The Smoking Gun

by Doug Richardson

“I did hear to you,” I argued. “I especially heard you when every time (the studio boss) had an idea—no matter how crazy or wrong or stupid—you said ‘awesome’ or ‘great’ or ‘that’s exactly what I was thinking.’”

  “Dude. That was just for the room. All studio execs want to hear me say is that they’re geniuses.”

  “They said it. But you rubber-stamped it. Now I got nothin’ but square pegs that they’re paying me to pound through round holes and make it read like a movie.”

  “Where are you?”

  “You called me. You should know where.”

  “(My assistant) dialed the number and handed me the phone.”

  “The number you got from the studio?” Of course, from the studio, I thought. They’d read the number on the caller i.d. and passed the info along to one of the star’s salaried Oompa-Loompas.

  “I’m in the desert.”

  “Well, I happen to know the studio would be more comfortable if you were back in L.A. and everybody knew where to find you.”

  “Can I please just finish this one pass at the script?” I urged. “I promise to attend to all your issues the moment I deliver—”

  “They’re calling me to the set. Do me a favor and phone me when you get back L.A.”

  With that, the movie star hung up.

  I must have stewed for an hour without getting a single word written. Then I tried to reboot the work routine by playing my daily round of golf. But my focus had been crushed along with my initiative. So I cut bait, checked out of the hotel, angrily stuffed my bags in the trunk and pointed my car west. I burned up every minute of the drive with my cell phone, talking between my no-help agent and my way-too-understanding wife. I wanted to quit. Who cares if it was a bad career move? I wasn’t going to get bullied into writing an incomprehensible screenplay. After all, it was going to be MY name on the script, not the star’s nor the studio’s. But before that, I re

  solved to have one last conversation with the celestial being. I dialed him the moment I sank into my office chair.

  “I’m back in L.A.” I began tersely. “My mobile phone is turned on and I’m easily found by you and anyone else who needs me. Now here’s what I need from you. Patience. Help me make the studio notes work. Otherwise, you’re going to be starring in a really shitty movie.”

  “You gonna fax me pages?”

  “No.”

  “Then we have a problem.”

  “I guess we do,” I said flatly. “I strongly recommend you fire me.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Seriously. Fire me. Please. Because I can’t get it done this way. I’m not doing you any good. I’m not doing the studio any good.”

  I begged him. Implored him. Demanded that he fire me. A bullet to the back of my metaphoric head would have been sweet relief.

  “What about the deadline?”

  “What’s it matter? Won’t make it if I’m serving two masters with different agendas.”

  For the first time since I’d begun working with the star, the phone fell silent.

  “I’m not firing you,” he finally said. “And you’re not quitting the movie. Just do your best, okay?”

  “All I’ve been doing.”

  And that was it. Two weeks later I’d produced a draft that was as ready as five weeks would allow. I delivered. While the studio chewed on it, the screenplay was over-nighted to whatever Timbuktu-locale the movie star was marooned on. I’m told he and his manager both read it while sitting in his deluxe, air-conditioned trailer.

  I was pulling out of my driveway, on my way to pick up my kids from school when my cell phone trilled. The caller i.d. registered a far away country code.

  “Hello?” I answered, pretty certain I’d find you-know-who on the other end. It turned out to be a conference call with the star and his manager, whom I hadn’t spoken with since I’d made the deal for the rewrite.

  “It’s phenomenal,” said the manager. “You did an outstanding job.”

  “Yeah,” agreed the star. “Exactly what I was hoping for. You totally rocked it.”

  The accolades continued. And I politely thanked them and engaged in some meaningless chitchat. Then two minutes later, the pair was gone. Of course, there wasn’t a whisper of our previous conflict. Success has a funny way of bleaching the stains left behind from a pissing war.

