A Screenplay in Search of a Better Ending

A congenital bone disease kept Richard Quinn the size of a 10-year-old and took him from ambulatory to cane-dependent to wheelchair-bound. The disease, Ehrenfried’s syndrome, did not, however, diminish his determination.

Richard was determined about a number of things. He was determined to be independent and self-supporting, and determined to help a troubled boy, the son of people he knew. He was determined, too, to be a part of the movie business. Working as a police dispatcher and an Amtrak reservation-taker, he clung to the edges of the film industry and hoped one day to be allowed inside.

In 1979, a man named Eugene Mandelcorn advertised in The Recycler for spec scripts for a low-budget cable TV series he called “The Sandman.” It involved a vigilante who captured criminals by putting them to sleep with a special gun. Richard submitted a script that Eugene liked. Eugene even let Richard direct the episode he wrote.

“The Sandman” didn’t exactly give Steven Bochco nightmares about lost ratings points, but Richard and Eugene, who works at the Los Angeles Central Library, became friends. In 1990, they teamed up to do a Siskel-and-Ebert-type show on local-access cable TV. It was called “Hollywood Unseen Videos” and was devoted to what Richard once called on-air “the B-movies, the Z-movies, the films the big guys wouldn’t even want to talk about.”

On a video of one show from 1990, Richard and Eugene assay films with such names as “Ghost Dance,” “The Doorman,” and “Ozone! Attack of the Redneck Mutants.” The tape shows Richard to be a handsome, dwarfish man, attired in a red-and-white striped golf shirt and a white necktie depicting Canada geese. His cane lies across his lap. He is well-spoken and keeps popping his small, round hands together delightedly as he assails “Redneck Mutants.”

Richard’s disease progressed through the mid-1990s, and eventually he could no longer do his work. Amtrak let him go after a career of 13 years. In 1998, Richard finished a screenplay for an animated feature film he called “The Dolphins of Pompeii.” It is a fanciful, emotional tale in which a pod of dolphins saves the children of the doomed city after Mt. Vesuvius erupts in the year 79.

Otherwise, 1998 was a disaster. That year the troubled teenage boy whose guardian he’d become robbed Richard and beat him so severely that he had to be hospitalized. After his release, he had to vacate the comfortable Culver City apartment he’d lived in for two decades because the building was to be torn down.

Eugene drove him all over Los Angeles to find affordable lodging appropriate for Richard’s diminishing capabilities. They could find nothing.

Richard became a street-dweller. He grew unkempt and his personal hygiene deteriorated. Each day he took a bus to Beverly Hills and begged for money around Nate-N-Al’s Delicatessen on Beverly Drive. Whenever his wheelchair battery failed, Richard called Eugene on the cell phone Eugene had given him, and Eugene would pick him up in his car. Despite his woes, Richard kept his sharpness of mind and became a familiar sight in Beverly Hills. Through a friend, film director Tom Shadyac learned of “The Dolphins of Pompeii” and optioned it from Richard for $1,500--manna from heaven. Shadyac bought the option partly because he thought the story had potential and partly because he wanted to give the dilapidating man in the wheelchair a boost.

Richard Arlook of the Gersh Agency breakfasted regularly at Nate-N-Al’s, and he gave Richard a dollar each time he encountered him. One day, Richard asked him to read his screenplay. Arlook thought, “Oh, boy . . . .” The screenplay, however, surprised the agent, who, reasoning that helping Richard would be good for his own karma, circulated “The Dolphins of Pompeii” to DreamWorks and Disney, among others.

Richard was living off and on in a transient hotel on the edge of skid row. His prospects worsening by the day, he pressed Shadyac for results. The director tried to get him to understand that “these things take time.” Richard, however, did not have the luxury of waiting out Hollywood’s desultory ways.

In early March, Nate-N-Al’s regulars began noticing Richard’s absence. Eugene tried calling on the cell phone. No answer.

A housekeeper found Richard dead in his room March 14. He had died, apparently of natural causes, at age 56. After the coroner’s office removed his body, somebody kicked in the door to his room and stole his remaining possessions.

Shadyac was unable to make anything happen with “The Dolphins of Pompeii.” Those to whom Arlook sent the screenplay eventually passed.

In “The Dolphins of Pompeii,” a crippled 10-year-old boy and a dolphin disabled in a shark attack combine to pull off the great rescue. The boy and the other children are transported on the backs of dolphins to a place of peace, joy and riches, and the lame boy and the handicapped dolphin are relieved of their infirmities.

Richard’s body is still at the coroner’s, awaiting cremation.

A Web site features a detailed treatment of “The Dolphins of Pompeii.” It’s at https://www.idowebpages.com/dolphin.html. Maybe someone else in Hollywood will give it a look.