![]() ![]() Because I had been surviving abroad on the equivalent of $100 a week and had no American reserves, this piquant financial arrangement was part of the deal with 20th Century Fox negotiated by my expert lawyer, Alan U. I had also never had a first-class air ticket, never written a full-length screenplay and never been met at the airport by someone handing over $500 in cash. I liked my chances.Īlthough I was born in Los Angeles and spent my earliest years in the Arcadian bliss of Coldwater Canyon, where my father had built a house, I’d never been back as an adult. To a society that fancied itself a Redeemer Nation, the bonanza of stars, paydays and lush life were proof positive that the system worked. As the song says: ‘Go out and try your luck/You may be Donald Duck/Hooray for Hollywood.’ America had always been a percentage play, and Hollywood was the fabulous embodiment of the nation’s faith in pluck and luck. From now on I would spend my literary life alternating between writing novels and adapting them for the silver screen. The days of word counts, deadlines, kill fees, dud plays were behind me. My trajectory seemed as straight and clear as the plane’s flight path on the cabin TV screen. ![]() (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our nomination. A couple of years earlier, Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet, a short film I’d written with the director John Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. He could finally stop worrying about me ‘making a buck’. I thought about Dad up there among the clouds and hoped he was looking down. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality that matched my elevated mood. Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. I n April 1973, on a Pan Am 747 jumbo jet from London to LA, I took my seat in the upstairs dining room opposite a Cincinnati salesman and his wife. ![]()
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