#26. New Glory light-show from UCLA film school

#26.  New Glory light-show or the UCLA film school goes rock and roll.

I'm kind of bouncing around and I'm sure some of you are tired of hearing about The Sixties, yet here I go.  It re-birthed music, political dissent, clothing (or lack of it), and an overwhelming wave of Let The Good Times Roll!

For many of us, it was Scene 1, Act 1 of Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll.  I dearly loved every single day of it although I quake at its lower depth and lowest chakra Camelot memories...even though I was one of the few of us who did not do acid, peyote, or mushrooms.  Back in those days, I still believed in Control and I wanted as much of it as I could grab with two paws and a rake.  Dogs don't do well on psychedelics.  You could look it up.

I got to the UCLA film school in 1964; oddly the Sixties didn't really start for me until about 1965 and didn't end until the mid to late Seventies when I finally let it go and got my hair cut.  Bye bye, Ponytail.  I was a little slow on the uptake.

It was 1965 and with the early success of the Bay Area rock and roll concerts and the meteoric rise of groups like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, it was only a matter of time before the Southern California dorks caught that same idea and put on their own concerts.  As long as you had the money, the groups would come play.  But you better have the agreed upon sum because some of the groups began traveling with Hells Angels who were all too good (then and now) at getting said money.  And word soon got around the motorcycle gang's 'pound of flesh' was an actual pound of flesh.

I was a Teaching Assistant / projectionist in 3H, the film school's ratty old theatre.  I worked for Gary Essert who knew Hollywood intimately and was a past master at booking movies for us.  Gary could get films that hadn't even been released yet and films that had thought to have been lost for thirty years.  He could get work prints, ancient explosive nitrate films (one reel of which went off on my friend Dave), Tracy and Hepburn's personal print of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."  He once got Charleton Heston's first movie, "Peer Gynt," a 16mm student film the skinny well-oiled hunk had made while a seventeen-year-old freshman at Northwestern!

Gary and a couple of his better-heeled off-campus friends decided to go into the rock and roll concert business.  They would call themselves Kaleidoscope.  So they got what they thought were the proper permits, got money promises, set up a business checking account, and began wondering how this badass guy Bill Graham was doing so well in S.F.

I volunteered myself and a few friends to become Kaleidoscope's light show!

We would be The New Glory (as opposed to Old Glory; get it, get it?).  We would wear American flag shirts (made by our friend and downstairs roommate, Gloria Garvin) and cowboy hats (made by Resistol) with American flag hatbands (made by me).  Now having envisaged ourselves, we thought we'd better find out what made an actual light show, giving rise to a tour of dance concerts in the Bay Area.

To accompany the massive amounts of weed and psychedelics consumed, overhead projectors and large concave glass trays of oil, water, and glycerin with colored dyes were employed.  Also Kodak Carousel slide projectors and as many 16mm movie projectors as we could wrangle.

One of us thought to add a portable pop-pop-pop strobe light blaster which was rumored to cause seizures in some but made everybody look like they were in an old-time movie.  Lord, if we'd only had the full color high def Mandelbrot fractal zooms!  But for us, it was early and rudimentary.  Excitement, a willing spirit, and the sneaky ability to kite checks helped enormously...as Gary and some of his cohorts proved daily.

Our mission finally coming into focus as The New Glory, we began to collect throw-out movies from various film school trash bins.  Old editing projects, camera tests, animation experiments, abandoned student films, anything that would fit on a reel and get through a projector: track 'em and stack 'em!  We gathered boxes and boxes full.  Then Carousels of slides, slides, and more slides; I stuck a few handfuls of my own into a tray, shuffled into the mix.

We found a company in the Valley that would rent us the projectors, 16mm and overhead, the cables, the junction boxes.  In L.A. they had everything.  We built a colored light keyboard which, in my mind, would be Thomas Edison great, but in reality was more like Billy Bob Edison, his wastrel idiot brother.  Although it did manage to nearly blind Jerry Garcia who apparently was staring at it a little too hard.

Tim, Dave, Gloria, and I set up a test run someplace, I can't even remember where, but it was a disaster.  Fuses blew (remember fuses?  We later bought like twenty boxes), projector lamps overheated and blew, we even lost power cords and had to replace them.  We were new to all this and it showed.  However, the difference between this test run and our first actual light show was night and day.  Well, at least night and evening.

Somehow it had slipped my melting mind: we were not the stars of these concerts, the rock and roll bands were.  They were musicians and they'd been working together for years.

Between the ages of ten and thirteen, I was trying to hide from John Lewis Fisher so I wouldn't get beat up during recess or to get one more first kiss from Nancy Thompson.  The musicians were at home, practicing the guitar, the keyboards, the drums.  It mattered to them.  Cool as we hoped we looked in our American flag cowboy drag, we were just along for the ride and for whatever ooohs and ahhhs we might elicit in passing.

Here are some moments from that time, as seen by flashing strobe light.  Don't have a seizure, okay?

      *  The Beatles, either together or individually, were rumored to be coming to this particular concert.  This happened every week for the six months of Kaleidoscope's operation and was usually low sparked by a high heel of Gary Essert.

      *  The concert venue seemed to change every half hour.  There was always some kind of looming disaster about the permits, the Fire Marshal, a bounced check, or a "better" deal afoot.
     
      *  As it became an official Scene, regulars began to appear.
   
        There was a very young Rodney Bingenheimer whose endlessly repeated mantra seemed to be     "Whaaaat's happening?!"  Rodney would go on to manage bands and become the unelected mayor of Sunset Strip.
   
      One of the regular dancers, an old soul with great legs, showed up one night with her panties worn over and outside her black tights.  She became known as Karen Underpants.  We'd heard she ran off with Paul Simon who wrote "Bridge Over Troubled Underpants" for her.  The song later went to the top of the charts in a slightly different version.
   
      Marc Wanamaker and Hy Slobodkin, two young guys who found their way to us and became helpful, willing to jump in their car and get us whatever we needed.  When the shit hit the fan, they were always ready to pitch in.  Marc was blood kin to one of my fave Lefty actors, blacklisted Sam Wanamaker who escaped the rightwing Hollywood purge to England where he became crucial to recreating Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.  When Sam invited a then 13-year-old Marc over to London to hang out, the first thing the old dude did was take Marc out to Highgate Cemetery where he showed him Karl Marx's grave.  My kind of guy.
   
      Outside the various concert venues was Larry "Wildman" Fischer, a bi-polar paranoid schizophrenic street casualty/musician, hawking his one claim-to-fame, a major label record of his songs produced by Frank Zappa.  I always greeted Larry but I confess his clear and present damage made me a little nervous.
   
Our first gig was a concert in the Grand Ballroom of L.A.'s famous Ambassador Hotel with The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Canned Heat (the last band managed by the boys of Kaleidoscope).  The Dead and Airplane were then the two hottest American rock and roll bands.  The Dead were like heavyweight Joe Frazier in the ring, the Airplane were like dancer Rudolph Nureyev without the tutu; both great but totally different.  The light show was good...if you shut your eyes and pretended you were watching the star-gate sequence from "2001."

A year later, about 20 yards from the concert stage where we were set up, Senator Bobby Kennedy, running for President, was murdered, shot dead by some loser Palestinian schmuck who's mother thought he was so nice, she named him twice.

We lightshowed some amazing gigs.  I lost about 25% of my hearing with the great power blues trio Blue Cheer, your basic stripped down model of Southern three-chord blues apostates.  It was rumored that one of them couldn't read or write.  True or not, it didn't slow them down a lick.  And a bunch of my hearing went with them.

We played for our old film school friends, The Doors at Ciro's on Sunset Strip.  They were just getting started on their mach ten journey.  A fuller accounting of this night can be found in the UCLA Daily Bruin, wildly over-written, but you'll get the idea.  We had the gorgeous Kim Gottlieb with us that night and for a while backstage, she was afraid Jim Morrison, completely drifted away and impervious to her revival attempts, was actually dead.  Four years later, in a Paris bathtub, he would be.

My first and last solo gig with New Glory was in New York City's Carnegie Recital Hall.  Malcolm Terrence, a whip smart ex-journalist from Tucson was in L.A. managing Joe Byrd and Dorothy Moskowitz' band, The United States of America. 

They had recently been signed by Columbia and to celebrate the release of their first L.P., Columbia arranged for a concert at Carnegie Hall.  The little one, to be sure, but it was still Carnegie Hall!  The band invited me to go to New York with them and do lights...but this time nothing but film.  No overhead sploosh splooshing, no strobe lights, no Carousel slide shows.  Just six movie projectors and oversized 16mm reels.

Columbia put us up in the old Henry Hudson Hotel; in a Sixties slump but friendly to the record company's budget and only blocks away from the venue.  One afternoon, I walked over to the rehearsal with Gordon Marron, the band's violinist.  Classically trained, Gordon was in hog heaven playing rock and roll.

We saw a crowd of people gathering up ahead.  Gordon, of course, heard the fiddle before I did.  He quickened his step and began opening his violin case.  As we arrived, the crowd parted as Gordon handed his case to me and started playing along with the street busking violinist.  His name was Richard, he was (as they say) famous all over town.  He had long hair and wore street makeup that he had not taken around the back of his neck.  Suddenly Richard and Gordon were soaring on some familiar piece of classical music, the crowd was enraptured.

And then, here came the cops.

"Ahright, Johnnie, nothing to see here, keep walking, let's go, nothing to see here!"  One of them was already trying to put the cuffs on hapless Richard.  Gordon stepped in.  "You probably didn't like the Mozart.  I don't blame you; it's too effete.  I bet you're a Dvorak man or maybe Samuel Barber!"

