I was having more fun than should legally be allowed.
In December 1978 the Los Angeles Times launched a San Diego edition under editor Dale Fetherling, and let it be known that they were looking for local writers. The San Diego Union and Tribune (which later merged) didn’t like the Times intruding on their turf and word got around that anyone who worked for them would be blackballed from the other two dailies. But I was prepared to take that chance when Dale asked me to come on board. I was still new to journalism, so the idea of working for the Los Angeles Times was too exciting to refuse. I would be a “special correspondent,” meaning I’d write regularly for the paper but wouldn’t be salaried. Given available space, he could only give me a few articles per month, but they paid a hundred bucks apiece so I could make that work. Writing for the Times had the added benefit of increasing my visibility as a writer, prompting KSDO News Radio—a CBS affiliate—to bring me aboard as on-air entertainment editor working pro bono.
This led to a meeting with an individual who identified himself as an independent film producer and asked me to write a movie for him. He offered the princely sum of one thousand dollars against a full Writers Guild screenplay fee should the movie be produced. I didn’t have an agent and knew nothing of contracts, but a thousand dollars was a lot of money so I eagerly signed the paperwork.
Around this same time Kathryn noticed a small advertisement in the Los Angeles Times soliciting writers for Alien Worlds, a half-hour science fiction radio drama series about a research station in Earth orbit that frequently found itself caught up in alien invasions and other interstellar nuisances. I’d heard a few episodes of Alien Worlds and thought the stories and production values were terrific, so I couldn’t understand why they were putting ads for writers in the newspapers when there were probably lots of talented writers in Hollywood eager for the opportunity. When I contacted executive producer Lee Hansen, he explained that television writers had become so used to relying on visuals that they found it difficult to transition to radio. I had only a modest background in radio drama, but that work—along with having studied under Norman Corwin—was enough for Hansen to send me a series bible, sample scripts, and several finished episodes.
A week later I fired off a spec script entitled “A Question of Conscience.” He bought it for several hundred dollars—more than I’d ever earned for a single piece of writing—and invited me to Los Angeles for the recording session. This was the first time I’d flown on an airplane, and as I stepped into a chauffeured car waiting at Burbank Airport it all felt very Hollywood. The studio session was great fun and the cast were exemplary. Pleased that I’d turned the script around in a week, Lee invited me to write as many episodes as I wanted.
For a moment, I allowed myself to think that this writing thing might actually work out.
Then everything all fell apart.
The flameout started with the Times. By July 1979 I’d been working with the paper for six months, and was just finishing up an article about a local religious theater group called the Lamb’s Players. During the interview the head of the group said that they were getting financing from the State of California. I quoted this in my article and noted that some people would consider this a breach of the separation of church and state.
When I stopped by the Times office to check the copy prior to publication, I noticed that the line had been cut. “This is supposed to be a feature story,” Dale explained when I inquired, “not a news story about a group receiving financing in violation of various laws.”
“But that’s as much a fact as where they’re performing next. Why is one fact okay to mention and the other fact not okay to mention?”
“Because that makes it a news story. You’re a feature writer, not a news writer; this is the features department, not the news department.”
“So you can only publish the article if it doesn’t say anything important?” I asked, getting cranky.
“That’s not the point and you know it. Everyone here understands that we have to color inside the lines.”
For me it was a question of right and wrong; for Dale it was a matter of editorial policy. In a way we were both right, just fighting from opposite sides of the desk.
“Here’s the deal,” he said. “If you’re willing to let the line go, I can publish it and give you another assignment. If you insist that the line stays, the article will not see print. I’m not spiking the article, just holding it in abeyance. But I can’t give you a new assignment until this one is resolved one way or the other.”
I was sure he’d eventually change his mind, and he doubtless assumed the same about me. It was just one sentence in an otherwise lengthy article. I should’ve let it go. But neither of us was willing to budge, and true to his word he never gave me another assignment. The article would sit on the shelf for almost a year before finally being published, minus the offending sentence, so in the end I’d fought for nothing. Losing the Times was a huge blow because I’d taken the job knowing I’d be blackballed by the other San Diego dailies, so I couldn’t go to them for work, and the Reader was cutting way back on freelance assignments.
