  What can I say, my kind of guy.

He also introduced me to saloon society; that demimonde evening pattern of hanging out in bars and lounges, drinking one's life into a velvet oblivion while some 'jazz' singer warbled a Carpenter's song or tried her pipes on (appropriately) "Lush Life."  About a year of this was all I could take, but what a year it was; college prep for alcoholics.  At that point, of course, I couldn't see it coming.  I was just barely understanding that sometimes no matter how hard you stared at the solution, you couldn't always tell which problem it went with.

Many of my Marvin memories are tied up with Texas.  Here's why.  He had fallen in love with an original western script making the rounds called "Dime Box" written by Bud Shrake and helped by Gary Cartwright, both doper roper Texans to their core.  Marvin optioned it and set about to make the movie.  The first thing he did was to somehow cast Dennis Hopper as Kid Blue, the lead.

At that point, Hopper was probably the most famous actor in the world.  He had done, of course, "Easy Rider," produced, directed and starred.  It was a smash hit yet the toxic rumors flew.  On his next project, he went to Peru (oh-oh) to do "The Last Movie."  The stories of cocaine, waste and fraud that sprang from the shoot became legendary as they were spoken!  Since that movie tanked under the weight of its own reputation, Hopper had become a complete pariah.  People were lining up to turn on him.  Kind of like the national finger-pointing fallout after President Clinton's sneak blowski.

By the time Marvin signed Hopper up for ("Dime Box" now called) "Kid Blue," the actor was radioactive.  And yet, this upcoming little western was all anybody in Hollywood could talk about.  Dennis this, Dennis that -- he tapped out his wife before he threw her out in the Taos snow, he hoovered so much Bolivian marching powder, he was blind in one eye and had a limp.  He ate a live scorpion, for god's sake!  You're crazy for hiring him.  And Marvin just smiled and honed the screenplay.

This is where the Chow Puppy came in.  Not as a writer; Marvin already had those, and good ones they were.  He invited me to come with him to Austin to hang out and maybe we'd even get some work done on a Hell's Angels project we were ghosting up.  And we'd get to hang out with Bud and Gary.

There is just no way to over estimate the burgeoning power of Texas in the Seventies. Outlaws Waylon and Willie, wild-man Jerry Jeff Walker, "Texas Monthly," the NFL Cowboys, a growing film industry, art collections like the de Menil in Houston, big oil (a.k.a. the awl bidness), non-fiction best sellers about high society family murders and their trials.  There was "Austin City Limits," and "Dallas," the #1 show on TV; hellfire, Texas was IT.  And money, weed, Cuervo Gold, and that around the clock marching powder seemed to be everywhere.

Hot fun in Texas, bro.   Because Mad Dogs party every night.

A good restaurant-bar we all drifted to was The Raw Deal.  Slow moving fast talking people on the make.  The Broken Spoke.  Armadillo World Headquarters.  And (as the cheapie film poster always said) GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS, one of whom was local politician Ann Richards who later became Governor and spent her last days with longtime companion Bud Shrake.

One of my favorite Texas moments oddly came one night in Beverly Hills, at the tail end of a party at Marvin's canyon house.  The phone rang.  It was one of his woman friends calling from Austin.  "Marvin, I'm stayin' up at Uncle Bud's place and we was talkin' about you and movies and all, and them young girls always around you."  Marvin looked out at the young girls in his house, some going home, some cleaning up, some helping a blithering Chow Puppy find his car keys.  "And we was wonderin," she went on.  "Are you in it for the wool?"

Well, duhh.

But the 'wool' was only a small piece, as it were, because he was Marvin Schwartz and he was in it for the love of EVERYTHING.  And everyone.  He burned hot and fast and eventually had to call in the dogs and piss on the fire.  Some version of this happens to many of us.  Sooner or later.

But at one point in that era's cyclone, Marvin had accidentally picked up a book on Buddhism at The Bodhi Tree bookstore on Melrose.  Then another.  And another.  I am not sure, but I think these books might have saved his life.

As his phone stopped ringing and the money and so-called studio 'housekeeping deals' ran out, Marvin sold his canyon home, his red Ford Ranchero, a few of his option deals, and yard saled his furniture and clothes.  With those proceeds, he put money aside for his children, paid some of his debts, and then bought a one-way KLM coach ticket to India and a 3rd class train ticket north to Nepal.

Richard and I took him to Musso & Frank's for one of his last dinners out.  We stopped at Cherokee Books where he found a used copy of Somerset Maugham's 'The Razor's Edge.'  "I always meant to read this," he said with a big smile.  "And now, I finally have the time."

A few days later, he left his Hollywood life and found reality.  Only this time, wool was not involved.  Just the heart.  "Remember, Puppola, if it was easy, anyone could do it.  So follow your bliss."  He laughed, hugged me, and the next time I saw him, fifteen years had passed.

We got the occasional letter, those flimsy light blue Aerograms that were covered, edge to edge with his tiny scrawl.  He was in the Canary Islands, he was in Sri Lanka, he was on a crowded train going to New Delhi, he was sick, he got well, and finally, he was at the monastery in Nepal.  He changed his out loud name from Marvin to 'John' because it was easier for them to pronounce and he wouldn't be writing for a while since he was working, mostly chores and driving the Jeep all day.  Then, prayer and chanting.  He said the Dalai Lama was a good guy and they laughed a lot.

