#7. Early days in NYC, script notes, and Leslie Caron

#7.  Early days in NYC, script how-to notes, and the sublime Leslie Caron.             

We look back on our lives and find a few huge, nearly unimaginable turning points.  As life-altering as they are/were, you'd think they'd be spectacular death in car or plane crashes, huge arrivals or departures, finding and losing great loves.  Or unthinkably massive moves.

Mine was a move.  But thinkable.  In 1964.  From New York City to Los Angeles.  But the tiny reason for why it ever happened is the plot point.  And it wasn't but this big(.).

I was living in NYC, day-job employed as a New York City Welfare investigator out in Red Hook, trying to 'make it' as an actor.  Sadly, I wasn't very good at acting and not even all that driven.  But, God, I was having a great time in the city, for much of it living in a tiny carriage house down in the West Village.  At night I sold orange drinks and bonbons in the Broadway theatre balcony of "Barefoot in the Park."

I was seeing Johanna then, a former pro whose main john (a top executive at a Fortune 500 company) had given her an elderly Jaguar, a Swallow Standard, type 1.  In mint condition.  One late afternoon she drove me to the theatre to work, as luck would have it, arriving at the same time as Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley, the play's stars.  They all swiveled to gape.  I know, I know, it was the car.  But, hey....

When I got home from hawking concessions at the theatre, I would turn on the radio and listen to Jean Shepherd and Long John Nebel all night.  On Sunday I played softball in Central Park for The Stay Out Late on Saturday Night and Get Up Early on Sunday Morning to Play Ball Yacht Club of Middle Greenwich Village Nine.  We had sweat shirts!

You know sometimes when you're sailing through golden quotidian days, swept along by happy detail, you sort of forget where the hell you're going?  Or why?  Well, I had.

Until one night when my Welfare Department buddy Ray was supposed to meet me for dinner.  But about six, he called and begged off, saying he had just scored a hot date with some girl he was pursuing.  He seemed genuinely remorseful until I began to hear his blood pounding over the phone.

So there it was: I was on my own.  At home, grumbling, I opened some frozen veggies and a can of my favorite Campbell's Scotch Broth soup.  God, why'd they ever stop making that?  Set up next to the TV (before the era of the remote), I started eating and flipping through the channels.

I landed on 13, PBS, a show called "Student Films."  After about twenty wide-eyed minutes, I realized my mouth was actually hanging open and my soup was getting cold.  The two films that most took me that night were "A Time Out of War" by Dennis and Terry Sanders for which they'd apparently won an Oscar, and "Freight Yard Symphony" by Bob Abel.  Both were made at UCLA. The next thing I remember is looking down at my forgotten dinner and two hours and the national anthem had passed.  I was eye to eye with the Indian on the test pattern.

The following day I sent for UCLA's catalogue and began to draft my supplicating letter for admittance to the graduate program in film.  "I know my Kent State University transcript doesn't look promising but I have undergone some difficult life experiences recently that have matured me."

Yeah, sure.

Months later, I'd heard nothing from UCLA and found myself a crash-and-burn contestant on the old NYC-based TV quiz show "Jeopardy" with Art Flemming.  My local friends thought my self-immolation was hilarious but I had totally embarrassed my baby sister back in North Carolina just because I couldn't get a good grip on that damn buzzer or answer questions about opera, particle physics, or Nigerian foreign policy.  They hadn't yet invented string theory or I'm sure that would've been one of my categories too.  The group right before me had questions about famous literary alcoholics, movies, and things chow puppies know.  I left the show with the loser consolation prize of four hundred pounds of Encyclopedia Americana.

The same day they were dropped at my door by two puffing red-faced delivery guys, I also got my acceptance letter from UCLA!  Oh, mamma, I was lost but now I'm found.  I left the unopened encyclopedia boxes for the next tenant.

And that's how I got to the University of California at Los Angeles film school; because Ray Berger wanted to get laid.  I hope it worked out as well for him as it did for me.  Several years later, I had an Master of Fine Arts degree auto-signed by Ronald Reagan.