With that Gordon began to play Barber's so well known Violin Concerto.  Richard somehow got his fiddle back under his chin and began to play too.  The crowd went nuts and, as the cops tried to regain the upper hand, the people began to boo.  Richard was lead to a squad car and as the cops were looking around for Gordon, he quickly cased his violin, passed it off to me, and we scurried away.

It was one of the all time coolest moments I have ever seen.  Years later, I read in Newsweek that the the famous busking Manhattan 'starving Julliard student' violinist Richard had retired at 45 and was living in his Miami beachfront penthouse condo...paid for with 20 years of tips.

The USA concert was a slightly befuddling success: the band was playing live rock and roll, using Moog synthesizers, odd time signatures, electronic stuff so common now but back then, most folks, especially rock and rollers, had never heard of such.  And Dorothy's glorious voice, ring modulated, holy ranchero!  The band got a good review in The Village Voice.  And New Glory Lights were mentioned in passing.

The last L.A. gig I remember was Country Joe and the Fish.  I loved those guys.  And maybe Steve Miller, back in the Boz Scaggs days.  Somebody get them a cheeseburger!  And I think on that same bill was Hammond organist Lee Michaels and his dervish drummer Frosty.  Between those two guys, they had so much hair, you absolutely could not see their faces.  But when they did what would become their great hit "Do You Know What I Mean," the place went completely apeshit.

When the gig was over, about 2AM, we packed up and went home, totally exhausted spiritually and physically.  Mental had taken an earlier train.

Our ears ringing, we were covered with sweat, cooking oil, chemicals, dyes, and I don't know what all.  We stopped at the laundromat down on Lincoln Blvd. and threw all our clothes into a couple of washers.  I may be combining two events here but I think my buddies went home and I stayed, fascinated, watching the wet, soppy clothes go around and around in the smooshy rhythm dancing soap bubbles.  Look at that.  Finally, a light show.

Since I was alone, I turned off most of the laundromat's overhead lights, shed my Levis and skivvies and tossed them in.  Then, my socks.  In the ensuing quiet hour, few cars drove by outside and no one came in.  I was so tired, I didn't even have a cover story prepped.  Now, in the dryer, the clothes were rolling and tumbling.  Made me think of Taj and Muddy Waters....

The sun was coming up as I got home.  But you know, anything for rock and roll.

#25. "Van Nuys Blvd," barely baked. And Wolfman.

#25 "Van Nuys Blvd," a barely baked idea.  And my weekend with The Wolfman.

Many years ago, this wild hare idea of mine was taken up by Burt Sugarman.

Burt was a well known hot music/TV executive with a whole floor of the 9000 building on Sunset.  This was the same building in which former Monkee Michael Nesmith's mother sold a little product she invented called Liquid Paper (later White Out) which corrected typing mistakes.  I used it for years; we all did.  It was the triumph of a good idea.  A secretary herself, Momma hawked it floor to floor.  She later sold the company to Crane or someone for nearly 50 million.

My story was to be called "Van Nuys Blvd." after a well-known teen-age cruising street out in LA's San Fernando Valley.  Under the influence of "Animal House" and "American Graffiti" I had a mob of half-baked characters: One guy had invented a gadget, a crossover TV remote that would change stop lights to green.

Another had a hotrod built around a WWII P-38 Allison V-1710 supercharged engine.

There would be prom hijinks under clouds of marijuana smoke, you know, real high class stuff like that.  The two lead narration characters were AM disc-jockeys, one guy a perennial favorite, old and tired at 37, and the new hot babe from New Orleans who was eating his lunch in the ratings.

Burt Sugarman was the creator and executive producer of the long running network rock and roll show, "Midnight Special."  He was married then to dynamite blonde actress Carol Wayne, a frequent guest/target on Johnny Carson's show.  Burt knew the music of the day and the men and women who made it.  His Rolodex was fat with all their names, addresses, and private lines.  By itself, it would have made an excellent 'McGuffin' plot device.  "The Heist Of Burt Sugarman's Rolodex!"

Burt thought it would be a good idea if I spent some time with the hot DJs in L.A.  All he had to do was make some calls (he was a maestro at Phone) and soon I was in with Humble Harve, B. Mitchel Reed, Emperor Hudson, three of the hotties of the day.  I spent a few hours with Harve and then he just dropped out of sight, taking humble to a new level.  However, a week later it broke that he murdered his cheating wife Mary Gladys and was now wanted for more than personal appearances and light yardwork.

I did some shifts with other jocks and began to learn the system of record rotations, rack jobbers, under-the-table favors, cash and otherwise and, most importantly, how to keep talking long after you had anything interesting to say.  I learned about radio's one unforgivable sin: silence...Dead Air (a title if I ever heard one).  I learned that some jocks read aloud from a record's liner notes as if they had just thought of it themselves, that a lot of this hypnotic jabber was fueled by happy drug Dexamyl greenies.  Thinner and a fast tongue, what's not to love?  Babe.

I was always waiting to meet the actual rock and rollers but Burt kept me well away from them.  They were his.  The one celebrity he gave me turned out to be good enough.  It was his "Midnight Special" singular voiced announcer, Wolfman Jack.  Who had already starred in "American Graffiti."

Burt arranged for me to accompany the Wolfster on one of his many public appearances; this one, the New Jersey State Fair.  We flew out early morning from LAX, first class and all, to Newark.  Travel with the Wolfman was unique.  Everyone loved him, they felt they knew him, and that he must know them, too.  This was a part he played brilliantly.  In just a couple of words, a sentence or two at most, he fulfilled them and kept them moving.  I asked him how he did it.  "We're bound by time and rock and roll.  Besides, I like people," he said.  "Kinda."

When we alit from the limo at the N.J. State Fairgrounds, we were met by a team of Clipboard People who had the whole day planned out, down to the minute.  Wolfman plugged into them immediately and deep.  He was theirs and he made sure they knew it.  "They pay the freight, they get the goods," he whispered to me and we were off.

Wolfman announced the bake offs.  Wolfman hawked for the carny Side Shows.  Wolfman announced the Any-And-All-Dog-Contest,  Wolfman manned the 4H table, handed out the ribbons, got a standing-O when he left.  With no script or notes, he announced everything they dragged him to, never at a loss for words or quips.  It was a stunning performance.  Then there was the looooonnng line at the Take A Picture With Wolfman Jack!  And oh, God how they did.  His charm and patience never flagged; he was he gravel-voiced Energizer Bunny.

When we got a little coffee break, I asked him how and why he did this.  He smiled.  "You'll see, Chow Puppy.  You will see."

I think the highlight for both of us was when he got to present the headline act of the day: Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes, who for years had been New Jersey's own hard core white boy blues band.  Until that pesky Bruce Springsteen came along.  But it was early, Bruce wasn't quite The Boss yet and Southside Johnny was still cookin'.  We had a great evening of music and Wolfie kept the show moving.  The band and the huge audience loved it.

When the night was over and we were about to climb into the company limo for the airport, an official handed Wolfman a brown paper shopping bag.  They said their goodbyes with a manly pelvis-held-safely-away hug and we got into the Lincoln.  "I'll call them and tell them you're running a little late."  Okay.

Wait...what?

On the red eye flight home, Wolfie opened the paper bag and began to count his money: banded packets of well used tens and twenties.  "You always want night flights," he said.  "Half the seats are empty, they're grateful for the business so they treat you good."  On this night, they actually held the plane for him.  And when he boarded, me bringing up the rear, the whole plane broke into applause.   As he talked, he never stopped counting.  Until he did.  "How much," I asked.

"I drifted off at thirty-five grand.  There was more.  For one day's work.  I do ten or fifteen of these a year.  Is this a great life or what?!"  He reached into his hand-carry bag and pulled out a can of Lysol.  He upended it into the paper sack, clamped the sack shut around his hand and sprayed for a full five seconds.  "Germs," is all he said.

That task complete, he washed down a 'lude with some champagne, dropped to the floor on his knees  -- what the fuck!? -- as he turned toward the seat, he draped an airlines blanket over his head and flopped down, asleep.

Okay, by now, you know the drill: way too often I go and see all these cool things and write the script about something else.  We should've done a documentary about Wolfman.  I should have written a movie about Michael Nesmith's mom and the White Out: Talk about a generous, inventive and empowered woman!  And we probably could've gotten a Monkees soundtrack out of it.  Hell, they made a whole movie about the guy who invented the intermittent car windshield wiper.  Or at the very least, I should've done Humble Harve and his gone wife.  We could've called it "Dead Air!'

But oh, noooo.  I had to stick with my stupid idea about the kids and disc jockeys of Van Nuys Blvd.  And folks, that script dead flat sucked.  Even my cat hated it.

Burt Sugarman, wherever you are in deep retirement and married now to Mary Hart, you are still king of the machers.  And I am utterly and forever sorry.

                          ****
                 
What makes a hit?

Oh, God, if they only knew.  Every few years, certain movies break out; The Little Engines That Could.  They come from nowhere, fighting through the shit storms of indifference, poverty, and fear.  Yet somehow they get made, get a limited release, and find an audience.  Some hits are bad, some are good -- it doesn't seem to matter.  They just spoke to people.

This is where the William Goldman quote from his 'Adventures In The Screen Trade' shines brightest.  "NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING."

When I was starting out in 1970 (Jesus, does the calendar actually go back that far?), it was a movie called "Joe" starring Peter Boyle and a very young Susan Sarrandon in their first roles, directed by John Avildsen who went on to direct "Rocky" and most of the "Karate Kids."  Written by the bizarrely great Norman Wexler (see earlier MGM pitch story) and made for only $100,000, "Joe" grossed over $20,000,000 for the goniffs at Cannon.