Years later, my phone rang in Hollywood.  "Hi!  Want to have lunch at Nate n'Al's?"  It was him.   He was in town to help out his old friend Michael Wayne put together the DVDs for the John Wayne Film Collection.

Marvin showed up in beat up stovepipe Levis, sandals, and pale orange Buddhist robes, his long curly hair was cut short and even grayer.  He had lost twenty pounds; old and thin as a buggy whip.  But there was an aura of peace and calm around him, utterly mismatched with that deli's usual suspects.

As he wolfed down at B.L.T., I told him he was the Deli Lama now.  He laughed.  "Bacon's the thing I missed most.  And flush toilets."  His blue eyes were so clear, so happy, half way through my Rueben, just being there with him brought me to tears.  He reached out and took my hand.  "How's it going for you, Puppola?"  I told him, hell, if it was easy, anybody could do it.  But I finally found a good chunk of my bliss, I said.  Her name was Paula and she was from Seattle.  It put a smile on his face and it's pretty much that face I remember now because I never saw him again.

But I know he's out there, somewhere.  Because as Texan Robert Earle Keen says, "The road goes on forever and the party never ends."

Marvin.                 
                     

#11. Pitch meetings, assorted stories, and Act 3!

           
#11.  Pitch meetings, assorted stories, and Act 3!

It's likely clear from #10 but I don't really want to be done with UCLA and the Sixties.  At least in the remembering of it.  No possible way could I ever live through it again.  So, like General MacArthur, I shall return.

But in the meantime, back to the Pup in Hollywood and some notes on the typing that kept him there.

            MY WORST PITCH MEETING EVER

A little background: Pitches are dirt common in Hollywood.  Every day writers, producers, directors and sometimes even stars traipse into some studio or network big shot's office, schmooze a little, settle in, and then pitch their idea for a movie.

Sometimes it's simple; one of the most famous consisted of just three words: cowboys and aliens. Bought on the spot for mid-six figures.

Sometimes it's forgotten; like the legendary MGM, no-notes, on-the-fly pitch by Norman Wexler. The executives were dazzled, Wexler's agent in attendance was amazed, apparently even the secretary standing in the door was blown away.  It was the best pitch in history for everyone except poor Norm. He had some mental issues to begin with and was allegedly so baked on Thai stick, that on the ride home, he couldn't remember a word of it.

Sometimes it's complicated; with beat outlines, charts, detailed full color story boards, people acting out scenes in a desperate assault to sell the project.  For those fifteen or twenty minutes, hearts are pounding because futures are on the line.  Half way through most of these fire-fights, M.E.G.O. sets in with the executives.  That's what my friend David Freeman (who has written plenty o' scripts and some of the best books about Hollywood) calls it: Mine Eyes Glaze Over.  Most pitches are turned down flat.  And yet on they go, rolling over successes, failures, and endless careers.

My particular pitch happened at Columbia.

They had just bought the film rights to that year's publishing sensation "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche," a clever meditation by Bruce Fierstein on what it meant to be a man back in the early-Eighties.  It was on the Best Seller list for fifty-one weeks.

As a real he-man myself, doncha know, I have always been interested in this sort of phenomenon and its subsequent media fallout.  There were Quiche opening monologues, Quiche comedy routines, Quiche NY Times Magazine articles, Quiche Phil Donahue and Sally Jesse Raphael shows.  For a year or more, that little book was everywhere.  I guess Columbia smelled money.  My agent heard them sniffing.  Then, finally, my phone rang.

I read the book many times which kept me laughing.  And buried in that consuming frenzy, I ghosted up a story that I thought might serve.  Here is the part of it that I can remember.

Most families have, somewhere, a deep vein of crazy, sometimes hidden, sometimes not.  Movies of course do better with "not."

So my version was a romantic comedy between two unlikely people -- Bobby Wade, an easy-going second generation cast off who grew up in rural Oklahoma and ended up a derrick monkey in the oil fields -- and Hannah, a bright, good-hearted girl from the highest echelons of Philadelphia society.  In my story, they are plot welded together by Bobby Wade's loving but insane Philadelphia grandmother who has just died and left her vast fortune to him...IF he can renounce his wastrel Okie ways, return home to Philadelphia which he has not seen since he was five, and become a complete and full functioning gentleman.  In a month.  The beautiful cross-purposed girl will be his teacher.

I tell you all this not to seek an opinion but to say I had this mammy-jammer completely worked out.  And I mean six ways from Sunday!

So I boiled it down two a two page ten minute pitch whereupon I was summoned to a pre-disposed Columbia vice-president's office (they owned the rights) and started my audition.  After about a minute, all smiles and excited desk pounding, Robert jumped up and stopped me.  "This is just what we're looking for, Chow Puppy!  Let me get the rest of the gang together; they'll love it!  Can you wait about a half hour?"  The only acceptable answer to this question is, um, yeah.  And then you look around for that day's Trades, the "Daily Variety" or a "Hollywood Reporter" to read.  My friend  Tom called them The Green Lies and The Red Lies.

At this point I was happy because Robert seemed to like my story ideas.  But I was getting more and more nervous.  I hate memorized pitches because my so-called memory can do a Super Duck face-plant AT ANY TIME and without warning.  The more I try to calm myself, the worse it gets.

