ROOKIE HITS HOMER WITH 1ST SCRIPT

Caution to struggling screenwriters: The following success story may be harmful to your health. If you were not signed by the William Morris Agency within a year of writing your first script, and if your first script did not sell for more than $100,000, consult your therapist before reading any further.

Tom Homans was a college senior before he realized that in planning to write a serious apologia for Christianity and the belief in God, he had bitten off more than he could philosophically chew. The subject had been tackled before, by people far more scholarly and skillful than he was.

So, he wrote a screenplay about Little League baseball.

If Homans had been living in Los Angeles, where even the bag ladies have scripts in their bags, he would have known that he was merely leaping from the precipice into the abyss. The odds on selling his apologia would not have been good, but at least he would have been the only one shopping the idea around.

But Homans was living in Baltimore, working in a warehouse, as philosophy majors often do. He had never met a screenwriter, nor seen a screenplay. He had never taken a course in writing. He couldn’t tell a narrative bridge from the kind he crossed on his way to work. He thought fade out was a phrase you used to describe old jeans.

He knew about Little League baseball, though. He remembered from his playing days how silly the parents acted, and he thought that would make a funny movie. He came up with a story idea about the star player of one team being kidnaped on the eve of the championship game. And so, between shifts at the warehouse, he began writing.

When he finished, he had 200 pages of dialogue he called “Umpire.” There weren’t scenes, only settings. He had people standing around in their homes or in their offices saying funny things. The bundle would have been easier to adapt as a doorstop than as a movie.

“I didn’t know you had to break it up exterior, interior, action, dialogue, all that kind of thing,” Homans said. “It’s easier to write down a funny line than it is to try to get people to visualize what you have in mind without saying it.”

Naturally, Homans had no idea what to do with it once it was written. That’s one thing about Los Angeles. There is always somebody around who will tell you what to do with it.

Homans, a 25-year-old bachelor living handsomely on $16,000 a year, was in no hurry. He got the addresses of some Hollywood studios and agencies and wrote to them asking if they’d like to see a comedy about the kidnaping of a Little Leaguer. This is like writing to Ronald Reagan and asking if he’s free a week from Saturday.

Then, Homans went to the library and began browsing through books that provided advice and addresses to free-lance writers. A line in an old edition of Writer’s Digest caught his attention. It said something like “the American Film Institute Alumni Assn.’s Writers Workshop is accepting screenplays from unknown writers.”

Homans said, “That’s me,” and sent off his package, with a check for $50. “Umpire,” two more pounds of ballast to help keep Hollywood from drifting out to sea, was one of about 300 scripts that arrived at the workshop office last year.

The vast majority of the screenplays are returned to the writers with a detailed critique from the workshop’s full-time reader. Most of the writers have tons of enthusiasm, and not an ounce of talent. But “Umpire” struck the reader as being heavy on both.

“Basically, it was 200 pages of one-liners,” said Willard Rodgers, who runs the workshop in the Filmland Corporate Center in Culver City. “It had no form or structure at all. But it was very funny.”

Rodgers called Homans and said that if he was willing to work on it, the workshop would schedule “Umpire” for a “reading” as soon as it was ready. Twelve times a year, Rodgers has actors come in and read workshop members’ script for audiences that include production people and readers from the film community.

This is not a ticket to ride. In seven years, only twice has a script gone from a workshop reading to actual production. In both instances, the writers had previous professional experience.

But it sounded good to Homans. And last March, when Rodgers set the date for the reading of the finished script, he quit his warehouse job--chucked the 3 1/2 years he had invested in learning how to inventory engine parts--and drove to Hollywood.

After the reading, there was a critique of “Umpire,” then Homans took his portable typewriter and a TV tray and went into the bathroom and did a third draft. The bathroom was the only quiet place in the two-room Los Feliz apartment that he shared with two other people.

A woman he met at the reading liked his script and after he rewrote it, she showed it to an agent. The agent, Cary Woods, of William Morris, read it in June, signed Homans in July, made a deal with Lorimar in August and delivered a signed contract two weeks ago.

“It’s a wonderful script,” Woods said. “I laughed out loud. But it’s more than funny; it has a character in there who’s unique. The character gives it the potential for a sequel or a TV series.”

Nobody would provide the financial terms of Homan’s deal, but he got a large option payment and if the movie gets made by Lorimar, Woods said his fee would be significantly greater than that usually paid to a first-time screenwriter.

“It’s really been easy from my point of view,” said the tall, unassuming Homans. “I haven’t had to do a lot of hustling or anything. It just sort of went from one person to another. Before I found the AFI thing, I wondered what I was going to do. I couldn’t picture myself running around getting on people’s nerves.”

Homans said he didn’t know until he got out here how many people he was competing with. Writing screenplays isn’t something he had given a lot of thought to. He is not a big movie or television buff. When people ask him if “Umpire” is anything like “Bad News Bears,” he says he doesn’t know. He hasn’t seen it.

So far, he hasn’t gone Hollywood over his success. He quit his $6.50 an hour security guard job downtown. He splurged on an exercise set, he took a trip back to Baltimore and he’s thinking about moving up to a word processor.

But he is still driving his dad’s 1978 Toyota. He’s still sleeping on a day bed in his friend’s living room.

Homans just finished a draft of his second screenplay and he has some other ideas. Some day, he said, he would like to try to work his apologia for Christianity into a script. In the meantime, as long as he’s here, he is thinking about trying to do some acting too. He even a wrote a character for himself into “Umpire.”

“It’s there. I don’t think the Lorimar people even know about it,” he said. “It’s not something I’m insisting on, but I’d at least like to get a screen test.”