#10. How I got here. Be true to your UCLA film school

#10.  How I got there: Be true to your UCLA Film School along with some dine-out characters.       
           
I thought it might be nice to take a little breather from all the Hollywood and screenplay stuff to tell you where it started with me.

I have loved the movies since the beginning.

In the late Forties and early Fifties, my best friend Mike Preston (recently departed) and I would walk home home from the Tryon movie theatre on Saturday afternoon re-staging the fist-fights we'd just seen in the roaring oeuvres of The Durango Kid, Lash LaRue, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry (even though he sang too much), and Randolph Scott (oops -- who knew?!).  We did it complete with sound effects and bush crashing falls.  I can still do the galloping horse effect.

Then, in the mid fifties, with dates, we would hold forth in movie theaters across the Carolinas, adding dialogue and sundry remarks.  Besties for 66 years, my job was to make Mikey and the rest of the audience laugh, no matter how loving or sad or horrifying the actual movie was.  To all of you who might have been somewhere in those theaters, my deepest apologies.

 In college from 1958-62, I saw a few movies that certainly peaked my interest.  Like "Sparticus," an early Stanley Kubrick Dalton Trumbo film about the Roman Gladiator Rebellion.  It had everything: spray tanned warriors fighting Kirk Douglas in vain, heart breaking shots of Jean Simmons, hysterical shots of Peter Ustinov, leftie politics, huge battle scenes, and hungry male erotic moments between Tony Curtis and Lawrence Olivier.  "I am Antoninus, singer of songs and I think you dropped your soap, my lord."  Say what?!

And "The Seventh Seal" although with no background in the classics, all that smarty symbolism was lost on me.  I just liked Von Sidow's haircut.

My first real cinematic wakeup call was "Last Year at Marienbad" by Robbe Grillet and Alain Resnais.   I didn't pack the intellectual gear to understand it but at one point, I was so stunned and gripped by its imagery, I jumped up and howled.  Then, from behind me I heard: Sit down, asshole!  Um, okay, okay.  Sorry.

But where my hard core addiction to movies really started was the mid-to-late Sixties at the UCLA Film School.

I got there in 1964.  Here's what was happening in that world: Vietnam, protests, commitment free love (as opposed to the Fifties sex-free love), 250,000 clear channel Mexican watts of Wolfman Jack rock and roll on XERB served up with weed and sunshine.  How could you go wrong?

Seriously.

After scoping out the film school's honchos like Caroll Ballard (already nominated for an Academy Award for his documentary "Harvest"), Francis Coppola (he hadn't gone 'Ford' yet but had already made two low budget features and what was it with these girl first names?), Nietzsche quote-spouting wild man Dennis Jacob, and teachers like Hugh Gray, Jean Renoir, Claude Jutra, and  Joseph von Sternberg.

I had never even seen a movie camera before, had no idea what synch sound was; the whole thing seemed impossibly improbable.

So I lit out for the smaller hills of student theatre, looking for more familiar ground, something I knew a little more about.  A very little it turned out.  Because they had their own honchos.  On their own mountains.  I was misinformed.

Ten years earlier, Carol Burnett had trod those boards; the alumni list was quaking: James Dean,   Gary Lockwood, Tom Skerritt, George Takei.  That year, 1964, Bonnie Franklin was in residence.  Rob Reiner.  John Rubinstein.  Tim McIntyre.

Every Sunday morning, the atheist theatre geeks played touch football in Beverly Glen park with starlets like Ryan O'Neal, his gorgeous wife Joanna Moore and their one-year-old topless toddler Tatum along with several USC and UCLA jocks drafted by the Pittsburg Steelers and a few times  Elvis Presley.  He moved pretty good for a pudge.  Thangka, thangka verr much.            

So falling back into old patterns, I auditioned for plays but, unlike New York, began to actually get parts, the best being Don Quixote in Tennessee Williams' "El Camino Real."  Even better, I did fairly well and made new friends.

Then one day, I got a summons from Colin Young, the head of the Motion Picture Division.  The bearded Scotsman looked at me, I looked at him.  "We took a film school gamble on you, Chow Puppy," he said.  "So far, it's not exactly paying off.  So: less plays, more movies.  That's all."

After my little hitch in the Dog-Marines, I got good at recognizing orders.  And one good way to reintegrate a life is often through work.  So I got a graduate student job as one of the projectionists in building 3H, the film school movie theatre.  In those days, nearly the entire film division was housed in WWII, un-airconditioned, mal-heated, nearly collapsing wooden buildings that teetered on the uninhabitable.  For some reason, we loved them.

We thought the new buildings were pussy.

Graduate school was a real eye-opener for me.  Every course I took was fun because it was all in pursuit of an MFA in film; film history, film editing, cinematography, film sound, film workshops, what's not to love?  And here are some moments from those days.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

I had two great camera teachers: firey Bill Adams who never let anything upset him.  "You have to learn to laugh as the camera goes over the side," he once said.  In other words, it's only a movie.  You're not curing cancer.  Fill out the insurance papers, get another camera, and shoot it again.  Keep going.  To me, this was one of the great Life Lessons, just those two words.

Keep.  Going.

And there was the great Joseph Von Sternberg.  I was assigned to help him get set up at the start of his year.  What do I call you, sir?  "Call me 'Joe'" he said.  Anxious to pass on his secrets, he never seemed to stand on worshipful ceremony.

One afternoon I watched him reset the various lights for one of our advanced students.  As we looked on, agog, the old man walked around, narrating what he was doing and why in the clearest, simplest terms.  "There," he said when he had rehung the last lamp.  "Is that all right?"

All fucking right?!  He had transformed a more or less acceptable scene into a perfect black and white Caravaggio.

'Joe,' huh?  I believe I'll stick with 'Sir.'

FILM HISTORY

We all knew and loved fellow student Mamo Clark.  She was from Hawaii and years before had been an actress.  But in '64 she was in her mid-fifties maybe, her beautiful skin weathered and lined by years in the tropical sun.

This moment happened when we were looking at a pristine 35mm print of "Mutiny on the Bounty."  Harvey was projecting, so I got to sit out front, right next to Mamo as it turned out.  As Gable and Franchot Tone were playing their scenes with two south sea island babes, I realized that (I believe) Tone's girlfriend was MAMO!  Right there, in her twenties, a vision in palm fronds and puka shells.  Jesus H.  It's Mamo.  Suddenly, we were all aware of it.  Applause began to build.  I looked over at her; tears were running down her face.  Pretty soon, a standing O.  And then, it was over.  At the movie's end, there she was in the cast titles.  Our Mamo.  Who knew?  I mean, who ever knows anything?