In his inner office, Robert began rounding up the other Columbia honchos and I worked up a really good flop sweat because my memory was beginning to fall out in chunks again.  I had three beloved cats at home, and at this point, I could not remember one of their names.  I looked for my notes, my two page story pitch.  Hook back in, hook back in!  But they were gone!

Then, I heard Robert laughing, reading one of my gags to someone on the phone inside.  I had left the pages in his office!  Then, he came bursting out, waving my pages.  "Let's go," he said.  "Everyone's waiting in Frank's office.  I'll keep these.  This thing is a home run!  You have a copy....

No.  I didn't.

Life lesson # 352,891: always make copies.  OF EVERYTHING!  I tried to ask him if we could stop and make me one.  But he was already headed down the hall.

He led us into Frank's huge office and there they were: Frank, a former screenwriter himself, now the co-head of Columbia.  Robert, my pages in his hand, all grins and excitement.  And two Development Girls from the story department, their Wallace Stegner grants from Stanford nearly visible, clipboards at attention.

And me, mouth dry as the second reel of "Lawrence of Arabia," moving toward that chair over there.  "Leave that one for Guy," Frank said referring to the other co-head of the studio.  "He's on the phone with Warren."  I guessed he meant Warren Beatty, who, as an agent, Guy used to represent.  There was one tiny place on a sectional couch and as I headed for it, I hungrily eyed my pages in Robert's hands.  I would have gleefully sold my entire family to the Gestapo for a five second look at them.  "Let's go ahead.  We can catch Guy up when he comes in," said Frank.

'Go ahead?'  WITH WHAT!?

The only thing in my mind were the howling Voices of Judgement, all screaming: Why are you here?  What are you doing?  You can't remember anything, you're a schmuck, a phony, worthless...you know, THOSE voices, now joining in a kind of dissonant harmony, the Thousand Voice Choir of Recrimination and Self Hate.  Let us just say I am not unfamiliar with their sound.  Personally, I don't think anyone who makes up shit for a living is.

I perched on the edge of the couch and looked around.  All eyes were on me.

Since I was a toddler, this was all I'd ever wanted.  An attention starved pill of the highest order, I was always the last one out of the pool, goose-stepping off the diving board, one hand up the the Heil- salute, the other one indicating the Hitler mustache.  "Look, Mommy, look!"  And that was when I was in my thirties.  Or near.

But in that office, I just wanted to die.  I had nothing.  After about ten or fifteen seconds, I looked at Robert and I knew he knew.  The color drained from his face as I kept my slow scan of the assembled.  Then, I did something I have never done before or since: I shook my head violently once and made a sound that was a cross between a scream and a loud grunt.  They all jumped, leaning back in unison, away from the psycho on their couch.  But somehow, it cleared my mind of the voices.

Tector, Lyle, Duke -- my cats' names came back to me and suddenly, I could see in my mind's eye, the first page of my pitch.  So with the biggest smile I could find, I started in.  I could hear poor Robert sigh with relief.  Pretty soon, they were all nodding along and I began to pick up speed as my second act came to an end.

Now, THIS was a pitch!  Hell, I was going great guns -- Ooops.

And there it was, the first reappearance of the Judgement Choir in nearly seven minutes.  See, not all judgements are bad...but they are distracting because they give rise to further judgements about the first judgements.  Suddenly I was in a hall of mirrors and the story began to swim away from me again, farther and faster, and pretty soon I was desperately scanning the empty horizon of my mind's eye.  I never thought to ask Robert to hand the pages back to me and he didn't know that such a simple act could save me.

I can no longer recall how my pitch ended -- the third act -- only that it somehow did (although occasionally in my nightmares all these years later, it's still going on).  Most of them had a stunned look on their faces; embarrassed yet hopeful witnesses to a minor catastrophe.  I could not read the small smile on Frank's face.  But if anybody in that room knew what this was like, it was going to be him.

At this point, Guy strolled into the office, sunflower seed hulls trailing behind him.  "What'd I miss?  Give me the two minute version."  My blood actually ran cold.  Frank said they would catch him up after I left.  Thank you, Frank, thank you, Frank.  Thank you.  With that, I left the scene of the accident.  Couldn't get out of there fast enough.

On the car ride back to my agency, I replayed the pitch meeting over and over and could find no solace anywhere in it.  I had embarrassed myself, my agents, the material, and Robert who'd only wanted me to succeed.

It had been a tap dancing disaster.

With every replay, their originally kind faces hardened into a Day of the Dead mural.  By the time I got to my agents' office, I had convinced myself that part of my massive failure was their fault.  Yeah, that's it.  My agents got me into this, they should've known I was unfit for this kind of job, it was them!

So by the time I strode into their offices, I was fuming.  My agent Rand came out, a big smile on his face.  "How'd it go, Pup?"  I gave him both barrels.  The more I stamped around, pissing and moaning, more and more of the agents came out.  They were all laughing and smiling.  "What's so goddamn funny," I yelled.

Rand put his arm around my shoulders.  "Columbia called.  They said it was the weirdest pitch they'd heard all year.  But they loved it.  You got the job!"

Well, Jesus H.  Nobody knows anything, least of all me.  So like a good screenwriter, I apologized profusely and headed for our nearby Sunset Strip restaurant-bar, affectionately known as Le Dump.

