The Plot That Made a Wallet Thicken : Books: After struggling for 30 years, Allan Folsom sold his first novel for a stunning $2 million. Now ‘I have some breathing room,’ the L.A. writer says.

The great L.A. success story, the one that recently sent a thrill up the spines of part-time waiters, valet parking attendants, journalists and grips citywide, began three years ago in Paris.

On their first visit to Europe, Allan Folsom, the quintessential struggling film and television writer, and his wife, Karen, sat in a cafe across the Seine from Notre Dame cathedral.

While they sipped coffee and relished the street activity, an innocuous thought flickered languidly through Folsom’s mind: “What if someone walked by who was important in my life 30 years ago?”

Jump ahead to Super Bowl Sunday, 1993.

Folsom is in the garden, trying to figure out what to do with mud brought down by the recent rains, when his phone rings.

On the other end is his literary agent, Aaron Priest.

Too stunned to avoid cliches, Priest asks: “Are you sitting down?”

And so our protagonist learns that the kernel of an idea that popped into his head in Paris, then grew into a 928-page manuscript--”The Day After Tomorrow”--has just sold for $2 million.

It’s a stunning sum that publishing industry experts say leapfrogs the previous record of $1.25 million, paid in 1987 to Sally Beauman for “Destiny.” And it dwarfs the amount most first novelists are told they can expect: from $5,000 to $7,500.

Folsom recounts the rapid-fire events leading up to his fame and fortune while seated casually in the office of his big Agoura home.

He is tall, with short blond hair and a complexion and physique that reflect the love of skiing he shares with his wife. Folsom doesn’t look like a man upon whom the collective envy of a city of writers has focused.

In one corner of the room is a banjo. A guitar sits in another and, off to the side, built-in bookcases display a lifetime of reading--from Louis L’Amour and Hemingway to a fat research volume, “Fundamentals of Criminal Investigation.”

In the background, a fax machine pumps out page after page--something to do with Karen’s executive search consulting business.

Since their marriage in 1979, Folsom says, “Karen carried a lot of the weight for a long time.”

Now, as she heads off to a meeting, Folsom comments that the pearls she’s wearing didn’t come from his windfall: “I bought them 3 1/2 years ago, then stuck them in a safe-deposit box. I knew something special would happen and there’d be a turning point. I wanted something to celebrate with.”

He knew it. And, like most writers, he doubted it.

Folsom opens a brown scrapbook his mother started keeping while he was in college. It begins with Folsom’s first flash of fame in 1963, when “Two Hours at Juarez,” a script he wrote as a student at Boston University, won a $1,000 Society of Cinematologists award.

Brian DePalma won the directing award that year.

Folsom’s climb to success was a bit more gradual than the director’s, though.

After college, Folsom moved to California, where he worked for producer David Wolper as a delivery driver, and later as a film editor and cameraman, while continuing to craft screenplays.

Over the years, Folsom moved between projects lofty and banal, from helping to edit “China, the Roots of Madness,” based on Theodore White’s remembrances, to scripting two episodes of the ‘70s Robert Wagner-Stefanie Powers television show “Hart to Hart.”

One of his earliest writing influences, Folsom says, was poet Anne Sexton, who lived next door in Boston. He still has her penciled notes on several poems he showed her: “You have a very good sense of style, not an easy thing to get.”

Folsom had met Natalie Wood while working as a cameraman. He immediately saw in her glimpses of the young Sexton, who committed suicide. Much later, after working on several projects with Wood, he asked her to take the Sexton role in a screenplay he’d written about the poet’s life.

Wood eventually agreed.

Two weeks later she drowned off Catalina Island. The script joined the 30 to 40 others Folsom has written that boomeranged around the circuit.

*

When Folsom returned from Europe in 1990, the cafe scene continuing to echo through his thoughts, he put his ideas into a novel “as a sort of hedge against the crazy film industry.”

The book, Folsom says, has two key characters.

Paul Osborn is a Los Angeles orthopedic surgeon visiting Paris. McVey, who has dropped his long first Irish name, is an American detective, in Europe at the request of Interpol to help figure out why headless bodies keep turning up.

“I met John St. John (the legendary Los Angeles homicide detective),” says Folsom. “He proved very helpful.”

With those characters in mind, Folsom crafted his first paragraph:

Paul Osborn sat alone among the smoky bustle of the after work crowd staring into a glass of red wine. He was tired and hurt and confused. For no particular reason he looked up. When he did, his breath left him with a jolt. Across the room sat the man who murdered his father. . . .