                                    ****
                               
In creating the screenplay, we have talked about story, about characters, about events in the script. You recall the Jean-Luc Godard drill: a man, a woman, and a gun.

So let's say -- like Les Bohem -- you have the idea for a story about a leak in the Holland Tunnel that gets bigger and bigger, developing into a serious flood, up to the hubcaps, then the door wells and finally into a full blown catastrophe.  Car alarms are going off, people yelling and screaming, thousands will be trapped at rush hour and will surely die horrible deaths.  You have researched it like a mad dog.  You have three notebooks filled with ideas, events, moments, heroes, and of course, villains.

Now, you just sit there.

You blink fast and often.  You're excited.  You know you have something... but what is it?  Well, let's find out.  Time to stand and deliver.  And here comes the Oh-shit moment that stops the faint of heart and some very good writers equally.

Taking this next step.

Here is how I sweet talked my way, sometimes conned my way past this quaking moment of self doubt.  By asking myself a few simple questions.

What is the THEME of the story?

In other words, what is this script about?  Many writers, even some pretty successful ones, don't have a clue.  But if you think about it, working it out, you will end up armed and dangerous.  Producers and executives alike react well to this stuff.  If you know your theme, you will be able to defend it.  You will be seen as caring, strong, even passionate (a holy word in Hollywood).

Say, for instance, you have a story whose theme is the power of redemptive love and sacrifice set against the chaotic backdrop of war.  Like WWII, in Algiers, just say.  Hmmm.  Bogart, Bergman, Claude Raines?  It worked for "Casablanca" because a timeless theme never dies.

I think most writers are obsessive by nature, so chances are they are drawn to a few themes over and over.  Those that work smoothly within the story's arc, run through their heart -- and yours -- like a silver river.

Let's assume that the writer has the theme worked out and spread over some story elements he/she knows they want.  At this point, they are chomping at the bit, ready to haul ass even though the compass and half the supplies have been left in the garage.  The excitement is so strong, you can hardly wait to type page #1 and FADE IN:.  But don't do it.

No.  Staaaay...stay.  Good dog!

If you tear off riding this joy -- fun as it would be for a while -- it can cost you weeks, sometimes months of work from which you will salvage very little.  I believe it was (yet again) Mark Twain who said "When you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there."  For most of us, the first and best way to start is

                                  THE OUTLINE
                             
The outline is to see exactly how the movie gets from the starter's gun to the finish line, from FADE IN to THE END.

Finding the story's beginning, middle, and end is a tough process which demands clear-eyed creative bean-counting while setting fire to dreamy, hopeful assumptions.  This clockwork is what I call plot and is the bane of many writers' existence.  Alvin Sargent, one of the best screenwriters who ever lived, hates this so much that he jokingly (I think) said he was going to have his marble gravestone inscribed with just four words -- "At last, a plot."

I usually do outlines on my beloved 3X5 cards.  And after 30 or 40 years, I still have them, rubber banded up and hidden away.  So that when St. Peter stops me at the locked and pearlies and wants to know why "The Rose" second act blew so bad, I can wheel out my cards and show him.  "There, suckah.  Plot point two!"

On these 3X5s I scrawl a few lines in pencil of what the scene might be, maybe even a line or two of dialogue.  These are the building blocks for the story.  Okay, this has to happen here.  Or should.  Or could.  You can change the locale, time of day or night, sometimes even who's present.  But -- for right now -- this has to be here and now.  It is crucial to keep this bad boy moving.  You can pause and think yourself straight to hell; I used to have the tee shirt concession on it.  So keep going.  You can make changes when it's done.  You can polish it when it's done.  You can sleep when it's done or you're dead.  Which ever comes first.

As we go from chunk to chunk, from card to card, is there a continual, believable conflict?  Are the dramatic and character arcs on their way to being fulfilled?  Is David fighting Goliath, not some easily beat dweeb named Gavin.  There is an old Air Force saying that "it takes a great enemy to make a great airplane."  The harder the hero has to fight -- within reason -- the deeper we are pulled into his story. All these things should become clear as you do the outline.