A year later there was Sister Mary Twiggy, a beautiful, happening, politically active Maryknoll nun who introduced many of us to a lifetime direction.  She once said all you need for a revolution was a Big Idea, a mimeograph machine, and a Swingline stapler.  We gave her the honorary last name.

One afternoon again in Film History class, we were watching the 1933 Merian Cooper/Willis O'Brien version of "King Kong" with Fay Wray and Bruce Cabot.  In the loving, oddball seduction scene with Wray sitting in Kong's huge hand, one of our best and weirdest students Felix Venable (more on him later) shouted out, "She's littler than Kong's cock!"

Don't look at me!  He said it.

FILM EDITING CLASS

For some years UCLA film geeks moved through the process learning to edit on "Gunsmoke."  Colin Young had made a deal with fellow Brit, Philip Leacock  who was then producing the highly rated, famous TV western.  As I recall, we were all given the same basics: One gunfight scene's worth of 16mm film uncut dailies, the uncut sound takes and the hardware tools to cut it.  Like gang synchronizers, trim bins, winders, splicers, viewers, and sometimes even one of the venerated Movieolas!  Oooo.

First we had to synch up the sound and film; a task that came more easily to some than others.  I was 'others.'

Then it was our job to cut that scene as we saw fit.  There were enough takes, many different angles to do it dozens of ways.  So those days and nights were filled with swearing, heat, the sound of flying winders and the slap of the Movieola brake handle.  But mostly what I remember is actor John Anderson saying to James Arness "So you really are a Marshal." After nearly sixty years, I hear this line in my dreams.  Like many there, I learned how to cut a scene in a fairly straightforward manner, a triumph of the uninspired.

When it came time to show our versions up on the big screen, one stood out.  Richard Chen, an impossibly tall Chinese graduate student, cut his "Gunsmoke" on nothing but reaction shots.  You heard everything including So you really are a marshal but never saw the source; his scene played out on others' faces.  It was odd but utterly compelling; a lesson that a straight approach may be the fastest, maybe even the clearest...but not necessarily the best way home.

OUR FILM 'ORGIES'

Even though I projected some of these, most in 35mm, I can't quite remember them.  The first one was twenty-four straight hours.  We showed old movies, new movies, studio movies, independents, some not even released yet!

Due to the wiles and secret phone calls of our film booker and my boss Gary Essert who had major connections with every studio in town, we saw "Dr. Zhivago" at MGM before Omar Sharif did.  We did a twelve hour marathon of nothing but trailers, previews.  It was the hardest, fastest projection we ever did; a thread-up and reel change every two-and-a-half minutes!  Everyone smoked in those days and we were screaming hippies, eating mostly cheese burgers, pizza and onion rings.  After these marathons, the projection booth smelled like a toxic dump site under a light coat of patchouli.

FIVE OF US GO TO BRAZIL

It was the longest short month of my life.  Stirling was producing and directing, Charlie was shooting, Kit was doing sound with Bruce, and I was along to schlep and do everything else.  It was to be an hour long documentary on the 'successes' of a USAID government program to help foreign small businesses flourish on the theory that then they'd want to become an America-loving democracy.  It was 1965; we were more naive then.

I never worked so hard to do so little.  From one end of poverty stricken Brazil to the other, most of the 'small businesses' we were to shoot had either moved or failed.  One abandoned tiny factory presented such a good photo op that we had to wait a day for some kind of chemical to be delivered that would smoke prolifically when ignited.  From a distance, it looked like the factory was chugging away, 'smoke' billowing from its stack.

It seemed we were broken down every week with malfunctioning equipment or seized and/or lost film.  Most of the time was spent in the dark interior of the huge country, in tiny rooms featuring on-and-off electricity, no showers, mosquitoes so big that when you killed them, they left a quarter-sized blood splatter, and only a single toilet down the hall.  We spent most of this off time trying to fix the Arri or the Nagra tape recorder or answering questions about the Watts race riots in L.A. which we knew nothing about because when they'd happened, we'd been in transit.

Here's what I learned from that trip: When you are making a movie that Steve McQueen is not in, for the U.S. government, in an unstable country in a paranoid time and you do not speak the language and don't really know what the hell you are doing, either drink a lot or bring enough reading material to get you through.

I ended up in late evenings, reading aloud "The Tin Drum" by Gunter Grass, a horrifyingly great book and a big hit with the crew.  God, I was glad to get home.  As for our 'mission,' I don't think I ever saw the finished film.

SOME REMARKABLE STUDENTS

Felix Venable was a hilarious, sneaky genius with the morals of a dumpster cat.  Back in San Francisco, he'd been employed (proudly) as an FBI informant, mixing good info with bad, selling it to the highest bidding careerist agent.  Felix made one of the most memorable films of that time: "LeS ange Dormant."  LsD...get it, get it?  It was hypnotically beautiful and totally original.  He peaked with that film and was lost for a while until he found...

...James Douglas Morrison, odd duck from Florida, the young son of a U.S. Navy Admiral.  Jim had discovered film, dope, girls, and rock and roll pretty much in the same year.  And you remember that face, once the baby fat fell away, oh my god, that face.  The resultant apotheosis was a group called The Doors.

Loyal and true believers, we followed them from little gig to bigger gig, from The London Fog to the Whiskey a Go Go when they famously played with Van Morrison's 60s seminal group, Them.  The Doors had something magic from the first time they took the stage.  And nothing like "The End" had been heard or seen: "He took a face from the ancient gallery and he walked on down the hall.  He came to a door..."  Much of their creative force came from keyboardist

Ray Manczarek, organist and south side Chicago jazz pianist.  He still had the "c" in his name back then.  I remember working on Ray's 171 graduation film called "Induction Day."  We were shooting in some little Santa Monica apartment and Ray, encountering a difficult lighting situation, sent me to fetch his faculty advisor, a Brit/Canadian film maker named Terence McCartney Filgate.  I found him out in his car, reading an article in the new "Cahiers du Cinema" about himself!  Eating my grin, I asked him if the article was any good.  He tossed the magazine in the back.  "No."

Neal Cassady wasn't a UCLA student.  He was, of course, one of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and Jack Kerouac's famous burned out inspiration for "On the Road."  Cassady was going to be the subject of one of our student's Mexican adventure film.  They borrowed my Ducati motorcycle (a five speed Diana, the fastest production 250 CC in the world at that time) for their trip, Cassady's last as it turned out.

