#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.

#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!

#18. Our Broadway smash (up) with Hank Williams

#18.  Our Broadway smash (up) with heartbroken dead country legend Hank Williams.

A year had passed between the end of our Jerry Lee Lewis script and Phillip Browning's call about the possibility of a Hank Williams musical.

During that time some changes had come into my life.  I got eye glasses and suddenly I could read again.  I thought I had gotten too stupid to read or had somehow lost the ability.  But when I put on those glasses and everything popped into focus was one of the better days of my life.

Oh, and I got married again.  So I pulled up stakes in Hollywood (as if you could ever really leave that town) and moved to Cape Cod, a little house right next to a five acre cranberry bog.  And I learned how to write a TV mini-series (more about that later).

Best of all, I discovered my old friend Syd Field's recently published book on screenplays called, wisely, 'Screenplay.'  He finally wrote it, I finally read it.  It was a marvel.  Still is.

Phillip and I met in Nashville to figure out what story we wanted this musical play to tell.  How deep were we going to go?  In which direction?  And for how long?  At the hotel, Phillip handed me a cardboard box that  was filled with biographical material on Hank Williams: actual books, magazine articles, tapes (the pre CD days), and a self published book, a good one, too, by some guy who'd written it as his Vanderbilt doctoral dissertation on Hank.

But the big news was that all of Hank's famous music, the songs he had written, were tied up by one of the big Nashville family power brokers.  They also controlled Acuff-Rose Publishing and the legendary Grand Ole Opry; this was with whom Pierre Cossette and Phillip were dealing.  In those days -- like the historic relationship between Pittsburgh and U.S. Steel -- Nashville was a company town.  And that company was Gaylord Enterprises.

The Gaylord guy we were dealing with was very high up in the food chain.  But for the life of me, I cannot remember his name so we'll call him Big Suit.

His play was to sit in silence, listening, but his main response to anything was a small smile.  In that first meeting he did offer that he and his wife had seen "The Will Rogers Follies" in New York and loved it.  That's why they were taking this meeting.  That and the fact that Pierre, in his younger days as an agent, had represented Ur country legends Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys.  Gaylord was sold on Pierre as a country music loving Keeper of the Flame, a real family man with Mary Mother of Five, a guy who could get the job done.

Now to the man who was going to write it.

Phillip asked Big Suit if he'd seen the tapes they'd sent him of "The Rose" and "Hooper" and "Gravy Train."  He just nodded and smiled.  While Phillip doubled down, extolling my several virtues, including the fact that I'd grown up with Hank Williams' music in a tiny town in the Blue Ridge mountains.  I could not take my eyes off Big Suit's unreadable face.  And slowly my blood began to run cold.

"What happened to your version of Jerry Lee Lewis," the Suitster asked.  Phillip responded, quickly spinning, that our script was just too good.  Too honest.  I was grateful to my friend but worried that remark might come back in the night, dressed as an E.M.T.

Big Suit had arranged our accommodations in the enormous Marriott-Opryland hotel, some meetings with the former members of Hank's band, and Minnie Pearl, still alive and, as we were to see, full of intelligence and light and lots of memories about Hank.

I spent the rest of that day and night reading the biographical material.  And oh, my Lord.  That wondrous hillbilly icon was a complete mess, God's very own blueprint for everything that could go wrong in a man's life.

He was born with spina-bifida and thereafter became addicted to pain pills.  As an alcoholic, he had a fear of being alone, had poor time management skills, was totally unreliable, had jug-ears and yet was a chronic catnip toy to women.  But most of all, and always, he had the high lonesome voice of a lost angel.

However, this is what great drama is made of.

And in the next days, meeting Minnie Pearl and Hank's old band members, more and more came to light.  Good and bad.  Hank was also a loving son, happy-go-lucky, generous to his friends, and up for anything.  He could write a great song in half an hour.  His voice was so achingly sweet, even when he sang a mediocre song, it sounded wonderful.  He was a terrible driver and an All-American depressive.

Jeez, I couldn't wait to begin.

In those pre-computer days, I was hauling my forty pound IBM correcting Selectric II around with me in an aluminum Halliburton suitcase.  I had already unpacked it, gave it some hay and water, and set it up in my hotel room.

I was chomping at the bit as we rode up in the elevator that afternoon; I already knew I wanted to start at Hank's memorial, where he would rise out of the coffin to narrate the show.  It would end the same way, only everyone would be singing "I Saw the Light."  And somewhere, my old Warner Bros. office buddy Billy Faulkner would be laughing.  Because along with Scriabin and all them guys, he liked Hank Williams, too!

GER-JUNK.

