by James Brown
“You certainly know how to write a screenplay,” the producer tells me after he’s read it. “But it’s too dark. I think we need a fresh eye on this.”
In short, I am fired and a fresh eye is hired. In this writer’s version the oldest brother, the aspiring actor, is now the lead singer of a rock band. The middle brother is the bass guitarist. The youngest, the runaway, is the drummer. They aren’t tough kids anymore. They aren’t even poor.
That writer is fired.
So is the producer. The executive in charge of the project takes it on herself to hire another writer. This one does a fine job but by the time he’s finished the executive has also been fired and the woman who replaces her has her own agenda. Unfortunately that agenda does not include making my novel into a movie and it soon falls into that netherworld known as “turnaround,” where the costs of another company acquiring the project are astronomical.
The option lapses.
My phone stops ringing. My book mysteriously disappears from the bookstores and a few weeks later I receive in the mail another rejection from the New Yorker. Because I’m depressed I run out and buy more drugs and alcohol. I invite my friends over to take my mind off things but half of them don’t show up. They’re lightweights. The party continues without them.
DEAL II
I am thirty-six years old and a little less confident. When an independent producer in New York options my third novel I am excited but cautious. In a year or two they might make the movie. Because it will be shot on a small budget, and because it will be only moderately successful, I can expect this novel to sell better than my last but by no stretch will it land on the best-seller list. I might appear on a local cable talk show. Maybe it will be a kind of cult hit. Above all the New Yorker will undoubtedly catch wind of this independent sleeper, recognize me for the undiscovered talent that I am, and publish one of my short stories. In the meantime the celebration begins. I run out and buy an eight-ball of methamphetamine because it is cheaper and stronger than coke, a few cases of Budweiser, a half-gallon of Smirnoff, Dewar’s scotch and Seagram’s 7 and invite my friends over for a party. But most of them are busy for some reason, and what few do show end up leaving early when I make an ass of myself. They’re lightweights anyway.
This time the novel I sold is about an old man who runs a little theater out of a hotel in downtown Los Angeles, a hotel that’s slated for demolition to make way for a freeway. He and his friend, a young alcoholic playwright, attempt to stage one last production before the building is razed, and time is running out. Of course there’s more to it, a lot more, which is one of the problems in adapting it into a screenplay. But I’m willing to try.
The producer flies out from New York and we meet at Starbucks in Brentwood. He is an older, impeccably well-dressed gentleman, and he stands out in this crowd of mostly college students dressed in tank tops and flip-flops.
“You realize,” he says, “that there’ll have to be some changes.”
“What kind of changes?”
“Don’t worry,” he says. “They’re nothing major.”
He takes a sip of his coffee. He sets it back down and dabs his mouth with his napkin. “For instance,” he says, “I don’t think the young playwright should be alcoholic. Alcoholics are detestable people and don’t make for likable characters.”
I wonder if he realizes that he is working with one. I wonder if he notices that my hands tend to shake around the time it is now, happy hour, a little after five o’clock. I need a drink but any suggestion I might’ve had of carrying this meeting over to the bar across the street is dashed.
The producer is an articulate, intelligent man, and during the course of our meeting he gives me several pages of notes, all of them insightful. I want to do a good job, and once more I’m willing to mercilessly cut and chop, create new scenes and eliminate others.
Inside of six months we have a strong screenplay with the original vision of the novel still intact. The producer shops it around to actors, directors and studio executives. A year passes. No luck. The call comes from Vermont, where he’s vacationing, and I can sense by the tone of his voice that he’s given up.
“You wrote a good script,” he tells me. “But they’re all saying it’s too soft.”
My phone stops ringing. My book mysteriously disappears from the bookstores. I think it’s all over and then out of the blue he phones again to tell me, in short, that I’m fired.
“What I think we need,” he says, “is a fresh eye.”
The new draft arrives in a manila envelope a couple of months later. The story, which originally took place in downtown Los Angeles, now opens in the jungles of Vietnam. But I’m not shocked. I’m not angry. I set the script aside after reading a few pages and reach for the other manila envelope that also arrived in the day’s mail, the one with my own handwriting on it. It’s from the New Yorker, and I’m hoping, as I split the envelope, that someone has been kind enough to include a word of encouragement on the rejection slip enclosed.
Because I’m depressed I invite my friends over for a party to help take my mind off things. But no one shows up. It’s just as well. This way I don’t have to share my dope and alcohol. I party alone with a gram of meth and a half-gallon of Popov’s vodka.
DEAL III
I’m forty-three years old now and not so hopeful anymore. Maybe I am even a little bitter. When my fourth novel is optioned by another independent producer, this one from London, I am guarded. Before the year is up I’ll deliver what I believe is a decent screenplay and then I’ll be fired. Because the movie probably won’t get made, and because my book probably won’t sell any better than my others, I’ll bank the money I make and be thankful I got it. In the meantime the celebration begins. I make reservations at a nice Mexican restaurant and invite my closest friends to dinner, the worst of the lightweights, the ones who prefer me clean and sober. We drink Martinelli’s sparkling cider and espresso and have a great time.