I number the cards sequentially in pencil as I go.  The reason is this: a brilliant but distracted student of mine named Jo at the National Film School of England once dropped his unnumbered loose cards on Kensington High Street.  It took him two full days and a migraine (pronounced mee-grain over there) to get them back in order.

Once you have ten or fifteen cards, a kind of exhilaration kicks in, good fertilizer for the creative process.  Look this this, I got the beginnings of a movie here!  Also cards make stopping and starting easier for me.  When I come back to it the following morning, I can quickly thumb through them to see where I am and how to restart the engine.  When I was in this process, I kept notes, sometimes even a little tape recorder of ideas that will always boil up (eg. card 3: add note from missing wife) but whatever you do, don't stop yet.

Keep this thing moving.  If you want to go slow, write a novel.

Once the cards are completed, beginning to end, you will feel bulletproof, or at the very least, warmed by the bright winds of Nirvana.  Because suddenly you can read your movie.  You can see where it flows naturally, which scenes work and which don't.  Since they are pencil numbered, you can move them around.  Or if there're too many scenes ("Too many notes") or not enough.  You can see where the dead-ends and unintended red-herrings are, where you left things hanging.  The over-all arc should look something like this:

                              holy shit!
                             x            x
                           x               x
                         x                  x
                       x                     x            adios  
                     x                        x             x
                   x                           x          x        
                 x                              x       x
               x                                 x   x
            x                                   whew
         x                        
     x
Hello

At the end, have things changed?  Has the hero, the lead, done a 180 from his initial course because of the story's effect?  If it seems good and tight, it's because it now has its most important overall element: STRUCTURE.

                                     ****

      AN EVENING WITH THE GREAT LESLIE CARON

She was probably in her late forties then.  But still breathtakingly beautiful and utterly elegant.  She was with a producer named Mark, a guy who was at the opposite end of the Warren Beatty spectrum, the man Caron had been, um, linked with for all those years.  Mark looked a little like a small town funeral director which, to me, made it even more fascinating.  Because he was a true New York tough guy with a shockingly good education; Columbia, Sorbonne, Oxford, the whole nine.  Imagine Jeremy Irons as played by Harvey Keitel.

Mark had called several agencies and set up a dinner party for two or three of their 'hot, young scribes' and luckily I was available and included.  We were to come to their hilltop house to meet the legendary dancer/actress so we could get to know her a little, and maybe think of a script idea for her and Mark to develop.

It was one of those stand-up-walk-around dinner parties; there was a baby grand piano and some guy in a tux playing show tunes.  What a riot.  Nine writers, basically unsocialized curs who make their living working alone, few of which could 'play well with others,' all wandering around, gawking at the antiques and career memorabilia, balancing plates and wine glasses, trying to come up with some story/script idea for the Great Dancing Beauty sitting over there in her wing chair.

And like them, on this night, I was lost.  So I set up on the closed lid of the baby grand, careful to put a folded napkin under my plate of seafood pasta and asparagus and its already wolfed hollandaise.

My agent walked up with producer Mark.  "Come on, let's go meet the hostess," said my agent.  "She thinks you look interesting."  I was the only guy in the room with black hand-stitched Lucchese cowboy boots and a pony tail.  Takes me a while to let things go.  I was still working in Word Star until seven years ago, okay?

The two of them had caught me mid-bite, so I picked up my plate and followed them over to Ms. Caron, still in her wing chair.  The closer I got to her, the more stunning she became and the deeper my undying love.

"Leslie, I'd like you to meet the screenwriter Chow Puppy," said Mark.  "His movie  'Hooper' is in the theaters now."  My agent added, "...and cleaning up."  Her face brightened immediately.

"Is zis the movie about stuntmen with Bart Reynolds?  I LOVE zis movie!"  She extended her delicate hand with a dazzling smile.  I was hers for life.

And then, it happened.

As I bent down to shake her hand, slowly, slowly (but not slowly enough) my entire seafood pasta and asparagus slid off its plate...and into her lap!

