A thrill ride from one dead end to another

FINANCING an independent movie is a game of inches. Only the most determined or the luckiest get to the finish line. There are endless unrequited phone calls and schemes that go nowhere. And yet, there’s an undeniable excitement in it, certainly for me. I keep asking myself, ‘Do I really want to hear all the details?’ Paul Mazursky, a producer as well as director, is handling it. All I do is offer occasional bits of advice that aren’t all that original anyway. It’s irresistible, though -- immediate and real. Not at all like writing, particularly when I’m not sure what I’m going to write next anyway.

This is a time for me of either frantically promoting my book or of mooning around the Farmers Market drinking too much coffee. All a writer really needs is a pencil and paper and an idea. To be a director, crowds of people and millions of dollars (or in our case pesos) have to be found and deployed. Because part of the picture is set in Mexico, there are local bandits to deal with instead of the usual Los Angeles thugs. So far I don’t see much difference -- they all treat the budget as if it were a guide to theft and then say something like ‘Can’t you cut some of these scenes and get everybody to take a salary deferment?’ And ‘Can’t you find a way to put J. Lo in it?’

Bookselling, the quiet art

I’m in New York at present reading and signing my book. People laughed more in L.A. I think that’s because the pages have local references and after all, making movies is our great Los Angeles adventure. The producer and now novelist Robert Cort (“Action!”), my fellow panelist at the recent Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, says, “Bookselling is handwork, unlike movies, where the risk is huge and the rewards can be even greater.” There’s something quaint about bookselling as opposed to selling movies.

The festival was crowded and great fun, but there was also something self-congratulatory about it. A lot of talk from authors and readers alike about how terrific it was that so many people were there and interested in books as if reading was a worthy civic duty rather than central to one’s life.

At the festival I spoke with the journalist Charles Fleming, who later sent me a copy of “High Concept,” his biography of producer Don Simpson. I had helped Fleming with the book but somehow never read it. Simpson died young in 1996. He was a fabulously excessive guy who had been head of production at Paramount and then with his partner, Jerry Bruckheimer, produced a string of hits that defined the slam-bang style of the 1980s.

Simpson lived a kind of Hollywood life that now seems the province of the music business: drugs, money, fast cars and faster women. In today’s Hollywood, with the studios in the grip of huge international companies, a life like Don’s is less likely. That era -- from the late ‘70s into the early ‘90s -- now seems so distant that I think we spoke a different language then. As I’ve been trying to settle on an idea for my next book, Don has come to mind. Deciding on subject matter for a novel involves a lot of ideas that go nowhere, not unlike raising independent money. Still, Don had size, and that’s important for a novel.

Writers at the table

As I write this, Writers Guild members are anticipating the resumption of negotiations with the studios. The possibility of a one-year contract, instead of the usual three-year, is being discussed. If a decent offer on the DVD issue is forthcoming, membership will vote on it and probably accept the recommendation of the negotiating committee. The guild’s position is that the companies are making a fortune from DVDs and its members want a piece of it.

The networks’ upfront market -- in which they sell the ads for the coming TV season -- starts tomorrow. Much of the fall season rides on this. It’s in the interests of both sides to find an accommodation. That doesn’t mean it will happen.

In the early ‘70s, when I was striking in New York, a little band of writers was picketing the MCA/Universal offices, which were then on Park Avenue, and some hopeless klutz of a screenwriter stepped off the curb and broke his ankle. Word of this preposterous accident got around and led to another writer on another New York picket line laughing so hard that he fell down and sprained his wrist. Dangerous places these picket lines.

I have an old photograph of myself and my great friend Roger L. Simon, the novelist and screenwriter and now neocon blogger, picketing at Universal (the one in the Valley, the real one) in what must be the mid-’80s. We’re laughing as we march about with our signs. I know, I know, strikes are serious, but there’s something goofy about screenwriters marching around with picket signs, many of them no doubt thinking they’re in a production of “Waiting for Lefty.”

When new members of the guild ask about the union’s history, I recommend “The Hollywood Writers’ Wars” by Nancy Lynn Schwartz. It’s a history of the battles behind the formation of the guild in the 1930s. The book was published about 20 years ago. Schwartz was a wildly promising young writer. She had a couple of big television credits when she died of a brain tumor. She was 26. The book was completed by her mother, Sheila Schwartz. The book is still the best place to look if you’re interested in the dicey little adventure that became the giant WGA.

The generation that fought those early guild battles has pretty much taken its leave. The man of that era I knew best and longest was Philip Dunne, who died nearly 12 years ago. Phil wrote a lot of the first-rate movies of his time -- “How Green Was My Valley,” “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir,” “Stanley and Livingstone,” among others. His father was the writer Finley Peter Dunne, who is not much remembered now but in his day, before radio, his character, the Irish barkeep Mr. Dooley, was as famous in America as Huck Finn.

Phil was active in the Democratic Party and was a natural to help organize what was then called the Screenwriters Guild. He and his wife, Amanda, built a house on the Malibu cliffs after the war and lived there for 50 years. Darryl Zanuck lent them the money to buy the land. With a 1920s boarding-school accent and patrician manners, Phil was classier than most screenwriters but just as funny and just as committed to the enterprise as any of the noisier rascals in the trade, then or now. I learned a lot from him -- certainly about the movies but also about politics and the world, which is to say life itself.

A promoting machine

In addition to promoting my book, I’m in New York for a reading of a play of mine. The reading is tonight, and we’ve been rehearsing all week. Readings of this sort are done so frequently in New York that the actors union has established working rules. I revise this play endlessly and a chance to hear it spoken by actors is valuable. It’s about mathematicians, so it’s been read at some smarty-pants places -- MIT and Princeton. I think I’ve now got it about right or as right as I’m likely to get it.

Unlike the book, I’m not selling anything -- of course, I’d like to have it properly produced -- but I don’t go to stores and yak about it. I keep telling myself that I’m not naturally good at promotion or self-promotion, anyway. It’s one of the many little delusions I carry around. I might not be particularly good at it, but to my chagrin, I’m relentless. A friend recently said, “These days, you’d go to the opening of a tuna fish can.” To my embarrassment, he’s right. It’s all true.