One night down there, under the stars and an inspirational miasma of cannabis and Seconal, someone threw out the open challenge to count the railroad ties from their encampment to San Miguel.  Along with how many donuts it would take to fill the Grand Canyon -- that sort of night.  The next morning, Cassady was gone.  Apparently, they found him three days later, near death, twenty miles down the track.  His last words were reported to be, "Sixty four thousand nine hundred and twenty eight."

The UCLA film crew was invited by Federales holding machine guns to leave Mexico immediately.  They beat feet with some of their equipment and the clothes on their back minus all their cash.  So far as I know, my Ducati is still down there.  None of them ever said a thing.  I loved that bike.

Rodney Alcala.  Ooooo, boy.  I will say nothing about Rod except he was famously a contestant on "Dating Game," has been on NBC's "Dateline" three times surely setting some sort of record.  And years ago, I was his T.A. in UCLA's beginning film workshop.  Find a pair of thick rubber gloves and click on his link.  You never know anyone as well as you think you do.

I guess I should tell you that back in the Marine Corps, for about five months, I was a Naval Aviation Cadet with Richard Crafts.  I'd known him at Parris Island, we were actually buddies.  I washed out of pilot training (smartest move the Corps made that year) and Dick went on to fly in Vietnam, later for the C.I.A., finally for Eastern Airlines.  Then he murdered his wife Helle.  Then he froze her body and chainsawed her into manageable pieces.  Then he rented a wood-chipper (is it coming back now?), took her out in a snow storm, deep into the Connecticut woods and -- well, you get the idea.  So did the Coen Brothers for "Fargo."

Although he was convicted and is serving 60 years, Dick still claims he's innocent.  That she either just disappeared or he was the classic SODDI victim, Some Other Dude Did It.  He actually hung his first jury with that one.  Ahhh, Dicky, we hardly knew ye.

ME AND LENI

Back to better times and another summons from Colin Young.  He looked from my new California drivers' licence to me.  "Pup, take the film school van and go to the Los Angeles airport tonight to pick up one of our guest lecturers." Okay.  Who is it?   "She's German, should be in her early sixties."  Okay.  Who is it?  "This is kind of a secret mission.  You know her work..."  Jesus, Colin (we were better friends now), who the fuck is it?!

When I first saw Leni Riefenstahl coming down the long tiled hall at LAX, I froze.  First of all, she was still beautiful, high style, all sharp angles and long grey hair radiance.  This was the woman who had directed "Triumph of the Will," one of the greatest documentaries ever made.

One little problem: it was a nearly two hour cinematic paean to the rise of Adolph Hitler.  Oh-oh.  Don't get me wrong, it's an artistic and strategic achievement by any measure... except the one that actually counts: who it's about.

And now, it was thirty years later and the people in West Los Angeles (with its significant Jewish demographic) had heard she was planning on coming to guest lecture at UCLA and were beginning to make their own plans.  All this, of course, was fully known to Colin Young but unknown to us Chow Puppies.

With a baggage cart of matched Parisian luggage, Frau Riefenstahl waited curb-side while I went to short term parking and got the van.  She already looked pissed.

When I came to collect her, she scowled as I tipped the Skycap who carefully loaded her endless luggage into the vehicle.  As we were on our way out, she asked me why I had given money to a man who was supposed to do exactly what he was doing?  "Why do you pay him egztrah?"

Listen here, Leni baby.  This ain't 1934, he wasn't SS and you don't have a goddamn all-event pass anymore so shut up and relax!  At least that's what I said in my mind.  I think the actual words might have sounded like "To make sure your luggage was handled the right way, ma'am."

She wanted to know how much I gave him.  All right, goddamn it, this is where I drew the line.  Right here, right now!  Unleashing my blitzkrieg move, I told her it was five dollars.  She snorted scornfully.  But I totally had her: It was ten.

Nailed it.  And the night ride up to Sunset Blvd. was peaceful.

When we turned right on Hillgard toward the UCLA guest house, everything changed.  There were cars double-parked up and down the street and a stream of middle-aged people were walking toward the UCLA guest house.  Wait.  What the hell is this?

I slowed the van; from the passenger side, Leni Riefenstahl rolled the window down and looked out into the night.

As we pulled up into the guest house parking spaces, we saw that the house was surrounded by two or three hundred people -- adults, strange at any time on a college campus -- their arms linked.  There were several police cars, both UCLA and LAPD.  I got out of the van and came around to the passenger side.  I looked at her, she looked at the crowd.  Who was creepily, utterly silent.  "I guess I should have expected this," she said, the overweening scorn gone.  "Some forgive, no one forgets."

And then, an older, well-dressed woman came up to us.  "Are you Leni Riefenstahl," she asked.  Frau Riefenstahl nodded.  "Then, go home," the woman said softly.  "If you come back, we'll be here.  With the L.A. Times and TV news cameras.  Understand?"  With that, she turned and walked back to join the silent line of people surrounding the guest house.

"Let's go," Riefenstahl said.  So we did.

I wish I could remember what happened then.  I know I didn't take her for pizza and beers.  I didn't take her to a hotel.  What did a broke hippie movie grad student know from hotels?  I didn't take her back to my shared apartment for her to sleep on the couch and then the next day start a career-capping documentary on chow puppies.  I didn't take her to a double feature of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" and "Night and Fog" and we didn't share a tub of buttered popcorn.  I didn't take her back to the airport.

I think I took her to Colin Young's house -- way the hell and gone up in Topanga Canyon -- and dropped her off for him and the howling coyotes to worry about.

But who knows?  That hot buttered popcorn's sounding pretty good about now.

#9. Jim G. and I go to Paris and Argentina. Plus Act 2!

#9.   This is where Jim Goldstone and I go to Paris and I learn to drink.  I promised you we'd get to this.

Jim (now sadly departed) had the wild heart of a ten-year-old and was always up for a good time.  He was a true family man with a bedrock wife named Cookie and three wonderful kids (one of whom I chauffeured to some concert in my old Ford Woody).  Jim was the least narcissistic director I ever met.  Maybe it was because he'd been raised in Hollywood show biz, but not as royalty; his father was a respected entertainment lawyer.  So whatever it was, Jim had already seen it.  Twice.  Our mutual agents had put us together for a reason.  And here it was:

Word was getting around about me -- clever but undisciplined, quick but careless, all character and dialogue, not much structure.  In other words, too much puppy not enough Chow.  They thought I'd be better off collaborating with a working director.  Especially one who had just finished a big racing movie for Universal with Paul Newman.