Her smile did not dim for even a millisecond. "Oh, dear," was all she said.  Mark looked like he wanted to kill me.  My agent's rictus said he would have gladly taken the night train to Peoria.  I wanted to die.  As for the galant Ms. Leslie Caron, she simply rose, trapping the whole mess in a filmy longer skirt with one hand and with the other, squeezed my arm and said, "Don't you dare leave.  I want to talk to you about zees stuntmen!"  And with that, was gone.

See, to me, this grace, this elegance, this je ne sais quoi (the only French I know besides 'Chevrolet') was what set her apart, even after these nearly forty years.  She was back in five minutes in new dress, looking even more beautiful.  She came straight for me.  "Now, when zay fall, do zay scream?  I would!  Let's get you a new plate," she said.  "I saw you didn't get any hollandaise on your asparagus.  I made it!"

Out of the depths of hell I came, surfing a wave of her very own hollandaise.  But I never came up with a story idea for her and on the way out that night, Mark grabbed my hand hard and pulled me close.

"Don't ever come back here."

On my motorcycle, I rode home along the Mulholland ridge, hoping the night-blooming jasmine wind would blow me a clear mind.  It did.  By the time I got home, my heart-rate was almost back to normal.  My agent wouldn't take my calls for a week.

What're you gonna do?  It's Hollywood, Jake.  It's Hollywood.

#6. Carpenter Harry, Veronica, Les B., and "Hooper"

#6.  Harry the carpenter, Veronica saved, Les hits the jackpot, and my dance with Burt Reynolds for "Hooper."
                          
We will get to Burt and the stuntmen but first (before I forget them), a few stories about show biz in general and trust specifically.

The first is the shortest and, for its two players, the truest.  Before he became a noir star, sullen and slow eyed Robert Mitchum met and married his wife Dorothy back east.  When they came west to Hollywood back in the late Thirties, Mitchum took her up on Mullholland Drive to show her the lights of Los Angeles spread out below. "Stick with me baby," he said.  "You'll be farting through silk."

Only Mitchum...

                                   **** 

Veronica Cartwright has been a very good actress since she was a child.  Veronica had been in "The Birds" and "The Children's Hour."  Her sister Angela was in "Make Room for Daddy," "Lost in Space," and "The Sound of Music."  These two women know show business.

In the middle of her career, Veronica had hit a slow patch; happens to the best of them.  It was 1978, her last movie, a big budget remake of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," had not been released yet, she was living in a little cottage in Beechwood Canyon and was down to her last $45.

That morning she got up, went to the bank and withdrew her money, all of it, and went downtown L.A. to the main flower mart.  Always one with a designer's eye, she walked around, carefully selecting the perfect flowers, not this one, THAT ONE, that's the one, look how great it is with these others.  When she was out of money, she got in her car and drove back home with her flowers.  On Olympic, she noticed she only had a quarter tank of gas left.  But even in L.A. it was more than enough to get home.  For whatever fate awaited her.

Back in her cottage, she arranged the flowers, then rearranged the flowers, then re-rearranged them.  Until they looked perfect.  Then she sat down, lit a cigaret, and thought about her life.  Here she was, about to be thirty, death for many actresses, tapped out, no real job in sight, recently broken up from a long standing relationship.  But, fuck it, it was a beautiful day, she had half a carton of smokes left, and those flowers were absolutely perfect.  In a beam of L.A.'s perpetual sun, she closed her eyes...

The telephone awoke her with a start.  What -- who -- what?!  It was London.

A few months back, she had auditioned for some smarty-pants Brit director who was doing a science fiction movie, an American movie, but over there.  Since Veronica had not heard anything for weeks, she'd pretty much let it go.  Lots of auditions, lots of "they've decided to go in a different direction."  But not this time.

The director on the other end of the phone was Ridley Scott, the movie was "Alien" and she had gotten the part: the only other woman on the deep space probe Nostromo, where 'In space, no one can hear you scream.'

