The Fickle Glow of the Green Light

If you live in Los Angeles, it’s almost inevitable that you have a couple of pals like Michael Sloane. They’ve become a Hollywood archetype: the wannabe screenwriter, the guy you see at Starbucks, hunched over his laptop, nursing a no-foam latte, working on a scene for a high-tech thriller with great parts for Matt and Ben that’s going to finally put him on the map. To make ends meet, they usually work a dreary day job they don’t like to talk about.

Until recently, the description fit Sloane all too well. Now 42, Sloane has spent years writing screenplays. Most of the scripts were never seen by anyone outside his tight circle of old Hollywood High friends. There was an action movie--sort of a “Die Hard” set at Club Med--and a comedy about a movie lover who kidnaps Orson Welles’ remains, but none of them went anywhere.

Having dabbled in stand-up comedy and acting, Sloane became a computer nerd to pay the bills, doing tech support at places like CalFed Bank and KCET-TV. The one movie gig Sloane got was writing a quickie sequel of a cult Roger Corman film called “Hollywood Boulevard.” The job largely consisted of Sloane writing scenes to link footage from old Corman movies--it went straight to video.

Without any new prospects, without an agent, Sloane decided it was time to, as he puts it, “confront my fear of getting something I cared about written.” He’d called in all his favors and maxed out his credit cards, carving out a six-week window away from his day job so he could direct a little movie based on a friend’s play.

When the actor he needed to get the movie made backed out, Sloane spent the six weeks writing a script that combined two of his favorite ideas: one about a blacklisted screenwriter, the other about a ‘50s movie theater coming back to life. Intertwined, they became a story, set in 1951, about a blacklisted writer who gets amnesia and awakens in a small town where the owner of the long-shuttered movie house mistakes him for his war-hero son, assumed dead since the end of World War II.

When Sloane finished, he called up a Hollywood High buddy he’d known since he was 16 and told him he was leaving the script on his doorstep. His phone rang at 8:30 a.m. the next morning. The first thing his old friend said was: “Who else have you shown this to?” And the next thing his friend said was: “I want to make this movie.”

Since the friend was director Frank Darabont, who has two best picture Oscar nominations under his belt (“The Green Mile” and “The Shawshank Redemption”), Sloane found his knees sinking to the floor. He told Darabont, “If this is a joke, it’s the cruelest joke you could ever play.” Sloane had shown Darabont his scripts before and gotten encouragement, but no results. Darabont reassured him: “It’s a great script.... It just kept getting better and better.” To prove his seriousness, Darabont hurried over to Sloane’s place and wrote him a check that served as his option on the material.

Michael Sloane was no longer a wannabe. He was a screenwriter.

Five years later, Sloane’s film, “The Majestic,” is just weeks away from its debut, with Jim Carrey as the screenwriter who inadvertently assumes a new identity. With Darabont as director, and its uplifting subject matter, the film is viewed as a possible Oscar contender. In some ways, Sloane’s life has completely changed. He has a top agent. His 17-year-old Honda has been replaced by a new BMW. He’s just finished directing a short film, designed as a calling card for a directing debut.

But in other ways, Sloane’s life is the same. He still has breakfast every Saturday with his old school chums at the Highland Grounds, a cafe down the road from Hollywood High. The cafe even named a dish after them: the HHS Blues Burrito. The school ties are strong; 14 Hollywood High alumni from Sloane’s era worked on “The Majestic,” including Darabont, production designer Gregory Melton, costume designer Karyn Wagner, location manager John Grant and hairstylists Nina Paskowitz and Katherine Rees, who all graduated in 1977, a year after Sloane.

Hollywood High was where Sloane and his friends first discovered the magic of make-believe. The catalyst was Jerry Melton, a legendary theater arts instructor who taught at the school from 1968 to 1991. “He was a great teacher because he challenged us,” Sloane explained the other day over coffee at the Grounds.

When not doing shows, Sloane and Darabont worked as ushers at the nearby Hollywood Boulevard movie palaces--Sloane at the Paramount (now the El Capitan), Darabont at the Paramount and then the Egyptian. Sloane drew on his love for these historic theaters writing “The Majestic,” which is an unabashedly old-fashioned, Capra-esque movie.

When Darabont first asked Sloane whom he had in mind for the lead roles, the screenwriter replied, only half-jokingly: Jimmy Stewart and Carole Lombard. Needing someone still alive, Darabont chose Carrey, one of the few modern-era stars capable of the kind of apple-pie innocence needed for the role.

But the script Sloane fashioned for “The Majestic,” especially the emotional core of the story--how a down-on-his-luck writer finds a surrogate family when the town’s movie house owner embraces him as his long-lost son--has a deeper resonance with Sloane. When we were at lunch one day, Martin Landau, who plays the movie house owner in the film, phoned Sloane to say hello. After Sloane got off the call, he said he’d grown especially close to Landau, whom he described as being “like a father to me.”

It’s a telling remark, for in many ways “The Majestic” represents a fantasy reenactment of Sloane’s own life. He is the product of an affair his mother had with a married man who was her boss at a Hollywood insurance company. He never knew his father, who committed suicide before he was born, apparently out of shame over the liaison. Sloane’s mother, who died in the early 1980s, never told him the truth about the affair.

“It must’ve been terribly traumatic for her, because she took it to her grave,” he says. “Her whole life was about covering something up and keeping it under wraps, even with her own son. In fact, she created a whole fictional story of a fictional father to protect me from the horrible truth.” Sloane flashes a faint smile. “My mother was a master of misdirection. I guess you could say she was a great writer of fiction.”

His mother’s brother lived just blocks away when Sloane was growing up, but Sloane says his mother created a rift between them so her son wouldn’t be tempted to ask her brother about his father. When his uncle first approached him after his mother’s death, Sloane says, “I blew him off. I thought I was being a good son by carrying out her instructions and keeping the rift going.”

In the mid-1990s, Sloane hunted down two of his mother’s best friends and asked about his father. “They said, ‘All we know is that your mother disappeared in late 1958 and reappeared in 1962 with a 3-year-old boy and told us, “This boy is Michael and don’t ask about his father.”’” Only in 1999 did Sloane seek out one of his uncle’s daughters, who revealed the truth about his mother’s affair.

He’s never made contact with his father’s family and isn’t sure he should. “It would make great movie drama, but I’m not sure they deserve to have their world turned upside-down,” he says. “I’d hope they would want to meet me as much as I want to meet them, but it would be rough to knock on someone’s door, say, ‘I’m your half-brother’ and have the door slammed in my face.”

Today Sloane lives with Tony Laanan, his partner of the past five years. Since his mother’s death, his surrogate family has been the Melton clan--he still calls his old drama teacher Mr. Melton--but Melton’s wife, Ruth, goes by Mom. His rift with his real family has been mended: Sloane spent Thanksgiving with his cousins.

In “The Majestic,” when we first see Landau’s character’s living room, the camera pans across his sideboard, which is decorated with wartime photos, one of them an actual picture of Sloane’s Uncle Max in his World War II Army uniform. It’s about as close as Sloane can get to connecting with his real father, placing a little bit of his blood kin in a movie about his imagined family.

“Martin would be an ideal dad to have,” Sloane says. “He has the best stories and does the best impressions of the people in his stories. He’s just a delight to be around. If my dad was alive and working as an actor, I’d like to think he’d be just like him.”

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