Desperate for income, I finished the movie script and asked to be paid the one thousand dollars promised by the contract. The “producer” pointed to a clause stipulating that this was a kill fee that would only be paid if he stopped making “best efforts” to get the script produced. In practical terms, it meant he could avoid paying the thousand dollars forever by saying he was still making best efforts.*
That left Alien Worlds as my sole source of income, and the hammer fell again when the show was canceled due to a misunderstanding between the producers and the sponsors about how many people were actually listening to the show. My first produced episode would never be aired, and none of the three new scripts I’d started would be purchased.
I tried to get KSDO to pay a token fee for my on-air reviews, but there was nothing in the budget to cover it . . . and suddenly I had no source of revenue. To make rent I sold my modest comic collection and stopped leaving the apartment because I couldn’t afford bus fare. Since food was the only expense I could control I cut back to just one packet of beef jerky and one can of Mountain Dew per day. The jerky provided protein and gave my stomach something to digest during the day while the Mountain Dew gave me a sugar spike to keep writing late into the night. On Sundays I allowed myself a few pieces of chicken and mashed potatoes at Kentucky Fried Chicken. What little money I had left over each week was spent on writing supplies and postage. I sent queries, résumés, and articles to every magazine I thought I could write for, desperate to sell something to someone.
Nothing sold. Nothing.
I spent my nights writing, sleeping only when the hunger got to be too much, and my days dumpster-diving for anything I could sell or recycle. I’d always been thin, but now the drop was precipitous; at six three I weighed only about 140 pounds, with a twenty-eight-inch waist. Friends, alarmed by my appearance, urged me to go on welfare. I refused. I’d make it as a writer or crash and burn trying. There were no other options. There couldn’t be, not if I was going to get where I needed to go.
To further stretch my already limited funds I began fasting one day per week, then twice weekly. My hands shook from hunger as I tried to type. My weight continued to drop, clothes hanging off me like clown pants. I was unable to sleep and too often unable to write; all I could think about was food and failure. I started wearing long-sleeve shirts in the dead of summer to hide how frail and thin I’d become. Every night I told myself that sooner or later I’d write my way out of this mess, but every morning looked more hopeless than the one before.
One afternoon, out of money, desperate and half starved, I wandered into a bookstore in search of magazines or books on writing that might have listings for new markets that I could copy down before putting them back on the shelf. But there were only a couple of out-of-date books on scriptwriting, more theoretical than practical, penned by academics instead of working
writers. (This was before the glut of scriptwriting books that would later crowd the market.) I was disappointed to find nothing new or useful in any of the arenas I’d worked in: playwriting, TV, radio—
Waitaminnit, I thought through a haze of hunger. Hold on a second.
I have a background in all those areas! I may not have enough experience with any one of them to write a full book on the subject—just television writing, for instance—but I can write a book that covers all of them in broad strokes. I can pad out each section by writing about the history of each medium, delve into the art and craft of the actual writing, and finish with a look at the current state of the market. No, I don’t have a lifetime of experience, but I have a lot more than any of these other people who’ve written books on scriptwriting, and that didn’t stop them.
I hurried home, wrote a fifteen-page outline for The Complete Book of Scriptwriting, and sent it off to Writer’s Digest Books with a prayer to the gods of writing to let this work out.
A few weeks later they sent back a letter commissioning the book for three thousand dollars: one-third payable on signing the attached contract, one-third upon completion, and the last on publication. I signed the contract and mailed it back the same day.
When the check for one thousand dollars arrived, I considered it no less than a bona fide, no-kidding-around, saved-at-the-last-minute miracle. It would cover two or three months’ worth of food and rent, and then I could—
I stopped. And then I could what, exactly? I was still persona non grata at the local newspapers, and none of the other gigs in my life were paying anything.