Though only the Show Biz gods could tell you why, Veronica Cartwright believed, trusted, and triumphed.  But like many so-called triumphs, there's always a cockroach somewhere.  See, Veronica had been cast as Ripley, the lead!  Until she got to London and had to switch parts with this young unknown tall drink of water named Sigourney Weaver.  What -- who -- what?!

But still...

                                     ****

Screenwriter Leslie Bohem is one of the nicest, smartest, funniest men I know.  Even when he was a dedicated rock and roller with Bates Motel, Sparks, and Gleaming Spires, he was truly a decent man.  So it is with the greatest pleasure I pass this story to you.

It was the mid-nineties.  Married to long time girlfriend Peggy, Les was in a slow patch of his screenwriting career.  His father Endre, a Hungarian emigre had been a working TV and screenwriter in another era; for years a staff writer/producer on TV's "Rawhide."  So Les learned early to budget his time.

Recently, Les had taken some of it to write a few original scripts (meaning not from a book, short story, play, or God help us, song title) on 'spec' (meaning for free, uncompensated, on your own).

One was called "Daylight," about the catastrophic death of New York's Holland Tunnel.  The other was about the catastrophic birth of a new volcano up in Washington's northern Cascades.  Les was into catastrophes that year.  And births and deaths.  Then, one morning, unknown to him, in his agent's office, things began to heat up.

That afternoon, dead broke, Les was home with three bags of laundry, and no quarters for the machines.  He clawed through the couch cushions and came up with some, Peggy's old bronzed baby shoe for a few more -- let's see, if he doubled up on the sheets and tee shirts, he could just about make it -- and then, finally, he hit a stash of change in a coffee mug they used when they played poker.  Yesss!  As he hoisted the bags, his phone rang.

"Leslie, are you sitting down," his agent asked.  No, but I will.  What happened?

Well, this happened.  When Sylvester Stallone revealed his interest to play the hero in "Daylight," suddenly two studios were interested.  And two others had looked around.  Pretty soon there came two more of the sweetest words a writer can hear: Bidding War.  And now, Les's agent was just about to close a deal for the script.  $750,000!

When word of this got around, suddenly Les's volcano script "Dante's Peak" went into heavy rotation.  It soon sold for a million two.  Les Bohem was back on his way.  And had lots of clean laundry.

As I said earlier, every dog will have his day.  And good dogs will have two!
                                                                               
                                     ****

My friend Richard Compton had a little two bedroom, two bath cottage in the Hollywood Hills, off Laurel Canyon.  It needed work, like most of those houses.  After Richard finished "Macon County Line," a surprise success, he had a couple of bucks squirreled away for a remodel.

Back then, there was one guy, The Guy, in the canyon to do the work.  We knew him as "Harry."  He was to wood what Michelangelo was to marble.  And now in between small part acting gigs.   So Richard hired him -- cash only please  -- forthwith.

Harry at work was slow, methodical, and brilliant.  Nothing seemed to faze him.  Carpenter ants?  He'd smile and take care of it.  Mold?  Didn't matter, in two days it was remediated and gone.  Twenty year old electrical problems?  Harry tore the knob-and-tube out, rewired, and kept on chuggin'.

Since I was over there lots (hiding from a hot summer in Richard's ratty swimming pool), I would see Harry up close and personal.  He was always pleasant, always friendly, but didn't talk much.  Just one of those kind of guys.  He looked like he was about to tell you a really good joke...if he could just remember what it was.

At the end of every work day, sawdust on his pony-tail, he'd come in the living room, fire up a blunt, sit on the couch and look around, making note after note in his head about what he needed for the next day's work.  Three of those, a tube of that, a new sawz-all blade, a bag of ten-pennies, on and on; you could almost see it registering in his mind through the smoke.  Never wrote anything down, didn't have to.

When he was finally done, we were amazed.  Harry'd come in under time, under budget, and, even with his reputation, under praised.  The work was immaculate, the joinery was nearly invisible, the the job was perfect.

But could we make a bank run?  Because he had to leave the next day for Northern California and he wouldn't be back for a while.  We remembered he was an actor but hadn't thought much about it.  He said it was some movie for this young film school director named John Lucas...no, wait, GEORGE Lucas... called "American Graffiti."  And then maybe this other movie Lucas was planning called "Star Wars."

