Close Encounters of the Hollywood Kind

Part One

There was a bidding war for the movie rights to my first novel, Under Cover of Daylight.

At the time, I was naively nonchalant about the whole process. I just assumed it was perfectly normal for a first time novelist to be courted by multiple Hollywood producers. However, from this vantage point, 35 years away, I can only marvel at the innocence and hubris of my younger self.

Several financial offers were made. Even Bruce Willis threw out a number which didn’t match the offers that two other producers had made. Sorry, Bruce. I probably should’ve taken your lowball offer. You would’ve made a great Thorn.

So my literary agent, in an act of what now looks like conscious cruelty, decided I should fly to Hollywood and decide which of the two producers whose offers were identical was more likely to actually make the film, and which of the two I would rather work with. He had to know he was throwing me in the shark tank.

This was 1987. I was 40 years old. But by Hollywood deal-making standards I was 11. Even 11 is being kind. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I’d been in school 90% of my life and though I’d watched a lot of movies, I knew nothing about how they were written (screenplays) or produced or how they were financed. Nevertheless, I was there to choose between two sets of producers who were well-versed in all of that. It was a “sliding doors,” fork-in-the-road moment. It was a choice that could have permanent implications on my career.

My agent decided I should stay in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, and as luck would have it, I was assigned to the uppermost floor. (A detail which will be relevant later.) First on the agenda was a breakfast meeting with a pair of producers. We met at some outdoor chic spot. I was dressed in my only sport coat and a tie. I believe the producers were expecting Thorn, a rugged guy in shorts and flip flops with sun-bleached hair. Well, at least back then I had the hair.

Paul Monash and Mace Neufeld were the producers. I’d never heard of either of them, but they were famous in movieland. Mace had produced The Omen and worked with Harrison Ford. He wanted to build a franchise around an ongoing character from fiction. I was one option. And I was to learn later that Tom Clancy was the other. Fast forward a million years and you can see who worked out for him. Mace Neufeld was the producer of all the Clancy movies.

Paul Monash had produced Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and Slaughterhouse-Five and Carrie. Paul and Mace decided they would team up to write and produce Under Cover of Daylight. A dream team, though I had no idea what an incredible stroke of luck this was.

We had a nice chat. Mace wanted to read some of my poetry. He was a poetry lover. He knew some famous poets back at Yale. Would I send him one of my books later on. Of course, of course. They wanted to know who they were up against. They wanted the names of their rivals, my dinner companions that same night. I was bright enough not to tell them.

Dinner that night was at Spago. Wolfgang Puck, le chef. I’d never heard of the restaurant, but I later learned it was the hottest of hot spots to dine. I forget the producer’s name, but his major credit was for Atlantic City, with Susan Sarandon. A movie I loved. The nameless producer brought along a date. He hoped I didn’t mind. She was drunk, she was stoned, she was high and chatty as hell. She kept talking about the book she was writing. She’d just finished a great scene that afternoon. The book was titled, You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again.

I thought, oh god, what a loser. What a stupid title. I had no idea who she was. That she and her husband had produced The Sting, Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It was Julia Phillips, and her book became a major bestseller, and a scandal because she exposed the dirty laundry of a few dozen Hollywood icons, Spielberg, etc. Jeez. As I said, I was swimming with the sharks.

All evening at our well-positioned table Hollywood stars kept stopping by to say hello. I was continually introduced as “the hot young writer from Miami.” That night was the last time anyone ever called me that. Ever again.

The next morning I went for a run through Beverly Hills checking out real estate possibilities. Some of the mansions were too excessive even in my swoon of self-importance. I was fantasizing about abandoning Florida, heading to the west coast and snuggling up with all these gorgeous people. That fantasy lasted about fifteen minutes.

Back in my hotel room, taking off my running shoes, a 5.9 earthquake centered in Whittier struck. The hotel shook, swayed, rumbled. I thought at first (being a boy from Kentucky) that the Magic Fingers had misfired in the bed. That it was only the mattress vibrating. But no. Windows broke, people screamed. And I did what any normal American does in a time of crisis, I turned on the TV.

The TV was set to a local news station and at that moment the news anchor yelped and ducked under his TV desk while lights exploded in the studio. California wimp.

I ran down many flights of stairs to the lobby to see what the protocol was and because the upper floors were still swaying. A desk clerk was standing on the check-in counter yelling at the panicked guests, “It’s over now, you can go back to your rooms. It’s over.”

And I’m thinking two things: How the hell does this guy know it’s over? Does he have a hotline to the tectonic plates? This could be the beginning of the big one.

And second: In Florida when we have our natural disasters (hurricanes), there’s a storyline: Well, something is coming off of Africa. We better keep an eye on it. Well, now it’s starting to gather energy from the warm seas. And now, well, it looks like it’s time to give this one a name. And now Grendel seems to be setting a path right for us. And now and now. A plot, a story. Not like this California stuff. It hits, it’s over. Get back to your latte.

And our newsmen don’t dive under their desks. They’re out in the hundred mile an hour winds, holding onto a palm tree reporting away.

And that’s everything I needed to know about California. Even their natural disasters have no attention span.

After the earthquake and the TV newsman, all I wanted was to get back to Florida. Flip a coin, choose a producer and be done with California forever.

I wrote a terrible script. Never got to work with Paul Monash to fix it because a Hollywood writers’ strike blew up at exactly that moment making it illegal for writers to communicate with producers. So it was months later that they fired me as the screenwriter and hired another script writer who wrote a silly script full of shark attacks and hurricanes and mafia types.

And nothing came of any of that except a couple of nice checks and these stories. In the long run, it’s these stories that sustain me.

There are several more to come. I’ll get to them soon.