Scenes From Hollywood

Screenwriter Phoebe Ephron used to remind daughter, Nora, “Everything is copy.” The Hollywood veteran knew what all writers come to know: that writing is an act of recycling, a way to turn the base metal of experience into gold. That’s just as true when the experience is awful as when it’s good. Real-life agony underpins much admirable writing. Phoebe Ephron reminded Nora of this even as she was dying.

“You’re a journalist,” she told her daughter. “Take notes.”

Virtually every writer who has worked in Hollywood has been stunned by the money, appalled by the behavior of some of the players, and realized, even as the star ranted or the deal dissolved, that there was a book in it.

According to writer Carolyn See, who wrote her UCLA doctoral dissertation on the Hollywood novel, the industry has been inspiring fiction at least since 1907, when “Love Story of a Movie Star” appeared. Hollywood novels, she says, “have been breeding like rabbits ever since.”

Almost everyone agrees that Hollywood has produced at least one great novel: Nathanael West’s apocalyptic “The Day of the Locust,” published in 1939.

In the classic manner of Hollywood novelists, West had a day job cranking out B-movie scripts for Republic Productions, widely known as “Repulsive Pictures.” The models for his grotesque characters were the stunt men and would-be starlets turning the occasional trick who lived in his seedy Hollywood hotel.

Hollywood continues to pay writers’ bills and fuel their imaginations.

Today’s Hollywood novel is as likely to be about television as about film, but the new Hollywood fiction retains many of the hallmarks of the old. Celebrities who have trouble distinguishing themselves from God are still a fixture of these books. As are the foibles of the rich and famous, including the widespread belief that lethal injection is preferable to flying coach.

Lee Goldberg is a TV writer-producer currently working on “Diagnosis: Murder.” The Tarzana resident is also the author of a new comic novel, “Beyond the Beyond” (St. Martin’s), that grew out of his experiences writing for “SeaQuest” and other shows.

Goldberg says he loves both his writing lives: getting well paid to do the collaborative work of television writing and getting a different kind of satisfaction from writing his over-the-top mysteries.

“When I write for TV,” Goldberg says, “I have to answer to the network, I have to answer to the studio and I have to answer to my fellow producers. With my books, I only have to answer to me.”

Not the least of the pleasures of fiction, denied to him when he writes for television, is the opportunity to be as raunchy as he wants. “Beyond the Beyond,” Goldberg’s second novel and the second to feature former cop, now studio security specialist Charlie Willis, includes a scene in which an actress kills a man with her mammoth breasts.

Goldberg’s book includes a manic sendup of the obsessive devotion of fans of television sci-fi. In the novel, “Beyond the Beyond” is the name of a classic TV show that sounds remarkably like “Star Trek.” In fact, says Goldberg, he realized how out-of-control such fans could be when he wrote a “SeaQuest” script featuring a character from an earlier episode and deviated from the detailed “fanfic” that devotees had written about the character.

“I got death threats,” Goldberg recalls.

While much of what he writes seems wildly exaggerated, he insists that “99% of the anecdotes are true.”

By fictionalizing megalomaniacal stars and disguising incidents in which real people acted badly, he gets to vent without paying the ultimate price--losing TV jobs.

“It’s a way for me to work out my aggressions and frustrations without burning any bridges,” he says.

Lindsay Maracotta was a novelist before she moved to Los Angeles in 1985 and almost immediately began getting screen work. She wrote screenplays for Disney, Goldie Hawn and Dino De Laurentiis and scripts for TV and was paid handsomely for them.

“It was fabulous,” she says. “It was like walking down the street and picking up money.”

It was also terribly frustrating. To date, not one of the screenplays has been produced. “Things would get to the point of greenlighting, then fall apart, over and over again.”

So she decided to return to the novel. “I wanted something that was all mine.”

As writers do, Maracotta had been taking notes, observing the Hollywood community that she was part of with an almost anthropological eye. The world she chose to write about is “domestic Hollywood,” a privileged universe where the children of the industry’s elite don’t have playhouses, they have entire villages in their backyards.

