#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.

#20. Teaching screenwriting

20.  Teaching screenwriting.

How in the world did I get so lucky?

Here's how: I kept going.

I was the sole operator and caretaker of a wild but mostly mid-range talent in which I found a kind of doggy ecstasy in doing every single day.  This alone separated me from most writers I knew.  So I figured I'd keep going until The Great Unnamed blew taps to drag my sorry ass home.

Screenwriting was fun and paid well and gave me a new definition to and for my life.  Which, despite my then thirty-five birthdays, two degrees, and a smarter-and-funnier-than-me ex-wife, up to that point had not gone all that well.  Until a year had passed with further assignments after Warner Bros. first hired me, I had no idea what to put in the 'occupation' box, filling out forms.

So in the mid-Seventies, when dynamo Gary Shusett asked me to come talk about screenwriting at his Hollywood Blvd. Sherwood Oaks Experimental College, I jumped at the chance.  He was known for getting name guests to come and talk.  It was something I had never been invited to do and the idea that someone, anyone wanted to hear what I had to say about writing was almost more than I could bear.  As I remember, I would be on a panel with Frank Pierson, Dan Teradash, and Joan Tewkesbury, writing shtarkers of the highest order.  They had more Academy Awards than I had ever seen.

I was the New Kid.

So on that dias in the huge, crowded room, I didn't say much.  I was too busy listening to those three screenwriting legends.  But when I first said something, it got a laugh.  Gary asked us to introduce our credits.  Frank, Dan, and Joan were circumspect, even a little shy but out rolled these Academy Award credits.  Christ, you could die and be swept straight into Heaven from just hearing them.

When it came my turn I said, "This won't take long.  'Hooper.'"  Then, I added, "With Burt Reynolds and Sally Fields.  We're the one about stuntmen but no Coors Beer truck."  Laugh.  I sat down.  Frank Pierson was doubled over.  I'd made a friend.

Here is what I learned that night.  I always had a stage-fright bordering on panic.  Until I started speaking about the role of the screenplay in movies and television.  I'm sure I looked like a hippie Raymond Burr but I felt like Fred Astaire up there.  I was totally relaxed because I was talking about something I loved, something I was interested in.  What skills I had were afloat because of the sheer love of that game.  And I hadn't even discovered Syd Field's book...because, as Syd sat there that very night, he hadn't written it yet.

Afterward, he came up to me.  We had known each other from when he worked as a script reader for Fouad Said and, because he was polite and unceasingly friendly, we had always gotten along.  "I'm going to write a book on screenwriting," he said.  "Hurry," I told him.  If I'd only known how much good that book would do for so many, I would have picked him up and shaken it out of him right there.  I later learned that during this time, he was dating my ex-wife Julie.  Or I might have given him an extra shake.

That night, I also met David Franzoni, a young screenwriter from Vermont who was so good-looking, you couldn't believe he was a writer.  We're talking David Benioff Sebastian Junger handsome.  Over the years David and I formed a small but bright friendship.  He told me some of his script ideas, all good, and then he'd work like mad to realize them.

Through the years he took over my apartment on Sycamore when I bought my little house up in Laurel Canyon.  David once fought off a home invasion in that apartment and got shot in hand for his efforts.

He later set up a Roman soldier script, a classy spear-and-sandal epic he'd been working on, which, after even more work and Ridley Scott, became "Gladiator" with Russell Crowe, winning a whole raft of Oscars, including one for David!  I was up dancing in my bathrobe as I watched my boy on TV that night.  Later, I found a script he'd written for Oliver Stone on George Washington that was one of the best screenplays I have ever read.

That night, I also learned a writing/geography trick from Joan Tewkesbury.  Every now and then, she would check into some local hotel to do her writing.  The idea was to get away from the phone calls, partners, kids, pets, the daily habits of Hollywood living.  There was always something around the house to take your mind off the script.  But if you committed to the hotel, it was just you and that room and your typewriter, hammering it out.  Every time I did it, I doubled my output.  And you got room service and lots of puffy clean towels!

