by Rex Weiner
It was time for me to head back to the Big Apple.
The Backstory
The Ford Fairlane stories first came to public attention through their publication in two quirky periodicals, The New York Rocker and the LA Weekly. The former focused on contemporary music and the latter was an “alternative weekly” devoted to local happenings. Neither had ever published fiction before, and the editorial decision to present stories about a “New Wave Private Eye” serialized in regular installments was not a likely bet.
The late nineteenth century was the heyday of serialized fiction, with Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Alexandre Dumas, Henry James, and Herman Melville among its most popular practitioners. Harriet Beecher Stowe published Uncle Tom’s Cabin in forty installments. More recently, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City ran in San Francisco newspapers, and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities appeared in twenty-seven issues of Rolling Stone.
The premise, of course, is that the immediacy of the writing captures a contemporary sensibility that strikes a chord; avid readers hooked by cliff-hangers at the end of each episode, rush to buy the publication to find out what happens next.
There was little evidence in the late 1970s, however, that punk rockers were avid readers, although several performers of the genre, such as Richard Hell, Jim Carroll, and Patti Smith, were active poets and writers. Recent books memorializing the era include Smith’s Just Kids, Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band, and Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain. But for the motley crowds crushed into CBGB or slamming the mosh pit at the Starwood, contemporary fiction was not necessarily a big draw.
Within this context, editors Andy Schwartz of New York Rocker and Jay Levin of LA Weekly—passionate about their publications, and with a particular editorial outlook attuned to their times—helped launch The Adventures of Ford Fairlane.
Similarly, but with a different object, filmmaker Floyd Mutrux got hold of the stories and became a Ford Fairlane fan, devoting nearly two years of his life to making a feature-length motion picture based on Rex Weiner’s concept of a private eye who worked in the music business.
For the first time, in interviews by author and musicologist Pat Thomas, Schwartz, Levin, and Mutrux talk about why they took a chance on Ford Fairlane.
Interview with Andy Schwartz
In April 1980, the New York Rocker launched The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, New Wave Private Eye as a six-part serialized story. Andy Schwartz was the editor and publisher of the monthly, tabloid-sized paper, which had a circulation of about twenty thousand and offices a short walk from the loft where Rex Weiner lived in what was then the warehouse district of Chelsea on Manhattan’s west side.
A New York native, Andy Schwartz began writing about pop music in 1972 as an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, and later wrote a weekly music column for the alternative weekly Metropolis. He also worked behind the counter of the legendary Minneapolis record shop Oar Folkjokeopus. Soon after returning to New York in 1977, Andy became publisher and editor of New York Rocker, the punk/new wave magazine founded by the late Alan Betrock. Under Schwartz’s direction, NYR published forty-four issues and became one of the most widely read and influential American music publications. He became director of editorial services for Epic Records, a division of Sony Music, and has served as editor of the program book published for the Rock & Roll Hall off Fame’s annual induction dinner. His recent clients include Time Life music and top-tier NYC jazz club, Jazz Standard.
The New York Rocker didn’t normally print this kind of stuff, what inspired you to run the Ford Fairlane serial?
Schwartz: Because we hadn’t printed that kind of thing before. No one had even tried to submit such a thing.
Do you remember what kind of reaction you were getting from readers?
Schwartz: No. I don’t remember getting any particular correspondence or anything. Of course, this is like thirty-five years ago, so. But I thought it was an interesting and unique idea. It seemed to relate to the New York scene of the time, the club scene, and so on, so I just went with it. I can tell you it wasn’t a big financial outlay on the part of the magazine.
What was your reaction when it was relayed into a movie? Were you surprised by that?
Schwartz: Well, yeah, because this was a period of almost a decade—like almost eight or nine years—between the time it ran as a serial in the magazine and the movie hit the screen. So, yeah, I was surprised.
Did you wind up seeing the movie?
Schwartz: No, I never have.
What would you say characterized the 1970s as a creative era?