“I had a wealth of observations that I could finally put to use,” she says. That raw material was transformed into her 1996 mystery, “The Dead Hollywood Moms Society,” featuring animator-sleuth Lucy Freers.

Among the true-life anecdotes Maracotta gleefully wrote into her book was one told her by a former teacher at one of the town’s most prestigious private schools: “She swore to me that one year, for ‘show and tell,’ a third-grader brought in Jane Fonda.”

“It’s hard to believe until you see it,” she says of Hollywood excess. “In fact, you have to temper it somewhat, because if you write it the way it really is, it just sounds too unbelievable.”

The second Lucy Freers book, “The Dead Celeb,” will be published by William Morrow in September. “Dead Hollywood Moms” is due out in paper in July, and Maracotta has begun a third book in the series.

Officially published on Oscar Monday, Jon Boorstin’s satire, “Pay or Play,” includes a character whose documentary about the plywood industry is nominated for an Academy Award. Boorstin, who lives in Studio City, knows whereof he writes. His 1975 documentary film, “Exploratorium,” was an Oscar nominee.

Boorstin’s wildly comic novel is about the making of an action-adventure called “The Agonizer” and includes knowing sendups of everything from how documentaries become Oscar contenders to the multiple dangers of exotic locations.

Like Goldberg’s book, it only seems improbable if you’ve never worked here.

“People outside the industry read it and say how crazy and absurd,” says Boorstin, the son of Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin. “People inside the industry say how realistic it is.”

His is not a revenge book, as some Hollywood novels so obviously are, Boorstin says. The characters in those payback books tend to be “boring and one-dimensional,” in his view. Instead, he wanted to write a book that would both amuse and reflect all that he feels about movies and has learned about the industry.

Boorstin, who worked on “The Parallax View,” “All the President’s Men” and other major films, is fascinated by the single-mindedness of filmmakers.

“What unites the community is their belief in the supreme importance of what they are doing,” he says. “It’s like going to war. On the other hand, nobody dies. It’s only a movie. The worst thing that can happen is the movie fails.”

He finds that contradiction inherently comic. But it is also “an analogy for the human condition,” he says. “We all care terribly about things that are ultimately not very important.”

In Hollywood, writers agree, books are written for love, not money. A handsome advance by publishing standards is “lunch money, compared to what you get for a script,” says Maracotta. (The Writers Guild minimum for a screenplay is $56,165.)

Los Angeles’s Charlie Hauck, an executive producer on TV’s “Home Improvement,” took two years out of his Hollywood career to write a classic novel about television, “Artistic Differences” (Morrow, 1993).

Like other Hollywood novelists, he loved making fictional use of such real-life indignities as having to meet with an imperious star while she was having her toenails done.

Collaborative writing has its own pleasures, including camaraderie, says Hauck, “but, in novel writing, you have more freedom. You’re creating your own universe.”

What you rarely have is a fatter wallet, which is why most Hollywood novelists maintain their industry ties even as they tweak their colleagues in print.

Hauck has completed a second Hollywood novel, called “Saint Missy,” currently excerpted in an anthology called “Absolute Disaster,” from Dover. But the novel has yet to find a publisher. Meanwhile, Hauck happily juggles “Home Improvement” with work on his third novel, a mystery called “Easeful Death.”

As for the money, Hauck feigns disbelief.

“There’s money in publishing?”

BE THERE

Courses in writing for film, television and other media, as well as writing fiction, are available on an ongoing basis through Learning Tree University-Thousand Oaks campus, 1408 Thousand Oaks Blvd.

Courses in May include: “Story Structure for Fiction Writers,” “Introduction to Screenwriting: An Intensive Workshop,” “Writing the Situation Comedy,” “Finding a Literary Agent for Screenwriters” and “Writing and Publishing Picture Books for Children: An Intensive Workshop.” For a catalog or more information, call (805) 497-2292.