I came back to Sherwood Oaks as often as they'd have me.  But even I had to 'graduate.'  It happened the day I got a call from my old UCLA mentor Colin Young who had become the first chairman of the National Film and Television School in England.  He wanted to know if I'd be willing to teach a four week writers' workshop in the Spring.  They'd pay me enough to live on in London and I'd be teaching twelve students, five days a week.

YES!

And it turned out to be so much fun, I did it every spring for the next four years.  Until Colin Young got politically side-swiped by an Academy Award winning British producer who took over.  Years before, back at UCLA, I had made Colin a desk sign plate, still on his desk, that said "C. Young.  HMFICC."  That stood for Head Motherfucker in Complete Charge.  When that was over, so was I.  Chows are loyal.

That first day of the National workshop #1 was hallucinatory.  I was jet-lagged to the max as I looked around at my students crammed into department head Cherry Potter's office.

They were from England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, Iceland, France, Hungary, and South Africa and the way they looked at me with curiosity and amiable suspicion made me nervous.  They appeared to be working class, middle class, and upper class; a week later I discovered I had misread almost all of it.  But, goddamn, that first week was fun.

By this time, Syd had published his book and I bought twenty of them (still have two).  When I got to England, I gave each of my new charges a copy.  "It's short," I said.  "Memorize it."  Then I added, "you'll see."  Eventually, I believe they did.

I broke them up into pairs.  Those who wanted to work together, would.  I assigned the rest.  Then, starting at 9AM, I took them two by two, each pair for an hour while I heard their story ideas.

My method of teaching, such as it is, centers around clawing a strong, clear narrative through an actual story with a beginning, middle, and an end, preferably in that order.  Once we got the 3X5 cards started, my role slid slowly from trail boss to cheerleader.

When you are doing the kind of lonely, creative work that sportswriter Red Smith described as "opening up a vein," it helps to have someone along to tell you how great and brave you are and how well it's all going.  Anything to shut those judgement voices up.  I had named mine Judge Dread and The Boys and had taken to wearing a rubber band on my wrist; every time I heard them start, I'd reach over and snap that band.  Hard.  Mary R., my therapist loved that one.

Back at the National, while we push-pinned Student One's cards up, Student Two and I commented on them to help clear the deck of unnecessary detritus.  At the end of a half hour, One and Two would switch places and we'd go again, this time with Two's cards.  At the end of the day, my head hurt.  Trying to keep one under-construction screenplay in your mind is hard, twelve is crazy making.

But as they caught onto the flow of Syd's so-called paradigm and reconciled it to their own stories, things got easier.  For all of us.  I began to get legitimately excited about their ideas and they started to gain some creative traction from my face.  If not the actual jumping up and down in joy.  I am an excitable pup.

I constantly checked in with them to make sure we were telling their story, not mine.  Every now and then, we'd have to re-box the compass and make a slight course change.  Sometimes I can sound like I know what I'm doing; you know, a man, a woman, and a gun.

Many of my former National Film School students' faces roll around in my memory to this day.  Even the most complex of them.

Niall Leonard from northern Ireland was, as the U.S. Secretary of State once called poet Ezra Pound, "a difficult individual."  And like Pound, one of our most valuable.  Young Niall was intense, suspicious, curious, kind, funny, and very creative.  I never saw him show fear of anything; maybe it was growing up in Newry.  Even though it came with some occasional eye-rolling, everyone loved him.

And finally, one girl LOVVVED him.  A beautiful young woman, Erika Mitchell was the studio managers' assistant at the film school and was as tough-minded and treasured as Niall.  Everyone was relieved and joyous at their union.  And in fact, are together today, thirty years later.  And neither of them will have to go on the dole (British welfare).

See, Erika is also known as E.L. James.  She wrote several books and a movie, a franchise high class stroke-book love story that became a Big Bang zeitgeist: "Fifty Shades of Grey."  Such Power-ball lottery success could not happen to two nicer people.