This last novel is a coming-of-age story, a love story about a son and his father and an ex-prostitute with a passion for crime. They’re on the run from the law, beginning on the banks of the Willamette River in Oregon and ending in catastrophe in Las Vegas. Of course it’s more complicated than this, and capturing those complications in a script won’t be easy, but I’m ready to try. I’m ready to give it my best shot.
The producer flies out from London and we meet at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. He’s a pale Englishman and we conduct our meeting over lunch under a cabana at poolside. Like his New York counterpart, he is intelligent and articulate, though considerably younger. His first movie has just been released, one of the actors has been nominated for an Oscar, and it is doing well here and abroad. As we talk a young woman in a bikini strolls by our cabana, and I think I recognize her. I think I’ve seen her on TV but I don’t remember where.
“It’s a terrific novel,” he says. “But I’m sure you understand we’ll have to make some changes.”
“What kind of changes?”
“Let’s have a drink first,” he says.
He orders vodka on the rocks. I order a seltzer water with a twist of lime. I like this man. He believes in my work, enough to invest his time and money, and it’s my responsibility to do the best job I can. I also know that I’m not getting any younger and these opportunities won’t continue to fall in my lap.
Once again, when I leave our meeting, I am prepared to mercilessly cut and chop. The difference this time around is that the producer has already interested an up-and-coming director in our project and soon I receive pages and pages of notes from both of them. I write a first draft.
They like it and want me to do another. They are already talking to studios, actors and finance companies. There is interest.
There is buzz.
I put in long hours on the next draft. I labor over every scene, every line of dialogue. In under a month I finish and send it off. The producer calls after he reads it and he’s excited.
Those are his exact words, and I can still hear them, echoing in my head, when he phones a week later to fire me.
“The director,” he says, “feels that it’s uninspired. What I think we need on this is a fresh eye.”
Before he can hire a new writer, however, the director hits it with a big movie and wants nothing more to do with our project. The producer’s interest wanes.
The option lapses.
My phone stops ringing. My book mysteriously disappears from the bookstores and soon another rejection slip from the New Yorker arrives in the mail. It sounds like the same old story but something has changed this time. Something about it feels brand-new. Maybe it has to do with that third strike. Maybe it’s about the other close calls, too, the hopes they inspired and my coming to realize how few ever get the shots I’ve had. I’m sure of one thing, though. It’s not about Hollywood anymore, or getting drunk and wasted, and in some ways it never has been. This is a bigger story now. One about change. Adaptation and acceptance. The drafts are endless but it’s the writer, not the story, who undergoes the most important revisions.
Summer 1970
A FINE PLACE
In the trunk we have four IBM self-correcting Selectrics, five adding machines and three Dictaphones. In the backseat, hidden under a blanket, are a Pioneer stereo, a half-dozen eight-track tape decks and a thirteen-inch Zenith color TV, brand-new, still in the box. I am fourteen years old. My friend Tito is sixteen, and we are unloading these items from his mother’s Buick, items I helped him acquire. This takes place in an alley behind a used-furniture store in Watts, and I remember it vividly, this summer of 1970, because it is the first time I used heroin.
The woman buying these things works at the furniture store. She wears high heels and a tight dress made of shiny blue fabric. She’s shaved off her eyebrows and penciled them in with black eyeliner, and I find this odd. I find it hard not to stare. She talks to Tito, not me, because they know each other from past dealings. He has sold her stolen goods before.
“You can keep the tape decks,” she says. “I’ll give you four hundred for the rest.”
“Why not the decks?”
“I don’t need them.”
“Ten each,” Tito says.
“Five,” she says.
“Shit,” he says. “The wiring is worth more than that.”
On one side of the alley are the back entrances and loading docks for the different businesses that face Vermont Avenue. On the other side are the garages and carports of the run-down apartments and houses that face the neighboring street. The woman points to a bright yellow garage just across from the furniture store. “You boys can put the stuff in there,” she says. “I’ll walk you over.” Tito reaches into the trunk for one of the Selectrics. I take another. It weighs about sixty, seventy pounds but feels light in my arms because the adrenaline is rushing and I am abnormally strong. What I want, and I want it badly, is to unload the car, collect our money and get out of here. Tito is experienced at this kind of thing and senses my anxiousness.
“Relax, Brown,” he says. “You’re sweating like a motherfucker.”
Inside the garage are four or five black men standing around a workbench in the corner. A dim lightbulb dangles from an extension cord strung along the rafters and the smell of something burning hangs in the air. One of the men looks up at the woman and nods. The others glance at us, then turn away, and it makes me curious, what it is they’re doing, how completely it consumes them. The man in the middle of the group is in the process of unfastening a belt from around his arm, and when we leave the garage, when we return with another load he is slumped in a chair, his eyes closed.
We set the stuff on the concrete floor, and on the way back to the car again I ask Tito about him, the man in the chair.
“What’s wrong with that guy?”
“Nothing,” he says.
“He looks wasted.”
“Wasted good,” Tito says. “Where he’s at right now nobody, nothing, can touch him. It’s a fine place, man, a beautiful place.”