Later that afternoon, I made many copies of my pitch, sat down at my IBM Selectric II with its lovely hypnotic hum and went to work.  That night, fueled by excitement and a little Herradura tequila (tuhhh-keeela), I got 14 pages!

Speaking of Le Dome: one last story.

I was to have a business lunch there with two legendary producers who had a rock and roll project they wanted to talk to me about (as they call it) 'coming on board.'

One of the producers was a billionaire who controlled record companies, rock bands and assorted stars, studios, concerts, the whole nine.  The other was a famous flamer millionaire and together they had just done the period movie musical of the year, maybe of all time.  An hour late for the meeting, they alit from a vintage purple Rolls out front and were instantly surrounded by fans and early paparazzi.

When they were finally seated, with no apologies for the hour they'd made me wait, they began a back-and-forth about their historical triumphs, about who they'd laid low, about how many were in their debt, about who they wanted to screw (economically and otherwise...with cringe-inducing details), and all the menu items they were about to order to eat one select bite out of the middle, then send the rest away, for the peons ha-ha-ha-ha.

I really couldn't tell if they were joking, fueled by years of success and pre-lunch cocaine.  Or just assholes.  In any case, clearly they didn't need me.  So I excused myself for the men's room, walked downstairs, right past the men's room, out the back door into the parking lot.

On my way to the car I saw the well-travelled beat up Rolls Royce belonging to production designer Leon Erickson with its famous pipe vice welded to the rear bumper.  It never failed to make me smile.  I got in my car, and drove home.

Have I mentioned?  I love the actual writing.  It's all the other stuff I hated.


             MORE NOTES ON THE SCREENPLAY...
           
When we left 'our script,' we were riding the second act to glory.  Here is where you get dead flat serious about the Hero's journey and all the things that are trying to stop him (sorry about the masculine pronouns).

Think of all the bad things that can happen.  Take a couple a three days and make a list.  Even the crazy things, the absurdos, even the beyond belief ones.  When you are first listing these, it's hard to overplay this hand.  You won't use them all, clearly; they have to be believable, they have to grow out of what has come before and what a reader/audience will accept.  So whittle the list down.

All right, you say to yourself (and to your hero) mid list -- I got bad news and worse news, which one you want first?  BOTH OF THEM!

Okay.  The Hero loses his job.  His wife and family no longer understand or care.  His car gets repoed, he gets beat up, someone puts a bullet or a scorpion in his mail box.  He reaches out for help and almost gets it...but it turns on him instead.

Starting to panic, he wonders if even his own family is somehow part of the cabal out to get him.  The forces that compel him nearly sink him and yet, he is unable to let go.  Through betrayal, pain, even death itself, he hangs on beyond his understanding.

This is the veriest dark heart of the Hero's journey.  If it was easy, anybody could do it.  If, in his heart of hearts, a Hero isn't afraid, he isn't really heroic.  Just nuts.

This second act is about piling on the troubles.  Remember Jason Bourne in the "Bourne" movies, especially the first one?  Just because he can kick the shit out of Superman doesn't mean he can find his way to knowing who and what he is.  Every way he turns is wrong, getting him in deeper and deeper.

It will take two-by-fours and mud chains to get him out.  This plagues all heroes on this journey.

Take Richard Dreyfus in "Close Encounters of the Third Kind?"  It's about his box getting smaller and smaller until it looks like there is no way out.  And then, we get Plot Point Two!  For hapless Roy Neary in that movie, will he see that the huge construction he has compulsively forged in the basement is a double for the Devil's Tower mountain on the TV news bulletin behind him!?  In the audience, our hearts are screaming to him, Turn around, man, it's right there behind you!  And then, it happens.

Plot Point Two -- the second believable but stunning major event occurs, growing out of the story itself, which propels the action into the unforeseen first wild tangent of

                        ACT THREE
               
This is the completion, the time and place where all the chickens come home to roost.  This is where most (if not all) of the secrets are revealed.  Act Three is the climax, the hash-settling last 15 or 20 pages of just deserts and hammering paybacks.

It is the conclusion.

Your hero can die as John Wayne did in "The Cowboys" or Bette Midler did in "The Rose," both directed by Mark Rydell.  Or Tom Hanks in "Saving Private Ryan."  This is dramatic but not an altogether good idea even if there is often an Academy Award nomination in it for the hero.  Hollywood loves death scenes.  If you ask an audience to go through two hours of hell (or at the very least, heck) and then kill the hero?  This kind of ending needs careful consideration.  Because it turns out that what Hollywood loves is the IDEA of a death scene.

It's better (but still dangerous) to kill the hero if, at his death, he metaphorically hands off the Torch of Truth to his confused, flawed young protege (us).  Great sacrifice has great meaning and should bring tears of sorrow, gratitude, and recognition.  To me, this is what saved "Saving Private Ryan."  They left Matt Damon alive.

Your hero can turn into a deeper mystery like Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles in "The Third Man" or Lee Marvin at the ghostly end of the brilliant "Point Blank."  These are fascinating but dangerous picks (and of course, attractive for that very reason).

Or your hero can save the day which is what happens in most movies.  Like chocolate; simple but always a good choice.  Most star actors will respond best to the classic hero's journey with its clean, unfettered triumph in the end.  Plus you get the possibility of a sequel.  This way we can do an "almost death scene" and yet keep chuggin'.

