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

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

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

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

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

Screenwriter CHOW PUPPY comes staggering out.

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

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

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

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

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

                            ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Knowing when to stop is a gift.

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

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

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

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

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

"BUFFALO MAN"

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

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

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

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

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

Here was my first day with Sam Peckinpah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"IDAHO"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I immediately called her.

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

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

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

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

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

Subsequent events can best be described in the following manner.

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

So bye bye Idaho.                   
             
"LITTLE RICHARD"

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

Maybe, generations later, Freddy Mercury of Queen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A wop bobba loo bop ballew bam boom!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just as the first of the explosive aftershocks rolled in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     8 SIMPLE RULES FOR A SUCCESSFUL SCREENWRITER LIFE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                   and most importantly

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

Keep going.

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

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

I count Wim Wenders as a friend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wim came.

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

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

But invited, I snuck in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

W H A T ?!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What?

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

                          ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My good fellow, does a cat have an ass?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so were we.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or not.

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

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

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

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

It's Hollywood, Jake.  Hollywood.

                     ****

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

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

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

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

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

Never say 'no.'

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

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

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

So, praise the Lord and pass the Milk Bones!

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

#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!