The elevator shuddered and jerked to a stop between floors.  I turned to Phillip about to laugh at another of our "fine messes."  Until I noticed the other couple in the elevator with us; a middle-aged nicely dressed man and woman.  She was white-faced and started to tremble.  She began to make panting sound as she sank to one knee and then a low moan.  "We're going to die," she said.

Oh, no, I thought because at that very moment I discovered that elevator panic is contagious.  My heart started to pound.  Phillip, good in so many situations, went to her side, leaned down next to her, put his hand on her shoulder and spoke to her so softly that I couldn't hear what he said.  And then the emergency alarm bell went off.  Her husband began to hammer the control panel with his fist as the woman got to her feet, the color coming back to her face.  Phillip stood and smiled at me.

Just as the elevator came back to life!

It began to ascend and the alarm shut off.  "You'll dine out on this, Puppy," said Phillip softly.  As often as I have been in elevators, this was the first and last time it ever happened to me.

About ten that night, Phillip stuck his head in.  Unable to resist temptation, I was already on page 9.  "Come on, let's go down to the bar.  They have a Hank Williams tribute singer."

Down in the hotel bar things were hoppin'.  The Hank Williams guy turned out to be good, if about twenty years too old.  Had the voice, though.  "Hey, good lookin', whatcha got cookin'..."  We found two seats at the bar and ordered Margaritas.  "We're going to die," said Phillip as we clinked glasses.

Just then, a gorgeous babe slipped into the chair next to me and put her hand on my shoulder.  Hey, now!

She leaned in real close.  I couldn't believe this.  Until she spoke.  "Why don't you introduce me to your friend there..."  I just lowered my head to the bar and bonked it softly a few times.  Phillip turned to see her glowing face staring hungrily at him and immediately assessed what had happened.

 Let's just say he was not exactly unfamiliar with his kind of situation.  And then, shutting it down, he explained to the girl he was very happily married to a glorious woman named Junius back in Malibu but he was grateful for her interest.

The next day we were on a plane to Branson, Missouri to meet Pierre.

                                 ****

Branson is Las Vegas for the geriatric set.

The small Ozark Mountain town was packed with enormous parking lots, filled mostly with picture window busses from all over America, motors endlessly running to keep the air conditioning on, in front of the dozens of huge concert venues, each owned by a corporate consortium or by the performing artist themselves.

Our destination was The Moon River Theatre owned and operated by easy-going crooner Andy Williams.  Who Pierre Cossette used to represent.  Andy had just had his dressing room(s), some three thousand square feet of it, featured in "Architectural Digest," and he was opening a new show.

Pierre explained that the Branson rationale, wildly successful, was to magnetically pull millions of people a year into a centrally located destination that was only about these shows.  There were no other distractions.  Like gambling.  Or sporting events.  Or famous scenic sights.  There were restaurants and Best Western motels to be sure, but it was only about the shows.  And nothing else.

Andy owned Moon River; he basically 'four-walled' his show, eliminating the greedy hands of promoters, agents, managers, and endlessly demanding talent.  The performer-owners controlled it all.  Those with a good business sense were raking it in.  Beaming, Pierre said Andy had never been so rich.  "And after 'Hank' finishes on Broadway, we're gonna bring it here to this theatre and you'll get rich, too!"  I didn't believe it for a second.  Not me.  I was too busy thinking about the new cowboy shirts and boots I could buy and books and records and all the dinners I could eat at Musso's and and and...

Andy Williams' opening night dressing room soiree was filled with music and Los Angeles royalty.  Not to mention the Mayor of Branson and the Captain of the Missouri State Police in his dress blues.  No one worked a room better than Andy Williams as he sidled over to us.  Pierre introduced me as "my guy who is writing my Hank Williams Broadway show," two possessive 'my's in a ten word sentence; not bad.

"Mr. Williams, half hour!" a crackling voice from wall mounted speakers.  "Half hour..."  With this, the party broke up and we were all led out and into the theatre itself.  Given programs, we were shown to our seats by uniformed locals.  "Enjoy the show, enjoy the show..."

The layout of the theatre was totally new to me.  About every ten or fifteen seats it seemed, there was an aisle up and down.  And when you sat in comfortable seats that whooshed when you sat down, there was at least four feet between your knees and the row in front of you.  "What's the deal," I asked Pierre.  He nodded to his right.  Here's your answer.  And there were two elderly couples, three of whom were using those aluminum walkers with the yellow tennis balls on the back legs.  As they made their way down our row, they smiled past without us having to even turn our knees to the side.

Of course, I am older now than they probably were then and I have learned how much it takes to navigate normal theatre rows even without the damn walkers.  Especially once the show started and all those pinched and tiny bladders began to kick in.  And the race to the bathrooms was on for, as my friend Wayne says, us Morse Code pee-ers.