  As for the movie? The studio’s cutting edge idea of hiring a shooter straight out of “director jail” didn’t fit the star’s image of a worthy auteur. Eventually, the production window slammed shut. The proposed release date was left in limbo and the movie star picked up another picture to fill his multi-million dollar slot. A classic parting of the ways.

  But when the trade press inquired as to why the studio and star couldn’t come to terms, it was the usual line of bull. Blame the writer. The script simply never worked. We went back to the drawing board.

  The screenplay I’d bled over was eventually reworked by the original scribe. As it turned out he still owed the studio a draft. So it was either pay the man for twiddling his thumbs or let him do his contracted duty.

  Four or five writers after that, the film finally got made.

  I’ve said it before, hindsight is a gift. Without it, how in heaven would we learn much of anything? Given the chance to do it again, I’m not entirely certain I’d handle myself the same way. It’s never a good idea to let feelings or a lack of patience screw up a chance at a go movie. On the other hand, based on the circumstance itself, I’m not certain the result would have been any different.

  Whatever. If there’s a life we learn with and another we live with, I often find myself residing in the former.

  Back in Black

  While in the midst of a publicity tour for my second novel, True Believers, I was scheduled for a radio interview in New York City. The station was conveniently uptown near Columbia University where I was to deliver a guest lecture to a gaggle of over-educated Ivy League film students. As expected, the enrollees were uniformly unimpressed with me as I began my humble presentation. After all, this was New York. Hometown to bona fide cinematic artists like Martin Scorcese and Spike Lee. Good thing I was prepared, having played the snobby film student vs. blue collar screenwriter game before. Oh. And it didn’t hurt that I was once an equally snotty film school undergraduate. So I understood from whence they came. By the end of my spin before the room full of young auteurs, I’d turned a few heads. Even impressed one or two. Satisfied with my performance, I moved on to my next appointment in Radioland.

  It was late afternoon as I took the elevator up to the station. As I stepped out, I was instantly greeted by a middle-aged receptionist behind a sliding window reminiscent of a dentist’s office.

  “May I help you?”

  “Yes,” I answered. “I’m here for an interview.”

  “And who are you with?” she asked.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I meant to say I was here to be interviewed. I have an appointment.”

  The receptionist looked at me oddly. And we all know that gaze. The one that makes you wonder if you’d just knocked on the wrong door.

  “Do you know who’s supposed to interview you?” she asked.

  “Afraid not,” I said before confirming I was at the correct radio station.

  “Oh yes,” she said. “You’re at the right place. But you don’t know who’s supposed to interview you?”

  “Nowhere on my itinerary,” I said. “Hang on. Lemme see if I can get my publicist on the phone.”

  “Publicist?” she said. “So you’re not here for a job interview?”

  “Oh, no,” I said, instantly recognizing the misunderstanding. “I’m a guest on a radio program.”

  “A guest?” she grinned. And then there was that look again before she asked, “What’s your name?”

  “Doug Richardson.”

  The receptionist shook her head and picked up her phone. As she announced me, I found a seat in the small reception area. It was rather nondescript. More fun
ctional than concerned with putting on a face. I hadn’t a clue what the station’s format was, the power of its signal or however many listeners it was able to rope in. What I did know was that I was a relatively unknown fiction author and not what anybody would consider ear candy. My experience in most electronic media was that broadcasters were more than happy to pimp my book as long as I chatted candidly about my travels in Hollywood. Civilized society vs. movie violence seemed to be the subject du jour. I was glad to tangle on any hot button issue as long as my book received a proper plug.

  “Where’s Mr. Richardson?”

  I looked up. But for the young lady in the doorway who’d uttered my name, I was the only other person present. The receptionist nodded toward me, that ever present grin of hers intact.

  “I’m Doug Richardson,” I said as I stood, hand extended.

  “Oh my,” she said, taking my hand.

  “Sorry,” I added. “But I’m getting the feeling that there’s been a screw-up. Do I have the wrong day?”

  In my addled brain, I was already blaming my publicist and the beaucoup bucks I was paying her. And this wouldn’t have been her first foul-up.