That first Writers Workshop day, Shawn Slovo's eyes seemed haunted.  She was the daughter of Joe Slovo and Ruth First who were with Nelson Mandela in the early days in South Africa.  Joe and Ruth were Jews, Commies, and not inclined to idle bullshit;  Joe ran the military wing of the Anti-Apartheid African National Congress and was thrown in prison by the ruling Afrikaans over and over.  Finally, Ruth was assassinated with a letter bomb sent by those same right wing assholes.

Shawn's early life was tumultuous.

I was told she had wanted to write about her childhood for a long time but had been blocked by the various invisible, catastrophic forces that stop writers now and then.  Yet, here she was with a little nervous smile, ready to try again.  I had paired her with Sally Anderson, a wonderful poet and wandering empath who ended up being the perfect writing partner at this point for Shawn.

So I dove right in.  "Shawn, you don't know me.  But you know Sally and you will be safe with us.  Take one of those 3X5 cards.  Okay, push-pin it to the upper left corner of the bulletin board.  Now, get a Sharpie... good.  Remember, these are just the cards, we can always change them.  So what is your first scene?"

She blurted something out.  I can't remember what it was, only that it was.  And we were off and running.  We stalled lots of times, sure, but by the time the four week workshop was over, she had all her cards, all three acts and plot points in good working order.  Somewhere, I still have a picture of her smiling proudly in front of that cursed bulletin board displaying her cards.

I haven't seen Shawn since those days but I know she wrote her screenplay called "A World Apart" and it was made and won a bunch of awards.  I don't really know how much of it was from those cards but at the very least I figure we helped break through the log-jam she'd had.  Secretly, I think to be of some use to Shawn Slovo might have been one of the reasons I was put on this earth.

I think of  those National students often, of Jo Blatchley, Leslie Manning & Andy Walker.  Also Ashley Pharoah, director Michael Caton-Jones and his then-wife Bev, Nick Harding, Polly Devlin, Gilles MacKinnon.  And a whole raft of others.  God, I loved those guys.

                         ****
               
Some odd moments from my showbiz life...              

            Close Encounters of the Kamikaze Kind.

There were once two absurdly talented and wealthy comedy writers.  For a while everything they touched turned to gold...until they unearthed this idea: A shell-shocked L.A. cop, two steps ahead of his own scandalous divorce, is demoted to a vice case about a man who reportedly exposes himself on a freeway overpasses to the million cars streaming below him.

The name of the movie was to be the same name the LAPD calls these perps: "Weenie Wagger."  In the end, convoluted but clever, it turns out that the perp is the desperate cop himself.  I read this script.  It was good.  And very funny.  Their intention was to star no less than Johnny Carson!  And they had the connections to get to him.

The surprising good news was that apparently Johnny Carson read the script and thought it was hilarious.  The bad news was that he reportedly said he would rather have his eyelids ripped off with needle-nose pliers than be photographed even holding a copy of that script.

The  most famous guy in America, Johnny Carson, wagging his dick at a rush hour packed Hollywood Freeway?  I don't think so, Sparkie!

                  The Gas Chamber.
         
Back when I was in the UCLA film school, HMFICC Colin Young had 'volunteered' five or six of us to the California State Department of Prisons to do a series of short documentaries about life behind bars.  Our first prison visit was to be San Quentin up in the Bay area.

We caught a dawn flight up and spent the longest day any of us could remember in the prison library, the prison chow hall, the prison guard towers, the prison laundry, and finally, even the prison gas chamber.

This is what we'd been waiting for.

The Warden himself led that part of the tour.  It had been years since its use, and yet it was cleaned every single day, its corrugated green steel panels were spotless.  I recall a vague peppermint scent in the actual chamber.  Without asking, I quickly sat in one of the two death seats, ran my hands over the steel arms, the back, the seat itself full of drilled out holes.  For the gas that would belch up when the pellets were dropped in the acid below.  Icily, the Warden asked me to get up, that we were going into the observation room.