Andy opened with Henry Mancini's "Moon River" and closed with the same timeless song.  In between, he did his other hits like 'Born Free,' pop song covers, the great American songbook, some light jazz and a few Bossa Nova numbers.  The man had an easy, wonderful voice and his orchestra was spectacular.  And yet, there I was, making notes on the back of the souvenir program booklet on possible Hank scenes.  "Stop that," whispered Phillip.  I couldn't.  Finally, he grabbed the program and started to read my notes by the ambient light.  A big smile came across his face.

And I knew I was headed in the right direction.

                               ****
         
Back in Hollywood, once I had my probable scene cards in the right order, I made an outline.  Then did it all again.  And again.  Finally I was ready to start.

Putting a play together is a whole other format I had to research and learn.  As best I could.  I had to remember that in the theatre you are dealing with a stage which is really only a big black box with lights and painted scenery, that only actors and what they say carries the story, that there are no close ups, no cutting to shift the attention, nothing is 'realistic' or natural.  It's ALL artifice.  It's supposed to be.

Drove me crazy.

Such experience and skills as I had learned in screen writing took me, every time, in the wrong direction.  So I read plays.  I saw as many as I could.  I talked to theatre people.  It got better.  I bought a laptop and typed faster: my first real computer.

And I loved it!  As far as I could tell, here was the laptop's only drawback:  One afternoon, I came into my office and my cat Frisco was on my desk.  Close to the keyboard.  Very close.  I got his attention and softly called him to me.  He turned and, as cats will, that little bastard walked away from me, ACROSS THE KEYBOARD thereby sending 3 prime, recently written pages of "Hank" into the ozone.

I yelled, I stomped, I freaked and I didn't see my cat for two days.  Good thing, too.  I know some of these tales end with the writer rewriting the pages and they are completely, joyously better.  Didn't work that way for me.  They were okay.  But the first ones were better.  I called it the Frisco Scene.  But I learned about some of them little buttons and clickers you could adjust to automatically save your material every 30 seconds.

Then finally, I had a first draft.  I read it over and over and over.  I don't know, I thought it was pretty good.  I thought people will like this Hank, these people in his life, the songs of course, but the whole thing just seemed...strong.

So I handed it in to Phillip and Pierre.  I didn't have to wait long.  Things started to move fast.

Phillip loved it, Pierre loved it, his son (and heir apparent) loved it, Mary Mother of Five loved it, assistants loved it, agents loved it; it caught fire.  Right up to the time Pierre sent it back to Nashville, to the Gaylords.

Oh oh.

Big Suit recognized its potential, its power, and its pedigree.  And how many people might see a play like this.  That was the problem.  I was told he thought it was too hard core, too tough.  Their main corporate mandate was to protect what would become known in the ensuing years as The Brand.  They wanted a safer Hank.  I found it ironic that the same people who had kicked him out of The Grand Ol' Opry for life, now found just the memory of those days too...icky.

But since without their full cooperation, there would be no "Hank" at all, EVER.  So I went back in and began to cut.  I took it from an R to the northern border of PG-13.  And when I read it, again and again, I thought it was still pretty good.  I missed its early rawness, its tough-minded overview of the angelic hellfire of his life.  But I still liked it.

And finally, begrudgingly I was told, so did they.  Nashville still had 'notes,' but at least it appeared to be still in play.  Then several things seemed to happen simultaneously.

We were given a green-light to put up a beginning production of the play in the Tennessee State Theatre.  Phillip called with the dates and made airline reservations for us all.  We would cast the show from back in Tennessee, using as much of their stock company as we could.  But they said we could bring a Hank if we had someone we thought was right for it.  I think they hoped Pierre and Phillip with their connections would come up with some magic voiced celebrity.  And we were, in fact, after one: Dwight Yoakam, a great singer/songwriter who was just getting his acting career started.

Then suddenly it was Thursday chaos by a flurry of phone calls.  Pierre's long-time Los Angeles attorney had somehow failed to send a check and renew the option with Gaylord.  The date had come and gone and it slipped his mind.  At least, this was the story I got.  Losing the rights is like taking off from the USS Lexington for a bombing raid on Tokyo and forgetting the airplane.

By this time Big Suit and his corporate cohorts decided they might as well do this show themselves; why did they need a bunch of suntanned Hollywood interloping fruit-burgers telling them what Hank Williams was really like.

I was actually packing for the trip when Phillip called.  "You remember that lady in the elevator in Nashville," he asked.  Umm, yeah.  "Well, she was right.  We're dead," he said quietly.  Then, nearly in tears, he explained it all.

And by the following day, in spite of beseeching phone calls to Nashville from Pierre, the whole enterprise had disappeared in a cloud of smoke.  Simply gone.

And that was that.

                              ****

A lot of writers don't like writing.