Then it seemed I heard a voice whispering in my ear, as intimate and familiar as the quiet turning of my considered conscience. You’re done here, it said. Time to move on.
I loved San Diego, but it held few opportunities for writers and I had burned through all of them. The town had been as generous with me as it could. If I wanted to write for bigger newspapers and magazines, or even—and this seemed an impossible dream at the time—for television or movies, I would have to move to Los Angeles.
The check for one thousand dollars had not come to provide security, three months’ rent, and a chance to maintain the status quo. The universe had just bought me a ticket out of town.
Moving to LA would be terribly risky. After initial expenses, cleaning deposit, and first and last months’ rent, the money would be gone almost immediately. If I ran out of cash in San Diego, there was at least the possibility of seeking help from friends, but I knew no one in Los Angeles and had no connections or waiting opportunities. If I didn’t get something going almost immediately, I’d be out on the street.
But I had to take the chance.
The hard part would be telling Kathryn. While I had been busy burning every bridge I could find, she had prospered, graduating from the SDSU Telecommunications and Film Department as Outstanding Graduate with Highest Honors, then taking work with KPBS-TV as an associate producer, then full producer on documentary programs. Her career path in San Diego was clear, and I couldn’t justify asking her to walk away from all that into the uncertain future I saw for myself. By now we had been dating on and off for two years. I liked her a great deal; respected and admired her even more, but neither of us were terribly demonstrative in our emotions, so in many ways we always felt more like friends than lovers. In recent months we’d started drifting apart, but neither of us had moved to change anything because nothing had happened to break the inertia. Now I had to confront reality for both our sakes.
The day I went to tell her my decision she came racing out of her apartment with news of her own. After learning that ABC was going to commission a new TV series from Carl Sagan—Nucleus, a sequel to his groundbreaking PBS series Cosmos—she had sent her résumé to his production company in Montrose, a northern suburb of Los Angeles. The letter was their reply, offering her a job as administrative assistant.
On hearing my news, she suggested that we pool our resources and move to LA together, no commitment, sharing space and expenses. If things worked out for us, great; if we went our separate ways, that was fine too. We all do what we do for the same reason: it seemed like a good idea at the time, so I said yes.
Moving to LA didn’t seem like a good idea to everyone else, however. Even my friends weren’t convinced. You don’t know anyone up there. You’ll be starting from nothing.
What if it doesn’t work out?
What if you fail?
I came to call this the Tyranny of Reasonable Voices. Those closest to us abhor the idea that we might get hurt, or be disappointed, or fail, because in contemporary American culture there is no greater peril or embarrassment than public failure. But sometimes failure is the only way to identify the flaws in our plan to get over the wall; if we don’t risk failure we never learn those things and thus never get over the wall. But that rarely diminishes the desire of those close to us to protect us, so they four-wall us with concern and gentle discouragement. Don’t take the chance, it’s not worth it.
The voices were right, the risks were huge. But we went anyway, and on April Fools’ Day 1981 we moved into a one-bedroom furnished apartment in Glendale, California, twenty minutes northeast of Hollywood. By the time the paperwork was signed, the one thousand dollars was gone.
I couldn’t sleep that first night, equally excited and terrified. We were making a new start in a city where the frontiers of possibility were as wide as we chose to make them. Anything could happen. We could succeed spectacularly, or fail just as spectacularly.
It scared the shit out of me.
Chapter 19
God, Death, and Harlan Ellison
One of the first things we did upon arriving in Los Angeles was to unpack the radio so we could listen to Hour 25, a science-fiction-themed talk show that had been running since 1972. Hosted by Mike Hodel and Mel Gilden, the show aired every Friday from ten P.M. to midnight on KPFK 90.7 FM, a Pacifica radio station. Kathryn had heard about Hour 25 for years but the signal wasn’t strong enough to reach San Diego.
