Dogged Dumpster Digging Pays Off . . .

Last summer, he was scavenging for provisions in dumpsters. Today, Lars Eighner is an acclaimed writer, with a feature film in the works.

The pitch: Homeless man discovers severed head in dumpster and works to solve the case. It’s got an irresistible hook but Eighner’s screenplay-in-progress pales in comparison to the real-life twists and turns of the writer’s own tale.

Eighner, 45, of Austin, Tex., is the formerly homeless author of “Travels With Lizbeth,” which was published in October by St. Martin’s Press. Now in its seventh printing, thanks to a windfall of positive press and the sheer power of Eighner’s prose, the book was named recently by the New York Times Book Review as one of the top books of 1993. It is a beautifully written account of the three years Eighner spent living under a shower curtain, sleeping beneath bridges and eating garbage in Austin and Southern California, accompanied by his Labrador-mix mutt, Lizbeth.

“I did not undertake to write about homelessness but wrote what I knew, as an artist paints a still life, not because he is especially fond of fruit, but because the subject is readily at hand,” he says in the introduction to “Travels With Lizbeth.”

Last week, Eighner flew to New York to meet director David Van Taylor (the 1992 documentary “Dream Deceivers”) and begin scouting locations and writing a screen treatment.

The film will feature an Eighner-like character on the streets of New York, someone who is “quirky, down-and-out . . . not a victim--an intelligent, complex person in his own right,” Van Taylor says.

This character will unravel a murder-mystery using skills he’s acquired through homelessness--the ability to decipher clues about people’s lives from their garbage.

This spring, PBS will air Van Taylor’s eight-minute video based on Eighner’s eloquent essay, “On Dumpster Diving.” Eighner--all 6 feet, 3 inches, and 350 pounds of him--takes viewers on a narrated tour: “At first the new scavenger is filled with disgust and self-loathing . . . every grain of rice seems to be a maggot. Everything seems to stink. He can wipe the egg yolk off the found can, but he cannot erase from his mind the stigma of eating garbage.”

But is Hollywood really ready for a homeless protagonist? Van Taylor thinks so. The recent “The Saint of Fort Washington,” starring Matt Dillon as a homeless man, did poorly at the box office, but Van Taylor was nonetheless encouraged by Siskel and Ebert’s reviews, which complained it wasn’t “real enough,” and “needed to be more like ‘Travels With Lizbeth’ by Lars Eighner.”

Meanwhile, fame has whisked Eighner off the streets: A $10,000 advance from St. Martin’s Press enabled Eighner and Lizbeth to move out of the abandoned bar where he finished the book and into a tiny efficiency apartment in Austin.

Eighner, who grew up in Houston, became homeless after walking out on his job at a mental hospital. He says the economic bust of the late ‘80s in Austin left him with few job options. He didn’t have a college degree, and says he was “really too old to compete for the flipping-hamburger, student-type jobs. So there was nothing.”

After getting behind on the rent and landing on the street, he began mailing dispatches from the road to author Steven Saylor, who is now Eighner’s agent. As Saylor read Eighner’s letters, “I was just bowled over by it.” He told Eighner, “You’re seeing things nobody else is seeing and you’re a great writer.”

Eighner wants to use his success to break into screenwriting beyond this one film, and Van Taylor is banking on Eighner’s ability. Eighner admits to a fear of ending up homeless again.

“This kind of book is about as big a hit as it could be,” he says. “But I’m not going to make all the money in the world off it. It’s not the kind of book that lends itself to any sequels. Essentially, this could very easily be a flash in the pan.

“I’ve got to make hay while the sun shines.”