A few years later, there were the Charles Bronson revenge blood-bath "Death Wishes."  Coming at a time when our national crime stats were out of control, these movies gave lines around the block a simple tough guy approach that completely satisfied...if you didn't look to closely.  Like at the movie itself or the U.S. Constitution.

Then there was "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," Nia Vardalos' theatrical memoir licence to print money.  And later anomalies were from 'documentarian' Michael Moore and movie star Mel Gibson.  Imagine dinner with those two.

Moore's docutainment "Fahrenheit 911" was made for 6 million and grossed 222.5 million.  As for Gibson, he decided to put up his own money, 30 million, when all his fair-weather buddies passed on "The Passion," his hard-core Jesus movie.  Then, four-walling it across the world, he ended up making over 612 million.  Think anyone saw that coming?

These movies may yet eclipse "The Blair Witch Project," a simple film about rage and Tarantino & Avary's masterpiece "Pulp Fiction" considered the most profitable films in history.  They didn't follow the normal success formulas.  They blazed their own staggering trail to financial glory, leaving us mystified but happy.

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?"  Well, The Shadow, of course.  But after him and all the way down,  a screenwriter does.  Because every one of these movies came from one.  Including Michael Moore who, on "Fahrenheit 911," functioned as a screenwriter as ever a writer did.

And Sparkie, I love screenwriters!  The good, the bad, and the ugly.

#24. The Baked, the unbaked, and the half-baked.

#24.  The baked, the unbaked, and the half-baked.

Here are some half-baked folk sayings that I love but have only the dimmest idea of what they could possibly mean.

   1.  "You can't tell which way the train went just by looking at the tracks."  Phillip Browning told me this one and I love it.  But wha?
 
   2.  "She cuts a wide peel on a small potato."  Chester on 'Gunsmoke' from local accordionist and Alaskan long haul truck driver David Locke.
 
   3.  "Be careful what you're dreaming.  Soon your dreams will be dreaming you."  Willie Nelson.
 
   4.  "Everything is going in the wrong direction..."  Jagger & Richards from The Rolling Stones'  song 'Connection.'  I know what they mean.  I think.
 
   5.  "Eat Death!"  Graffiti spray painted on a Dallas overpass.  Say what?
 
   6.  "I don't always understand what I'm talking about.  But I know it's right."  Mohammed Ali.
 
   7.  "Time is a ruthless and hungry lover."  Printed without attribution on the inside of a book of matches.
 
   8.  "Civilization is like sour mash whiskey.  Too big a dose the first time could put a man off it for life."
 
   9.  "When the heart is full, the mouth is shut."  Um, actually, I think we all know what this one means.  Even if we almost don't.
           
   10.  "Am I dreaming or did I just see a gorilla and a beautiful dame?!" from the 40s movie  "Mighty Joe Young" that can be used unsuccessfully in almost any situation.
 
   11.  "You have to get off the porch if you want to run with the big dogs."  A bumper sticker seen in Langley.
 
And while we're on baking in general, here was my business card, set up in perfect screenplay format, complete with Courier type:

EXT. 2808 LAUREL CYN PL. LA, CAL. 90046 - DAY

Screenwriter CHOW PUPPY comes staggering out.

CHOW PUPPY
(dramatically)
Anybody else want to talk
'story?!' Call (213) 650-1628.

Inside a producer lies dead, shot through his Upmann
cigar.  Oh oh.
                                              CUT TO:

Someone once told me she saw my card on Roman Polanski's refrigerator door in Paris.  Success enough for moi.  
 
                            ****

Here are a few stories from some of the scripts I either invented, got hired to write, or joined in progress.  The reason I mention them at all, is that some of them were okay, a few were awful and one or two were pretty good.  But all of them held joy or heartbreak in their typing adventures.

And, except "Little Richard," they went nowhere but kept me and a small number of others employed for a while.  I'll finish this with rock and roll's great architect Richard Penniman.

                            ****

It's right there in the Hollywood Bible: Man cannot live on development fees alone.  Although I gave it a good run.  With the three main TV networks, all the cable companies, the Studios, and the various independents, at any one time, there must be thousands of  scripts in actual paid development.

In bedroom or studio offices, in garages, in living room corners, on dining room tables, in coffee shops, there are hundreds of writers hammering out screen or teleplays of all kinds.

They are based on original ideas, other scripts, novels, plays, true stories, history, even songs.  I was once approached by a producer who had the rights to Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville."  As a recently realized alcoholic, I thought it better to stay away from that one.

As we all approach our own third acts, I heard somewhere that Buffett was considering a national chain of old-age retirement homes under the Margaritaville banner.  I envision a battalion of sloe eyed old hipsters wandering about in their flip flops, stepping on pop tops, looking for their lost shakers of salt.

I was always waiting for someone brave to come forward with the rights to Van Morrison's "T.B. Sheets."  Now that's a scary song; U-tube it.

In this process, meetings are held, notes are given, agents hammer out the deals, checks clear and the writers start typing as, in opposite directions, they all sail away on different boats to the mystic shores of Development Hell.

As these scripts progress all over town, favorites rise and fall, project rabbis come and go, zeitgeists are caught and fly away.  And even though many screenwriters make their living in this land, not enough of these projects ever come to fruition.

It's like a plethora of Hollywood marriages; long term often means boredom and exhaustion.  So it is with script development.  The longer a script is in this process, I believe the more remote its chances get at ever being made.  It's too easy to rewrite the life right out of a good story.

Knowing when to stop is a gift.

As my novelist friend Judith Walcutt has pointed out, there is a wild pony strain of childishness in Hollywood.  We know time (especially our own shelf life) is short -- so eat dessert first!  Part of that dessert is more paid projects, num.

Say a writer wins an Oscar or an Emmy.  And has a genuine hit.  And does a big TV interview show and charms everyone (hey, it could happen!).  At this point, the writer and his agent set him up with three or four more projects.  Wherein the writer will take the necessary meetings to show his best tricks.  And then, one of the dirty little Hollywood secrets makes its first appearance: the writer will hire several of his unemployed writer friends to lay down a first draft.  The hot writer will then rewrite and polish it until it looks like his.  Or enough.

The principal writer got, say, $350,000 for a first draft and two sets of revisions.  Although I never got this kind of bread, most do now, if not more.  He or she will pay his friend $10,000 under the proverbial table.  This is frowned upon by everyone except the two dancers and yet is one of the hidden economic tenets of screenwriting.

The second writer gets no credit, is virtually unknown by the production team if it ever gets made, and gets no residuals.  Maybe he gets to sneak his high school girlfriend's name for one of the minor characters.  But with this unreported income he was able to pay the rent and put food on the table or get caught up on child support.  No small achievement.

Anyway, this is how I remember script development and here are some of the stories it generated for me.

"BUFFALO MAN"

The first script I ever wrote; it came to me like a radio-active dream when I was in the UCLA film school.  This was in the mid Sixties when our movie ideas seemed to come in little flashes, mostly made up of rock and roll (Country Joe and the Fish's "Section 43" was a universal favorite), cars, girls, half naked and otherwise, cars with girls in them.  And more rock and roll.  But suddenly, I had this idea for a Western.  Where the hell did this come from?  It was 95% fictitious and was this:

Famed buffalo hunter Joe Victory Smith was selected by Teddy Roosevelt to put down the last buffalo, celebrating the moratorium in 1900.  Only three things stood in his way -- Runs at Night, a Lakota Sioux war chief, an old enemy.  Time.  And finally, the old buffalo hunter's dormant conscience.

Soon this idea possessed me and I bought every book on the history of buffalo hunting in American I could find.  There're more than you'd think.  Then I began work on it without ever having seen an actual screenplay.  Not one.  I just wrote as if I was describing the movie in my head, minute by minute.  I think my dialogue even had quotes marks around it.

I showed the first 30 pages to Colin Young, the film school's director and it generated an idea.  He knew I loved the films of director Sam Peckinpah, ex-husband of Marie, one of Colin's secretaries.  And apparently Sam was in an unemployed Hollywood slump after the well publicized problems generated from "Major Dundee," a cavalry picture with Charlton Heston.  This was well before "The Wild Bunch."  Lots of us movie geeks at UCLA were early to Peckinpah's party.  "Ride the High Country" still makes me cry.

So Colin set it up; Sam would get some sort of honorarium to mentor this film student and we would meet up in Trancas to work on "Buffalo Man."  Sam, behind in rent, alimony, and car payments, took me on without having read my 'script' first.  I later learned this was a lifetime pattern of his.  He couldn't stand to be out of work even for a day.  If you got him at the right moment, he'd sign up for the start money to write and direct a laundromat opening.  "There's a good idea in there somewhere," he would say.

Here was my first day with Sam Peckinpah.

As he opened the door to his rental beach house north of Malibu that morning, he was shorter than I thought he'd be.  And apparently my hair was longer than he thought it'd be.  For ten or fifteen seconds, we just stood there and looked at each other.  He took a slug of his pale orange juice mimosa and told me to come in.

We sat at a kitchen table in bright sunlight overlooking the Pacific Ocean waves flopping in relentlessly.  Boy this was the life.  Sam wore shades the entire time.  I never saw his eyes.  "You wanna drink, Bob?"  He called me Bob for the entire time, too.  I passed on the mimosa, not having discovered the deadly joys of alcoholic mornings yet.

"Colin told me you were in the Marine Corps."  You could have opened a beer bottle on the lifted lip of his sneer.  "I was a World War II China hand.  What were you, a hippy Marine?"