Once there, we were shown its features; three rows of chairs, the curtained window into the gas chamber and at the back of the room, two rows of risers, one a little higher than the other.  What's that for, one of us asked.  Then my friend Tim Huntley said, "It's for the choir."

The corrections officers didn't think that was funny at all.  But I saw a little smile on the Warden's face.  So far as I know, no movie was ever made and our prison visit was never referred to again.  Tim went on to become a prolific and well-regarded film editor.  He also wrote a great book on learning to make movies; "Film School, '69," available on Amazon.

                  The Battle of the Blues.

Back in the late Seventies, during my few days of A-listery, I worked on two projects for John Foreman and Paul Newman.  One was a stock car script I had written, an 'original' about two battling brothers, called "Double Zero."

The other was a rewrite on a script they owned called "Hillman."  It was an odd but interesting story about an off-the-grid guy who lived and worked in a city dump, happily surviving on the stuff that people throw out.  For a while I had a lock on two of Newman's loves: car racing and recycling.  Paul took to calling me "Hotrod," probably because he had forgotten my name.  I was like the four millionth writer he'd worked with in his long career.

They sent me to Tucson where Paul was shooting a Terry Malick script called "Pocket Money" in which he was co-staring with Lee Marvin.  When I got down there, I met Paul for lunch.  I was totally shocked.  He had the bluest eyes I had ever seen on a human, bluer than back in L.A.  I kind of remembered them from his early movies, but this was ridiculous.

We talked about both scripts, I took notes, he signed for the lunch tab.  This was when I noticed that he bit his fingernails down to the quick.  I also met his brother Art who looked just like Paul but was cue ball bald.  However, Art's hands and fingernails were perfect.  I was told that he did Paul's hand close-ups.

The next day, I met Newman on the set of the movie and there was Lee Marvin.  They were in the middle of a scene.  I believe you know by now, I LOVE Lee Marvin; I mean, "Point Blank?!"  And "Cat Ballou?"  And even "M-Squad?"

And there he was...with the laser bluest eyes I had ever seen.  Then Paul turned and, Jesus McCravey, his eyes were now even bluer!  No one else seemed to be paying any attention but I couldn't get my jaw off the floor.

Later that night I got the skinny.  Paul, a high-functioning practical joker, had gone to a local optometrist, and gotten a series of bluer and bluer contact lenses.  But, unknown to anyone, so had Lee Marvin!  And it was now the unspoken war of the baby blues.

I heard later that Lee Marvin finally had to surrender; he couldn't see anymore, and was running into the furniture and grip stands on set.  But apparently no one said anything, no victory laps, nothing. Just that in the end, one Blue Eyes remained on that picture.  It was enough that the two of them knew.

                     "Well, I'll tell you, Phillll..."
       
I first met Phil Mishkin back at U.C.L.A. in the Theatre Arts Department.  He was an actor, a good one, and very funny.  His best buddy in those days was Rob Reiner.  This was before Meat Head and his brilliant directing career.  They were just Rob and Philly.

So some years later I was glad to see them again when I got my first gig at Warner Bros.  They were there on a writing-producing deal for TV development, a show called "The Super" which actually got on the air.

One afternoon we were having lunch in the commissary when Phil told me the following story.  Earlier that week he had been out running on the UCLA track off Sunset Blvd, famously open to the public.  He came upon a familiar figure, pounding laps out on the inner lane.  Phil slowed down: it was Burt Lancaster, then in his early sixties, still magnificent.  Wow, I'm running with Burt Lancaster.  Phil, stride for stride, introduced himself.  "Mr. Lancaster, my name is Phil Mishkin and I'd just like to know how you stay in such great shape?!"

Burt Lancaster looked over at him and then uncorked one of those smiles, you remember that smile, don't you?  Phil almost had a seizure.  "Well, I'll tell you, Phillll," said Lancaster.  "Two glasses of hot watah when I get up in the morning, I shit like clockwork!"

