When Hollywood Calls

It was during those bizarrely tumultuous months of 1994 that I found myself sitting stiffly inside a luxury suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, an unlikely member of a late-night strategy meeting with bad-boy Hollywood producer Jon Peters. 

An earthquake that year had already leveled much of the San Fernando Valley, OJ Simpson had made his fateful Ford Bronco freeway run and a Malibu fire had sent scores of Hollywood celebrities — Peters included — reeling from their seaside mansions for swank temporary digs in places like Beverly Hills.

All of LA seemed topsy-turvy, reeling from malevolent forces beyond its control, and the evening somehow fit the pattern in its own twisted way: I’d been suddenly moon-shotted to kooky, creepy Planet Hollywood.

Nursing a bottle of Evian water (which backwards spells naive), I sat next to David Glascock, a gay activist who had made a name for himself protecting gays and transvestites from abuse by other inmates in the LA County jail system.

Glascock was a barrel-chested man with a walrus mustache who resembled 1970s character actor Wilford Brimley (I’ll pause for you to Google him). I’d written a profile of the activist for the Los Angeles Times headlined: His Brother’s Keeper: David Glascock cares about the people nobody cares about — imprisoned gays.

A college girlfriend-turned lawyer suggested that I get Glascock to sign a contract that included me in any Hollywood project that might result. It was the best unsolicited advice I’d ever received. 

Dave was a cool guy; we liked one another. He was in.

Hell, what did he have to lose?

Plenty, as it turned out. 

Films depicting colorful men parading around in outlandish women’s clothing were all the rage in the 1990s, with hits such as The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert; To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar; and even the mainstream Mrs. Doubtfire starring Robin Williams.

Peters, by then Hollywood’s top power broker, was intrigued by Glascock’s story, but soon learned that the activist’s participation came with a major string attached:

Me.

A Peters minion named Mary telephoned to invite me to the meeting. What choice did Peters have? A contract was a contract.

“Jon loves absolutely everything about this project,” she told me. “Except one thing.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“You,” she said flatly.

Fair enough. I had nothing to lose. At that point, I’d never written anything for Hollywood, never even ran for coffee or dry cleaning for some demanding star. I had nothing to offer other than the story I’d already written.

Worse, I was an emotional ship-adrift impersonating an adult. Already separated from my wife of just three years, I was renting a house in the San Fernando Valley with my younger brother. I drove a 1990 Honda Accord. I washed my dirty clothes at the local laundromat. I owned one pair of shoes.

Hell, I was playing with house money.

I recall sitting in that chair, teeth clenched, glancing over at Glascock, my remaining umbilical cord to reality. Neither of us did any talking.

Instead, Peters paced the suite, buzzed from too many martinis and God knows what else, rambling on about himself. When he passed a mirror, he stopped and posed.

Here was a onetime hairdresser and Barbra Streisand boyfriend-turned domineering Hollywood movie mogul, known more for his ego and erratic behavior that his artistic vision. His credits as executive producer already included such hits as Batman, A Star is Born, Rain Man and The Color Purple, but Peters was dogged by an image of aggressive self-promotion, sexual harassment and bizarre creative demands.

At one point, fake-tanned, his body gym-toned and well-massaged, his hair well-coifed, super-sprayed, almost helmeted, he gazed over toward Glascock and his sycophants (but not me; he never looked at me) and emoted: “I want these characters to be rebels, outsiders, people who challenge the system — just like me!” 

Then he paused, as though suddenly perplexed. “But hey, now I am the system.”

I cringed. David Glascock was the real deal, his story as refreshing as a spring shower on Santa Monica Boulevard. But now his altruistic tale was going to get a second treatment, this time under the toxic, acid-rain atmosphere of Jon Peters.

“Welcome to Hollywood,” I thought. “Shoot me now.”

In Robert Altman’s 1992 film The Player, a satirical comedy on Hollywood excess, Tim Robbins plays a megalomaniacal film producer — aka Jon Peters — who during a pitch meeting holds up the newspaper’s local news section. a knockoff of the LA Times.

One by one, he points to headlines and says “That’s a movie. That’s a movie. And that’s a movie.”

Most Los Angeles journalists of the era wholeheartedly agreed with those sentiments.  Everybody knew that Hollywood itself was bankrupt of ideas. And where was such a delusional and self-important industry going to find the kernel for its next box-office blockbuster?

Well, the local newspaper, of course. 