"They didn't have them yet," I said.  "So I just waited it out.  I couldn't fly a plane, I couldn't shoot the M-1 rifle, I didn't want to carry the base plate of the 81mm mortar, and I hated Parris Island.  I thought the Marine Corps was your basic Big Green Dildo."  Which at least made him laugh.

"You were a Marine," he said.  "Now, let's talk about 'Buffalo Man.'"

So we did for the next two hours.  And I learned a lot.  Unfortunately, fifty years later, I can't remember hardly any of it.  Except this: write better...but less.  And this, too: even though you're the guide, let the reader (and viewer) find their own way into your story.  It will mean more to them.

"There's a good idea in there somewhere.  Call me when you get more pages and want to meet again," said handing me a little slip of paper at the door.  His phone number.  "And you gotta start drinking, Bob.  Writers drink."

About a month later I called him.  The number had been disconnected.  The next day I read in the "L.A. Times" Calendar Section that he'd gotten a new picture and was on his way back to Mexico.  I never saw him again.

Twenty years later, I finally wrote a full draft of "Buffalo Man."  Then, again.  And again.  Maybe someday I'll finally catch it, maybe not.  So here's to you, Sam, wherever you are.  Even though you're long gone, Bob salutes you.

"IDAHO"

When I reread my script years later, "Idaho" is one that works.  As improbable as the story was, somehow it works.  Oh, if I could have just gotten a few more to think so.

I can't remember whose idea it was; probably a joint-custody job but I jumped on it like a Kardashian to a tanning bed.  Its genesis was from the early Nineties, growing out of the pre-Tea Party lunatic fringe's idea to take Idaho (ever a haven for the Good Ideas of the extreme right) and secede from the union.  For a while, the movement was led by a bemedaled retired Army Lt. Colonel gasbag named Bo Gritz.  While his true history is somewhat suspect, the power of his personality is not.  I thought, wow: movie!  Because...there's a good idea in there somewhere.

We got a Canadian company working out of Showtime to finance the development and a research trip to Idaho and northern Montana where there had been recent unrest with the Militia of Montana and some federal officers.  For a while in the 80s and 90s, these survivalist nut-cases were on the news every couple of weeks, sometimes with fatalities.  The killings at Ruby Ridge were a true believer's nightmare.  One of life's enduring mysteries is why some people court death so religiously.  And so it came time for me to go see what was up there.

I flew to Seattle where I met my girlfriend and future wife Paula.  We rented a car and headed east together across the Cascades into Idaho never-never land.

There are great and grave differences between being a screenwriter and a reporter, skilled at interviews.  A few like David Simon, Cameron Crowe, and Pete Dexter have done both well.  Me, not so much.  But over the years, I pretty much learned how things in life work.  I mean it's not exactly a secret.  So within those holes in the narrative give and take, I just make shit up.

A long time ago, I interviewed black revolutionary Eldridge Cleaver for the L.A. Free Press.  He told me some wild story involving Angela Davis that dropped my jaw; the one where she hides a small handgun in her towering Afro.   I asked him if it were true.  He smiled and said, "If it ain't true, it ought to be!"  I took this rubric directly into my bloodstream, where it remains to this day, the pulse of fiction writers everywhere.

For years, Sand Point, Idaho has been known as Copville.  Hundreds of retired police officers have lived there, many from the LAPD and other southern California law enforcement entities.  It is a stunning town on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille.  In the late 80s and early 90s, nearby Hayden Lake was the home of the Aryan Nation Brotherhood.  The northern panhandle of Idaho and the Northwestern tip of Montana was free range to so called patriots of the reddest stripe.  There was always cracker-barrel talk, some in jest, some not-so, about secession from the union.

I thought northern Idaho was one of the most beautiful places I'd ever seen.  The same with Montana.  It all seemed like a reality tinged Lake Wobegone.  Only nicer.

We pushed on to the little town of Noxon, Montana.  A few years earlier, it had been featured on a CBS "48 Hours" when some of the townies'd had enough of the recently formed all white paramilitary Militia of Montana.  In a TV-covered demonstration, a beloved local school teacher named Joyce Coupal had called out one of her former students, John Trochmann, a retired snowmobile mechanic who was now the grand poobah of the Militia.  Their face to face set-to, seen by millions across America, was both hilarious and touching.

I immediately called her.

We drove up to Joyce's house in the middle of apple pressing time; she put us right to work.  The interview could wait as we were recruited to several hours of serious farm/orchard labor.  The Coupals insisted on putting us up in their guest room and after a few hours watching us carefully, her  advice was that we should definitely get married.  As soon as possible.  Our time in these haunts were filled with such hi-def moments.  One of which was a breakfast meeting with "Colonel" Rick Rackley, Minister of Information of the Militia, which took place in a classic small town restaurant, its counter filled with home-schooled kids all watching a fuzzy Disney's "Cinderella" on a large screen TV.

Nearly the first thing Col. Rick said was that his former teacher Joyce was a well known commie which then opened his conspiracy gates to the entire left-leaning education system in America, not to mention the U.N.'s black helicopters, the Jew-run media, the new Denver airport where we would all be collected and disposed of in the vast new luggage system whose slots were body-sized, doncha know and he had rock solid proof that the NAACP were all slavering leftie mud-people.  The only thing that stood between their chaos and utter ruin was the Second Amendment, its guardian the NRA, and misunderstood groups like his.

During his deadly eyeball-locking rants, he kept urging us to "read his lips."  After he left, Paula pointed out that, ironically, Col. Rick was one of those guys who had no lips.

After more interviews, more meetings, I was chomping to start writing.  I had scenes and characters constantly loping through my mind.  Most of them had lips.

So I started to work.  And somehow -- mirabile dictu -- it kept getting better.  But one's own opinion is just that.  And just when I thought I had it as good as it could get (still do), I turned it in to Showtime and Alliance Films.  God I was happy.

Subsequent events can best be described in the following manner.

It was like the Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoon: in full chase, catching up, closer, closer then suddenly he freezes and looks around.  He's over the edge of the cliff!  And then,
                                W
                                H
                                O
                                O
                                O
                                S
                                H
                                straight down, finally disappearing into a tiny cloud of dust in the bottom of a deep canyon.  Who knows how, who knows why?  It just IS, brother and somehow, like the immortal Chuck Jones cartoon, it seems understandable...if not exactly right or fair.

So bye bye Idaho.                   
             
"LITTLE RICHARD"

I'm not sure, but I think there has never been a more beloved, a more important rock and roll icon who was gay and a childhood cross dresser to boot than Little Richard Penniman.

Maybe, generations later, Freddy Mercury of Queen.

One of the many differences between them was that Little Richard was there in the beginning, one of the inventors and absolute monarchs of rock and roll.  Plus which, in those days, there was virtually NO acceptance of this kind of sexual behavior.  I mean in those days, if you started that ol' shit, there'd be someone in the back of the crowd, looking for a rope.

He was, as his song sings, "Tutti Fruity."  And since I first saw him in concert in Greenville, South Carolina in 1955, he was mesmerizing.  All us white kids up the balcony were invaded by a wild-eyed demon spirit that night.  So much that some of us were actually lowered onto the main stage by our friends so we could dance with the all black audience.

Little Richard was a pioneer, a  rock and rollin' beautiful little bad ass.  He was a wild-eyed revolutionary funster of the highest order and once you surrendered to his down bound train, you were NEVER the same.  I became Uncle John, as in "Long tall Sally, she built for speed, she got erry-thing that Uncle John need, oh, baby..."

So I read all the books, all the articles, talked to all the people including Richard, all the while playing his records, night and day and night again.  And do you know, I never got tired of them. 

I loved this script.  I got everything I wanted in it.  And then some.  As it passed from hand to hand going up the necessary but harrowing executive food-chain, the reaction was the same: Great script, let's cast it and go!  For a while my stock was rising again.  Ahhhh.

Then, it hit the last guy in line, the president of the company, a thin, handsome guy in a five thousand dollar baggy suit who thought it was maybe pretty okay.  But nothing more.  "Who can we get to rewrite this thing?"

This was the last news I heard from the studio for a year until I read they were making the 'new version' with Leon as the eponymous rocker.  I was happy I ended up with a 'written by' credit along with the New Guy but was still so discouraged that, shamefully, it was ten or fifteen years before I could actually watch it.  One morning reading my beloved "TV Guide," I accidentally saw it listed on B.E.T. and, what the hell, recorded it.

Holy Kazinties, it wasn't half bad!  Most of my stuff seemed to be still in it and Leon was great.  In the end, I got paid, had a good time writing it, re-heard a lot of great music, and like the best of life, the bad memories were washed away by the immortal incantation of --

"A wop bobba loo bop ballew bam boom!"

#23. "Lakota Woman," what they want and 8 Simple Rules

#23.  "Lakota Woman" -- What they want and don't want -- And 8 Simple Rules for success.

Recalling The Billionaire, the Academy Award winning Actress, and the Indians.  Starring Ted Turner,  Jane Fonda, and Mary Crow Dog.  Featuring Lois Bonfiglio, Frank Pierson, and a Chow Puppy.  Not exactly in this order but you want to lead with your good-looking, big-bucks people.

Ted Turner is a hero, my benefactor, and will one day be known as Film's savior for three initials: TCM.  That's Turner Classic Movies where they show great old movies without commercials (at least so far) and uncut all day and all night!  To me, this is one of the great exhibition achievements in film history.   And let's face it, he's lots better looking than Louis B. Mayer, David Selznick, Harry Cohen or pretty much any projectionist who ever lived.  He's Clark Gable to their Charles Laughton.

I also found Ted Turner to be bratty, narcissistic, and always in a hurry.