Seconds later, Mr. Lancaster was twenty yards ahead.  And never looked back.

#19. My first long form television, the WGA, and fate.

#19.  My first long form television, the Writers Guild of America, and fate.

If whining were an Olympic sport, most writers would have Michael Phelps' lopsided grin on his "Sports Illustrated" gold medal cover.  There are, of course, good reasons for this.

To be blunt, many of the projects we get hired to do end up in the toilet.

It wasn't quite what we hoped for, they say, the star wanted to go a different way, we hired a new writer, and in one stunning case for me, the Berlin Wall had come down.  I'll tell you about that one later.

But just know this: It's simply the way of things, the lay of the Hollywood land.  It has mostly to do with who owns the copyright (them) and who doesn't (us).  Which is why they pay us so well.  This is the opposite of the theatre where the playwrights get very little to do the actual writing but end up with the copyright and control of the play.  And a significant piece of the gross box office weekly receipts.

All of us in both businesses -- stars, directors, writers, producers even executives -- have had our share of heartbreak.  Many of us have occasionally slipped in under the proverbial wire.  And some have had a few real successes and happy working times.

My biggest one came two years ago on a mini-series about hillbillies I wrote back in the mid-Nineties.  I will tell you about it later (yet another 'later').  Its birth had more twists and turns than Script du Soleil.

My first happy time came years ago on a sad mini-series I wrote for producer Steve Krantz about two hapless Australian boys who tried to smuggle some heroin out of Kuala Lumpur back to Melbourne and got caught.  They were charged, tried, convicted, and hanged.  This was a true story, names and all, about the first white people ever convicted under the new draconian Malaysian drug laws.

It was my first long form television.  And it had another format entirely.  Each night had seven acts, each ending with a bated-breath stinger so the audience would wait through the Ford truck and Campbell Soup ads to come back to us.  I found to do this well and smoothly, to hide its trick, is hard...until you learn how.

That's where Steve Krantz came in.

Since I was from the movie world and this was my first TV, oddly but happily, he treated me like royalty.  For a while.  Steve was in his mid sixties, impossibly tall, with a tennis tan and blinding white teeth.  He was a published novelist, had produced one of the first black youth films "Cooley High" which I had loved, and a very famous animated feature "Fritz the Cat" with Ralph Bakshi.  A hit with the hippie and hipster set, Fritz won some awards that seemed mostly shaped like dildos.

Steve was married to Judith Krantz, a fiction factory as popular back then as Fifty Shades' E.L. James is today.  Let's just say, the Krantz house up in Bel Air knew about writing for the mass market.

Steve had made wildly successful network mini-series out of three or four of his wife's best sellers.  Not many Emmys but fat, FAT ratings which is the absolute key to happy television.  But I sensed he was itching to break out of that mold.  He wanted to do something that mattered to him, something true, something shocking that would make you cry real tears.

My agent Rand called us in to his office and basically said, "Steve, this is Chow Puppy.  Pup, this is Steve Krantz.  The network deal just closed so I now pronounce you producer and writer!"  And thus began my Wild Long-form TV Ride.

The first thing he showed me was all the news footage from the so-called "Dadah Is Death" trial from Kuala Lumpur.  Then, some interviews with the two boys and a mother.  Then, he dropped off a pile of mini-series scripts.  "This is for format purposes only, not for writing style, character, or dialogue. For all that, we want YOU.  The short take on a two night miniseries is First night: crime.  Second night: punishment."

Oh.

"And by the time this is written, filmed, and gets on the air," he said, "people will have mostly forgotten what actually happened.  They will not see the ending coming."  So, once again, the network start money check cleared and I went to work.

First I read all the scripts of the Judith Krantz mini-series he'd given me.  I began to see a structural pattern.  Then I attacked the boxes of documents and videos.  Finally, the translations of the Malaysian court transcripts.  Oh, my God.  Their perusal would have given Franz Kafka a woody.  They had a completely different system of 'justice' over there: Islamic sharia law doled out by Cotton Mather in a British judicial wig and black robes.