In that way, the LA Times was Hollywood’s hometown movie tip sheet. Whether you were a film tycoon or a shameless industry bottom-feeder. Hollywood once began its day reading the LA Times.

As a feature writer who sought out compelling stories across LaLa Land, I was uniquely positioned to take advantage — or get bulldozed — by the trend. I wrote in a breezy narrative style with dialogue and scenes that could easily be translated to celluloid. 

I tracked down people the Hollywood script scouts rarely found: A Venice Beach poet who taught a writing class for convicted murderers at a state prison. An alcoholic former LA studio musician, condemned to life on the streets, who regularly played piano at a North Hollywood barber shop. I spent weeks riding the local transit system’s 204 line through near-lawless South Central Los Angeles for a story on risk and recklessness.

It wasn’t long before Hollywood called. Usually, the voice on the line was breathless, fawning in its praise of the story and the writing. They promised fame and fool’s gold, riches beyond my wildest dreams, enough to quit my ink-stained day job and join the ranks of the entertainment in-crowd.

Most of them, of course, were lying through their teeth.

For the next two decades, my telephone did not stop ringing. Younger reporters began consulting me when they received similar come-ons. I’d listen to their stories, gauge the excitement in their eyes, and then gently take the air out of their balloons.

No, they were never going to get rich. At best, some low-level producer (which I called the pilot fish) would option the story for chump change (I’ve received option offers for as low as a dollar) and then take the idea to a major studio (those lumbering more-clueless sharks that swam behind the pilot fish.)

But that’s where the journalist’s role usually ends. Producers don’t need them to write the screenplay. No legitimate project is ever based on a first-time screenwriter. So my advice was to sign the contract, give Hollywood the rights to your story, then buy yourself a nice dinner on your low-key largesse and move on with your life.

Over the years, my own experiences have pretty much followed that script. I have yet to see any story I have ever written reach the big screen (or the smaller streaming screen) but I have come close. 

Along the way, I have scribbled my signature on enough contracts and cashed my share of paltry checks (never more than $10,000 or $15,000). I have met people whom I would now cross the street to avoid and others who are now lifelong friends. 

Brothers, even.

I’ve learned that Hollywood is not all Jon Peters-sleazy. There are well-meaning professionals out there who want to tell a story through film. It’s not all acid rain.

But what I will always remember most are the good, everyday people I profiled that got Hollywood to come calling in the first place.

This post is for them.

I was on a story-book Hollywood run in the mid-1990s. 

Soon after the Glascock story, I wrote a profile of a long-distance trucker named Norman Thorne. Instead of working for a big shipping company, guided by a dispatcher to ferry loads here and there, Thorne was an independent, soliciting leads from machines known as quotrons found in every big truck stop.

I rode shotgun with Thorne for nearly a week, across five states. Under the headline Vanishing Mavericks of the Open Road the story began:

“There’s something about rock ’n’ roll music and the darkened cab of an 18-wheeler lumbering down the highway at night--head-knocking riffs from Aerosmith, Deep Purple and guitar god George Thorogood.

For Norman Thorne, it inspires an urge to play air guitar behind the wheel of his big rig, shouting lyrics into the darkness that mingle with the drawling banter of the CB radio boys and the steady beep of his dashboard radar detector.

It is well past midnight on a stretch of eastbound Interstate 40 in Arizona and Thorne feels bad to the bone. He is master of this frenetic freeway universe--moving the throttle through all 10 gears of a powerful 450-horsepower engine, his cab perched 12 feet above the scattering, insect-like four-wheelers down below.”

Hollywood’s siren call came within days.

Film god William Friedkin, the director-producer responsible for The Exorcist and The French Connection, invited me for coffee on the Paramount Pictures lot. Friedkin was avuncular. He said my lead put him in the cab of Norman Thorne’s semi.

He wanted me to convince Thorne to sign a contract giving the producer rights to his life story. In return, I’d get to write a film treatment, a precursor to a script, for something like $20,000, an amount that could buy an awful lot of new shoes. 

My agent said it was a raw deal, that Friedkin would cut me out as soon as he had Thorne in the fold. And so, like a novice fool, I said no to working with William Friedkin, and later fired my agent over her bad advice.

Thorne, for his part, never signed any contract. He told me that he would never trust his life story in the hands of Hollywood, which could transform his character from an Average Joe into a serial killer or child molester. When Hollywood went on its merry way, film profits in hand, he still had to go into those truck stops late at night, alone.