And two star-struck British producers had just the project: a spy book called "Tricks of the Trade."  I think it must be out of print now, but, as I recall it was a good story about a husband and wife spy team (ooo, oooo) chasing down their "MacGuffin," a steamer trunk full of spy-type goodies from Paris to Barcelona to the Gold Coast of Portugal to Buenos Aires to the Laurentian Mountains in Canada.

After we had several meetings with the producers, it was decided that Jim and I would do a little recky, a 1st class travel brochure struck to life.  This was back in the insane, halcyon days when both the Directors' Guild and Writers' Guild had all 1st class travel mandates in their Minimum Basic Agreements.

It was the first limousine I had ever been in.  It was so luxurious, so comfortable, so window-tinty quiet, I fell asleep in the back, going down LaBrea on our early morning way to the airport.

One of the things I loved about Jim was even though he'd been to Paris many times, he seemed as excited as I was.  And when we got there, I wanted to go everywhere at once.

We set out walking from our piss-elegant little hotel suites to the Eiffel Tower and ran smack into about the worst city traffic jam I'd ever seen.

So this from my first Parisian day: An old lady trudging home from the bakery with a long loaf of bread sticking out of her shopping bag.  All of us mired in the city traffic, a little Citroen pulled up and was stopped dead in the walkway, blocked by a thousand other cars.  He looked helplessly out his window and shrugged.  With that, the old woman wheeled out her baguette and began to beat his car, over and over and over until the loaf just flew apart.  His terrified face was priceless.

Jim and I looked at each other with huge grins.  "It's going in the movie," I said.  "Dinner's on me," he replied.  Here comes Plot Point One in my real life story.  You'll see.

There is a fairly decent restaurant at the top of the Eiffel Tower.  Maybe not four star, maybe not even three...but it's on the Eiffel Tower, bro, and it rotates!  Jim and I were seated and the waiter came over, all tourist milking grin and took Jim's drink order as he handed us the menus.  "I'm getting a Bloody Mary," said Jim.  "What do you want?"

The last time I'd had alcohol, it was a mountain rainy night, I was fifteen and heartbroken over getting dumped by Mary Ann Haines.  So I showed her.  I chugged a pint of Century Club paint stripper masquerading as bourbon and puked so violently, I swear to you, I lost several fillings.  I vowed never to drink again.  Ever.

Ahhh, but that was years ago in Tryon, North Carolina, not now in Paris, France.

"I guess I'll have a Bloody Mary, too," I said.  Jim knew I was more of a doper than a roper.  He wondered if I should've toked up back in the hotel.  I told him I'd had a major panic attack when I came back from my London trip six months before with Eli Silver and The Who.  I'd hidden a chunk of blonde Lebanese hash in the fold of my shearling coat sleeve.  So my heart was pounding as I went through US Customs eyeballed by a nasty looking German Police Dog, apparently one of those new dope sniffers.

Though, when he got to me, my coat was so ratty with LA's smog, London's dirt, Keith Moon's flying food splatters, a thousand farts, and my endlessly spilled coffee stains, the poor dog slunk away like he'd just caught his mother getting humped by a Chihuahua.

So this time, I hadn't brought any illegal substance with me at all.  I savored the Bloody Mary.  Damn, this is good.  Where has this been all my life?  So I ordered another one.  And as Jim and I ate delicious French food on top of the Eiffel Tower, we talked about the movie we hoped to make, shared life-stories, and watched the scenery circle around us.  I  kept wondering if it would be cool to order another Bloody Mary, like for dessert?  And I could get him to tell me the How Did You Meet Cookie story again.

This early magical evening along with my somewhat diseased thought process should have warned me about the wonderfully shitty era I was about to enter.  But let it not be forgotten, while Chow Puppies can be cute, they are not the brightest dogs in the pound.

Not even close.

"I'll have another one," I told the waiter.  Jim ordered a port wine.  "You should try the port instead," he said.  So I did.  Yumm-ola!

Looking back on it, I understand it was probably at that very moment I became a working alcoholic as well as a working screenwriter.

Jim Goldstone and I went to every single city in every single country that figured into "Tricks of the Trade," the last of which was Argentina.  All I remember about Buenos Aires is that right after our plane landed, we were shunted off onto an ancillary apron to wait while the Argentine Army scrubbed and fire-hosed off the tarmac near the terminal.  There must have been two or three hundred soldiers.

I turned from the window to a well-dressed Argentinian businessman next to me.  "What're they doing?"  He showed me the front page of the International Herald Tribune he'd gotten in Paris that very morning.  One of the headlines read, 'PERON RIOTS FEARED AT BUENOS AIRES AIRPORT.'  "So what are they scrubbing?' I asked.

"Blood," he said and went back to his newspaper.

We got home, back to Los Angeles.  I wrote the script, I even thought parts of it half decent.  One of the best scenes was the old woman beating the car with her baguette which, hard as I tried, I could not get it to be an integral part of the story.  But we liked it.  So foolishly I left it in and handed in my first draft.

You know how when you toss a stone into a well, you expect to hear it glancing off the sides and eventually splash into the water?  That was in 1973, maybe '74.  I'm still waiting.

                           ****

Further thoughts on the screenplay...and the rocks and shoals of the dreaded
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                              DOMM!
                                        ACT TWO
                             
Act Two is where the whole circus parade is first and finally seen in its full glory.  It is in this seventy or eighty pages -- gulp -- that most of your story -- double gulp -- is revealed.  Don't worry, it strikes cold dark fear in everyone.  As essayist Wendell Berry once observed, "the un-befuddled mind is not fully employed."

Recall that your set up act, Act One is now over, having been capped brilliantly we hope by Plot Point One.  This event or moment should believably (key word that) swing the action, the story, the entire flow of the river into a new and exciting direction.

For example, "2001, a Space Odyssey," even if (and they did) design it to be a four act narrative, Plot Point One comes when Moonwatcher, the first ape finally works up the nerve to actually touch the mysteriously appearing black slab monolith.  Very shortly afterward, he has his first human idea: take a large bone from the pile and use it for a tool.  Hey, now.

Hard on that idea's heels comes another one: You know, thinks the monkey, I bet I could use this for a weapon!

With that, Moonwatcher beats one of the marauding apes to death, then joyously flings the bone in the air into a match-cut of a space ship.  This is one of the most breathtaking cuts in the history of film: Four million years pass in one frame.  One twenty-fourth of a second.

