That’s a Print

For a screenwriter, two of the most beautiful words in the English language surely must be “Fade Out,” the screenplay equivalent of “The End.” Typed with conviction, “Fade Out” becomes the password to a magical realm of anticipation. It is now time to go forth and multiply--that is, duplicate your work and send it around--and biochemically speaking, some of a screenwriter’s best moments come standing in line at the copy shop.

Bob Cohen, a.k.a. Bob the Printer, must have known this five years ago, when he moved the Van Nuys copy shop he’d started in 1979 to North Hollywood, amid a burgeoning number of entertainment industry offices. Here is an establishment designed to nourish that fleeting interval when the future seems haloed in a golden light of unlimited potentiality--after the hard work, and before the rejection, the round file, or the meeting in which the producer opens to Page 32 and says, “This would be a great place for a teen suicide.”

Above the mustard-yellow facade, emblazoned with Groucho and the Three Stooges and a Jurassic-themed mural, protrude wooden cutouts of frolicsome, if snarly, dinosaurs. Bob’s Coffeehead cafe next door is fronted by a sand-covered patio studded with umbrellas and palm trees so that you can pretend as if your script has already sold and you’ve absconded with your loot to some suitably tropical getaway.

Inside the print shop, aside from the free popcorn, is a shelf full of nutritional supplements, a huge barrel of shower heads Bob is unloading for $1.99 apiece and whatever else Bob thinks might be of use to his customers, who range from production companies in high gear to winsome novices. “Bob thinks that anything that has to be done should just be as fun as it can be,” says Mrs. Bob the Printer, or, if you prefer, Janie Cohen, who keeps the copy machines humming when the peripatetic Bob is out rummaging the county for shower heads.

Whether by virtue of mojo or location, the Bobs take a good share of credit (or blame, as the case may be) for keeping Hollywood stuffed to the gills with scripts. Pillars of scripts tower behind the counter--Mrs. Bob estimates the shop runs about 750,000 copies each month. They even keep scripts on file so that harried writers can call for extras on the spur of a moment. This sort of tonnage has made Janie Cohen well-versed in, literally, the brass tacks of screenplay formatting. She has saved more than one fledgling scribe from the disaster of incorrect binding. “Apparently, it really matters how many brads the script is bound with,” she says. Huh? “Never send out a script with three holes and three brads. Three holes and two brads is the rule. It’s crazy, but I’ve had too many writers tell me their scripts got tossed in the garbage because they had three brads.”

And that’s no small ray of light in the semiotic wilderness of script submission.

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Bob the Printer, 11002 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood; (818) 766-9379. And 3760 Cahuenga Blvd. W., (818) 754-0081.