  “No,” said the comely young lady. “You’re in the right place at the right time. Wanna come back with me?”

  I followed the young lady into the bowels of the radio station. The corridors were tight, flanked by shelves stacked with spent audiotape.

  “Listen,” she said, “this is kind of embarrassing. But before I introduce you to John—he’s the host—I should tell you…”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Guess there’s no easy way to say it. When we booked you, we thought you were black.”

  “As in African-American?”

  As she nodded, it was all coming together like a csi crime scene. Uptown radio station. The quizzical looks from the receptionist. Oh, and did I mention that everyone who worked in the building was black? Ah, the dangers of a busy mind as I was once again caught unaware of my own surroundings.

  “Yes. Black,” she said. “I’m so embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be,” I said.

  “Really,” she said. “It’s my fault. I saw you’d written Bad Boys and this new Wesley Snipes movie that’s coming out. And I just thought…”

  “Then there’s my name.”

  “Richardson. Yes!”

  How many times has it been asked, “what’s in a name?” Well, in my surname, a lot of color. And in the United States, much of that traces back to the Deep South and the horrible legacy of plantation culture.

  Despite the crossed lines of communication, the radio station was classy enough to carry on with the scheduled interview. We even made hay of the misunderstanding with a robust on-air discussion about race in film. I might’ve even told the tale of my very first film class at usc. The professor was reading off the names of those in attendance. The professor eventually called out my name. I raised a hand. Then he called out another Richardson. The man next to me raised a massive black hand. Two feet to my left was a behemoth football player who shared my last name. He stared me down as if I resembled his brother from another planet.

  “What can I say?” I joked. “We had slaves.”

  The football player paused, then busted out with a broad smile. Everybody laughed. And from that day on, we’d greet each other with high-fives. I was “Brother Doug.” He was “Brother Dennis.”

  A week following the radio interview, I was visiting a Houston tv station when I was shaken by a sense of deja vu. The segment producer assigned to the pre-interview, was having difficulty finding the right words to describe her situation.

  “Lemme guess,” I said. “You thought I was black.”

  “How’d you know?” she asked, relieved I’d taken the air out of the balloon.

  “Not my first rodeo,” I said. “My name. My credits. Easy mistake.”

  Moments later she was staring at the jacket photo on the back of my novel.

  “How long have we had this book, anyway?” she asked an assistant. “You think somebody’d look at the damn picture.”

  It was maybe a month or two after when I’d returned home to Los Angeles and was happily back in the movie

  business. A producer pal had slipped me a black-themed action script that needed a speedy rewrite. Considering all the coin I’d paid out for travel and that lousy New York publicist, a quick production pass would have embroidered a big smile on my bank account.

  So I agreed to meet the producer and the film’s African-American director at his Warner Brothers office. As I sat in the reception area, I heard voices rise from the director’s inner sanctum. He was having an argument with my producer pal.

  “I’ve met Doug Richardson,” shouted the director. “And you know what? He’s NOT black.”

  In the meeting that followed I tried to convince the young director that having successfully written for Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, I’d passed the color test. We even shared a few laughs about the racial profiling that comically peppered my recent book tour.

  Yeah. But I still didn’t get the gig.

  Roadkill

  I was in a meeting with a Dreamworks executive. Somehow we got sidetracked into the always entertaining subject of “the strangest place a writer tried to slip you a screenplay.”

  “On my wedding day,” Deb began. “In the temple, wearing my wedding dress, waiting for my father to walk me down the aisle. The rabbi walks in. I think he’s there to check if I’m nervous. Small talk. Asks me where we’re gonna honeymoon and if I’m gonna have time to read. This is when he hands me an envelope with a script in it. Can you believe it?”

  Yes. I did. Pretty much everybody in the business with half a profile can relate.

  It’s been widely rumored that everybody in L.A. has a screenplay in their desk drawer, under the spare in the trunk of their car, even under their rabbinical robes.