Schwartz: Well, you know, it’s a big question. Musically—I’ll just speak to that—clearly the original punk rock movement, most of which was not even punk rock in the way that most people think of it. In other words, The Ramones are a template, or an archetype, but these other bands that were their contemporaries in New York—Blondie, Television, Patti Smith Group, Talking Heads—each one was a different idea, and few, if any, sounded like people’s idea of punk rock. In that sense, the American creative impulse was moving in a bunch of different directions that were really, if they had anything in common, it was really only in response to the rock/pop mainstream of the period. If you look at the Hot 100 of 1978 it’s like the softest, weakest, most gutless Hot 100 ever, you know? It’s a ton of Bee Gees–related records, some of which were good pop records in and of themselves, but a lot of it is like Clapton to Neil Diamond, Elton John…all this soft rock from this period in 1978. So, what these bands that I’m talking about, the foundation of that scene—what they had in common was what they stood in opposition to.
And in the time of “Ford Fairlane,” rent was still cheap, right?
Schwartz: That was certainly true. New York City was still very much like the New York City of lore. High crime, housing stock in decay, buildings abandoned by their landlords in places like the East Village and taken over by squatters. It was rough and tough. All of those elements that are now used to set the scene in movies and TV series about the city in the seventies was quite real, which is not to say that there weren’t a great number of wealthy people living in New York and major corporations doing business everyday, you know. But the seventies was when the music business, in large part, moved from New York to Los Angeles. Capitol had always been based in LA, but Jac Holzman’s Elektra label was moved to LA under him and then under different CEOs until it was moved back to New York. Warner Bros. had always been based in Burbank. Columbia Records had been, as a part of CBS, based in New York, but established a major headquarters and a much stronger presence in Los Angeles in this period, and so on. There was considerable movement. RCA was headquartered in LA.
Can you tie the Ford Fairlane stories to any other writing from that era or genre? If someone asked you what the stories were like, and they hadn’t read them yet, would you be able to give a comparison to anything?
Schwartz: It seems to me that in this period of the late seventies and into the eighties there was something of a revival of interest in classic, hardboiled literature. Even the discovery of authors whose work had been completely classified as drugstore exploitation books, someone like Charles Willeford, Jim Thompson, people like that, I think underwent a kind of rediscovery, beginning in this period. Some of those books were reprinted. As far as Rex’s contemporaries, I’m not sure really who would come to mind here. I was pretty busy publishing a magazine; I didn’t necessarily keep up with current literary events of the time, you know? So, this is why I have a hard time thinking a suitable comparison to the Ford Fairlane stories. This era seems to be making a comeback in terms of a whole slew of memoirs. Richard Hell did a book about two years ago, Robert Lloyd just did a book, Patti Smith’s done two volumes. Richard Boch did a book on the Mudd Club.
Why would somebody who hasn’t read the Ford Fairlane stories before be interested in them
—what would you tell a younger person is the attraction?
Schwartz: I’d tell them it was fun to read and that it tells an intriguing, fictional story set in that time and place, and it’s got a degree of verisimilitude with real musicians and real people weaving in and out of the scene. It’s just a fun thing to read.
Interview by Pat Thomas
Interview with Jay Levin
In the fall of 1980, just as the concluding episode of the first “Ford Fairlane” story was published in the New York Rocker, a new “adventure” was launched in Los Angeles. Episode One of The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, New Wave Private Eye appeared on September 12, 1980 in the LA Weekly, kicking off a six-part serial in the same way as the New York Rocker, but a distinct departure from the weekly’s usual editorial mix of crusading local journalism and hipster entertainment reviews.
Jay Levin is the founder and former CEO and editor-in-chief of the award-winning LA Weekly newspaper, which he sold in 1996 and went on to run three other media companies and start three nonprofits. Currently, he is president of the Big EQ Campaign, an educational advocacy group. Levin is also a life and executive coach.
What inspired you to publish the Ford Fairlane serial? Something that the LA Weekly typically didn’t do.