He'd had his eye on Jane Fonda for years.  So when she and hardcore lefty politico Tom Hayden split up, the Tedster swooped in, all tall, grey, and handsome with the following portmanteau -- He's rich -- He scrubs up nice -- He is a good ol' boy with an adventurous spirit -- He (unlike Georgie Minafer from "The Magnificent Ambersons" which ran on TCM last night) can actually captain a racing yacht to win the America's Cup -- He's progressive and generous; he gave a billion (with a 'b') dollars to United Nations' direct-to-the-people programs back in 1997.

One of the best things he did, brought us together for a short time; Ted and Jane, America's Fun Couple of the Nineties, for a little while in search of an available screenwriter.  Pledging 40 million dollars, Ted had set up a series of programs that would run on his TV network about the plight and heroism of the American Indian to be called "The Native Americans, Beyond the Myths and Legends."  Well...maybe in addition to the myths and legends.

They would start off with movies about Geronimo, the great Shawnee warrior Tecumseh, and Crazy Horse.

It's my theory that part of the energy that brought this project to fruition was a non-fiction book that Ted and Jane had encountered called "Lakota Woman," a memoir by Mary Crow Dog with Richard Erdoes.  This is one book that CAN be judged by its cover; a haunting picture of Mary, taken when she was young and beautiful.  That one picture drilled me dead and still does.  I think it's one of the reasons the book has been in print so long.

Turning that book into a Turner movie fell into the capable hands of Jane Fonda and Lois Bonfiglio.  Lois was the one I saw most often.  And I love that woman.  Lois is from New York, in her middle years, a strong cookie with an arrestingly beautiful punim (and I am a face man), a great sense of humor, and a deep work ethic.  She had toiled on the Sergio Leone masterpiece "Once Upon A Time In America," plus "See You In The Morning," and "Old Gringo."

I'm sure we must have met in Hollywood before we made the deal.  But my first memory of our meet was in Santa Fe where Richard Erdoes lived.  I believe Mary Crow Dog was there at Richard's house, too.  Years, children, and troubles later, Mary looked nothing like the cover of "Lakota Woman."  Life is harder on some than others, I'll leave it at that.  And I was just discovering what the Res was like; the hard scrabble ass-end of existence.

This country is not exactly famous for its generous treatment of the vanquished.  It's a known fact that you can take an American flag and fold it in such a way that, when held up to the light just right, it says Hooray For Us -- Fuck You.  What with the mysteriously intentioned Catholic Church, the corrupt and self-serving Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Seagrams, the Indians never stood a chance.

This was our charge with "Lakota Woman:" show it.  So we began.

Mary Crow Dog grew up a multi-race Sicangu Lakota Sioux on the Rosebud Reservation in barren, wind-swept South Dakota.  Her autobiography and our movie showed her childhood up to her twenties as she became involved in the American Indian Movement's occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.  It was political, familial, and romantic.  But mostly "Lakota Woman" was about institutionalized poverty and racism in America.  As Mary found her way through old family, new friends, and first lovers into the protest occupation of the historical shrine, she let go of the girl and became a Lakota woman.  And yet somehow held on to her innocence.  She was a unique and powerful human being.

As I wrote and wrote, I felt that I was on my game because I was doing something that mattered.  But as they read and read, so were Lois and Jane and for that very same reason.  As we gave and rejected notes on the script, sometimes it felt like a free-for-all tennis match with the Williams sisters and Jimmy Conners.  In the end, I think we all made things better.

And as we went about our business, I learned such interesting things.  For instance...

When you build a house, be sure to put plenty of sound-dampening insulation into the inner walls.  Not just the outside walls.  When Ted's Atlanta Braves were in the World Series, we all lit back to the Turner spread just outside Atlanta.  Lucky Lois got the guest room down the hall and I was given the common wall room next to Ted and Jane's master suite.  Here's all I will say about that: they had, at least that weekend, umm, a very active love life.  And the Braves won.  I'm not saying one had anything to do with the other but....

Later at a meeting on their jillion acre Montana ranch, I discovered the guest room sheets were high thread count, scented and IRONED!  Man, I love ironed sheets.  And the guest bathroom had new toothbrushes, new combs, new toothpaste, new razors, new shaving cream, new everything! Apparently Ted and Jane would fly in periodically and their full-time staff would have it all sparkling ready.  That staff made, to this day, the best coffee I have ever had.

I fell asleep that night thinking of the excuses I might invent so that I could just live there forever: I'd had a small, painless stroke and couldn't really be moved -- I was getting the best work ever and couldn't really be moved -- I'd give them free options on anything I wrote for life and couldn't really be....zzzzzzzz.

After Ted had showed me his Bierstadt painting that he'd paid a million dollars for, I decided this was a unique chance to politely ask a billionaire how much was enough.  Ted mused for a second and then said, "I think about this.  And what I came up with is Just A Little More."

Time passed, I kept typing, big wheel kept on turning, Proud Mary kept on burning.  This latest fire was my actual life, back in North Carolina.

For reasons that pass understanding, Lois and Jane stuck with me through the death of my mother and father and the loss of my marriage.  They easily could have Force Majeured my weepy sad ass out the contractual door but they didn't.  And when my beloved ancient cat Frisco died, that was it.  I packed up and moved back to Hollywood.  Which was prepping its own little Chow Puppy type surprise for all of us.

At 4:31 AM on January 14th, 1994, Los Angeles was hit by the North Ridge earthquake.  A booming 6.7, it was felt as far away as Las Vegas.  Here are some of the things that happened that morning.

Sound asleep, I was shot out of my water bed on a surfable wave.

My little Hollywood house on Alfred Street shook and vibrated to its groaning foundation, producing a terrible sound of things coming apart that you never hear until it happens to you.  It's all your furniture trembling around the rooms at the same time.  It's your dishes, silverware, glasses all doing the St. Vitas Dance.  It's pictures falling from the shaking, cracking walls.  It's your refrigerator swinging open, disgorging its innards.  It's your toilet flushing by itself, over and over.  It's your neighbors screaming and calling out to one another in terror.

I heard the signed Tiffany standing lamp that had been in my family for eighty years topple over, its favrile glass lamp shade shattering on the hardwood floor, 3 inches away from a thick rug that might have saved it.  My blood actually ran cold.

My dog Roxy jumped up on my shaking bed, ducked under the covers, scrambled down to the bottom and trembled against my feet.  She had never done anything like that before.

All the lights were out; Los Angeles was without power.  My phone rang.  It was a friend back in North Carolina and their morning TV shows had been cut into by the We Interrupt This Program earthquake story.  I told her it had seemed like 20 or 30 seconds of a war zone.  She said she had to go to work but she put her land line phone down by the TV set, left it on so I could hear the over view of what was now being called The Big One.

Just as the first of the explosive aftershocks rolled in.

I am proud to report that neither Roxy or I doo-dooed the bed as we rode out another fifteen minutes of these major tremors and listened to the cacophony of the police and EMT sirens woven into the million howling car alarms set off by the quakes.

By eight that morning I had swept up all the Tiffany glass as tears rolled down my face.  Roxy came over and actually licked some off: salt I guess.

I called my friend Dee, a knockout widowed paralegal, who oddly had been to every Academy Award show in the last decade and years before had co-invented flavored douches.  What's not to love?!  I was so glad to hear her voice.

We drove around until we found a place open for breakfast and then we all, perfect strangers, did the heart-pounding Look We've Come Through data dance as we wolfed down our eggs and extra bacon.  It was during my third English Muffin that I remembered my computer was in Santa Monica at the Lakota Woman offices on Montana Ave.  Yikes.  It had all my research and 3/4 of the first draft stuffed in it!

When we got there, the Earthquake Police were already slapping up the no entrance red tags all over the rickety wooden two-story.  It had housed the offices of the Indo-China Peace Campaign for years and some of its staff were there with Jane Fonda and Lois, all of us stunned to silence.

I wish I could remember what happened next.  All I know is the following  day, I somehow had my old Zenith laptop (one of the first) dented and covered with sand and dust.  I took it to the hallowed, first-of-its-kind Writers' Computer Store down on Santa Monica Blvd. and had them retrieve everything they could, dump it down on ASCII file discs and then download that onto a brand new Toshiba T-1900 laptop.  My heart was doing the 1812 Overture as I opened the first file.  But there it was!  We were in business.  And I went to work on the plow horse computer that would faithfully serve me the rest of my screenwriting days.

I knew if I could get my script past Lois Bonfiglio and Jane Fonda who had, between them, been dealing with scripts for a combined fifty years, we would have something.

Eventually, we did.  And when they hired director Frank Pierson who hired actress Irene Bedard to play Mary Crow Dog, we sure enough DID have something.  They invited me to casting sessions, on locations scouts, and even to the set out in Rapid City, South Dakota.  Frank, a writer to his marrow, had the company treat me like a prince.  The production was largely made up of various peoples of color and as many qualified tribals as they could find.

Some months later, Turner Films held an industry screening of "Lakota Woman" at the Directors' Guild's huge theatre.  The place was packed and the movie played well.  Of course, I saw all the mistakes I'd made and yet it was still a great night.  I felt as if I'd finally done something that counted even though I wasn't quite sure what.  But I got a single card "Written By" credit, my very favorite kind.

While cast, crew, and audience milled around after the movie, congratulating, drinking, and eating, I snuck out and went home.  I always thought this would be my favorite part but I never know what to say except "thank you" over and over as my embarrassment rises; pretty soon it begins to sound to me like I'm speaking in tongues.

Thanks to The Program (which is what us alcoholics call AA), I had stopped drinking some years before.  So when this kind of social situation begins to overwhelm, I go home where it's much clearer; just me and my dog and cats and my huge Go to Hell television set bought after my divorce when I finally settled into who I really am.