With this kind of plot swing, the story as a whole begins to pick up speed.  I believe in any kind of drama, increasing the speed -- however slowly -- while 'falling forward' is the key to wide-eyes, slack-jaws, and open wallets.  It holds true for Stan Lee and Edward Albee, for Gillian Flynn and William Faulkner.  For every dramatist ever.

As we enter Act Two, it should engender the feeling of certitude, even of calmness as we bob up in this new swift current.  Well sure, I got my life vest on, I can swim this thing.  I see why I'm here, makes perfect, horrifying sense.  Now, let me look around and see how the hero is doing.  Maybe I can help.  This is a perfect symbiotic empathy.  You're now in the flow with the protagonist; while it's happening to them, it's happening to you.

And here are some of those 'happenings' as you lay out the huge map of further complications.

Love and loss.  Fear.  Task failure.  Shifting allegiances.  Blind alleys.  And throughout, events are seen as dark, darker, darkest.  Make a list of the possibles.  Most of the things on that list should serve to keep the hero from reaching his/her goal.  They should be nearly swamped by an ocean of lies, all of which sound perfectly plausible, even to us.

This also holds true in comedies.  Look at "Bridesmaids" or "The Truman Show" or "Some Like It Hot."  Check out "Sullivan's Travels."  Oh, baby...

In Act Two, more twists and turns.  Friends turn out to be enemies.  Dangerous plots against the hero are uncovered.  Confusion reigns (for the hero, not you).  Other friends fall away, some will even die. Clouds of contention make it rain conflict.  The situation looks dire.  Is there no escape?  We can barely stand it!

Who do you have to screw to get out of this movie?

In his structural view, Syd Field also has a smaller but crucial Mid-Act Two Plot Point.  Even though I never quite got it or why it was there, I totally trust Syd and again recommend his book "Screenplay."  Maybe you can bring some light and understanding to it.  If so, contact me.  Old dog seeking new trick...

But back to the onrushing Second Act train.  The hero almost dies, ends up crawling out of a mythic grave with the classic wound that will not heal.  Chris Vogler is very good about this, Joseph Campbell even better.  The Hero finds the courage and strength to go on in the very last place they look, the last place any any of us would ever look.

Act Two is where you can add color, patterns, moments, sub-plots, leit motifs, even an occasional red herring or two.  But most of it must be in service to keeping the hero from their goal, their Valhalla, their peace.

It is also the place where you invite the reader/audience to make dozens of tiny leaps ahead: oh, God, are they gonna go that way?!  This way?!  I can see this happening -- oh, wait, that can't happen.  Can it?  These tiny spasms only take a second or less.  But oddly, they help pave the way to YOUR conclusion by illuminating and then activating the brains and hearts of the reader/audience without ever having them have to jump off the fast moving train of your plot.

You can certainly stack the deck.  You should.  But you can't make it so impossible that Jesus in Houdini's dinner jacket couldn't find his way out of it.

Like real life (whatever that turns out to be), it's all a balancing act.

And just when it seems like there is no way out, that the pressure keeps building and building until it seems it will all blow up, turning into a throbbing nuclear explosion of maple syrup, it does!  And we have Plot Point Two.

Yet, sometimes Plot Points can be very quiet.  For example, Plot Point 2 in "Lawrence of Arabia."  They don't all have to be spectacular.  All they have to be is singular.

Lawrence has been 'tortured and stripped and repeatedly whipped and subject to all kinds of whoredom' and now only wants to quit the desert, to go home to rainy afternoons in England.  But General Allenby knows how to play him, how to get him to stay and be part of his Big Push.  The conniving old pro simply leads Lawrence into believing that the Arab warrior tribes he desperately needs won't come for money.  No.

But they will come for him.

When O'Toole turns to face the General, you see he has bought it hook, line, and sinker.  And it will cost him his soul.  Lawrence tries to save his honor by saying "They will come for Damascus."  But falls into his own blue-eyed blond reflection again by adding "I will give it to them."

In the movie's narrative (not necessarily the same as history's), if Lawrence doesn't go for this, if he sticks to his "I'm an ORDINARY man" and goes home, Damascus might not get taken and Allenby's plan falls apart.  Along with the side deal to carve up the Middle East for France and England.  As a result, the area, as we know it today, would look entirely different.  All from that one little universal moment.

For want of a nail...

Which takes us into the final movement of this visual symphony -- propelling us into the inevitable sprint of a concluding Act Three.  Normally this is fifteen or twenty pages; in "Lawrence," longer because it's a four hour movie.

But the principal remains the same.  As they almost always do.

So stay tuned!  Because I WILL get to my worst pitch meeting ever, I promise.   And my slow dance with the brilliant, sad singer named The Rose, a rock and roll casualty so buried alive in the blues that it almost took me down with her.

#8. Titles, parties, agents, the Farrellys, and Act 1

#8.  The meaning of producer titles, parties, agents, the Farrellys, and the great Syd Field's Act One.

My God, these days it seems to be raining producers!

Years ago, back before that pesky Consent Decree  in the Forties, there were only a few that counted.  When David O. Selznick or Sam Goldwyn or Darryl Zanuck produced a movie, they actually produced the movie; from beginning to end, for better or for worse.

They all had wild egos, ulcers, smoked huge cigars, and slept fifteen minutes a night.  They were made out of film.  If you opened them up on an operating table, where their heart should've been, was a rack-over Mitchell 35mm camera, a drugstore girl, and a thousand deal memos.

One movie, one producer.  Here's the kind of guys they were.

The story goes when Selznick premiered "Gone With the Wind" in Atlanta back in 1939, he was so taken with it all -- the hurricane of adulation, the stars, the show itself, and the clipboard of notes he'd made for 'improvements' -- that he took off for the after-show soiree, leaving his wife Irene Mayer Selznick out in the street in front of the theatre.  And brother, this was not just any wife...she was Louis B. Mayer's daughter!  Producers.

But that was the good old Then.  Now, we are awash in producer credits, if not actual producers.  So here are some of the ever shifting Rules of Thumb about them.

In movies, the term 'Associate Producer' is a kind of producer's production assistant.  They are usually installed for their tireless energy and burning desire.  Or they are put in the mix by a friend or relative who wants them around while they make this movie.  So they can learn how it's done.  The pay is negligible, the credit small, and the work endless.  You're a Suit go-fer that everyone laughs at behind your back.  Or right to your front.  But if you are thick skinned and very patient, you will learn a lot, especially if you are working for a great producer like Walter Mirisch, Joel Silver, Scott Rudin or, back in the day, the doomed Harvey Weinstein.  Of course, ol' Harvey will go down in the Annals of World Class Assholes but they cannot take those great pictures away from him.  Yet.