Jay Levin: We were very experimental and open-minded about what would work and what wouldn’t work. We didn’t want to be too predictable, so if something came along that I really liked or that I thought would speak to an audience but would be in the gestalt of the audience—well, that was an operational theme we had at the time. I came out of New York, I got on the phone with Rex about his stories—at that time it was running in the New York Rocker. He talked about merging it to LA and I thought, “OK, this would be fun and an easy read,” and, “Why not?” I’d once asked Charles Bukowski to do a column and he said, “Yeah, as long as I get to write whatever I want.” I said, “Yeah.” So, he did three or four and they were fun and fine—Bukowski kind of stuff—and then he did one where he had this mother take a girl to an eye doctor and the eye doctor closes the door, says the mother can’t come in, and wants to molest and scare the little girl into sex acts by showing her a bottle of eyes, and he’s saying, “I’m gonna put your eyes in here unless you cooperate with me.” He expected me to run it! And I thought, “Well, this guy’s just testing me. He’s gotta just be testing me.” I said, I’m not running it, so he quit. [Laughs] I knew that with Rex that wouldn’t happen. I thought what he was doing was fun and cheeky. It was not a hard decision.
This is sort of the golden era of the entertainment weeklies, right?
Levin: Yeah, this was sort of in the middle of the golden era. It got more golden for the weekly over the next twenty-five years.
Around that time period, when the Ford Fairlane stories ran, rents were still cheap in New York, which allowed artists and musicians to do their thing in a loft that they probably paid a hundred dollars a month for. Was LA similar back then?
Levin: Yeah, there was that scene there, for sure. LA also created the wise-guy cop writers, the LA writers like Raymond Chandler, so Rex’s story sort of caught a bit of that flavor as well.
Do you remember any feedback from the readers?
Levin: I don’t remember anything negative. People either liked it, thought it was relevant. Overall, my memory of it was that we had a positive response to it.
Were you surprised that a decade later it became a movie?
Levin: No, and hooray for Rex. I knew that was his goal, but I thought it was a long shot. It was popular and I think it helped him get the movie deal so that was great.
Did you see the movie?
Levin: I can’t remember. [Laughs] I don’t remember a lot of what happened back in those years.
Interview by Pat Thomas
Interview with Floyd Mutrux
Not long after The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, New Wave Private Eye ran in the LA Weekly in the fall of 1980, the stories came to the attention of LA-based writer/producer/director Floyd Mutrux. By October 1981, he and Rex Weiner were developing a screenplay for a motion picture version under contract at Columbia Pictures, to be directed by Mutrux. It never went into production. Not until the stories were optioned, developed into a screenplay by a series of writers, and later produced in 1990 by Joel Silver at 20th Century Fox, and directed by Renny Harlin, did the stories become an actual major studio motion picture. But Ford Fairlane was first introduced to Hollywood as a viable movie project through Mutrux.
Floyd Mutrux grew up in Houston and Los Angeles. After a stint with Second City in Chicago and New York, he attended Columbia University before returning to LA in the 1970s. He wrote and directed a documentary for Warner Bros. about heroin on the LA streets called Dusty and Sweets McGee, which earned rave reviews. Mutrux went on to write and produce the action comedy Freebie and the Bean at Warner Bros., one of the biggest grossing films of 1974; the next year he directed Aloha, Bobby and Rose, released by Columbia, the sixth largest grossing picture of the year. Among many movies he was involved in, Floyd directed American Hot Wax at Paramount, about Alan Freed, the 1950s radio DJ and concert promoter who coined the term “rock ’n’ roll.” Today, Mutrux is the writer of Broadway hit musicals Million Dollar Quarter and Baby It’s You.
When Rex Weiner met Mutrux, the veteran Hollywood filmmaker had recently completed writing and directing Hollywood Knights—starring Tony Danza and a young Michelle Pfeiffer—a summertime teen comedy, which grossed $10 million on a budget of $2.5 million for Columbia Pictures. Mutrux seemed to be on a roll.
How did the Ford Fairlane stories first come to your attention?
Mutrux: A guy named Neil Silver worked for me. He had worked for the record producer Lou Adler. Lou and I had produced the Cheech & Chong movie Up in Smoke. Neil read it somewhere. I don’t remember where. He spoke to me about it.
