WRITERS TEAM UP MILES APART

The writer of legend is a solitary figure, alone in the garret with an incipient ulcer and unpaid rent. Hollywood is the exception, and here collaboration is the norm.

The writers of Hollywood legend (which is quite accurate, actually) tend to be two in a room, one pacing, the other flailing a typewriter and complaining that nothing said so far is funny, sexy, violent, exciting, suspenseful or childish enough. Only in Hollywood do you get two incipient ulcers and two unpaid rents for the price of one.

One of the most untraditional and successful Hollywood collaborations of the moment involves two authors who never meet and who live 2,000 miles apart.

Jack Epps Jr. is based in Los Angeles and takes meetings in Hollywood. Partner Jim Cash is irrevocably committed to East Lansing and teaches at Michigan State, where they were pupil and teacher, respectively, a dozen or so years ago. Linked by telephone, mail and modem-equipped personal computers, they wrote the Robert Redford-Debra Winger romantic comedy “Legal Eagles” earlier this year, and then “Top Gun,” which at last accounting had done $154 million at the box office, the top draw of any film so far in 1986.

When Cash started at Michigan State in the mid-’60s, there was, he said, “an incredible renaissance of writing on the campus. Guys like Tom McGuane, Jim Harrison and Walt Lockwood were like gunfighters, challenging each other.”

Cash dropped out twice--once to live in Greenwich Village, N.Y., and write, supporting himself as custodian of an apartment building, again to do factory work in Grand Rapids, Mich., so he could write all night.

“I thought of myself as an Olympian in training” Cash said. “I wrote only dialogue for two years, filling notebooks with it. I audiotaped old movies and listened to them. You learn more about dialogue that way.”

In 1970 he went back to Michigan State, got a graduate fellowship, earned his Ph.D. and began teaching screenplay writing and adding to his stock of unpublished novels, the last a 2,000-page manuscript.

One of his students was Epps, a young Detroiter who played on the hockey team but aimed to write. “I still remember that we discussed ‘Butch Cassidy’ in class one day and Jack’s perceptions of it were so good that I said to myself, ‘This was a special talent,’ ” Cash said.

After his graduation, Epps headed for Hollywood and caught on as a production assistant to Tony Bill on “Hearts of the West.” He sold scripts to “Hawaii Five-0” and “Kojak.” On a trip back to East Lansing in 1976, he sought out Cash, met him for a bowl of chili at the Union Grill and proposed they write movies together.

“I’d been writing those inevitable first novels as The Tragic Young Man,” Cash said. “Then one day at 3 in the morning, I said, ‘Wait a minute! I’m not a tragic young man, and I’m sick of this stuff.’

“I turned on the television and there was ‘Casablanca’ and I said this is fun . This is what I want to write.”

Thus the Epps visit was timely. In an hour they sketched on paper napkins the ideas for 10 films. The first idea, inspired by a short paragraph in the Frederick Lewis Allen social history, “Only Yesterday,” was for a movie about two Prohibition agents, “Izzy and Moe.”

“It took us two years to write it, making all the popular mistakes,” Cash said. But it became the first script they sold (to Bud Yorkin). (Their project was unrelated to the 1985 CBS movie, about the same two historical figures, played on television by Jackie Gleason and Art Carney.) In fact, honoring another long-established Hollywood tradition, it was something like eight years before they actually saw one of their scripts, “Legal Eagles,” on the screen.

“Top Gun” and “Legal Eagles” were the sixth and seventh scripts they wrote. “Top Gun” was inspired by a magazine photograph Epps saw of a Navy pilot standing beside his aircraft.

Epps researched the film, riding in the jets, fighting blackout and four times doing the underwater escape exercise, dropping 10 feet into a pool and holding his breath for 20 seconds while escaping from the pilot capsule--as he said in proper Navy-ese, “exiting in an orderly fashion.”

When “Top Gun” went into production, Cash and Epps had gone on to “Legal Eagles” and other hands made script changes in “Top Gun.” Cash and Epps are philosophical, but on what they expect will be their next project, the deal is for the authors to co-produce and Epps to direct. Control is the ultimate Hollywood grail, a reward beyond riches.

They have sold eight scripts, including innumerable drafts for various producers of “Dick Tracy,” which is in other hands, including Warren Beatty’s.

Their third produced film, “The Secret of My Success” with Michael J. Fox, a revision of A. J. Carrothers’ original screenplay, was shot in New York earlier this year, with Herb Ross directing.

The interesting question is: How does the transcontinental collaboration operate? “Jack,” Cash said, “is the greatest natural storyteller I know, a wonderful structuralist. My specialty is the dialogue.” (The years of Olympic training paid off.) “Of course, the dialogue is what other people change first,” he added with a sigh.

“We like to work with a line,” Epps said. “Those 10 stories we sketched out in an hour back in 1976 were essentially one or two sentences. We’re both from the Midwest. I think we’re in touch with the audience. We love entertaining the audience, taking the world with us into the world we’re discovering, in which there’s fear, danger and romance.”

Cash, married with four children, lives on a large estate near East Lansing with 20 birds and 20 animals. “We both have strong egos and we challenge each other,” he said. “Jack’s usually several scenes ahead of me in the construction.”

Epps, who lives in Brentwood with his wife and new daughter, said, “We both believe in action and timing. We both love Howard Hawks. We have a words-and-music relationship--I’m the music; he’s the words.”

“The interesting thing,” Cash said, “is that out of our two strong egos we create a third, combined ego which, or who, knows more than either of us alone. Something between us knows what’s really right. The third person is the partnership.

“The nice thing is, we don’t have to pay the third person.”