  But let’s rewind a second for a brief reality check. Step One as a screenwriter is that you must get your screenplay read by someone who matters. Family members, car wash attendants, and pediatricians don’t generally count unless they’re related to or neighbors of an insider who’s a household name above a picture’s title. So Step One can be flat out hard. Step Two, getting repped, is even harder. Harder still is Step Three, getting paid to write. Of course, that’s followed by the most difficult of all, Steps Four and Five, getting your screenplay produced then getting produced again so you can make those mortgage payments on that pre-war junior-ranchero you just moved in to in Santa Monica.

  But still. None of that happens unless you first complete Step One. If you don’t get someone that matters

  to commit their eyeballs to those hundred-plus pages you’ve bled over, nothing good will happen. The question is, how the hell do I get read? And sometimes, the answer to that question requires more creativity than your best writer’s moment, not to mention a load of stones, gall, or plain inspiration.

  I followed up Debbie’s rabbi story with my own fave.

  It was a sunny Wednesday in February. I’m in my Jeep, top down, driving west on the 118 Freeway in the north Valley. I’m on my way to a director pal’s movie set. He’d set me up for a casual lunch with a particularly sexy young English actress with whom he was currently working. Thus, the perma-grin etched on my bachelor’s face. I was just pulling off at the Tampa exit when I came upon a poor fat sod in a loud sports jacket and his broken-down Cadillac. Radiator steam was fizzing out from the open hood. The man had no cell phone so he was waving me down. I slowed and kindly agreed to deliver the hapless sap to the nearest gas station. He climbed in, buckled, and clung tightly to his briefcase.

  Southbound on Tampa the fellow asks, “What’s a young lad like yourself doing out in the middle of the day? You have a job?”

  I was so ginned up over my upcoming lunch date, I forgot to tell the usual fib (to avoid awkward situtations such as the one that followed), and instead told him the truth.

  “You’re a scr
eenwriter?” he said. “A working screenwriter?”

  I answered in the affirmative. That’s when, in his moment of excitement, my passenger flicked the locks on his briefcase and lifted the lid. Inside was the man’s typewritten screenplay, loose leaf. His one and only copy.

  Let me now explain the aerodynamic properties of a Jeep convertible driving at fifty-five miles per hour. The vehicle was never designed for a quiet cockpit. In fact, it’s pretty perverse. I’d often pick up dinner dates who were wearing sundresses, hit the gas, only to have their lightweight frock rise up skyward to both embarrassment and giggles. At worst, it was a conversation starter.

  Back to my over-excited passenger with his original and unbound screenplay laying in the briefcase that he’d just so unthinkingly thrown open. It was as if all one hundred pages of his hard work had been volcanically shot straight up in the air out of a canon.

  “My screeeeeeeeeennnnnnnnppppplllllllaaaaaayyyy!” he yelled.

  I instantly braked. But I could already see the writer’s nightmare unfolding in my rear view mirror. My passenger’s one and only copy of his typewritten screenplay was now decorating Tampa Boulevard like confetti.

  My lunch with the hot-off-the-boat Brit was suddenly on pause as I found myself dodging cars, assisting my passenger in the page by page retrieval his opus, one precious slice of paper at a time.

  The script was scattered over more than an eighth of a mile of four-lane blacktop. Some pages were relatively unscathed. Others newly stamped with tread marks. It took something like thirty minutes but I believe we were able to vacuum up most of the script. It was when I was trudging back to the Jeep doing my utmost to help collate my pile of paper when I couldn’t help but read a few lines of my idiot passenger’s not-so-clever dialogue.

  I can’t print any of it here. Let’s just say it was adult in nature and in keeping with the rest of the porn opus I’d just helped rescue from becoming road kill.

  “Porn movie, huh?” I said to my passenger.

  “You read some of it?” he asked.

  “Sorry. Couldn’t help myself.”