Besides, accidentally, I was getting pretty tight with their mom, a wild Norwegian broad who taught me not to carry a wallet because it ruined the bun fines on my tight whites. She should've been a pro, not a mom. Definitely.
One day I came over and the house was locked up. My boss was sitting on the front porch, drinking out of a bottle of aquavit, grinning into a bright, chirpy morning. He said his wife and a small hit squad of lawyers had gotten there at sunup. They had served him the divorce papers, then seized the house and contents. He showed me his Oscar, proud they hadn't got that, too.
That afternoon, we went to work at Warner Brothers. He had two tiny offices in the Writers Building, where he made phone calls, drank, coasted on his dimming reputation, and tried to put together projects for which Warners got "first look."
I started out as a reader for him. I read novels, magazines, plays-anything with print, it seemed-to see if there was a movie idea in it Hollywood is the only economic system I ever heard of that is this suicidaclass="underline" They have the basis for their life's blood-screenplays--read and analyzed by unqualified, jealous, illiterate jerkoffs like me. Then, the studio's current high-rolling bigshots scan the one-page "coverage" which, by the time they get it, has been Xeroxed so many times it's dark gray. After they see whether it's a project they might shoehorn one of their play-or-pay stars into, they then commit somewhere between ten and thirty million dollars and two hundred lives to it.
All because some pear-shaped wimp in a windowless room who, basically, gets paid by the cord, says yes or no. Smart, huh? And get this-the bigshots, who may be buttholes but are not stupid, know exactly how kamikaze their system.
They chuckle about it to each other over sixty dollar hot lobster salads at lunch. It's a great business. If you're a moron.
Anyway, after a while, I got bored reading; they never made one of MY movies.
I recommended this one to them-I did everything but go in and tap dance it-and they passed. It went back to its producer on turn-around, he took it to Universal who made it, and it grossed over a hundred million. By law, I can't tell you which one it was, they could sue me. They would, too. Movie executives can be real snakes, especially the piranhas in legal and business affairs.
My office was nice and all. I made my own hours, I liked my boss, and the work wasn't that hard.
But it sucked in the rewarding department and the bottom line is that you have to dig what you do, if you're going to do it well.
So when Bart Lopat, the famous old stunt gaffer-turned-director came in for a meeting with my boss, I struck up a friendship. Time passes. One day, I get a call from Lopat, who is shooting this flick in Portland.
I liked being a stuntman lots better than being in the story department. For one thing, it was mostly outdoors. They started me off stow-fight scenes, simple one-story falls, like that. I doubled Burt Reynolds up there in Oregon and later, Jim Gamer down in Mexico. It was great.
Real guys (none of your Volvo-driving Alan Alda types) doing real-guy stuff like jumping off trains - or falling off cliffs into icy rivers. Drink all night and sit around all day.
That's pretty much what studio moviemaking is all about. But it was good money and that's where I met the Fatman.
He was a legend, even among the stuntmen. He had been one of the great ones, way back when.
But he'd fused half his spine on a high fall gag in How The West Was Won and had to retire. That's when he discovered food and began getting fat. He didn't begin to get rich until he discovered his housekeeper, who had a real good set on her and the morals of a Moroccan goat. He changed her name to Sheenya Deep and turned her into a porno star.
Now, the Fatman was (outside of the Mafia) the biggest producer of adult films in town. He did Citizen Kum and The Maltese Phallus, among others. The guy's famous.
One afternoon (he'd come down on location just to hang out with the old gang), we were taking a whizz together in the honeywagon porta-potty, and - what can I tell you - the next day, I was in pornos.
When I started out, it was only on weekends. The bucks were good and I hate Sundays, anyway. Everything is closed and TV is mostly golf (barfo-matic) and political shit. The big surprise to me was that the folks who did dirty movies are nice. They are kind (if not real - bright), and considering they screw for a living, they are decent, honest people.
I had a few fairly rare attributes, which I don't think is really necessary to go into here, but suffice it to say, pretty soon they wanted me full-time. So, what the hell. First I did five days. Then, seven. It's easy work and all, but when push comes to flog, it's demeaning.
So when that- rag, The L.A. Express, published my daily diary in weekly installments, my shone didn't stop ringing. They called me the new Nathanael
West, whoever he is. All I did was tell the truth, pretty much. I was tired of being a sex object!
Plus which, my real sex life was beginning to drag. And I was getting bored with in-and-out, in-and-out-an endless routine only broken up by pompously dramatic blow jobs from girls with the mentality of an after-dinner mint.
So I took an early retirement and went to work for this guy, a real Hollywood operator, who I met at the Farmers market. He wore a pinky ring and had a hotcomb plugged into the lighter of his midnight-blue Eldo. He bragged that he'd been on every Writer's Guild strike-list since 1967.
He'd read in the trade papers about some movie about to be made that sounded good. Like one about an earthquake or soldier ants that take over Dayton.
Then, he'd go to one of the typing services, the ones that specialize in scripts, and he'd bribe some 100 word-per-minute dork typist and he'd come home, with a copy. Here's where I came in.
I rewrote them, scene for scene, changing all the names and places and dialogue. Where it would say "thousands of people are killed," I'd change it to "five people are killed." And where some poofter writer would be describing the hero as Clint Eastwood, I'd change it to Brad Dilhnan or George Maharis.
Then, my boss would take and sell it under the table to some TV company for ten grand and they'd try to make it. We averaged three of these a week. Slick, huh?
But it got grueling, even though I learned to type fast. So, as my sex life got back to normal, I began to look around again for something new. That was when I got into network television.
I had some things on The Mod Squad, Starsky and Hutch, and a few movies-of-the-week. I did the pilot for "Manimal," even though I lost the credit in a screwjob arbitration. They fucked the show up. My script was incredible.
Anyway, these days, I sell a little coke, although the business is not exactly growth anymore. Not like it used to be. Before Jane Fonda's belly muscles and that workout tape, before torn and Perrier got hip. But it still keeps me in enough bucks so I don't have to steal scripts or do wet loops anymore. Those days were the pits, I mean it. You look at those hunkie guys hunched over and covered with baby oil, blowing weir rocks all over the place, you probably think they re just country . boys with a double-digit I.Q. and no dream. But hey, one of them was me. So now you know you were wrong.
My life turned a comer into daylight the night I met Robin Lamoureaux.
I'd seen her, sure. Who hadn't? Three Emmys for Nighttime, she was so great, it gives me goose bumps to think about it. Remember her on the Donahue show when she got him to sing "Danny Boy" and he cried? Robin had been a semi-well-known character actress for years. She'd show up in the middle of the second act and get all the reviews by critics, who always forgot her name.