They like 'having written.'  I admit there is a certain relief in that but what I really love is the actual writing.  I don't like the schmoozing to get the job, I don't really like the research, I hate the interviews you have to do for story or background or both.  I am happiest behind this keyboard, and even though I am nearly the worst touch typist in history, I love pounding it out.  Part of the pleasure is the solitude.  And I like being alone.  No one to disappoint.  No checking in.  Silence.

Surely you have heard that Chows are not very social.  They mostly just sit and stare, glowering, not really knowing what the hell anyone is talking about.  Is it time for dinner?  Is it time for a walk?  No?  Then, you suck and I'm gonna take a nap.  I am sorrowful shamed by this, but it was my way for most of my years in show biz.  Even a little bit now.

Once in the old Earthling bookstore in Santa Barbara, my final wife was skimming a book on dog breeds.  I heard her laugh so I went over.  "Look at this," she said.  "Golden Retrievers are supposed to be good for families with kids.  Labs are good for couples.  German Shepherds good for a single person.  And here is The Chow."  She pointed to the page and right there it said 'a no person breed.'

Yep.

                               ****

SCRIPT EDITING

This is a crucial procedure: it can mean the difference between a made movie and 117 pages of telephone scratch pad.

When the first draft is finished, make a copy file immediately, one you're not afraid to play with and then, cut it to the bone!  Be brutal.  If you're doing this right, you have likely cut 30 pages out.  I know, it's absurd, you've just cut the heart and soul out of it, what in God's name have you done!?

You can't get your breath, this is an atrocity, oh my God!  Breathe, breathe, it's gonna be all right.  This is not Forever.  It's just to see what it looks like.  In the giant scheme of things, It.  Will.  Be.  All Right.  You have the original full file and a back up right there, a few clicks away.

So here's what you do next.  Go back to the beginning of this massacred new bare bones version -- and put back maybe 10 or 15% for flow and reading ease.  And try to do it without going back to look at the original.  Restore, say, three cool lines.  No more!  Now your page count is back up to 100.  And you're breathing a little easier.

Told you.

You want the version with the least amount of stuff that will clutter up the view and allow the light to shine through, illuminating the strength of your story.

Now, either email or print out enough versions to give to some friends who will read it and give you notes.  Even though they might be wildly divergent, these notes can sometimes mean the difference between success and failure.

Have you cut so deeply, that no one can follow the story?  Have you over-written so much that no one wants to?  Are eyes glazing over?

As you debrief your friends, do not be defensive or morose.  Of course this is hard.  But they are helping you and the most they will get out of it is dinner or a thoughtful gift.  They just did you a huge favor.

In the overall process of writing your three-ring notebook monster (keep all the drafts all of the time), you will encounter many demons, many angels. And some that come dressed as their opposite.  These are very dangerous because while they seem so cool, in fact, they can derail the whole train.  They might be majestic stretches of prose, a jaw-dropping brilliant scene, hilarious dialogue that jumps off the page.

You know, the kind of stuff you want to stop people in the street to show them.  I call these 'my babies.'

May I tell you a story I once heard?

It was the summer of 1898.  Auguste Rodin, the premiere sculptor of his time, had just finished an enormous commission in plaster called "Monument to Balzac."  It was to be a historical figure of one of France's greatest writers, driven, tortured, wrapped in the huge dark cloud-like robe he wore when he wrote.  When it was okayed by the powers-that-be, it would be cast in bronze.

When Rodin finished but before he showed it, he invited the members of his masterclass in to see it.  They were euphoric in their praise.  Oh, Master, they cried, how stunning, how magnificent!  You have captured all of humanity in Balzac's hands.  His hands are perfect.  His  hands say it all.  On and on they went.  Hands, hands, hands.

Finally, Rodin thanked them and sent them home.  That night, by firelight, he went in with his hammer and a chisel, and chopped off both hands.  He had certainly taken pride in their creation; from the drawings that remain, deservedly so.  But that piece wasn't about hands.  It was about the man, his work, the whole.  And that is why today you see Balzac in his robe that seems to come down and cover his hands.

What matters is knowing that sometimes you have to kill your babies.  Because there can be enough, of great hands, even of chocolate mousse.

Wouldn't it be perfect if the story were true?  But who knows?  In his earlier "The Burghers of Calais," you will see six figures and seemingly about a hundred hands.  All ropey arms and hands, hands, hands.

But who the hell am I to question The Great Man?  I was just a screenwriter who wouldn't even race Jerry Lee Lewis down his driveway, backward.  Yet here is my secret; I am willing to learn from the highest and the lowest, the best and the worst.  Even from myself.  And apparently, so was Rodan.

See, I didn't come just to load the wagon.  I am here to get in that sucker and, as the sun comes up, drive it to Glory.  I already got the pretty girl.

Yee-hah!