Or your hero can dissolve into a big question mark like Tom Hanks in "Cast Away," one of my favorite endings, standing at a deserted country crossroads, looking up for a sign, even a hint toward his future as the camera cranes up and out....

While you're juggling story elements to wind up this hero's journey -- wherever it's going -- don't forget his friends and enemies.  They are called 'b' and 'c' stories and give the main story, the 'a' story dramatic richness and texture.  So-called real life hardly ever does any of this but movies, TV, plays, and novels always should.

If you end in Bitter/Sweet, like "The Family Man," "Dirty Pretty Things," or the great "Men in Black," do it verrrry carefully with the accent on Sweet.

While we're speaking of Death and Bitter (and at our age, who shouldn't be?) one of the worst things they can say about your script is that it's DARK.  I know this because I was unfortunately addicted to night and the D-word was used often on my work.  This simple accusation can keep an option from being renewed, a script from being bought, a movie from being made.

On the other hand, fuck 'em.

Remember, anyone can create a surprise by killing the hero.  But there are good surprises and bad surprises.  Unless you are doing a true story (as in "Hoffa") or one in which the death is utterly necessary (as in "American Beauty,") killing your star is an idea whose time has went.  Unless the hero can enter his house justified (as in Sam Peckinpah's "Ride the High Country") or having done all he can do on this earthly plain, is now happy to be 'going home' (as in "Gladiator"), leave your hero ALMOST dead.

Well known inherent tragic material is something else again.  If you are doing a version of "Romeo and Juliet," it would be unthinkable not to end it with their deaths.  I had an experience which confirmed this in a heartbreaking way.

I wrote the first three drafts of the mini-series "On The Beach" from the famous book by Nevil Chute and the movie by John Paxton and Stanley Kramer.  It is about the end of the world from an accidentally started nuclear war.  Driving its clockwork is a love story, a time-honored tale of sacrifice and duty.  In the end, the American submarine captain has to leave his newly found love in Australia and take his men back home to a certain high-rad death in the completely obliterated United States.

Simply, his men want to go home.

When a giant American cable network bought into this project, they had a few changes they wanted.  One, naturally, was a new writer.

The other modification was a new ending in which the sub captain abandons his men to their own homesick wishes so he can stay in Australia with his girlfriend.

Apparently, there was no talking the president of the company out of this  change and I must say, I'm glad I wasn't around to try.  He felt that today's audience wouldn't sit still for that kind of a "downer ending."  I had, um, other feelings.  Chowpuppy Screenwriter Goes Berserk In Meeting, Maims Three!

In the end, it was their dime, so they made it their way.  Oh well.

And on that note, we end this posting.  But, kids, STAY TUNED!

#10. How I got here. Be true to your UCLA film school

#10.  How I got there: Be true to your UCLA Film School along with some dine-out characters.       
           
I thought it might be nice to take a little breather from all the Hollywood and screenplay stuff to tell you where it started with me.

I have loved the movies since the beginning.

In the late Forties and early Fifties, my best friend Mike Preston (recently departed) and I would walk home home from the Tryon movie theatre on Saturday afternoon re-staging the fist-fights we'd just seen in the roaring oeuvres of The Durango Kid, Lash LaRue, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry (even though he sang too much), and Randolph Scott (oops -- who knew?!).  We did it complete with sound effects and bush crashing falls.  I can still do the galloping horse effect.

Then, in the mid fifties, with dates, we would hold forth in movie theaters across the Carolinas, adding dialogue and sundry remarks.  Besties for 66 years, my job was to make Mikey and the rest of the audience laugh, no matter how loving or sad or horrifying the actual movie was.  To all of you who might have been somewhere in those theaters, my deepest apologies.

 In college from 1958-62, I saw a few movies that certainly peaked my interest.  Like "Sparticus," an early Stanley Kubrick Dalton Trumbo film about the Roman Gladiator Rebellion.  It had everything: spray tanned warriors fighting Kirk Douglas in vain, heart breaking shots of Jean Simmons, hysterical shots of Peter Ustinov, leftie politics, huge battle scenes, and hungry male erotic moments between Tony Curtis and Lawrence Olivier.  "I am Antoninus, singer of songs and I think you dropped your soap, my lord."  Say what?!

And "The Seventh Seal" although with no background in the classics, all that smarty symbolism was lost on me.  I just liked Von Sidow's haircut.

My first real cinematic wakeup call was "Last Year at Marienbad" by Robbe Grillet and Alain Resnais.   I didn't pack the intellectual gear to understand it but at one point, I was so stunned and gripped by its imagery, I jumped up and howled.  Then, from behind me I heard: Sit down, asshole!  Um, okay, okay.  Sorry.

But where my hard core addiction to movies really started was the mid-to-late Sixties at the UCLA Film School.

I got there in 1964.  Here's what was happening in that world: Vietnam, protests, commitment free love (as opposed to the Fifties sex-free love), 250,000 clear channel Mexican watts of Wolfman Jack rock and roll on XERB served up with weed and sunshine.  How could you go wrong?

Seriously.

After scoping out the film school's honchos like Caroll Ballard (already nominated for an Academy Award for his documentary "Harvest"), Francis Coppola (he hadn't gone 'Ford' yet but had already made two low budget features and what was it with these girl first names?), Nietzsche quote-spouting wild man Dennis Jacob, and teachers like Hugh Gray, Jean Renoir, Claude Jutra, and  Joseph von Sternberg.