In movies, the 'Executive Producer' title  doesn't mean that much.  It often indicates lots of back and forth phone calls by lawyers working out a deal.  It can mean that this particular guy once owned the property on its tortuous way to becoming a movie.  Maybe he had an option on the underlying rights or some version of the script he financed or shepherded in some prior incarnation at another studio, part of the endless pass-through chain.

Often these executive producers get some kind of payday along with the placement of the title but were not a part of the actual making of the movie itself.

The honcho in movies is usually The Producer.  They have an equal vote (more or less) about where and how the project is set  up, about script rewrites, the director hire, casting, and various other things like locations, scheduling, and the movie's overall look.  Of course the director figures heavily into this mix.  But the producer is usually the first royalty.  
                       
In television, the opposite is true: the Executive Producer is king.  This is why you see so many of those titles now, gathered around the trough.  The Executive Producer (along with the Created By) and the last title at the end of the show usually means that they are the Big Cheese.  In all the CSIs, it was Jerry Bruckheimer.  In all the "Law and Orders," and the current crop of Chicago police and fire department shows, it's Dick Wolf.   And the amazingly fecund Shonda Rhimes who birthed "Grey's Anatomy," "How to Get Away With Murder," and "Scandal."  Most recently, "For The People."

Back in the day, it used to to be guys like Aaron Spelling, Steven Bochco or Norman Lear.  They're even above Show Runner: their word is absolute because they are utterly bankable.  They have made networks and studios billions.

I once counted twenty-two so-called producer titles on a movie.  The audience was actually laughing. And it wasn't a comedy.

The one that perplexes me (and most writers) is "A Film By."  I guess if you do two but preferably three of the major jobs on the movie...maybe.  One of the few actual 'auteurs' in movies is Woody Allen and he wouldn't be caught dead with A Film By credit.  His always say, in that same type-face all these years: Written and Directed by Woody Allen.

Yet I never begrudged Ridley Scott his film-by because he is the real deal.  And Wes Anderson.  And James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, and Coppola.  You know, the usual suspects.  Even some unusual ones like Peter Hyams who produced, directed, wrote and (get this) was the cinematographer on his movies which were mostly good if not great.  But you gotta give a guy props for doing everything but catering (meals) and honey-wagons (porta-potties).

My favorite credit of all time was just "The Hospital, by Paddy Chayevsky."  Possessive credit by the writer, now we are talking!  If there was ever a better screenwriter or a more complicated unhappy individual, let them now step forward.  Yeah, I didn't think so.

Well, maybe Aaron Sorkin....

On the other end of this possessive spectrum, I remember seeing a movie (I think it was "Message in a Bottle," a Kevin Costner - Robin Wright movie I actually liked) that said A Film By Luis Mandoki.

Seriously, dude?

When you see the ampersand sign (&) between two names, that means they did it in some kind of partnership.  Like the Coen Brothers or the Farrelly_Brothers  If the names are joined by the  word "and" that means that someone came along usually after the first one listed and did rewrites.

The Writers Guild of America has a good but not foolproof credit arbitration system that a screenwriter may use if he or she needs it.  And they usually do because these days there is so much rewriting by so many Script Doctors.  These are flavor-of-the- month gunslingers who get paid way too much for way too little.  I have doctored, I have been doctored upon; just part of the dance.  The Writers Guild arbiters (made up of working members of the Guild) are well aware of this and try to keep their eyes on the work of the first writer on the project.  The one who started with the blank page. The second and third writers often swear they never even saw the first, original version.  Uh-huh, right.

Speaking of ampersands: I knew the Farrelly Brothers from our mutual time living on Cape Cod.  I was mid-career, they hadn't started yet.  But, mamma mia, did they catch up.

I heard this story on 'Inside the Actors Studio' on Bravo TV when James Lipton interviewed Matt Damon.  He asked Damon what the best piece of direction he'd ever received was.  Damon laughed and said it was on the Farrelly Brothers' "Stuck on You," a comedy about conjoined Siamese twins.  Damon said they were in long shot and suddenly he heard them call CUT!  Then, the Farrellys trudged from back in video-village out to where the actors were, performing the scene.  The four men looked at each other.

Finally, Peter just said, "Suck less, okay?"

I met Peter first.  He was a bus-boy dishwasher in an excellent Italian restaurant named Cipolina on the Cape where I lived in the late Seventies, early Eighties.  Our regular waiter had told him that we were seated in his station and that I was a working screenwriter.  With that, Farrelly marched out and introduced himself.  With a winning angelic smile he said, "Skip told me you're a writer.  I'm a writer, too!"

All this time later and six days older than dirt, I cannot recall the exact details of our early friendship, only that it was and circled around racquetball, local gossip, and talk about movies and TV.  Petey was a completely authentic charming guy with an active curiosity and a wide ranging sense of humor.  Ran in the family.

Brother Bobby told me that when Petey was about fifteen, he'd taken the family's Dymo Home Labeler and clicked out "I JUST FARTED."  Then one morning when his mother was going out to play Bridge with her friends, he gave her a big hug and patted the sticky plastic strip on her back.  With that he went back to sleep.   He awoke suddenly about two hours later to find his mother standing on his bed, beating him with a plastic fly swatter.   Bobby was helpless with laughter recounting this Rhode Island well-worn family story.

These are, of course, the visionaries who, years later, made "Dumb and Dumber," "Something About Mary," "King Pin," and "The Three Stooges" among others, grossing many hundreds of millions of dollars.  And speaking of 'grossing,' Petey told me his parents' first day visiting the set of his first movie was the Jeff Daniel's Turbo-Lax toilet scene.  How perfect.

His last movie, "The Green Book" won him the screenplay Oscar and the movie itself won the Best Picture Oscar.  If you missed his acceptance speech, you can see him, all these years later, on YouTube and in his list of Thank Yous, he generously gave a shout out to his favorite Chow Puppy as 'the first actual writer he ever knew.'

I was stunned, touched, nearly brought to tears by my old friend.  It was the last thing I expected but, turns out, the very thing I needed.                 
                                               
                                  ****
                               
I was never what you could call a Hollywood party-animal.  I had a kind of shell-shock after the Leslie Caron debacle.  But every few years I'd go to one.