Harrison Ford was (and apparently still is) about the best carpenter wood craftsman I have ever seen.  And I'm sure when Richard sold that little house ten years later, the remodel story probably added another twenty-five grand to the price.  Second bathroom and built-in bookcases by Han Solo!

                                     ****

Years ago, just before John Garfield was supposed to testify before House UnAmerican Activities Committee in New York about his so-called left-leaning past, he decided he'd go back to Brooklyn where he been born and raised.

At this point, Garfield was arguably the biggest movie star in the world.  Women wanted to have him, men wanted to be him; he was Brando before Brando.  Check out "Humoresque" or "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and get back to me.

He caught an #8-Flatbush Ave. bus, thinking to just ride and look.  Through Prospect Park...Lefferts Homestead, Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, the zoo, all the way out to Floyd Bennett Field where a car was waiting to take him back to his hotel.  The next day he would face the rabid commie-hunting committee of slavering weirdos.  But today it was old home week.

Garfield had been on the bus for about twenty minutes with other passengers sneaking peeks at him.  Finally this old Jewish man put down his paper, looked intently at Garfield.  "Julie?  Julie Garfinkle is that you, all grown up?"

Charmed to be remembered by his original name, Garfield nodded.  "Yes.  It's me."

The old man folded his newspaper and smiled.  "So?  Vat's new?"

                                  ****
                               
My friend Carl Gottlieb told me he thought Martin Mull had the best definition of Hollywood: "It's high school with money."                    
                                   
                                  ****
         
I have always loved Hollywood movies about Hollywood.  In my opinion, Gene Kelly's "Singing in the Rain" is at the very top.  Followed by the tragically under-seen "Bofinger" with Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy, "The Bad and the Beautiful" with Kirk Douglas and Lana Turner, "Career," written by Dalton Trumbo among others and staring Dean Martin.  Michael Tolkin's "The Player" directed by Robert Altman should be mandatory viewing for every show biz aspirant who lands at LAX.  Those who drive in, should have to stop at the city limits and look at Richard Rush's "The Stuntman" with Peter O'Toole and Steve Railsback.

And for those who still read, here are a few of my current favorite Hollywood books.

"Lizzie Pepper, Movie Star" by Hillary Liftin.  It is trashy and quick, a nearly fictionalized story of a mega star very much like Tom Cruise and his young love, a beautiful Katie Holmes type.  It's a knowing, smart, and brave book: I imagine the lawyers mud wrestling the bulging insurance riders dealing with possible retaliatory bombing runs from Cruise, Holmes, and of course the ever present Church of Scientology.  If you think you'd like to be famous, this book will give you the full scale Willys as it surely steers you in the opposite direction.

"Le Jet Lag" by Peter Lefcourt is a frantic, hilarious Hollywood book set in and against the Cannes Film Festival where, thank God, everything is going in the wrong direction.  Lefcourt is a really good writer with years of Show Biz experience (see his "The Deal").  One of "Le Jet Lag's" unforgettable characters is an old washed up TV star, playing out his last years in Europe doing cameos in low budget movies.  Somewhere, somehow he has learned to be a very good pickpocket to eat and pay his skeletal rent as he winds his way through this story nearly being recognized by everyone.  Nearly. 


                                     ****

Time passed and one day I got hired to rewrite a script Warners was developing called "The Stuntman."

Tom Rickman had taken a pass at it so it was already in good shape.  I never thought they needed to hire me, but I was grateful.  Since Rush's stuntman movie was finished and released first, we had to find a new title.  Ours was to star Burt Reynolds to be directed by Hal Needham, a legendary stunt-gaffer and Burt's best buddy.  The reason Warners was so high on this project began to assert itself one evening over at Burt's house, our first actual meeting.