I had never even seen a movie camera before, had no idea what synch sound was; the whole thing seemed impossibly improbable.

So I lit out for the smaller hills of student theatre, looking for more familiar ground, something I knew a little more about.  A very little it turned out.  Because they had their own honchos.  On their own mountains.  I was misinformed.

Ten years earlier, Carol Burnett had trod those boards; the alumni list was quaking: James Dean,   Gary Lockwood, Tom Skerritt, George Takei.  That year, 1964, Bonnie Franklin was in residence.  Rob Reiner.  John Rubinstein.  Tim McIntyre.

Every Sunday morning, the atheist theatre geeks played touch football in Beverly Glen park with starlets like Ryan O'Neal, his gorgeous wife Joanna Moore and their one-year-old topless toddler Tatum along with several USC and UCLA jocks drafted by the Pittsburg Steelers and a few times  Elvis Presley.  He moved pretty good for a pudge.  Thangka, thangka verr much.            

So falling back into old patterns, I auditioned for plays but, unlike New York, began to actually get parts, the best being Don Quixote in Tennessee Williams' "El Camino Real."  Even better, I did fairly well and made new friends.

Then one day, I got a summons from Colin Young, the head of the Motion Picture Division.  The bearded Scotsman looked at me, I looked at him.  "We took a film school gamble on you, Chow Puppy," he said.  "So far, it's not exactly paying off.  So: less plays, more movies.  That's all."

After my little hitch in the Dog-Marines, I got good at recognizing orders.  And one good way to reintegrate a life is often through work.  So I got a graduate student job as one of the projectionists in building 3H, the film school movie theatre.  In those days, nearly the entire film division was housed in WWII, un-airconditioned, mal-heated, nearly collapsing wooden buildings that teetered on the uninhabitable.  For some reason, we loved them.

We thought the new buildings were pussy.

Graduate school was a real eye-opener for me.  Every course I took was fun because it was all in pursuit of an MFA in film; film history, film editing, cinematography, film sound, film workshops, what's not to love?  And here are some moments from those days.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

I had two great camera teachers: firey Bill Adams who never let anything upset him.  "You have to learn to laugh as the camera goes over the side," he once said.  In other words, it's only a movie.  You're not curing cancer.  Fill out the insurance papers, get another camera, and shoot it again.  Keep going.  To me, this was one of the great Life Lessons, just those two words.

Keep.  Going.

And there was the great Joseph Von Sternberg.  I was assigned to help him get set up at the start of his year.  What do I call you, sir?  "Call me 'Joe'" he said.  Anxious to pass on his secrets, he never seemed to stand on worshipful ceremony.

One afternoon I watched him reset the various lights for one of our advanced students.  As we looked on, agog, the old man walked around, narrating what he was doing and why in the clearest, simplest terms.  "There," he said when he had rehung the last lamp.  "Is that all right?"

All fucking right?!  He had transformed a more or less acceptable scene into a perfect black and white Caravaggio.

'Joe,' huh?  I believe I'll stick with 'Sir.'

FILM HISTORY

We all knew and loved fellow student Mamo Clark.  She was from Hawaii and years before had been an actress.  But in '64 she was in her mid-fifties maybe, her beautiful skin weathered and lined by years in the tropical sun.

This moment happened when we were looking at a pristine 35mm print of "Mutiny on the Bounty."  Harvey was projecting, so I got to sit out front, right next to Mamo as it turned out.  As Gable and Franchot Tone were playing their scenes with two south sea island babes, I realized that (I believe) Tone's girlfriend was MAMO!  Right there, in her twenties, a vision in palm fronds and puka shells.  Jesus H.  It's Mamo.  Suddenly, we were all aware of it.  Applause began to build.  I looked over at her; tears were running down her face.  Pretty soon, a standing O.  And then, it was over.  At the movie's end, there she was in the cast titles.  Our Mamo.  Who knew?  I mean, who ever knows anything?

A year later there was Sister Mary Twiggy, a beautiful, happening, politically active Maryknoll nun who introduced many of us to a lifetime direction.  She once said all you need for a revolution was a Big Idea, a mimeograph machine, and a Swingline stapler.  We gave her the honorary last name.

One afternoon again in Film History class, we were watching the 1933 Merian Cooper/Willis O'Brien version of "King Kong" with Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot.  In the loving, oddball seduction scene with Wray sitting in Kong's huge hand, one of our best and weirdest students Felix Venable (more on him later) shouted out, "She's littler than Kong's cock!"

Don't look at me!  He said it.

FILM EDITING CLASS

For some years UCLA film geeks moved through the process learning to edit on "Gunsmoke."  Colin Young had made a deal with fellow Brit, Philip Leacock  who was then producing the highly rated, famous TV western.  As I recall, we were all given the same basics: One gunfight scene's worth of 16mm film uncut dailies, the uncut sound takes and the hardware tools to cut it.  Like gang synchronizers, trim bins, winders, splicers, viewers, and sometimes even one of the venerated Movieolas!  Oooo.

First we had to synch up the sound and film; a task that came more easily to some than others.  I was 'others.'