Much of what I read revealed Geoff Chambers to be a cold-hearted dick, an experienced heroin smuggler and Kevin Barlow to be a nervous but good-natured young dork who made one horrendous choice about How To Strike It Rich.

I thought it best -- this being Eighties American TV and all -- to dial Chambers' drug history back and have them both be a little more Innocents Abroad.  This was forty years ago, before Walter White and "The Sopranos" and I needed an audience to care about these guys.  So in our version, they weren't big druggies, they just wanted to get ahead and thought one go to hell smuggling trip would do it.  Since in my earlier days I had been tempted by just such dip-shit plans, I began to relate to these guys on a deep, personal level.

Also I came to think that Kevin's mother Barbara was the smartest, fiercest, most driven of the bunch.  Her familial love and belief in her son was oceanic.  As a result, the Barbara role kept getting bigger and bigger.  Even her outline cards went from 3X5s to 5X7s.  She was the one who talked the most famous defense lawyer in Malaysia, Karpal Singh, into representing them.

But finally, I had the cards all push-pinned up on the board; to me they looked like an innards flow chart of a goddamn Rolex.  You know, a pretty good watch.  So I went to work.

In my thirty plus years, I only had maybe three Scripts That Wrote Themselves.  You've probably heard of those kinds.  This was my first.  And they all came off strong outlines.  I was getting fifteen pages a day!  When I finished, I did one more pass, cutting three or four pages out of it.  Satisfied, I made copies and Fed Exed one of them to Steve in L.A.  I heard from him a day later: my Movie Guy tiara already shined and set at a rakish angle.

He wasted no time.  "This ain't good.  Meet me in New York at the Carlyle Hotel."  Umm, okay.  When?  "Tomorrow morning at ten.  I'm taking the red eye.  We have work to do, kid."

Since I was then living on Cape Cod, I caught an early morning puddle-jumper to LaGuardia; Scare New England was still flying DC-3s in those days.  When I met Steve to go over the script for night one, the bloom was off the rose.  Remember the old Carole King song "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?"  Well the answer to that question is almost always NO.  As it was here.  There was no more flattery, small talk, or show biz gossip.

The next hotel room six hours were balls-to-the-wall tough.  I listened hard because I realized he was Willy Sutton and I was there to learn how to rob banks.  So for one of the few times in my professional life, I took every single note.  When it came the usual time for lunch, he just shook his head.  He ordered room service coffee.  Again.  And we kept going.

It was dark when I packed up to leave.  Steve stopped me at the door.  "You can do this," he said.  "Or I wouldn't have hired you."  I straightened my tiara.  "CBS wants a first draft of Night One in three weeks."

They got it.

You know, without that iceberg, Titanic would have been just another spiffy trans-Atlantic cruiser.  Our iceberg was a looming strike deadline by my beloved Writers Guild of America.  And once it rolled around on the back of a strike vote, I would have  to stop work right in the middle of whatever paragraph or cool line of dialogue I was typing.  We all would.  So everyone in Hollywood was racing to get their ducks in a row.

When Steve got the new version that addressed all his notes he called me to tell me how happy he was (always a nice call to get) and to go ahead and start Night Two.  He laughed wildly when I told him I was already on page 46.

A few words about the Writers Guild.  They protect their own.  If it weren't for them screen and television writers would get maybe $1000 a script, there would be no residuals, no health care, no pension plan, the producers and directors would end up with the writing credits, and (the new political climate in America would love this) there would be no collective bargaining at all.

As usual, the so-called rising Tide of Management's dreams would lift the yachts, leaving our banged up little row boats on the bottom.  This is what passes for business logic from the top.  But the Writers Guild, with all their faults, protects their own and I totally supported them, then and now.  I voted for the strike.