There I was, drinking coffee, trying to make light conversation with one of Hollywood's biggest stars, and not doing too well.  He had just finished "Smokey and the Bandit" for Universal which opened as the #2 movie ("Star Wars" was #1) in America for the third straight week.  And Burt was a gross percentage player.  In other words, he got a percentage of the gross take, from dollar one, before the studio taught it to jump through hoops, to roll over and beg.  This is what all stars and star directors and producers get.  So Burt (and maybe even Hal) were already raking it in from "Smokey."

But it turned out that on Burt's old iron-clad contract with Warner Bros, he owed them one last picture, for, maybe, $250,000, whatever...but no gross percentage.  He had "net points," sure, but they never pay off.  In a famous lawsuit about profits to Art Buchwald on the Paramount hit "Coming to America," star Eddie Murphy had famously called them "monkey points."  Net is meaningless in big movie accounting.  For a juicy full accounting of these practices, see the book "Fatal Accounting" about Pierce O'Donnell and Art Buchwald.  Your jaw will be hanging open for days.

Two interesting things happened as I was working on this project.

The first is I got to work part time with Robert Towne, one of (if not THE) greatest screenwriters ever.  I noticed recently, he had a consulting producer credit on "Mad Men."  Maybe that's why it was so good.  Back then, Warners had made some kind of 'house-keeping deal' with him in which they set him and his huge, dreadlocked floor-sweeping Komondor dogs up in a continually remodeled casita next to Clint Eastwood on the lot.

In one of our meetings, Robert (who always seemed aware of an unknown camera angle on him) told me the the first thing he wanted to know about his characters was what they feared.

I was gobsmacked.

It set off a four alarm fire in my brain because, as simple as it sounds, embarrassingly, I had never thought of this.  I ran back to my office and applied this handy dictum to Sonny Hooper, my main man stuntman.  It opened many story doors for me -- then and now -- and as I leafed through what I had already written, it began to rain ideas.  What a day.

The second cool thing that happened was that next to my Warners' office back in the Writers Building, a new bunch settled in: Saul Krugman Productions.

Saul was a fast talking, funny, very opinionated personal manager from New York City who now was contractually linked to character actor Tony Zerbe who worked constantly and screenwriter  Charles Eastman who had just done a Robert Redford motorcycle racing picture called "Big Fauss and Little Halsey."

But mostly then, it was about David Carradine, a huge star from the "Kung Fu" TV show wherein he would talk Buddhism and lounge around like a cat for fifty minutes and then explode and karate kick the shit out of everybody for the last reel.  Saul also was managing Barbara Hershey and Jon Voight, star of "Midnight Cowboy" a massive hit for which he had been paid scale, nominated for an Academy Award, and become the most sought after actor in the business.  He had already made "Deliverance" at the studio for movie star bucks which cemented his career's trajectory.  I either didn't know about his bizarro right wing political beliefs or they hadn't surfaced yet.  But Jon as an actor and a regular guy was...and is...the real deal.

Yet to me, Saul was the most interesting.  He was then in his mid sixties I'd guess, red-faced with a mane of white hair, barefoot in his Italian loafers, he talked like Thelonious Monk played piano.  It never quite made perfect sense, but somehow you got it.  And one afternoon, finally off the phone, he invited me to lunch at the commissary.  Hello, syrup-soaked Monte Cristos!

That day, oddly, was one of the most important of my life because over lunch, Saul told me about the most important day of his life...five years before, back on the mean streets of New York, when he'd had his first heart attack and died.

Nobody had ever talked to me this way before; it made me proud, it made me nervous, it shook me to my core.  Because Saul told me the wondrous details of where he went when he died, what he saw, how he felt.  All the sarcasm and naked ambition was gone, while I looked at him, he simply became who he was.

I am not going to recount the details for you here.  It was Saul's reality-dream and I am sure he is now where he was then.  But he said he'd never known such peace, such beauty, such a profoundly happy feeling.  Right up to the point where someone was yelling at him and pounding his chest.  Saul said he struggled mightily to stay where he was.

But slowly, surely, he was dragged back, looking down on his own racking body, coming to in a speeding ambulance, sirens wailing, EMTs shouting instructions, outside horns honking.