Then it was our job to cut that scene as we saw fit.  There were enough takes, many different angles to do it dozens of ways.  So those days and nights were filled with swearing, heat, the sound of flying winders and the slap of the Movieola brake handle.  But mostly what I remember is actor John Anderson saying to James Arness "So you really are a Marshal." After nearly sixty years, I hear this line in my dreams.  Like many there, I learned how to cut a scene in a fairly straightforward manner, a triumph of the uninspired.

When it came time to show our versions up on the big screen, one stood out.  Richard Chen, an impossibly tall Chinese graduate student, cut his "Gunsmoke" on nothing but reaction shots.  You heard everything including So you really are a marshal but never saw the source; his scene played out on others' faces.  It was odd but utterly compelling; a lesson that a straight approach may be the fastest, maybe even the clearest...but not necessarily the best way home.

OUR FILM 'ORGIES'

Even though I projected some of these, most in 35mm, I can't quite remember them.  The first one was twenty-four straight hours.  We showed old movies, new movies, studio movies, independents, some not even released yet!

Due to the wiles and secret phone calls of our film booker and my boss Gary Essert who had major connections with every studio in town, we saw "Dr. Zhivago" at MGM before Omar Sharif did.  We did a twelve hour marathon of nothing but trailers, previews.  It was the hardest, fastest projection we ever did; a thread-up and reel change every two-and-a-half minutes!  Everyone smoked in those days and we were screaming hippies, eating mostly cheese burgers, pizza and onion rings.  After these marathons, the projection booth smelled like a toxic dump site under a light coat of patchouli.

FIVE OF US GO TO BRAZIL

It was the longest short month of my life.  Stirling was producing and directing, Charlie was shooting, Kit was doing sound with Bruce, and I was along to schlep and do everything else.  It was to be an hour long documentary on the 'successes' of a USAID government program to help foreign small businesses flourish on the theory that then they'd want to become an America-loving democracy.  It was 1965; we were more naive then.

I never worked so hard to do so little.  From one end of poverty stricken Brazil to the other, most of the 'small businesses' we were to shoot had either moved or failed.  One abandoned tiny factory presented such a good photo op that we had to wait a day for some kind of chemical to be delivered that would smoke prolifically when ignited.  From a distance, it looked like the factory was chugging away, 'smoke' billowing from its stack.

It seemed we were broken down every week with malfunctioning equipment or seized and/or lost film.  Most of the time was spent in the dark interior of the huge country, in tiny rooms featuring on-and-off electricity, no showers, mosquitoes so big that when you killed them, they left a quarter-sized blood splatter, and only a single toilet down the hall.  We spent most of this off time trying to fix the Arri or the Nagra tape recorder or answering questions about the Watts race riots in L.A. which we knew nothing about because when they'd happened, we'd been in transit.

Here's what I learned from that trip: When you are making a movie that Steve McQueen is not in, for the U.S. government, in an unstable country in a paranoid time and you do not speak the language and don't really know what the hell you are doing, either drink a lot or bring enough reading material to get you through.

I ended up in late evenings, reading aloud "The Tin Drum" by Gunter Grass, a horrifyingly great book and a big hit with the crew.  God, I was glad to get home.  As for our 'mission,' I don't think I ever saw the finished film.

SOME REMARKABLE STUDENTS

Felix Venable was a hilarious, sneaky genius with the morals of a dumpster cat.  Back in San Francisco, he'd been employed (proudly) as an FBI informant, mixing good info with bad, selling it to the highest bidding careerist agent.  Felix made one of the most memorable films of that time: "LeS ange Dormant."  LsD...get it, get it?  It was hypnotically beautiful and totally original.  He peaked with that film and was lost for a while until he found...

...James Douglas Morrison, odd duck from Florida, the young son of a U.S. Navy Admiral.  Jim had discovered film, dope, girls, and rock and roll pretty much in the same year.  And you remember that face, once the baby fat fell away, oh my god, that face.  The resultant apotheosis was a group called The Doors.

Loyal and true believers, we followed them from little gig to bigger gig, from The London Fog to the Whiskey a Go Go when they famously played with Van Morrison's 60s seminal group, Them.  The Doors had something magic from the first time they took the stage.  And nothing like "The End" had been heard or seen: "He took a face from the ancient gallery and he walked on down the hall.  He came to a door..."  Much of their creative force came from keyboardist

Ray Manczarek, organist and south side Chicago jazz pianist.  He still had the "c" in his name back then.  I remember working on Ray's 171 graduation film called "Induction Day."  We were shooting in some little Santa Monica apartment and Ray, encountering a difficult lighting situation, sent me to fetch his faculty advisor, a Brit/Canadian film maker named Terence McCartney Filgate.  I found him out in his car, reading an article in the new "Cahiers du Cinema" about himself!  Eating my grin, I asked him if the article was any good.  He tossed the magazine in the back.  "No."

Neal Cassady wasn't a UCLA student.  He was, of course, one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and Jack Kerouac's famous burned out inspiration for "On the Road."  Cassady was going to be the subject of one of our student's Mexican adventure film.  They borrowed my Ducati motorcycle (a five speed Diana, the fastest production 250 CC in the world at that time) for their trip, Cassady's last as it turned out.

One night down there, under the stars and an inspirational miasma of cannabis and Seconal, someone threw out the open challenge to count the railroad ties from their encampment to San Miguel.  Along with how many donuts it would take to fill the Grand Canyon -- that sort of night.  The next morning, Cassady was gone.  Apparently, they found him three days later, near death, twenty miles down the track.  His last words were reported to be, "Sixty four thousand nine hundred and twenty eight."