But that didn't mean I couldn't hurry to get this thing done, especially since it was going so well.  Steve and CBS were already sending out Night One for casting as I was coming down the homestretch of Night Two.  They'd hired the estimable Jerry London to produce and direct -- this bird was gonna fly, Mabel!

And I was still its only writer.

When they were casting, a lot of actors turned it down.  It was a depressing story; when you got to the last pages and the cavalry was nowhere to be found, people were doubling up on their Xanax.  Plus not many of them were willing to go much farther than the Fox Ranch for three months of shooting, much less to Australia.

Then Steve had a flash: he would take the script to London where he had a whole raft of connections due to his making many of the Judith mini-series over there.  He knew everyone.  He knew Julie Christie!

It quickly came to pass that she read it and loved the politics of it enough to immediately sign on.  It was the first time I had ever heard the expression 'over the moon' which was used to describe her reaction to our project and ours for getting her.  Then came John Polson and Hugo Weaving.  Next was Victor Banerjee who had stared in David Lean's "Passage to India" and Sarah Jessica Parker, post "Annie" but pre "Sex in the City."  I couldn't believe our luck.  But would it hold?  And would the WGA still love us tomorrow?

Umm, no.

The Writers Guild went on strike.  But not before I got Steve and CBS Night Two.  So they were in business and thousands of writers were suddenly out of work.  I had planned to be in Australia, on the set of "Dadah is Death," making cuts, adding dialogue, getting Ms. Christie more tea.

Not this time.

I kept thinking of that good-looking line I had written for her when she sees dawn of the last day her son may live to see.  She says, "I never knew a night so long could go by so fast."  I thought, awww, she's in good hands and with that, and I went out on the picket line.

The Strike of '88 was ugly, unprofitable, and went on way too long.  At 155 days, it was the longest strike in Guild history and got both sides very little except sunk into an anger that has not abated to this day.  At least by me.  The Strike's biggest crime was that a significant part of the TV audience went away and and never came back.  Lots of them discovered books and conversation (the swine).

And our phones had stopped ringing as agents and producers got out of the habit of calling us.  When the strike finally ended, a lot of that didn't come back either.  Also it was in this time that networks discovered the true crime series like "Dateline" and "20/20" which did well and cost about a third of what regular programing cost.

Most of the writers I knew began to ransack the storage lockers of their imaginations.  Madly searching for ideas we could build into a spec script, our poor little squinched up faces reflected the hope and despair of our shared situation.  Nothing was going well.

Suddenly with no income, some writers had to sell their houses, take their kids out of private schools, fire Maria the maid, and what was worse for the spouses, the writer was now home, under foot, grumbling about Management's latest offer, and eating Cheerios all day.  Most of this didn't apply to me; I don't have kids, I already cleaned my own house, and I ate Grape Nuts, not Cheerios.  But twice I had to borrow money from my aging parents and I'm sure I was not alone.

I got one Australian post card from Steve Krantz as they finished shooting which just said "Everything copasetic, thanks to you."  I learned from the WGA that my screen credit on "Dadah" was to read 'Written by Chow Puppy,' the best credit one can get.  I was stoked.

Plus which, I had just thought of a spec script idea.  I began working on it, I worked on it later, hell, I'm still working on it.  It'll probably never be ready but I love it.  It's about three people, two men and a woman, for different but intersecting reasons, mountain climb The Sears Tower in Chicago, then the tallest building in the world.  I would call it "Enough Rope."

GOD, I love titles.

The WGA could strike the studios and the network but they couldn't strike the grapevine.  I had heard that "Dadah" was cut, scored, and scheduled in CBS's fall lineup.  This was as smoothly as any project had ever gone for me, starring one of the most beautiful women who had ever won an Oscar.  I can't quite remember but I believe the network held my check; I think they probably held all writers' checks during the strike.  Added pressure to settle.  And they got the accrued interest on those millions they held for the five-and-a-half months.  Fuck 'em.

Since I had not seen a screening of the mini-series, like the rest of America, I would have to wait to see it aired.  And because I have a little surprise for you, you have to wait, too.