I still think it was a good call on his part, if not mine.

What followed in the ensuing years was a series of false starts. Television producer Aaron Spelling, the creator of Charlie’s Angels, Dynasty and Beverly Hills, 90210 summoned me to his office one day to talk rights over another of my stories. Friends said he was not to be trusted and would eat me for lunch. 

He turned out to be a decent guy and even introduced me to his daughter, the actress Tori Spelling. But we never made any deal.

I moved to San Francisco for the Times in 2000 and kept finding stories. Hollywood still had my number. I did a piece about San Quentin prison’s inmate baseball team, populated by robbers and killers, a squad that logically played all home games.

Under the headline The Bad Boys of Summer, the story described “a gut-ugly dirt diamond where foul balls bounce off guard towers and umpires take the heckles of unruly fans dead seriously.” 

San Quentin’s home field advantage was so imposing “that opponents sometimes fail to show up. Their own coach can’t fill out his lineup card until game time because he never knows which starters have been sent to the hole or confined to lock-down.”

A production company optioned the rights to my story, along with those of some of the players. It was the most direct way to get a film made: get the principals under contract, to chase way any Johnny-come-lately outfits who wanted to swoop in. Then someone read in Variety about a competing unauthorized project, based on the story, that had not bothered to reach out to me or the players. Strangely, my people got cold feet. Neither film was ever made.

Not long afterwards I wrote a story about the night watchman of Alcatraz, where I spent a long night with the lone guard assigned to patrol the spooky abandoned prison and its facilities from dusk until dawn. It was a long, nerve-jangling night as the watchmen toured the abandoned cellblocks and told stories of the killers once housed there. 

The story was headlined “Getting Rattled on the Rock” and another Hollywood deal soon materialized. This time, I partnered with an independent producer. One variation of the script involved a prison slasher film that saw the ghost of a murderous former inmate kill off, one by one, a group of terrified high-schoolers who had stowed away overnight at the prison on a dare.

Our project died a death no less horrible than one of those teens.

Yet my relationship with Hollywood has slowly matured. 

A few years ago I profiled a Native American officer on the Navajo reservation who patrols, often alone, with backup hours away, a swath of land the size of Delaware. I teamed up with a Hollywood producer who has become a close friend. For years, we negotiated with the Navajo reservation on a possible TV series. 

We were eventually bested by the group that produced Dark Winds, but our concept still lives to be pitched another day. 

The same goes for a magazine story I wrote about a crew of roughhouse Aboriginal boxers touring the Australian Outback to fight at county fairs. I spent weeks on the road, nights spent the ground in a sleeping bag, fearing visits by spiders and snakes. 

Again, I got lucky. For years, I worked with a duo of father-and-son producers to bring the concept to the small screen. We’ve become good friends and even though we’re on hiatus now I miss our telephone calls and witty banter.

In 30 years, I’ve come a long way from the narcism of that former hairdresser.

But in those early Hollywood years, crazy Jon Peters and his goon squad loomed large.

Soon after that meeting in Beverly Hills, they began whispering to Glascock that my stubborn inclusion would ruin the project. I still recall our shouting matches on the phone, but our partnership, and our friendship endured.

At one point, my lawyer spotted a loophole in my contract with Glascock that gave me rights to attempt a screenplay. And so I got to work, with no experience other than a few how-to books and a bit of Chutzpah.

I remember going over the house of Nick Wechsler, then a budding producer in Peters’ fold. He was getting a massage in his living room when I told him that I was going to take a stab at writing the screenplay. I was calling it “The Witch’s Castle,” from a line in the story. For protection, the gays and transvestites were kept in an isolated ward of the LA County jail, away from the straight inmates with whom they liked to flirt.

Not happy, one put the back of her wrist against her forehead and lamented: “They always keep the witch locked away a place where no one can hear her cries.”

Wechsler later called my chess move to write the script “ballsy.”

At one point, I told Mary, the head Peters viper, that I was progressing with the project, despite the fact that my wife had filed for divorce and that I was miserable. She didn’t miss a beat. “Put some of that angst into the script,” she said.

Well, thanks Mary, I did just that. I delivered a final product within months and Peters reluctantly paid me for my efforts. Then he immediately hired real screenwriters to do rewrite. The script went through countless versions before it was shelved for good.

I haven’t thought about that script for years. It’s probably tucked away in some box of files, in a place where no one can hear its cries.