It was a delight. Mike ran the show with a thoughtful, casual ease that encouraged even the shyest guests to open up. Broadcasting out of a coffin-size booth at KPFK’s studio on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, the show’s roster of guests included Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Philip K. Dick, George Clayton Johnson, and Robert Silverberg, along with genre producers, directors, prose editors, and publishers eager to discuss the art and craft of their work. My long-distance role model Harlan Ellison was another frequent guest, answering questions and reading aloud from some of his more recent works. Hearing Harlan transition from conversation to reading one of his stories aloud solidified the connection between the way a writer writes and the way he speaks. Harlan sounded like his stories, and his stories sounded like Harlan; it was who he was. I’d known that intellectually, but the experience of hearing it was a revelation.
Mike took calls from the show’s listeners during the last half hour, and I sometimes summoned up the courage to call in with a question or observation, but never when Harlan was on the air. He was a powerful speaker and not to be trifled with. Still, I hoped to tell him one day how much his work had guided me over the years.
My opportunity came a few months later on a hot summer day during a strike by the Writers Guild of America. As a WGA member—courtesy of the still-unpaid feature I’d written—I was required to march on picket lines outside studios I had never sold to, whose lofty portals I had never crossed, alongside writers of infinitely greater stature than I could ever hope to achieve. When I saw Harlan, I approached him and stammered out, “Hi, my name is Joe, and you’re one of the reasons I’m a writer—”
“I’m not responsible for anyone other than myself, fuck off!” Harlan snapped back.
It took several weeks to rebuild my courage enough to call during one of Harlan’s appearances on Hour 25 to tell him what I’d tried to convey on the picket line: that as a fellow street rat who came from nothing, his work inspired me
to keep writing when nothing else worked. Pleased by my words, he invited me to stop in during an autograph party the next day at Dangerous Visions bookstore, named for one of Harlan’s stories.
The line of fans eager for his signature stretched around the block, and the tiny store was packed with well-wishers and other writers. When Harlan took a break, Arthur Byron Cover, co-owner of Dangerous Visions, brought me to face the man who had unknowingly been my long-distance mentor. The meeting lasted only a few minutes; Harlan had a limited attention span for anything less than witty or interesting banter, and I was hopelessly inept at such things, so after a brief exchange, he glazed over and went off in search of deeper waters. But that was okay, I was just happy that I could finally thank him for his inspiration over the years, and happier still that he hadn’t yelled at me or hit me with a chair.
While Kathryn carried the burden of earning a weekly income I finished writing The Complete Book of Scriptwriting and a boatload of short stories, none of which sold. Gradually, however, I began to get traction in other areas. To set the stage for the script book, Writer’s Digest magazine gave me a monthly column that paid five hundred bucks per issue. I also started selling articles to David Gritten, entertainment editor for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. I liked writing for David because he took the time to point out the errors I was still making in my work.
Then Cathi Williams (now Jamison) called from San Diego to tell me that the congregation of the First Baptist Church, former home to the House of Abba, was blowing apart in a fireball of appropriately biblical proportions.
Years earlier some of the Elders had steamrolled me out of Community to keep me from discussing Pastor Ken Pagaard’s sexual indiscretions with some of the women in the church, affairs that had grown out of his “inner healing” sessions. After my departure, and despite knowing exactly what was going on, they continued to do all they could to discredit or intimidate church members who saw that something was wrong and dared to speak out.* But the rumors snowballed anyway, leading to an article in Eternity magazine by Ronald Enroth entitled “The Power Abusers,” in which he wrote that “A well-known charismatic American Baptist church in Chula Vista, California, continues in a swirl of controversy over the alleged authoritarianism of its leadership, especially the pastor, Ken Pagaard. The church, many of whose members live in communal households, has also been criticized for certain aspects of its ‘inner healing’ ministry. Some ex-members have claimed that . . . any criticism of the pastor (occasionally referred to as ‘our apostle’) and elders was interpreted as a ‘spirit of rebellion’ and hence, the work of Satan. Many have left the communal lifestyle claiming that heads of households are ‘on a power trip.’”
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