And this one was a Friday night, up on Mulholland Drive, at a young producer's house.  He was the scion of a famous eastern seaboard real estate developing multi-millionaire.  Steve's father built whole communities named after himself, still on the maps, and now his son wanted to make movies.  So the first thing Steve did was throw a huge party.

On this particular night, there were so many invited that I had to walk the last two hundred yards because of all the cars parked on both sides of the road.

Inside, spilling over to outside, were both top flight and mid flight show-bizzers, dozens of drink-bearing waiters and waitresses, food, and ice-sculptures shrinking by the minute in the hot Santa Ana winds.

After an hour of wandering around, I noticed that everyone in the room, on the decks, the porches, down by the pool, were all 'A' to 'K.'  You know, Robert Aldrich, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Dyanne Asimow, all the way through half the alphabet to Michael Kane, Jonathan Kaplan and Ron Koslow, an old UCLA buddy.  At this point, I surmised there would be another party the following night, and that would be 'L' to 'Z.'

As a 'C,' I was here on Friday.  So I made the most of it by heading straight to Steve's bedroom's en-suite bathroom.  And its medicine chest.  Youth Wants to Know!  But before I got there, I heard a huge cheer from out in the main room.  Having the concentration of your average goldfish, I turned and headed straight for that sound.

In the main room, fully head and shoulders above everyone else, was retired Los Angeles Laker, at 7'1", 245 lbs., basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain!  'Wilt the Stilt' (a nickname he hated), 'The Big Dipper,' a nickname he at least would answer to, looked around with a beatific smile on his face.  Years later, his autobiography would claim he bedded, what, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand women?  Still, even then, we all knew that look.  It was the Daddy Lion on the hill, patiently scanning the veldt for his next wham-bam ten second sweetheart.

I slowly made my way over.  The closer you got to Wilt Chamberlain, the more you began to think, 'this is surely what God had in mind.'  He was simply a perfect specimen as a male human being, and standing next to the pool table, every eye in the house was on him.

Spread out on that green felt was now a growing pile of cash.  Here was the house bet:  Wilt Chamberlain could pick up this pool table, all six legs off the floor or fail miserably in the attempt.  We looked at the table, full slate, solid oak, massive, "leave the balls in the pockets, it won't matter."  That thing must weigh a thousand pounds!  A stunning Eurasian woman came to his side, touching his arm.  He smiled.  Is everybody ready?  He played it like the pro he was.

Finally, silence.

Then, he flung his arms across the pool table as everyone moved away.  Pulling it back against his thighs and with a huge roar, he lifted the immense table fully a foot off the floor!  The one pool ball that rolled out onto the carpet was the eight ball.  I love noticing things like that.

There was a cheer from the crowd as he set the table down and began raking the cash off in handfulls.  The beautiful Eurasian girl got credit for the money raking assist.  I saw twenties, I saw fifties, and brother this was the start of the cocaine snorting era, so I saw plenty of dusty hundreds.

"Where're you going now, Wilt?" someone called out.  Like they expected him to yell, "Disneyland!"

He looked down at the girl next to him and smiled.  She was probably number eleven-thousand-six-hundred-and-fifty-four.  "Tomorrow V-ball in Sammo, the next day, Philadelphia.  Good night, sports fans!"  And he was gone with the spoils of a fifteen minute visit.

We would later learn from his biographies that in his retirement, he had become one of the truly great beach volleyball players and also was addicted to long distance high speed non-stop driving in his huge Lincoln.  Apparently he made the cross country trip fifty or sixty times, setting records that still stand.

We have all heard of superhuman feats of strength, maybe even seen some.  This one is mine.  And I never got to prowl though Steve's medicine chest but I was later told by someone who did, it looked like your average Rexall prescription center.

                                    ****

John Ptak was nearly my first and surely one of my favorite agents.  If I wasn't his first client, I was right next to it.

I had known him at UCLA. During that time he'd been an assistant manager at the Stanley Warner theatre on Wilshire and used to let us destitute movie geeks sneak in through the side alley door.  In those days, we called him 'Jack.'

In his new incarnation, he was 'John' or to me, 'J.P.'  I tend to nickname everybody.  Ptak had, way more than most, an open door office policy at the hugely successful I.C.M. agency on Sunset.  I went up to visit him two or three times a week to see pretty girls and either report on my project's progress or to remind him that I was bushy-tailed and available.

During these visits, I would occasionally overhear his side of his phone calls.  One was him putting the "Jaws" deal together with Peter Benchley, Richard Zanuck & David Brown.   And some new kid named Steven Spielberg.

During those years, I got to meet Rod Serling who drove a vintage Auburn boat-tailed Speedster (the one with its own little golf club bag door), the cadaverous noirist and Herculean drinker Jim Thompson and lots of movie machers including Donald Sutherland.  At the time, he and I resembled each other -- blond pony tails, same height and weight, both favoring a modified cowboy drag.  The only real difference being he was a beloved, rich, handsome, successful actor dating Jane Fonda and I could type fast.

There was also Kitty Hawks, an agent down the hall from J.P.   Director Howard Hawks' daughter, she was about eight feet tall, cascading black hair, so utterly beautiful that after you saw her you wanted to run to the nearest desk and jam a letter opener into your eyes.

Did I say letter opener?  That reminds me...

An agent spends 3/4 of their time on the telephone making deals, massaging deals, repairing deals, and sometimes getting out of deals.  J.P. would be leaning back in his chair, talking his talk and tossing little push pins up into the acoustical tiles in the ceiling.  He got very good at this.  There seemed to be, at any one time, hundreds of them stuck up there.

Then, one afternoon, again on the phone, he was absently playing with a letter opener. And I actually saw the thought come from his nine-year-old bad boy mind into his hands and FLIP -- he underhanded the opener up into the ceiling!  It stuck.  I was agog.  And then, with the slamming vibration, all of those little push pins started raining down.  I think he actually jumped under his desk, never missing a syllable.

I loved his sense of humor.  One day I heard him spell his name for some harried assistant on the other end of the line.  "Ptak.  P. 6. T. A. K.  The '6' is silent," he said.

One morning I came in to his office and he had the biggest grin on his face.  "Chow Puppy, I just got you your first directing job!  Deal is closed.  It's a prison picture called 'The Slams' produced by Gene Corman.  Starring...Jim Brown!  You're gonna be a director!"

It was one of those moments where the blood actually runs cold.  I had to be the only writer in town who didn't want to direct a movie.  It's hard enough to write one.