Later that year, "Lakota Woman" won a bunch of awards, including one for me.  Ironically it was a best screenplay award from the National Cowboy Hall of Fame...for a movie about Indians.  Go figure.  That bronze wrangler award is on the back of my commode where I happily see it every day.  I named him Floyd.

But my biggest thrill came at the Humanitas Awards luncheon.  This is an annual screen and teleplay prize (with cash!) given by the Catholic media mafia.  I was nominated.  However, we didn't win, swept away by "Shawshank Redemption" and "The Burning Season."  But afterward, a golden age Academy Award winning screenwriter Daniel Terradash sought me out to say that as a juror he had voted for "Lakota Woman."  Best of all, it was in front of Lois and my new love Paula.  That was one thank you it was easy to say.

                          ****
           
    WHAT THEY WANT AND DON'T WANT      
         
For a Hollywood screenwriter to find work and keep it (no small task), comes down to who you are. And just as importantly, who they think you are.

You have to be at least pretty good and you have to be ON.  They want writers who are passionate about their project.  They want excitability.  They want to see you dance because they want to dance, too.  Put yourself in their shoes: If you had the choice of a good writer who is sullen, defensive, and constantly whining -- and an only slightly less good one who is receptive, positive, and up-beat...who would you chose?  Unfortunately, I have been there, I know.

It helps to keep in mind that many of these studio and network execs have no real skills in the business they are running.  All they really have is judgement and they are as nervous about that as you are.  Although they may call themselves "creative," they would do just as well at Boeing or Coldwell Banker.  They probably got their job in the same kind of accidental oddball way as you did.  Most of them know this and it fuels guilt and resentment for the true creators who they see as sketchy, unreliable flakes.

These executives are often over-worked: your script is but one of the many they are shepherding through the smokey fens of development hell.  They wouldn't actually mind the writing being good, the story problems being solved but it only means more work for them.  And since you created the damn thing, you are the enemy.

Yet it pays real dividends to be kind to these executives.  Even though they are now your gatekeepers and make twice the money you do, in a few years, most of them will be somewhere else or out of the business.  They know this.  And the life fear this engenders gives rise to a bunker mentality and anger.  Whatever you can do to defuse this will not only be decent human behavior but is likely to help your career.

In the end, it doesn't really matter how brilliant you are if you are sitting at home with no food, a repoed car, kids in a school you can no longer afford, with credit cards that glow in the dark, and the bank calling you night and day in a house you are trying to sell for less than you bought it for ten years ago.

Back when you were fresh and hot, you know, the bulletproof bad-ass, the new fast gun in town.  When you were good, in demand, arrogant, and a royal pain in the ass.

Things change.  And as Bob Dylan said "The first one now will later be last."

It's all about attitude.  Given the equality of talent and hard work, the writer who is open, forgiving, and passionate will usually get the job.

Believe me, sitting at the Farmers Market over a double latte, unemployed, re-running the part where you told the producer and the development exec to tandem kiss your ass is a soul deadening exercise.  Because unlike Mark Twain, you must learn to "suffer fools gladly."  And speaking of Twain, you are not allowed to ask an executive (as I cruelly did once) how he could have lived so long and learned so little.  In fact, stay away from recycling Twain altogether; he mostly worked alone and was an unhappy hardcase to the end.  Plus which, he burned the ground behind him so do not try to stand on it.

     8 SIMPLE RULES FOR A SUCCESSFUL SCREENWRITER LIFE

1.  Learn to sort the good ideas from the execrable without making those who sold you the bad ones feel foolish.

2.  Smile and nod knowingly as others steal and spout all your ideas.  The legendary former Governor of Texas Ann Richards once said, "You'd be surprised at what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit."

3.  Always be on time...even if they are not.  And you should be good natured about the wait.  I think the Kindle was invented for this purpose.

4.  You must be empathetic.  The shoe could so be on the other foot.  And probably will be soon enough.

5.  Your time is their time.  You must be willing to work on weekends, at night, on holidays, whenever.  What they do with their time is of little consequence to you.  Comparisons will only serve to enrage.  Your mom told you years ago that life isn't fair.

6.  When they have helped you to death with their notes, when you cannot take any more, when they have fubarred the whole mess, you must tell them.  Peacefully and with the greatest equanimity.  You are your script's attorney.  If you let it go down the tubes, you will be haunted by its failure for the rest of your life.  And I am not even kidding.  So take a deep breath and calmly make its case, point by point, ending with a positive suggestion about where you might start -- together -- to get this train back on the tracks.

7.  During all these rules or ANYWHERE, do not call attention to yourself; it's the script that matters.

                   and most importantly

8. Keep going.  Do not listen to the Bad Judge voices in your head; the ones in your heart are the ones that matter.  Fuck those Bad Judges and the horse they rode in on.  Nothing worthwhile to say, they are old news.  So snap that rubber band on your wrist and just keep going.  Keep going.  Never stop.  And

Keep going.

#22. A slow tango with Wim Wenders. The Power.

#22.  A slow tango with Wim Wenders.  And the Hollywood pecking-order of The Power.

I count Wim Wenders as a friend.

But I really have no reason for it except I made him laugh.  He is certainly one of the world's great film makers.  And I am probably one of the pretty okay writers here on South Whidbey Island.  If you give extra credit for the Chow Puppy part.  For instance, I know for a fact that National Book Award winner Pete Dexter who lives here doesn't have a drop of Chow blood.

When I first met Wim Wenders, it was only briefly, back when he was married to my friend Ronee Blakely.  She had just delivered an Academy Award nominated performance for Robert Altman in "Nashville."  Ronee and Wim were beautiful, hurtling intensities; reminded me of that early 20s newsreel footage of the two driverless steam locomotives charging toward each other on the same track into a collision.

Wim and I met again some years later through producer Jon Taplin on an MGM rewrite, an early computer movie called "Trapdoor."

As I recall the script was already pretty good and I liked Jon, with whom I had done a picture in 1973 called "The Dion Brothers."  He is a very bright and funny guy out of rock and roll who also knows about world-wide finances, you know, half-caff debenture bonds and barking rollovers and all that stuff.  We even heard he got the billionaire Bass Brothers to help save Disney in the 80s.  Jon was a loyal friend who always believed in whatever it was I had that I might bring to "Trapdoor."

Actor Christopher Reeve, white hot off "Superman," was attached to star.  Mostly, he wanted to work with Wim and who wouldn't?  As Chris was appearing in Lanford Wilson's "The Fifth of July" on Broadway, we convened in New York mostly working out of my hotel suite.

Those were good old days (by cracky); first-class days, per diem days, sometimes even creative days.  But not always.

I had been on the road with celebrities before but it was nothing like walking down the street with Superman!  Jaws dropped, moon faces whirled in our trail as folks danced around like they had to pee.  Chris, ever the gentleman, smiled and waved as we ducked into coffee shop after luncheonette to hide and work.  Living in Manhattan for the play, he had become used to it.  He said it was mostly the tourists; New Yorkers left him alone.

To get a New Yorker's full attention, you had to be the Pope or the return of Moondog or maybe Broadway Joe Namath.  I once saw President Gerald Ford and his phalanx coming out of the Sherry-Netherland Hotel into waiting bulletproof limos and the New Yorkers streaming past never looked, didn't even brake stride.  God, I love that city.

We continued to work on "Trapdoor" even as it sprung its own on us, very probably guided by me.  In the end, even with Jon, Wim, and the biggest star in America, I couldn't really find a way to an exciting narrative for this early computer movie.  All that remained was for my script to do a beautiful cannonball into Lake Suckorama.  Which it did.

As the old chief says in "Little Big Man," Sometimes the magic works and sometimes it doesn't.

By this time, I had moved to Cape Cod and was about to get married again.   And there for a while it was a pretty peaceful run.  The marriage ceremony on the Cape in the Christopher Wren church was especially festive.  Many of my L.A. friends joined us and the reception was held in our yard overlooking a five acre fresh water Lily Pond.

Wim came.

I have two memories of that day.  One -- I stood next to the shrimp platter and gorged myself.  I figured it was half my day, screw it.  That's what I mean about the 'same schmuck.'  And Two -- when Wim arrived (he was always taller than I remembered), he was in his red frame eyeglasses and a full length black leather SS coat.  He came over and joined us, sitting on quilts out on the lawn.  He seemed to do a little spin as he dropped down next to someone's brand new baby whose eyes widened in terror.  Her scream popped eardrums for miles.  That child is now in her early thirties, likely with kids of her own.

Around this time, Wim had joined forces with Francis Coppola to direct a Ross Thomas script about detective fiction writer Dashiell Hammett.  When we were both back in L.A., Wim called me.  He was having a terrible time making sense out of it all.  He and Francis were at loggerheads and producer Gray Frederickson had been told to keep people away from Wim so he could finish the script polish.

But invited, I snuck in.

Wim looked to be at the end of his proverbial rope.  So I gave him the present I had brought to cheer him up; a first edition book of Alan LeMay's "The Searchers," maybe Wim's favorite Western.  And as I was going over my few notes I thought might help, the door blew open and there stood a livid Gray Frederickson.  I was immediately thrown out.  So I went to Tana's and fell face first into a bevy of margaritas.

When I finally saw "Hammett," it seemed to me they had not quite answered the main question I posed to Wim that night: "What is this story about?"  Oh, well...

In his next movie, "The State of Things," the book I'd given to him was featured as a minor plot point.   As the director character lends "The Searchers" to someone he tells him to take great care with this book, it was given to me by a friend.  When I saw that, shocked, it brought tears to my  eyes.  And I don't cry pretty.

