9/18/22
Newsletter101
The Crack of Dawn
When I moved to Hollywood in 1976 at the age of 17, overflowing with ambition, the love of movies, and hubris coming out my ears, I honestly thought, “Now the real history of Hollywood begins.” I set up my electric Smith-Corona typewriter in my $65-a-month, then purchased 1,000 sheets of erasable, yellow typing paper, and vowed I write on every single page. And it was then that I came to unsettling realization that I didn’t know how to write. Yes, I’d written a bunch of short stories, and a few short screenplays, but I really didn’t know how to write. I read a book called The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri, and that helped, but I still didn’t get it. One night I was hanging around with my new friend, Sheldon, and his old pal, Inigo De Martino Jr. On our way to wherever we were going we stopped to see Inigo’s parents, who lived in the huge, odd apartment complex, Park La Brea, built in 1948 and is the largest apartment complex west of the Mississippi with 4,255 units. I met Inigo’s parents. His mother was a “Tex-Mex,” as she put it, with a Texas drawl; his father, Inigo De Martino Sr., was a distinguished, white-haired gentleman from Mexico. Mr. De Martino had written 35 Mexican movies, and directed 7 of them. I was immediately enchanted. When Sheldon and Inigo were ready to leave, I stayed. And then in the course of one evening, Mr. De Martino taught me the basics of screenwriting. This was by far the most important writing lesson of my life. For instance, he explained that “your character writes your story,” and gave me a clear example: “We’re in a saloon in the old west. Big Bad Bart slams his pistol on the bar and says, ‘The next man who walks through that door is dead.’ Now, whoever walks through the door, that’s your story. If it’s Clint Eastwood, we have a drama; if it’s Woody Allen, we have a comedy.” He then went through every genre and explained them. This was how he exemplified suspense: “A woman is on a cliff about to dive into a beautiful lagoon. She gets into position, is about to dive, then turns around and puts on some suntan lotion. We see, though she doesn’t, a giant tenacle come out of the water, then go back in. She turns around and gets back into position to dive. Every second she hesitates, that’s suspense.” I learned more from Mr. De Martino in one night than from all the books I ever read about it, which were many.
Armed with this new invaluable knowledge, I returned to my tiny apartment across from Paramount Pictures. I had typed all over the 1,000 pages of typing paper, but still hadn’t written anything of value. That’s when I came to my next realization: I had nothing to write about because I had never done anything. How would I fix that?
On the wall of the apartment building next to mine was a cracked old plaster bas relief of Jack London in profile wearing a sailor’s cap and smoking a pipe. The inscription below it read: “Jack London, world-famous novelist, journalist, short story writer, adventurer, war correspondent, and photoplay scenario writer, lived in this house during the 1914 production of William Selig’s motion picture version of The Sea Wolf.” I went to the library and read about Jack London. Among many other adventures, he had gone to the Yukon for the gold rush. And so I naturally decided to hitchhike to Alaska, which would take me through the Yukon Territory. It took me nine days to hitchhike from L.A. to Tok Junction, Alaska. I was there during the summer solstice and the sun never went down. There were also more mosquitoes than I have ever seen in my whole life. There were literally clouds of enormous mosquitoes that were so ferocious they were known to drive grizzly bears crazy. I turned right around and left. I hitched down to Vancouver, then across most of Canada to Detroit. After a week of R&R I hitched back to L.A., got my car and all of my belongings, then drove straight back to Detroit in 60 hours.
And it worked. I wrote my Alaska hitchhiking story as a book called Going Hollywood, and it was published . . . 31 years later.
Better late than never.