Excerpt copyright 2006 by Bruce Kimmel
HOW TO WRITE A DIRTY STORY
He was down and out, living in one of those
turning-to-seed bungalow courts on Whitley, just
above Hollywood Boulevard. It was 1959, and things
just hadn’t panned out the way he’d hoped.
Oh, he’d written a couple of produced screenplays
for a couple of those low budget sci-fi and horror
things, those Grade Z movies that ended up playing
the bottom half of double bills in second-rate
fleapits and drive-ins.
But his good scripts (and he had a drawer full of
them) hadn’t had any takers and even the Grade Z
films had dried up. He read the trades daily, hung
out at all the right watering holes and restaurants
that directors and producers frequented, and he hung
around his agent’s office. According to his agent,
it was just one of those things, one of those dry
spells that screenwriters occasionally went through.
Unfortunately, he’d been going through it for over a
year.
His agent had suggested he write a play and try to
get it done in one of those tiny little theaters
down on Santa Monica Boulevard, like the Player’s
Ring or the Cameo. So, he’d written a play and had
given it to an actor friend, and it had gotten done,
and no one cared. At twenty-eight, Charles G. Laskey
(Charlie, to his friends), screenwriter, was a 5’7”
slightly balding nebbish with no prospects, who had
watched as his savings dwindled down to almost
nothing.
In the evenings, he hung out with his cronies,
mostly out-of-work actors. They’d go to Lucy’s over
on Melrose, or Oblath’s, across from Paramount or,
if they were feeling especially poor they’d just
meet at Coffee Dan’s or Hody’s in Hollywood, and sit
there for hours, commiserating about their hard
times. Gone were the days when he’d do the Brown
Derby/Nickodell/Musso and Frank circuit. At Coffee
Dan’s or Hody’s he could have a cheeseburger, french
fries, a coke and, with a dime tip, still be out of
there for under a buck.
After they sat for hours, he and his pals would
sometimes wander over to C.C. Brown’s to have a hot
fudge sundae just to have something sweet to
counteract all the sour bellyaching they’d just
done.
He decided it was time to knock out a new script.
Rather than trying to write something good, he began
writing a horror movie called The Monster of
Pacific Ocean Park. He thought Pacific Ocean
Park, the low-rent Disneyland of Santa Monica, would
be an interesting location to shoot a monster movie.
He typed seventeen carefully carboned pages on his
trusty Underwood (he’d bought his trusty Underwood
years ago at a pawnshop on Western and he loved it
dearly, battered and beaten as it was). He felt
really good about having typed seventeen carefully
carboned pages on his trusty Underwood—that is until
he read them. Then he didn’t feel really good,
because he thought the seventeen carefully carboned
pages were really bad. Bad bad. Awful bad. Worse
than the Grade Z dreck he’d written before. He gave
up on the script.
On days when he’d done his rounds and seen his
agent, he’d walk down to the boulevard and go to the
movies. He’d check out the lowrent theaters like the
Admiral or the Academy or the New View, but if he
couldn’t find anything that interested him he’d
splurge and go over to the Iris or the Vogue or the
Hollywood. For the time being, the Egyptian, the
Paramount, and the Chinese were too rich for his
blood.
His agent finally managed to get him a meeting on a
picture at Warners—some cheapo gangster movie they
were doing. It needed a dialogue polish. Dialogue
was his specialty, the meeting went well, and he got
the job on the spot. It was only going to pay a few
hundred dollars, but a few hundred dollars was manna
from heaven at this point.
On the way home, his ’54 De Soto stalled on Highland
near the Bowl. He couldn’t get it started, so he
called the Auto Club and they towed it to a
Richfield station on Sunset. The battery was shot,
kaput, as dead as his career. Wasn’t that just the
nuts on the sundae? He got a new battery, which
brought his current bank balance down to $162.41.
Hopefully, he’d knock the script polish out in a
couple of days and get his check and get his bank
balance to a more comfortable level.
He met up with some of his out-of-work actor friends
at Lucy’s to celebrate his job. There were always
interesting people at Lucy’s. On this particular
early evening, Chuck Heston was there, and so was
Bill Holden, happily drinking away. He didn’t see
any directors or producers that he knew, so that was
a drag. Sometimes it just helped if you were lucky
enough to see a director or producer in Lucy’s,
because it jogged their memories and occasionally
resulted in a job.
He and his friends shot the breeze. Beatnik pictures
were popular, and a couple of his pals had the
beatnik “look”—dirty sweatshirt, torn jeans, short
messy hair. One of them even had a goatee. They sat
there, doing “beatnik”—talking the lingo (or
whatever their idea of beatnik lingo was—their
conversation was peppered with words like “cool,”
“man,” “daddy-o,” and “squaresville”), spouting bad
poetry, and just making fools of themselves. They
were pretty rowdy, but it was really funny and they
laughed and laughed, while downing quite a few
beers.
At some point they grew tired of doing “beatnik,”
and they just started complaining about how slow
things were. Charlie’s actor pals all had similar
going-nowhere careers, but they all still had that
hope that actors have inbred in them that things
would turn around. The real common denominator
amongst them was that they were all barely making
ends meet.
“You know what you ought to do?” Charlie’s friend
Joe asked.
“Drive off a cliff?” Charlie replied, taking a swig
of beer.
“Cool it with that talk, daddy-o,” Joe said, and
they all laughed again. “I know a way to make some
bucks if you’re interested.