"Wings of Desire" was a hit for Wim and I thought a wonderful movie.  We had flown to NYC for the premiere.  I still have the tiny gold feather lapel pin Wim gave me.  This trip coincided with my friend Susan Felter's opening at some downtown hot shit photo gallery.  She had gone on the pro rodeo circuit for a season with the cowboys and a large format camera.  Susan June's work is spectacular; I am looking her shot of legendary bull rider Gary Leffew that hangs in this office right now.  As I remember, Wim -- himself a photographer -- loved them, too.

Now, we arrive at one of the strangest, saddest moments of my screenwriter life.

Wim came to visit on the Cape with his exotic French German girlfriend and star of "Wings of Desire" Solveig Dommartin.  They were putting a new project together, a science-fiction film, and were talking to writers about joining them.  This weekend, it seemed, was my turn.

Well, thank ya Jesus!  Let's talk.  So we did.  And did.  And did some more.  And it was great; I was drooling, laughing, crying, dying.  I knew this was it, I was ready to start then and there.  All in.  Right up until the moment Wim said, "Okay, that's the back story.  Now the film starts."

W H A T ?!

I don't know whether it was the shock of discovering that the hour long 'back story' wasn't a part of the deal or whether it was that the ideas they had for the film did not seem as developed or compelling as the amazing story they had just told me.  But I realized that this was not going to work for me and I'm sure they could tell.  Because  when you are dead flat broke and want to play poker, I'm your mark.  Everything I think is writ large on my face so you are going home with all my money and probably my car which is why I don't gamble.

Mercifully, I cannot recall how this ended.  Only that they departed the next day.  Soon, I read in the trades that Michael Almereyda was set to write the new Wim Wenders'  "Until The End Of The World."  In the way of things, it was later rewritten by Peter Carey, Wim, and Solveig who also starred in it.

I finally saw the movie but even at four-and-a-half hours, I didn't quite get it.  And here's the sad part for me.  I love Wim, and for a while we wuz bro's, but I am mostly not on his story-telling wave length.  Any room he is in, he's going to be pretty much the smartest guy.  And for sure the coolest.

Any room I'm in, I'm barely going to be in it, and can't wait to get out.  Wim is an intellectual German film maker, living with his history, far away so close.  I was an excitable skateboarding Chow Puppy in a cowboy hat and the only history I got was from books about way back when and somewhere else.  The British call this kind of mix chalk and cheese.

We never saw each other again.  Except once for about an hour, years later.

I was having dinner in a Sunset Strip L.A. restaurant with Paula who would become my last and final beloved.  We had just ordered when Wim and his new wife Donata walked in and saw us.  The years between sightings fell away in a happy avalanche.

There were introductions and hugs all around: we had never met Donata, a German photographer and Wim had never met Paula, down from Seattle visiting.  Someone suggested they join us so we pulled up more chairs, they sat down, and we started talking, catching up.  It was a great dinner.  And then it was over and Wim had an appointment somewhere about financing for his new project which might have been "Buena Vista Social Club."

My default position at the end of most restaurant meals, is that I truly enjoy picking up the check.  It's an odd but comforting way to pay forward some of the generosity that has been shoveled out to me, now over a lifetime.  But I do like to see what happens when the check arrives.  There are so many ways these things can go.  You know, the big To-Do; here, let me have that!  The Stare Down.  The Dueling Wait-It-Outs.  The I-Don't-See-anything.  The Go-To-The-Bathroom Sneak Away.  So many ways and, let's face it, I Am Curious (Puppy).

Unfortunately, it seems I am also Bad Memory (Puppy) so that evening's details are fading even as I sit here.  But I did happily pick up the check.  As we made our good-byes, Wim headed out to get their car when Donata came close to me and said the strangest, most interesting thing.  "Wim must really care for you," she said.  "He doesn't usually allow anyone to buy him dinner."

What?

Then, with the two-cheek European kiss, she was gone.

                          ****

Hollywood is a company town.  Because of the expense, the power, and the celebrities involved, both movies and TV have a strict hierarchy and a pecking order.  So no one accidentally goes out of order, ya know.  Counter-jumping is strictly forbidden... unless you are with a star or have a mega-hit in tow.

Here's how it works, no big secret.  Take a look at any of the show biz websites or magazines like the Trades or "Entertainment Weekly," the old "Premiere" or "Vanity Fair's" annual Hollywood issue in which the Fabulous Fifty or the Hot Hundred or whatever are laid out.  The Heavy Hitters list.  You know, who does what and to whom.  I think every business has this, ours has it in spades.

Those that own the multinational corporations that own the studio or network are at the very top.  Bob Iger who runs Disney, according to informed sources, pulled down $46,500,000 last year.  The average salary of his employees was $19,530, below the poverty level for a three person household.  Nice, huh?  Disney owns ABC Network, Marvell Comics, pretty much all of George Lucas, Touchstone Pictures, Pixar, all the ESPNs, theme parks, cruise lines, etc.  Check the holdings list.  So Bob Iger's probably your top dude.  And I hear he's actually a pretty stand up guy.

Rupert Murdock, Les Moonves (now "retired"), there's five or six of these billionaire machers, all tough, all men, all white, all wildly over-paid.  Fortunately, they give some of that money away to charities.

Then, you have the stars; this generation's usual suspects.  The Toms; Hanks and Cruise.  Bradley Cooper, Julia Roberts, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Sandra Bullock, the Fast and Furious actors who one day will probably be racing jet powered wheelchairs down the halls of the Motion Picture Country Home.

Then, the producer-directors like Steven Spielberg,  Joss Whedon, J.J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan, Clint Eastwood, etc.  These are the guys, you know: one phone call, one green light.

And TV (in a new Golden Age, believe me: I watch more TV than any four people you know) we have the show creators and show runners like Shonda Rhimes, Dick Wolf, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Robert and Michelle King.  Money and power for them is delivered in dump trucks.  The Kings and Rhimes actually write and they are extremely good at it.

Also the great Aaron Sorkin, Matthew Weiner, Vince Gilligan, and David Chase.  TV is where the poor little Typing Lambs finally found their way home.  Baa baa baa.  "Vanity Fair's" editor Graydon Carter recently wrote that TV used to be for the kids, the movies were for adults.  Now, it's the other way around.

• In Hollywood, while writers are crucial, they are also interchangeable.  Sydney Pollack and Dustin Hoffman reportedly used a total of 23 of them (most uncredited) on "Tootsie," a masterpiece comedy.  I was one of 12 writers (most uncredited) on "48 Hours," a pretty okay comedy with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte.

You wonder why the people at the top spend so much money hiring so many writers.  I mean, they seldom ever read the actual scripts.  They read something called Coverage.  This Black Plague is a two page nasty book report done by Readers, often faceless writer hopefuls, making a living now by hating everything that comes across their desk because it's not theirs and they're not going out on any limb so a big-shot's frown can saw it off.

Trying to understand in what esteem a script is actually held is a constant struggle.  The apocryphal joke is the Producer who lumbers into a studio yelling "I just bought the greatest script ever written!  Who can we get to re-write it?"

Who indeed.

See you next time, boys and girls, for the tale of the Billionaire, the Academy Award winning actress, and the Indians.

#21. "On the Beach" and the process of 'notes.'

#21.  "On The Beach" and the process of notes.

The greatest and the least; they all start out with a phone call.

You pick it up, it's one of  the agents, those caregivers that brought me into being then tended my working life: John Ptak, Rand Holston, Abby Adams, Pat Faulstich saying, "Puppy, we got a call this morning from CBS with an offer (three of my favorite words) about a miniseries remake of 'On the Beach.'  Remember the movie with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner?  Stanley Kramer?"  Boy, did I ever!

From 1957, the classic novel was written by Australian transplant Nevil Shute, one of the early end-of-the-world nuclear sagas that later was made into memorable and very successful movie.

Scenes from its indelibly doomed love story were flying through my mind.  After a world-wide atomic war, American submarine commander Dwight Towers brings his boat to Melbourne, the last of the untouched cities, to assess the situation.  America was already a smoldering atomic graveyard.  Most of the rest of the world has already died under a massive cloud of radiation or nuclear winter.

"On The Beach" is that nation's cri de coeur for peace and love in a world gone mad.  Commander Towers and his U.S. Navy crew track down a mysterious, intermittent radio signal from Seattle then return to Melbourne to wait out their days.  Towers falls in love with Moira Davidson and after years of wartime command, finds peace with her.

But as the end time draws near, his crew comes to him; they know it's hopeless but they want to go home.  His sworn duty is to his men and his boat.  In a heart breaking sequence, he leaves Moira and, as she watches from cliffs high above, the last of the sailors drop into the boat from the conning tower.  The hatch slams down and the locking wheel spins shut as the USS Scorpion submerges into the Australian Sea, headed back to America.

It's been nearly sixty years since I first saw that movie and it haunts me still.  In those days we were on the verge of the Cuban Missile Crisis, "Dr. Strangelove," Mutually Assured Destruction, "Fail Safe," Peter Watkins' "War Game," and a kind of world-wide fear that bordered on panic.

The two biggest countries in the world hated us and things hadn't changed much on the morning I got the call from my agent.  "Does that sound like a job you'd want?"

My good fellow, does a cat have an ass?

The new version would be executive produced by and star Peter Strauss.  In the Seventies and Eighties, he was the king of the mini-series.  Check those credits!  I mean, please.  Right now.  Turns out it's not a stretch for Peter to play intelligence, honor, and conflict; he was apparently born with all three.  I thought he would be perfect to play Towers.  We went to the network and made the deal.  So I beat feet down to Blockbuster (remember them?) and bought VCR tape of the movie (still got it) and over to Borders for a paperback of the book and went to work.