With that beginning and an idea of where he wanted the story to go, Folsom focused on his computer screen.

“There were a lot of blind alleys,” he says. “I probably threw out 300 pages.”

At one point, he recalls listening to Olympic gold medalists talking about their excellence: “They kept saying, ‘You have to raise the level of your game.’ I thought, maybe I’ve got to dig down into myself and crank it up a notch. I think I did that.”

In the process, he became absorbed in “the intensity” of the book, which now careered along on an intricate plot line of international intrigue.

Still, “writing is done in a vacuum. I didn’t know if it worked or didn’t work,” he says.

When he started the book, he went to a psychic. She told Folsom the book would be published, sold by a man who “owes you something from another lifetime. It will make you rich and famous.”

*

Folsom’s film agent sent the manuscript to Priest in New York.

The literary agent received it Jan. 12 and a few days later told Folsom: “This is a very interesting piece of work. I know I can sell this book.”

“What do you think we can get?” Folsom asked.

“This kind of thing is hard to track,” replied Priest. “I’d say the low will be $50,000. Could possibly go as high as $250,000.”

On Friday, Jan. 22, Priest finished making calls to “seven or eight” publishers and sent the manuscript out.

As Priest headed off on a scheduled vacation, Folsom settled into a familiar limbo.

“I had that sense that the book was special,” he says. “I’d catch myself going back and reading it, thinking, ‘Oh! This is good.’ ”

But then again, what did he know? “It might be 900 pages of scrap paper,” Folsom thought. He was confident it would sell, but he also expected rejection: “That’s what usually happens. The agent calls and says, well, we tried. Now go write another one and we’ll try again.”

Walking through his neighborhood, Folsom found himself ruminating on his life.

“I was thinking, maybe I should reconsider this,” he remembers. “Maybe I’m too old. Maybe I should get a real job. . . . I’m 51 years old. I have a handful of TV credits. What the heck is that? The best thing they’ll be able to say at my funeral is, ‘He tried.’ ”

Meanwhile, Priest had barely settled in at a Barbados resort when the calls began.

The first offer was for a $350,000, Priest says, and it ratcheted up from there.

On Jan. 31, a Little, Brown editor called.

“The Super Bowl is about to start; don’t you want to watch it?” Priest asked.

“I want to see it,” the editor replied, “but I want to buy this book before the kickoff.”

The deal, a joint agreement with Little, Brown (hardcover) and Warner Books (paperback), closed a few calls later.

Priest didn’t know Folsom well and was genuinely concerned when he called him, asking about his health: “You’re heart’s good? You’re in good health?”

When Folsom assured him that he was, Priest let it out: “I just sold your book for $2 million--North American rights only.”

Folsom’s breath presumably left him with a jolt.

*

Folsom tried to put his feelings in perspective. All he could think of was another surprising call he’d received six years earlier.

That time, the doctor had phoned to say the tests were back, that he had bladder cancer.

The shock was the same, Folsom says, “but from a 180-degree different perspective. You think, ‘This happens to other people. Not to me. It’s not real. There’s no reality to it whatsoever.’ ”

Folsom found Karen puttering in their terraced back yard.

“We sold the book,” he said.

She screamed and jumped up and down.

When he told her how much it sold for, he says, “she just about fell into the pool.”

They made reservations at a budget condominium in Deer Creek, Colo., and used their frequent-flyer passes to get there.

Since then, things have continued to click into place.

The film option sold for $750,000, with a provision that Folsom write the script. If the movie is made, he will get another $750,000.

Now the foreign bidders are calling and offering unheard of sums. The bidding in Holland is up to $75,000, Koreans are offering $35,000 so far and elsewhere the deals are already done: $20,000 in Finland, $150,000 in France, $85,000 in Italy and $600,000 in England, says Priest.

A few days after the film deal, Folsom went on “Today,” and Bryant Gumbel asked him what his new status meant.

“It means I have some breathing room,” Folsom said. “It means I have a vote of confidence.”

Now, he adds, “In a sense it’s like you won the lottery. But not really, because you worked for it. . . .”

But he won’t feel truly successful, Folsom says, “until I’ve got my third or fourth book done. I still expect everyone to change their mind and say, we’ve reconsidered. . . .

“I still think $2 million is too much. But on the other hand, if you amortize it over the 30 years I’ve been working, it isn’t that much.”