If I signed off on this, I would become a white over-educated hillbilly directing a blacksploitation low budget quickie with ex-NFL star Jim Brown who had been arrested a few years earlier for allegedly throwing his girlfriend off their condo balcony.  When Brown -- the greatest football player who ever lived -- was at Syracuse, he was all-American in football AND lacrosse, in both their Halls of Fame, man.  Those lacrosse guys run around for hours in the snow in shorts with hardly any pads and beat each other with sticks.  They don't have their own teeth!

Besides, directing is a social job.  I don't give good social.  I like working alone, sitting at the typewriter in my bathrobe, drinking coffee, scratching that new rash, trying to unpaint myself from story corners; my idea of heaven.  That's why I was a writer.

"J.P., you gotta get me out of this!"  So he did and thank ya, Jesus.  My record of cowardice in the face of opportunity remains unblemished.

Five years later at Fox, working with producer Marvin Schwartz (more about him later), he told me that on "100 Rifles," a western he produced starring Burt Reynolds, Jim Brown and Raquel Welch, that the great football player was seemingly gentle until seemingly provoked.  Then apparently, he had a cold, murderous glare that made Clint Eastwood's death scowl look like the Gerber baby.

                                ****

As a screenwriter, structure is your king, your god, your all consuming passion.  Because it's gonna lead you and your story to the promised Promised Land.

As you do your outline, you see where things go.  How much to tell, how much to hide.  Who does what and goes where, all rough strokes to be sure.  The cool detail of what it all looks like and sounds like will come a little later.  When you're sure about your first act, your second act, and your third act.  And what propels you from one to the other.

Most of my ideas about structure comes from Syd Field's book, "Screenplay."  To me, his was the first book of its kind.  And because of how big it hit in Hollywood, most of the network and studio executives have read it or attended one of Syd's workshops before he died this year.  So they now speak the language.  Or some Truby-Vogler-McKee version of it.

Scripts are built on the classic three act frame (Syd called it a 'paradigm') that stretches back to Aristotle's "Poetics."  This structure has a beginning, a middle, and an end although as Tarantino showed us in "Pulp Fiction," not necessarily in that order.

So let's start with --

                       ACT ONE

Act One is usually about ten or twenty pages long.  Maybe even twenty-five.  As you can tell from that spread, this ain't exactly brain surgery.  Only it kind of is: It sets things up, introduces most of the main characters, shows the tone of the movie, hints at the theme.

The beginning of anything is important, especially movies.  Down the line, its audience will be settling into their seats with a lap full of high-carb no-nutrient goodies as the the light show begins up on the wall.  In a short attention span culture addicted to The Next Ten Minutes, at this point, everything is still hopeful.  That's why you have to get this first part right.

For me, the set up stuff is the most fun to write.  Movies that fall apart usually self-destruct in the later pages of Act Two or the beginning of Act Three.

But Act One is getting all your balls in the air (as it were).  This alone takes grace, smarts, focus, and hard work.  Not to mention sleight-of-hand.  A good example of this would be "The Usual Suspects"  or "Sixth Sense," two movies that pay off slowly, that depend on the gathering and manipulation of detail.  And it all starts in Act One.

But sometimes these details can be deadly.

Back in the 40s, when Warner Bros. was in the middle of shooting the first "The Big Sleep," director Howard Hawks (Kitty's dad) and star Humphrey Bogart became so confused about one of the early murders, they actually called Raymond Chandler, the original author.  I believe they finally tracked him down in the bar at Musso's.  He heard them out...and then admitted he'd never known who did that one.

Since the studio was way past the point of no return, they continued shooting fast and stylishly on that thin ice and the result is a classic.  Even if you have to squint your eyes just a little.

This opening act closes with what Syd called

                          PLOT POINT ONE

But you can call it anything you want.  It's here in the story, just when you think you have it figured out, that comes some wowie-zowie action or event that happens usually to the main character that plausibly swings the action around to a different course.  We are off on a W.T.F. new tangent.

This is just Newtonian Physics: cause and effect.  Of course, there can be lots of little plot points -- twists and turns are always good -- but only two major ones, the kind that completely alter the flow of the river.

If the plot point is real enough, the new direction can be mind bendingly wild.  A good example of this is the car crash about fifteen minutes into "Erin Brockovitch." written by Suzanna Grant.  It comes out of nowhere, it's stunning, and after it, everything for Erin is different.  It sends her, with casts and crutches, to the Albert Finney attorney where, because of a languishing old case he has against Pacific Gas and Electric, she will eventually change all their lives.

Hard on this plot point's heels comes another one, even more important because it's more personal.  Erin is so destitute and stove in by her accident, she ends up interning for this lawyer.  A naturally flouncy and somewhat brazen babe, she is motor-mouth nervous in her new job and has big gazingies to boot.  Julia Roberts said on "Oprah" that her push-up bra should have gotten the Oscar.  The secretaries and para-legals in the office hated her and when they went out for lunch, she was pointedly excluded.

It was one of those lunch breaks where a delivery comes regarding the PG&E case.  That box of files is fobbed off on Erin, eating at her desk, to "keep busy with."  If she had been at lunch with the others, it would've been a different movie.  But when she opened that first file and began to read, it became hers.

I believe this is the Real Plot Point one.

In more recent movies like "Gravity," we have these: About a third of the way in, plot point one happens when George Clooney unhooks himself from Sandra Bullock' tether to save her life after their space station is smithereened by flying Commie space junk.  About two thirds of the way later, when she is totally out of options and ready to give up, comes -- as you sensed it would -- plot point two!  She gets (semi spoiler alert) an unexpected visit from an old friend who goads and inspires her to dig deep and find a way home.

Once you get used to identifying these plot points, your friends and loved ones will hate you.  Because unless you are smarter than me, you will tend to mutter "plot point one" in what you assume is a low voice, meant to be heard by only the twenty or thirty people nearby.  Sometimes this disease is catching; your friends or loved ones will begin to search for plot points, too.  And then we will all be living in a world of movie structure smartypants.

Be still my heart.

For next time, the dreaded Act Two, great glory or the graveyard of broken dreams.  And my worst pitch meeting ever.
                       

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, sure.

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

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

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

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

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

Now, you just sit there.

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

Taking this next step.

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

What is the THEME of the story?

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

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

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

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

No.  Staaaay...stay.  Good dog!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                     ****

      AN EVENING WITH THE GREAT LESLIE CARON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then, it happened.

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

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

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

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

"Don't ever come back here."

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

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

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

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

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

Only Mitchum...

                                   **** 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But still...

                                     ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                     ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


                                     ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was gobsmacked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

                                      ****

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aren't I pitiful?