                           ****

So while we're waiting, let's talk again about screenwriting.

In almost any kind of writing, there is waged an endless war of too much, too little, too dark, too light, too simple, too complicated, too sour, too sweet, revealing secrets too soon or too late.  This knuckle-gnawing worry about proportion is a dread companion of all artists, all of the time.  Its balance is one of the chief elements in a piece's success or failure.

As for script devices, pay no attention to Conventional Wisdom.  Nothing is totally forbidden in Hollywood except failure.  And getting old.  Or fat.  Or publicly ranting about Jews.  Or being Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein.

I have used a narrator.  I have used title cards, used characters talking directly to the screen, used songs.  Of course, all these devices can be (and usually are) cliched but I am willing to try anything to help tell my story.  If it ends up not working, out it goes no matter how cool it seemed or what good writing it may have harbored.

I found it useful to resist explaining everything, even though they want you to.  It will kill the magic.  The Man For All Seasons, Sir Thomas More once said, "in the end, the human heart is a mystery."  I say leave it that way.  If you show them how the trick is done, for a about 1.4 seconds they'll be grateful.  Then it will turn to anger because they had to have it explained to them.

Iago, probably the greatest villain in all of dramatic literature, refuses to tell us and Othello why he did it.  Any of it.  "What you know, you know," he says.  "From this time forward, I will never speak word."  And he didn't.

In "Close Encounter of the Third Kind" we never find out why it's Dreyfus the aliens want.  We don't know where they're from, what their mission is, or what's going to happen.  In spite of an 'expanded version' later on, part of that movie's lasting greatness is it's mystery.  The same with "2001."  That's why all these years later, it still stays ahead of you.  Kubrick and Clarke explained nothing; they just presented it.

Open the pod bay doors, Hal.

                             ****
             
Suddenly, the air-date for "Dadah is Death" was upon us.  It had been advertised and reviewed favorably in 'TV Guide.'  In one of the Boston papers' reviews, my script got singled out as 'a very effective but somewhat over-wrought teleplay.'  Hmm; that's a scorpion's kiss, but at least they had spelled my name right.  And now, we would get to have a look at it.

Friends of mine who had a very large TV, made a small viewing party for Night One at their house with a picnic dinner and lots of beer.  As nine o'clock rolled around, my heart was trip hammering.  And then, there it was.  My friends all cheered as my Written By title card came up.  And from that moment on, everyone of them was talking for the entire time.  Non-stop.  Loudly.

As I explained before, this is my karma; when I was a kid, I held forth in movies, a full running commentary.  Godfrey Daniels, what a pill!  My payback is that, for years, I have gotten every like-minded jerk in the audience, sitting right behind me, yacking through the whole movie.

This night was no different, even though they were MY jerks and I loved them to death and one of them had made me a dozen deviled eggs, my fave.  So as I was listening to comments about how Ms. Christie's breasts weren't near as big as they used to be, I was shamefully wolfing down the eggs.

Fortunately, I had taped the show at home on my trusty VCR.  So I looked at it the next day by myself.  Oh, lord.

It started with Julie Christie and my Great Line about a night so long going so fast or whatever it was.  It just plopped there like a dead fish.  And I realized that if a great actress like her couldn't make the line work, like one of Rodin's hands, it should've been cut.  I thought the show was pretty okay but, truth be told, it had too many 'hands' sticking out all over the place.  Like Emperor Joseph II's famous movie critique of Mozart: "Too many notes."

And now you can check it out, too.  "Dadah is Death" can be seen on Youtube in all its low-def glory.  I'm not sure I can join you; too much water under that bridge.  But it's there.  For the full Chow Puppy experience, make yourself a plate of deviled eggs.

The '88 WGA strike finally settled and I went on to another mini-series, this one a remake of "On The Beach" with Peter Strauss as the Executive Producer and its star.  This was an even happier experience but, in the end, odder yet.

See you next time, buckaroos!