Later, when we’ve collected our money, Tito buys two bags of heroin for forty dollars and we drive back across town to the mountains of Griffith Park. At sixteen he has already fixed before. “A couple times,” he tells me. “And it’s a real trip.” But I am fourteen, a virgin to the needle, and scared. I have heard the horror stories in school about drug addiction and junkies, stories designed to frighten, but still, or in spite of them, I want to go to that fine place where nothing can touch me. I see it as a kind of test, a kind of dare. With his teeth, Tito tears a strip from an old beach towel he found in the trunk of the car and ties it around my arm.
We are parked now along a quiet mountain road overlooking Hollywood, and in the distance, as Tito tightens the knot, I think I can see all the way to the Pacific. I don’t want to watch what he’s doing. I don’t want to see the needle going in, and so I look out on the city spread before me. “Make a fist,” Tito says. The sun is just setting, a thin layer of smog hangs in the sky, and the colors, refracted through the fading light, are remarkable. Pinks. Yellows. Shades of purple and brown. “Hold still,” he says, and then I feel it, the sting, like a mosquito bite. The rush is deep, warm and profound. It’s as if I’m sinking into myself, and for several moments, instead of feeling pleasure I am panicked, because I don’t know where or how far it’s taking me, how deep I’m going down. But then it levels out and I find myself somewhere between wakefulness and dream. Tito laughs, but his laughter sounds hollow, distant, like an echo.
In the summer of 1970, after a lengthy battle, my brother receives a psychiatric deferment from the United States Army. This is during the Vietnam War and he says he would kill himself if he were drafted. He says he would kill those who come to take him away in self-defense, fully expecting to go to prison or terminate his own life. In this memory I am troubled for my brother. In this memory I am sitting at the table in the kitchenette at his apartment and he is standing in the living room in front of the window that overlooks the rooftops of the shops and stores along Hollywood Boulevard.
We are drinking Wild Turkey 101 from styrofoam cups but it’s too strong for me. I’m not keeping up.
“You don’t really mean that stuff,” I say, because I am concerned.
“About what?”
“Killing yourself.”
He speaks casually, with false bravado, and it angers me.
“Maybe,” he says. “Maybe not.”
“Don’t mess with me,” I say. “You made it up to get out of the draft. That’s all.”
He laughs, and for a moment I relax and laugh with him. I like to believe that it’s all just a smoke screen, an acting role, another stellar performance that commences years earlier, when he first sees a psychiatrist. He goes not because he wants help but because he needs to establish a psychiatric record for himself, knowing full well that whatever he tells the doctor will later appear on the report to the draft board. My brother is a fine actor and his plan works. I’m relieved that he won’t be going to Vietnam but that doesn’t stop me from worrying. His drinking is getting out of hand, though it has yet to take its toll in physical terms; at his age the body is remarkably resilient. Barry is strong and handsome, his career is going well, and for all outward appearances he is a model of success.
A copy of his psychiatric report rests on the table in front of me, and I read from it, silently, to myself: An induction of this young man would result in personal catastrophe of either suicide or homicidal violence. In either condition he would be of no service or use in the Armed Forces.
I push the paper aside.
“It’s bullshit, right?”
“I don’t know.”
“What’d you mean you don’t know?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore, does it? I’m not being drafted.”
I want to believe him, and I do. In this scene, at this moment, his rationalizations are enough for
me. Free of the draft, there is no threat to his life or another’s. But some years later, when I’m going through his belongings and come across the psychiatric report, I will know I believed a lie.
This takes place at a small Equity-waiver theater on La Cienega Boulevard in Hollywood. Again the year is 1970. Again it is summer, and my sister is performing tonight in an experimental play, an ensemble piece designed to showcase the talents of the various members of her acting class. The teacher is a veteran character actor who rarely works anymore, who survives now from the proceeds of his teaching, and he is staging this production for the benefit of his students. He is also the playwright and director. According to my sister there will be important agents, producers and directors in the audience tonight, and they will all be looking for new talent. Marilyn is both nervous and excited. She wants what Barry is now getting, recognition, but so far it has eluded her.
My memory of this night opens in the theater: my mother and I, sitting on hard wooden fold-out chairs, fanning ourselves with our programs, waiting for the play to begin. The place is packed, and with no windows, no fans or air-conditioning, it is uncomfortably warm, the air unpleasant to breathe. Still I’m looking forward to watching my sister perform and I am sure that our mother feels the same. My brother is conspicuously absent from this picture.
Because there are thirty students in Marilyn’s acting class, and because the teacher wants to give each of them the opportunity to be seen, there are thirty roles in the play. This makes the story hard to follow with the different actors coming and going onstage and occasionally all of them appearing at once. I am confused much of the time but I attribute this confusion to my inexperience and lack of education. Certainly the play has hidden meanings, meanings that escape the simple mind of a fourteen-year-old boy, and because they escape me I am sure they must be significant and profound. Unfortunately Marilyn is just one of thirty hopefuls, and in the end, when the curtains are drawn, I feel that she’s been cheated, the display of her talents shortchanged, lost in the chaos.