At this point there were tears in his eyes.  "I told you this because I thought you needed to hear it, Chow Puppy."  Then he started his rice pudding.  "God, I love rice pudding," he said.

I did need to hear it, Saul.  More than you know.  Thank you.  And I love rice pudding, too.  Especially the kind with the swollen raisins.

                                      ****

A week later, I flew down to Mexico with my first draft of (new title) "Hooper" where Burt Reynolds was shooting the big budget "Lucky Lady" with Gene Hackman and Liza Minnelli, a period costume romp in speed boats.  On an open ocean.  These comprise three of the hardest things to shoot and apparently it was not a happy set.

Warners arranged for me to hitch down on Gene Hackman's private plane, a sweet little Beechcraft King Air.  For reasons best known to himself, this pissed Hackman off royally.  Part of the tax-dodge reason he even had the plane was to lease it back to the various film companies for serious money.  But every time I'd see him, ol' Gene would give me the stink eye.  And that's serious coming from Popeye Doyle.

The first day, they were all out shooting on the boats so a production assistant dropped me off at Burt's house, a four bedroom three bath Santa Fe style jobbie with open doors just begging to be wandered through.  So I dropped the script on the dining room table, set up my IBM Selectric (more on this little beauty later) and looked around for some books to peruse.  I love to see what people are reading.  But there were none.  So I set off exploring.

Oh, please.  Tell me you wouldn't do the same thing.

The house was as neat and clean as a five star hotel.  I think I was supposed to bunk there but I can no longer remember for sure.  So I began to stroll around.  I am naturally curious and a life-long lookie-loo with semi-elastic boundaries.  I know I went to the kitchen first but I can't remember that either.  Then the various bathrooms.  Don't really remember them either.  But I'm sure they were nice.  Oh, wait: the master bath had a huge Jacuzzi, the first in-home one I'd ever seen.

Then in the master bedroom suite -- ahh, the memory returns -- a huge California king bed, a couple of pictures of Sally Field...or was it Dinah Shore?  Memory, don't desert me now!  I glanced at both of the bedside tables and paused for a moment.  But I didn't look in them.  No way was I going to open those drawers.  A few years prior, in another house, I had and saw things I wish to God I'd never seen.  You can probably imagine but that's all you'll get from me.

Then, I encountered Burt's enormous closet; no doors, a huge walk-in.  So I did.  Lights came on automatically.  Jesus.  Sue Ellen didn't have a closet this big on "Dallas!"  Even the closet had its own closet: shoes, in this case, boots, all shined and lined up for inspection.  And in the closet's main room, about twenty feet of hanging, pastel Western suits, each three inches apart, seemed to go on forever.  And over there, double hung rows of shirts.  On and on.  And on.  It looked like a men's clothing store in Amarillo.

Right about here, the water in my memories sort of evaporates.  I recall Burt and I at the dining room table talking about some scene in the script which elicited his Carson show famous giggle.  And then somewhere, at some point, for something either real or imagined, he told me he was going to tear my head off and shit in it.  If you Netflix "Hooper," a movie about making movies, you will see we used that very line to good effect.  It's been years since I saw it, but I believe he is talking to the screenwriter when he says it.  Hmmm.

Burt died recently and was remembered fondly.  Sadly, he passed without getting to tear my head off and take a dump in it.  I supposed I have that to look forward to somewhere in Hollywood Heaven.  Line starts over there, Burtski.

When I finished "Hooper" and it was made, mirable dictu, the Writers Guild awarded me my co-screenplay credit!  My first one.

The movie cost $6,000,000 and ended up making $78,000,000 which essentially means Warners had to put on extra traffic cops to direct the dump trucks of money.  They were so high on it, in front of the main entrance, they built an enormous billboard with a huge model of a bridge-jumping rocket car mid-flight whose WHEELS ACTUALLY TURNED.  Across the whole display was the catch line "Ain't nobody can fly a car like Hooper!"

And there, down just a little, there was my name!  I must finally be a real writer; I mean there's the proof.  At one point, I think I just stood in front of it and gaped.  Wow.  Wowie-wow.

Aren't I pitiful?