The UCLA film crew was invited by Federales holding machine guns to leave Mexico immediately.  They beat feet with some of their equipment and the clothes on their back minus all their cash.  So far as I know, my Ducati is still down there.  None of them ever said a thing.  I loved that bike.

Rodney Alcala.  Ooooo, boy.  I will say nothing about Rod except he was famously a contestant on "Dating Game," has been on NBC's "Dateline" three times surely setting some sort of record.  And years ago, I was his T.A. in UCLA's beginning film workshop.  Find a pair of thick rubber gloves and click on his link.  You never know anyone as well as you think you do.

I guess I should tell you that back in the Marine Corps, for about five months, I was a Naval Aviation Cadet with Richard Crafts.  I'd known him at Parris Island, we were actually buddies.  I washed out of pilot training (smartest move the Corps made that year) and Dick went on to fly in Vietnam, later for the C.I.A., finally for Eastern Airlines.  Then he murdered his wife Helle.  Then he froze her body and chainsawed her into manageable pieces.  Then he rented a wood-chipper (is it coming back now?), took her out in a snow storm, deep into the Connecticut woods and -- well, you get the idea.  So did the Coen Brothers for "Fargo."

Although he was convicted and is serving 60 years, Dick still claims he's innocent.  That she either just disappeared or he was the classic SODDI victim, Some Other Dude Did It.  He actually hung his first jury with that one.  Ahhh, Dicky, we hardly knew ye.

ME AND LENI

Back to better times and another summons from Colin Young.  He looked from my new California drivers' licence to me.  "Pup, take the film school van and go to the Los Angeles airport tonight to pick up one of our guest lecturers." Okay.  Who is it?   "She's German, should be in her early sixties."  Okay.  Who is it?  "This is kind of a secret mission.  You know her work..."  Jesus, Colin (we were better friends now), who the fuck is it?!

When I first saw Leni Riefenstahl coming down the long tiled hall at LAX, I froze.  First of all, she was still beautiful, high style, all sharp angles and long grey hair radiance.  This was the woman who had directed "Triumph of the Will," one of the greatest documentaries ever made.

One little problem: it was a nearly two hour cinematic paean to the rise of Adolph Hitler.  Oh-oh.  Don't get me wrong, it's an artistic and strategic achievement by any measure... except the one that actually counts: who it's about.

And now, it was thirty years later and the people in West Los Angeles (with its significant Jewish demographic) had heard she was planning on coming to guest lecture at UCLA and were beginning to make their own plans.  All this, of course, was fully known to Colin Young but unknown to us Chow Puppies.

With a baggage cart of matched Parisian luggage, Frau Riefenstahl waited curb-side while I went to short term parking and got the van.  She already looked pissed.

When I came to collect her, she scowled as I tipped the Skycap who carefully loaded her endless luggage into the vehicle.  As we were on our way out, she asked me why I had given money to a man who was supposed to do exactly what he was doing?  "Why do you pay him egztrah?"

Listen here, Leni baby.  This ain't 1934, he wasn't SS and you don't have a goddamn all-event pass anymore so shut up and relax!  At least that's what I said in my mind.  I think the actual words might have sounded like "To make sure your luggage was handled the right way, ma'am."

She wanted to know how much I gave him.  All right, goddamn it, this is where I drew the line.  Right here, right now!  Unleashing my blitzkrieg move, I told her it was five dollars.  She snorted scornfully.  But I totally had her: It was ten.

Nailed it.  And the night ride up to Sunset Blvd. was peaceful.

When we turned right on Hillgard toward the UCLA guest house, everything changed.  There were cars double-parked up and down the street and a stream of middle-aged people were walking toward the UCLA guest house.  Wait.  What the hell is this?

I slowed the van; from the passenger side, Leni Riefenstahl rolled the window down and looked out into the night.

As we pulled up into the guest house parking spaces, we saw that the house was surrounded by two or three hundred people -- adults, strange at any time on a college campus -- their arms linked.  There were several police cars, both UCLA and LAPD.  I got out of the van and came around to the passenger side.  I looked at her, she looked at the crowd.  Who was creepily, utterly silent.  "I guess I should have expected this," she said, the overweening scorn gone.  "Some forgive, no one forgets."

And then, an older, well-dressed woman came up to us.  "Are you Leni Riefenstahl," she asked.  Frau Riefenstahl nodded.  "Then, go home," the woman said softly.  "If you come back, we'll be here.  With the L.A. Times and TV news cameras.  Understand?"  With that, she turned and walked back to join the silent line of people surrounding the guest house.

"Let's go," Riefenstahl said.  So we did.

I wish I could remember what happened then.  I know I didn't take her for pizza and beers.  I didn't take her to a hotel.  What did a broke hippie movie grad student know from hotels?  I didn't take her back to my shared apartment for her to sleep on the couch and then the next day start a career-capping documentary on chow puppies.  I didn't take her to a double feature of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "Night and Fog" and we didn't share a tub of buttered popcorn.  I didn't take her back to the airport.

I think I took her to Colin Young's house -- way the hell and gone up in Topanga Canyon -- and dropped her off for him and the howling coyotes to worry about.

But who knows?  That hot buttered popcorn's sounding pretty good about now.