What interested you about the stories?
Mutrux: I’d had it in my mind at some point to do some kind of Dashiell Hammett, Farewell, My Lovely kind of story—the PI, the girl, whatever. I had an idea to do one of those. Like the series James Garner was in that ran for many years about this kind of guy—he lived in a trailer out on the beach, a detective who doesn’t carry a gun and has an assistant who’s an idiot.
I’d done a ton of cop movies, maybe ten different pilots for TV, and the movie Freebie and the Bean. I hung around cops a lot in the parking lot of the Whisky a Go Go. The Sunset Strip belonged to the Sheriff’s Department. There was one cop, a big tough guy, heart of gold—but you hoped he’d better not be the bad guy—a big Mexican American who worked homicide. He was at the Whisky a lot. It was kind of a mobbed-up joint; Jimmy Hoffa was arrested there. A lot of wise guys hanging there, gangsters, whatever. That part of the Strip was what it was.
Along the way I decided to write about this PI who had a lot of history that was cloudy. What was the music called at that time, The Pretenders, Soft Cell, Pet Shop Boys—new wave? I wrote about a new wave detective, a guy who drove around town in a Rent-a-Wreck and as a policy didn’t do cases involving runaways. On the door it says, “No Runaways.” Of course, the first case he gets into ultimately involves a runaway. And his whole history is revealed—the girl that he loved, the woman on the Strip that got away, the one he always thought was dead. The runaway turns out to be his illegitimate daughter that he didn’t know about, and her mother is the woman he’d been in love with. The story was called The Girl With The Purple Hair. The girl’s name was Tomorrow. The sequel was going to be called Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. That was in my mind.
So you optioned Rex Weiner’s stories and…
Mutrux: Rex did a series of articles. I don’t know that I read them all. What happened was, I told Columbia what I was doing on [a project about the Hillside Strangler called] The Strangler, and I was working also on the prequel—or was it the sequel?—to Up in Smoke. Barry Diller didn’t want to do the original movie.
We were doing American Me, and at one point Al Pacino was doing it. But he chose not to drink and took the year off from work. That’s what his analyst suggested. So I was in the middle of it. Al and I were drinking together. We were doing rewrites on a movie called Scarecrow with Gene Hackman, won Best Picture at Cannes. We were hanging out, drinking at Dan Tana’s, the Troubadour, and all that. Then Al agreed to do Bobby Deerfield about a sports car driver. I was going to teach Al how to drive a stick shift while we were drinking, you can imagine how that worked out.
Anyway, this was somewhere between American Hot Wax and a great script I’d done called Happy Hour, Jon Voight was on board. It kept starting and stopping. Studios changed, executives changed. I’d also written a very strong script about the Hillside Strangler, a famous case where a number of women were snatched, they disappeared, their nude bodies were always discovered on a hillside. The script never got made. Neither did Happy Hour.
It was in the middle of all those things that I decided I wanted to try to do the Girl with the Purple Hair. I contacted Rex. Frank Price was head of Columbia Pictures, the studio where I was doing the Hillside Strangler. I said to Frank I wanted to do this other thing. At that time they would do anything I wanted. Aloha, Bobby And Rose and Freebie and the Bean had made a lot of money.
I described to Frank what I liked about Ford Fairlane. New wave music, the music that came after rock and roll went away. First there was rock and roll, then there was Michael Jackson, then it was gone. MTV told you everything you wanted to know. Music used to be a hip thing. Everyone who was into rock and roll, you know—it was like a secret club until it got out to the public. MTV killed all that. The bands stopped touring. They just did MTV, and guess what? When a band’s on the road—that’s when they write. They’d go on tour for six months and come back with an album. What do you think Mick and Keith do when they’re on the road? They take a barroom queen from Memphis down to the French Quarter in New Orleans, get wasted, and they write about it. “Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!” The Eagles went out on the road, they set up in a hotel, and they couldn’t leave, you know? MTV fucked it up. The bands never had a chance to grow. MTV and the record companies killed the music. It was over.