Then, I did something I'd never done before.

I went to the art supply store in Westwood and bought a large 14X20 3-ring notebook.  At Kinko's I had them blow up the individual pages of "On The Beach" to about twice their normal paperback size on large format paper they had that would fit my oversize notebook.  When I got home and assembled the device, I had a large print (I hadn't yet discovered what I really needed was glasses) book with room on all four sides to make notes!  Such a simple rig did me so much good.  Even though, open, it seemed to take up half my dining room table.

After several read-throughs with the subsequent additional notes, I had enough to go back to Kinko's to make another large format copy to give to Peter.  So we could be, literally, on the same page.  As I recall we looked at the movie together a few times, too.  Once we were pretty well synced, I went to work.

I don't believe I have ever had such great, inspiring material to work from or a better producer to work with.  John Paxton who wrote Stanley Kramer's screenplay, novelist Nevil Shute, Peter and I were all singing this wonderful dream-like song about something we totally believed in: to slow the atomic pulse in an angry world's blood stream, to somehow expose national hatred to healing sunlight.

This was another of the very few Scripts That Wrote Themselves.  Thanks to the aforementioned guys.  The originals.

Since there was no WGA strike looming, I didn't go fast.  I tried to go good.  The story with its three-and-a-half hour running time had me by the throat.  I cannot remember my personal situation during this time; where I lived, was I still drinking, was I married?  I'm sure this lapse is no accident.  I was completely taken over by Dwight and Moira on her father's sheep ranch, by the American submarine's foray to Seattle to track down the endlessly repeating near nonsense Morse Code signal, taken away by Moira's scientist friend Osborne, blazing down an Australian desert highway in his Ferrari at 140 mph.

I was floating in warm maple syrup for the months I wrote "On The Beach."

Wherever I was, I wanted to be at home, writing.  Whatever I was doing, I wanted to put it aside and get back to the script.  Their story I knew would end tragically but it was more real and somehow better than my actual life.

But as I was coming down the homestretch on Night Two, things were rumbling over in Russia that would change everything.

As I recall, Peter Strauss loved the first draft but had some notes.  Of which I took every one with only a modicum of defensiveness.  Peter lived in Westwood at the time and after the notes meeting, we walked down to the Village for lunch.  Peter's two young sons, Tristan and Justin had gone five minutes earlier with Peter's assistant Andrew who the kids loved.  Andrew was basically a 6'5" kid himself.  I remember thinking as we walked through the Village, that this was what Melbourne might have looked like, right out of the story.  We stopped when we saw a crowd gathered at a street corner.  "What the hell," Peter said.

Up ahead, lay Andrew, Justin, and Tristan, flat on their backs on the sidewalk, laughing, looking up at the people, the cars, the buildings.  When we got to them, Andrew jumped up and explained that he wanted to show the kids what ants must see as they scurry under our lives.  Way up here.

As we ate our sandwiches and Peter drank a West German beer, there was rumored trouble brewing in East Germany.

When we turned in the revised first draft to the network, it was like some kind of glory bomb had gone off.  It had been assigned as the Weekend Read and everyone had loved it; very rare and there wasn't a dry eye in the house.  Peter and I were summoned the next day.

As we walked down the long hall to the honcho's office, everyone came out of their offices to look at us.  I know, a large part of it was Peter's Emmy-winning acting fame.  He was a genuine celebrity.  But, as I dimly remember it, a few of the readers, the assistants, the developers actually began to applaud.

I have never had anything like that happen.  I realized that it was the steel strong timeless story and its creators that garnered that kind of appreciation.  We were just its latest interpreters.  But still.

The network and Peter started to make preproduction plans before we were officially green-lit.  And the next day, the entire first page of the Los Angeles Times and every other newspaper in the world showed the Berlin Wall coming down!

"Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!"  As Ronald Reagan's wish came true, our dream went up in smoke.

The unthinkable had happened.  Peace had broken out.  Suddenly in the warm fuzzies of what was now taken to be Pax Eterna, no one could see their way clear to making a mini-series about Atomic War.  Very quickly, the Soviet Union was over with a capital "V."

And so were we.

As the months rolled into years, we tried to set up "On The Beach" somewhere else.  Anywhere else.  No thanks.  As a movie, no thanks.  How about a radio show?  Umm, no.  And in the end, we had to give it back to legend and the movie god of broken dreams.  Both Peter and I went on to other but certainly not better things and as time passed, the sadness began to fade.

Then, one day, ten years later, I read in Daily Variety that Australian Film Commission and Greg Coote were going to make a 3 hour "On The Beach" for Showtime.  After a few calls back and forth calls to my agent, as we understood it, Peter and I would not be involved even though they were using my script to get started.  They had hired Aussie David Williamson to re-write me and as I said before, if you're gonna get re-written, it might as well be by somebody good.  And he is.

They told me they had left all my dialogue from the many submarine scenes.  I had a friend, a graduate of the Naval Academy, who'd gone into nuclear subs as a weapons officer.  He still remembered all the talk, all the details, all the drill.  I milked him shamelessly and gave him my gifted pinball machine as payment.  And to their credit the Aussies recognized the reality value when it was presented.

A few weeks later the trades released the casting on the show: Bryan Brown as Osborne the scientist, okay, I guess I can see that.  Rachel Ward as Moira, okay, she's been good before.  Then Armand Assante as Dwight Towers, oh-oh.  His credits speak for themselves.  Finally, the director, Russell Mulcahy.  Double oh-oh.  His credits, likewise.  To me, this seemed like simple miscasting in order to get the necessary points to make it an Australian project for financing and tax purposes.  But hey, what do I know?

Later I was informed by the Writers' Guild that I would be getting teleplay credit, second position behind David Williamson so at least I'd get some residuals.  I was invited to a huge screening of this new version at the Academy.

I flew down from my Pacific Northwest island and sat with my friend and "Lakota Woman" producer, Lois Bonfiglio.  The Academy Theatre was packed.  Lois introduced me to her friend Larry Gross, also a writer, another good one.

When he heard my name he asked if I was the guy who wrote "Clay Allison" back in the day (see post #2) .  I guessed I was, my very first job, nearly thirty years before.  His grin took over as he began quoting lines from that script.  I was struck dumb but appreciative and thought maybe it was a sign that things tonight might go better than anticipated.

Or not.

It was, as they say, a long, LONG evening capped by a new scene at the end where endlessly mumbling and Method-y Commander Towers abandons his command, stays in Australia with Moira and sends his men home alone.

Apparently this little change was a mandate from the head of the cable company who didn't think today's audience would sit still for the tragic real ending.  He can think what he wants.  Here's what I think: he has doubtless done some good things at Showtime.  But when he made that decision, he left his heart and his courage down in the trunk of his Mercedes.  I hope he remembered to get them back.

After the screening, I saw Peter Strauss for the first time in years.  Utterly crestfallen, we embraced and then, just shook our heads and I went out into the jasmine-scented Wilshire night, alone.

I flew home the next day.  Landing in Seattle, taking the shuttle to the ferry and then the boat across to my island, as I was walking in the door to hug my beloved wife, I realized I had not spoken a word to anyone since I left that screening the night before in L.A.

It's Hollywood, Jake.  Hollywood.

                     ****

 ON NOTES...
         
The notes process can be the bane of screenwriters' existence.

Typically, after you hand in your first draft, the producer, the studio, or the network executive and their staffs will call you in for a meeting that always runs an hour longer than anyone thinks.  You are dealing with one script.  Often the exec is facing forty or fifty so sometimes these folks are unable to focus or express themselves in helpful ways.

Occasionally they are at odds with you and even each other about their ideas.  Mostly, they just want to mark it like an old tomcat so they can feel like they helped out, you know, bringing them into the creative process.  Even the most highly paid and successful screenwriters have to endure this.  The great Pauline Kael once described this period as "being helped to death."

Yet bewilderingly, some of these half-baked, soul crushing ideas will be good.  The writers' job in these meetings or at a later date is to recognize which is which, yet seem "open" and reasonable to ALL of it.

Even the stupid ideas that are not likely to help the script.  I once had a studio vice-president suggest we reset my Western in Seventeenth Century Russia.  He'd just read coverage of this book, see.  As you first hear these ideas, concentrate on your breath -- in, out -- and keep a friendly look on your face and say "let me think about that and find a way to make it work."

Never say 'no.'

It's contentious and mostly unnecessary.  Because as one of "The Good Wife" writers pointed out, "The absence of 'yes' plus time equals 'no.'"  Or was it the other way around?  Russia?  Interesting idea; let me get back to you.  On that.

And all this while you take notes.  Nobody will be totally fooled but believe me, this kind of attitude will help.  Unfortunately I was often unable to do it: that's why I know.  Later, they will not remember 70% of their notes and the few that you used, you will lily-gild while you rain praise around them.  There isn't much real world embarrassment in Hollywood.   They seem impervious to it.

So now, you want to rake all the typos and format hiccups out of the script.  To me, the easiest way to do this is to read through it, page by page, backwards.  Then once more from the beginning to make sure the plot points are there and clear.  And that you have done the very best job it is possible to do.  If you have any doubts AT ALL, hold the script for another week and do whatever needs to be done.  Remember, us Chow Puppies have only one chance to make a good first impression and this is it.

So, praise the Lord and pass the Milk Bones!

See you next time for a discussion of Jane Fonda and Ted Turner, America's Fun Couple of the Nineties and their "Lakota Woman."  And what I learned about the screenwriter's actual life.  You know, some goals to achieve and some pitfalls to avoid.