LAST BITE : A Final Word About Living Out a Fantasy and Changing With The Times

I wasn’t really sure this column should be called Man Bites Town. Even though I had thought up the name in a fit of over-cleverness one night, I was afraid that it wouldn’t be understood (I’m not sure I understand it) and that it would wear out its welcome with repeated printings. So I pleaded with the editors: “At least make the name of the column real small on the page.” They did.

As of today, the problem of repeated printings of that title has been solved. By decision of the management, this column is ending, and before I do the bat-out-of-hell thing, I wanted to use this final page to say goodby.

The opportunity to arrive, unbidden, on more than a million doorsteps or lawns each week is not one to be taken lightly. It came as a major surprise to me when management suggested that I have that opportunity. Like anybody who had put in time on a college newspaper, I’d entertained vague thoughts of a column. In fact, while in college, I wrote a column of vague thoughts. But show business beckoned, and it paid more.

When this magazine reawakened that old fantasy, it came at a remarkably opportune time for me. With a mostly justified reputation as a stubborn kind of fella, I had pretty much given up trying to get my point of view represented on the motion-picture screen or, for that matter, on the Nintendo screen. Here, all of a sudden, was Destiny, sitting in the executive dining room of The Times building, eating a dieter’s salad and opening a new door for me.

I’ve had a very good time since walking through that door. When you write movie scripts, the only prose you get to compose is stage directions, the paragraphs in which you describe what’s being seen when no dialogue is spoken. More than one producer has told me to shave that verbiage to a minimum because “You know executives don’t like to read.” Fortunately, a substantial number of the people who get this paper each weekend do like to read. And they like to write and talk back.

I’ve had more immediate feedback about certain columns--celebrity confessions and breast implants being two recent examples--than about anything else I’ve ever done in the media. Some of the letters have been argumentative, some complimentary. None has been scurrilous, and one (in reaction to a column on race) I still keep in the clutter near my typewriter because, every time I stumble across it, it retains the power to move me.

Not having written anything like a column since UCLA washed its hands of me, I approached this task the way we’re told to approach everything in life: as a learning experience. Writing even a slightly topical essay four weeks before it’s published is trickier than you might think, and helping me enormously have been two editors, Susan Brenneman and Emily Young. Each week we talked, argued, joked, threatened and, at times, grew thoroughly exasperated with one another. Yet, as I remember telling friends soon after the column began, I was amazed, after years in Hollywood, where creative discussions too often are of the “Couldn’t the senator be a talking dog?” variety, to find myself having conversations about nuances of meaning and the rhythms of words.

Even so, it astonishes me that I lasted two years at this paper. My connection with it was basically by phone and fax machine, so I have no real firsthand knowledge of what goes on inside the fortress on 1st Street, nor am I privy to all that motivated this change. But The Times was the paper we never read while I was growing up in Los Angeles. Everything it stood for my family was against, and vice versa. I remember my parents feeling trapped, after the old Daily News shut down, into buying the afternoon Mirror. They knew it was owned by The Times, but still, it wasn’t The Times.

The paper has changed enormously since those days and, obviously, it continues to change. As a matter of fact, I could never quite shake the sense that one of the Otises or one of the Chandlers must have been spinning in his final resting place every time my column hit print in his beloved newspaper. The good news is, he can stop spinning.