At Lompoc Prison, Pen Is Mightier Than the Pen

Man and nature created this ironic setting, this picture-postcard jigsaw for the eye: On both sides of the two-lane road, just beyond the newly framed clusters of tract homes in coastal Lompoc, fields of new flowers roll with the contours of the land, dampened in the morning fog.

But straight ahead, other fields, fields of razor wire beneath the towers of surveillance and the doors that close with certain finality, U.S. Penitentiary, Lompoc.

Inside, another irony. Creativity in the lock-up, for even in this hard-time maximum-security federal prison, a writers club stirs. But this one has a different slant: a Hollywood connection. Members of the Writers Guild of America have taken on the Writers Club of Lompoc-West as an organized, on-going project.

Mirroring life outside, almost every club member has a script in mind or in his pocket, along with a book or a short story or even children’s stories. Membership is only 40, but that has risen recently. The prison’s population itself is an over-capacity 1,800. The club has operated on and off in its 10 years--off for a three-year period after a former warden’s ruling. Now it’s definitely on.

Last week, the club threw its annual “banquet,” honoring winners in the club’s writing competition--even the cooks received certificates for their creativity. It was a night someone could have written a movie about: short speeches and long sentences, a dinner paid for and inimitably prepared by inmates (they earn 10 cents to 20 cents an hour for their prison employment), and a singular guitar display that could have awakened a dormant Bob Dylan.

It was also a night that honored some of the Hollywood writers who have been working with inmates informally and who would join the new instructional effort.

Tom Palmer, club president, set the evening’s purpose in talking to members in the prison’s 50-year-old visitor’s room: “We have to make a personal commitment. If you want to write, write every day. If you devote your time to writing, the doors will open.”

The reference was to doors beyond the prison, obviously not prison doors. Good time--reductions in sentence--no longer is given for such extra-curricular programs. The reference more directly was to careers or secondary careers. In part, that’s one of the purposes of this writing program. Rehabilitation, too. Training. A creative escape valve, a creative way to reach beyond the confines.

Some inmates say the writers club program helps break the prison stereotype of desperate men of desperate purpose. One inmate cites statistics that the recidivism rate of prisoners taking courses is about 10%. For others, better than 50%.

This prison link with Hollywood goes back seven years when guild member Viki King, who wrote the book “How to Write a Movie in 21 Days,” started receiving letters from a Lompoc inmate seeking guidance. She put an ad in a guild publication, asking, “Do You Want to Go to Jail?” seeking volunteers to provide writing help. She and writer Lew Hunter began the visits with inmates.

Veteran TV and movie writer Gordon Mitchell recalls seeing that advertisement. “I was curious and terrified,” he says. He went, was invited back and returned several other times, bringing other writers.

Duhhain Waekker, a longtime member of the Guild’s Academic Liaison Committee, also started counseling inmates and started traveling north by himself and with writer Nelson Giddings. At the same time, he tried to get the union’s executive board to approve formal endorsement for the program, one that would have that screenwriter’s favorite ingredient, continuity. The guild is expected to give formal blessing to the project at Monday night’s board of directors meeting.

“There’s so much talent up there,” Waekker says, “they have to write.”

Dear Sir/Madam:

I am a new screen writer presently in a situation which does not permit me to pound the pavement, so to speak, in search of an agent to represent me. I am incarcerated at the U.S. Penitentiary in Lompoc, California.

That’s the start of a five-paragraph letter that 36-year-old Dennis Peckham, writers club treasurer, has been sending to Hollywood agents for the past four months, looking for representation and using a 4-year-old copy of the Hollywood Reporter’s Blu-Book directory.

So far, no takers.

Almost the same for one of his two scripts. Peckham has been unsuccessfully shopping his 127-page script “Young Mob” to studios and independent production companies. Most have come back, but two are still out. He faces, he says, the same Catch-22 outsiders face: Writers need agents to get scripts read but agents usually pass on uncredited writers in need of agents.

He sees the script as being topical: “Young Mob” is about the rise of rival black and white youth gangs in a suburban Los Angeles community whose members eventually reach a truce. Peckham and his cellmate have a second script ready to go out, this a slapstick comedy about a private detective.

Why his Hollywood dreaming? “Easy money,” he says, legal money. Status. Rehabilitation. “We don’t want to be convicts. We’re writing to better ourselves. No one wants to come back to prison.”

Many here at Lompoc U.S.P., have read my screenplay and are truly impressed with the content and delivery. Believe me, these readers are very well versed in less than legal affairs and the accompanying issues, yet, they are not producers or agents.

Please advise me of your considerations as a possible client, and thank you for your time.

Prison writers have had a long, uneven tradition in this country. Bank embezzler William Sydney Porter wrote stories in jail under the pseudonym O. Henry. Edward Bunker, a former inmate at San Quentin and Terminal Island, was co-writer of the Jon Voight movie “Runaway Train” and Dustin Hoffman’s “Straight Time.” The late Miguel Pinero wrote the first draft of his play “Short Eyes” in prison. Then there was Jack Henry Abbott, whose writings attracted Norman Mailer, who led a campaign for his release. That release lasted for six weeks. Abbott killed a man.

“Son of Sam” laws in several states prevented prisoners from profiting from their writing, instead requiring that fees go to victims and their survivors. Last December, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down such laws, possibly taking the onus off inmates with scripts in their pockets.

Lompoc’s writers club meets two or three times a month in a room set aside by the prison. Supplies and materials are bought by the inmates. Most writing is done longhand because typewriters are scarce and in demand. Three-fourth of the members say they are working on scripts.

Some resource material is available in the prison’s limited library and there are ongoing Chapman College courses available inside. Because of limitations on research material, most of the men write about personal experiences, but not always about crime.

“The college kids and young writers you see in Hollywood haven’t lived yet,” says the guild’s Waekker. “These men have something to say.”

Waekker stresses the development of storytelling skills, encouraging inmates to try various forms of writing. “If a person can structure a story then he can go several ways with his writing,” he says. He is using a correspondence course he developed and has been using for several years.

“Screenwriting,” he says, “can be the ultimate exercise in futility.”

He also stresses rewriting . . . and more rewriting, recalling telling an inmate to take more time rewriting. The inmate agreed. He had 300 years.

Beyond the monthly writing sessions, Waekker has other hopes for the writers group. He’s talked with officials of the Directors Guild for volunteers to provide insight and lessons on the technical side of filmmaking. One Writers Guild member has suggested enlisting the cinematography department at Santa Barbara’s Brooks Institute of Photography so that scenes from the prison writers could be shot and analyzed.

Club treasurer Peckham, who has 41 months to go on his eight-year sentence, obviously feels that prison writers can make a creative contribution to Hollywood--they haven’t had the structured college instruction that produces writers who make carbon-copy movies and television shows. Prisoners’ “writing comes from feeling, from the gut,” he says. “Their writing comes from life’s ups and downs. From high-rolling good times, to down-in-the-dumps bad times. Their writing comes from experience and it also comes from boredom.”

The club’s awards were handed out, the short evening was over. Time for some to return to cells, others to leave. But Waekker took the floor, reminding the inmates of their writing assignment, a character analysis that they would mail to him.

He’d be back, he said. The deadline was theirs. They had a month.