Chapter 5: Hooray for Hollywood

Wolfe took Gene's advice. He called the studio and was told he'd be contacted with the tickets and all necessary information. In short order, he was on the train out to the West Coast in the solitary luxury of a Pullman cabin. At Los Angeles he was greeted by a studio representative and driven in style to the studio Hollywood offices.

Once the greetings and publicity photos were taken, they got down to business. They gave Wolfe a contract to sign for his services on the screenplay for River Gravers, including all living expenses. Then they gave him the seven rejected scripts. Knowing that Wolfe had never seen a movie script, they also gave him four scripts from successful films and a studio manual for the format of a script. They also gave him a copy of the novel, but Wolfe laughed and said that he thought he knew the story pretty well.

The studio rep took Wolfe to a luxurious residence hotel; his home base for the duration of the assignment. Once he got settled in, Wolfe read through the rejected scripts and even through his ignorance of the screenplay format, he could see that they all were pretty bad.

Oh, they looked professional, but it was very hard to see his novel in them.

He read through the good scripts, which had all been adaptations of novels he had read.

Wolfe tried to go to school on them, and the guidance in the studio manual, but was baffled by the artificial restrictions and conventions of the medium. And when he tried to write, his natural descriptive style took over.

By now Wolfe had graduated to writing on a typewriter. The result was proving to be a slightly abridged version of his novel crammed more or less into the conventions of a script format. If he went on, the resulting screenplay would be several hundred pages longer than the longest script he had in his possession. He suspected that it would be the longest script ever seriously written.

Wolfe strongly suspected that the studio moguls would not be pleased.

He ate the fine meals at nearby restaurants. He swam in the hotel pool. He developed a lovely tan. He found himself flirted with by daringly-bathing-suited Hollywood starlets and starlet wannabees.

He wasn't naïve. He knew that they were willing to fuck him or do anything else that he wanted in exchange for him using his studio influence to get them a small part or at least a screen test.

As a screenwriter currently employed by a major studio, Wolfe had an in. It was the extended version of the casting couch. These women and hundreds before them had screwed writers, directors, producers and casting assistants to get a screen test or a bit part in a film.

If Wolfe had wanted to play the game, he could have gotten laid every night. But after his initiation and lengthy affair with Mrs. Gant, Wolfe was more sure of himself and his sexual abilities. And he had also absorbed a great deal of Gene's philosophy. He had held a genuine affection for Eulie, and it had fueled their affair.

These girls had no feelings for him, other than as a stepping stone for their ambition. Nor had he any feelings for them other than simple lust. Being a red-blooded American male. he took advantage of the first couple of cuties who were persistent. It was sex, but he had come to expect more. In Hollywood just about every other woman that you see is a sex- goddess. Wolfe was further tempted, but couldn't bring himself to further indulge. If he had been having success with the writing, he might have been more tempted. But he was not

He was living the good life in an earthly paradise, but felt he was on borrowed time.

Sooner or later would come the time when his lack of talent would be revealed by his failure to write a decent script.

Back when he had been going through the mounting serial disappointments of seeing the Heap rejected, one at a time by every one of the New York publishers, he was at least bolstered by the conviction that he was a good writer, and they were at fault for not recognizing it. He had no such confidence here.

One afternoon, he gave up on the poolside locale and went back to his suite. Nothing happened from the change of venue. He began to think he was stealing the studio's money.

He began to think maybe it was time to pack his suitcase and admit defeat. He would turn in what he had done and resign the job. Some of the seven scripts had never been completed; evidently the writers had simply given up.

He was sitting at his studio-furnished Royal upright and staring at the blank sheet of paper when an idea struck him. He looked at his pocket watch and realized that his East Coast friends would have just started working. On an impulse, he picked up the phone and asked for the long distance operator.

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Gene was in his office, reading a submitted MS. The irony was not lost on him; he was president of his own successful publishing company, but he could never seem to escape from being a slushpile First Reader!

He sighed and marked it as a reject and tossed it onto a table. But before he could pick up the next one, the switchboard operator rang in and told him he had a long distance call from Hollywood. It was Wolfe calling.

The famous young writing sensation apologized for interrupting, but Gene could hear how unhappy his friend was, just from the tone of his voice. "Wolfe, ease up. You know you can call on me any time. You sound like your dog just died. What in Hell is going on out there?"

He listened for twenty-five straight minutes as his friend poured out his frustrations. In this kind of call, where the cost was billed to the studio, the Long Distance Operator never broke in.

He explained how badly he was flopping. He talked about the seven bad scripts and the four good ones, and detailed his inability to do any better than the former and how he couldn't begin to approach the quality of the latter. He even described the emptiness of the casting couch culture and how he was being flirted with and propositioned every day but was too miserable from his failures and too hung up on foolish romantic notions to even think of indulging.

As for the writing itself, Wolfe said he realized that his normal verbose descriptive style that worked so well in a novel, or at least when cut back by a great editor like Gene, was useless in the visual and spoken conventions demanded of a script. He said he was just about to chuck it all and come back home with his tail between his legs.

Gene tried to put himself in his friend's shoes. No one on earth knew Wolfe's writing style any better than Gene.

"Wolfe," he asked, "Do you think you could send me a few of the scripts? Say the best two of the failed River Graver attempts and two of the good movie adaptations from novels.

Maybe I can come up with an idea. And as far as the foolish romantic notions go, I think you got a lot of that from me, remember? Relax, big guy; you just have to find your own Cora. Give me your number out there; I'll call you in a few days."

Gene got the scripts and pored over them, looking for the difference between a good script and a bad one. All had been written by veteran screenwriters, and looked the same on the page. The difference was in the content and how the story lines were crafted. He read them several times, and then picked up his own autographed copy of River Gravers to refresh his memory of the story.

He called his friend on the fifth day. The hotel operator said that she was unable to reach Mr. Webber in his room, so she had him paged.

A few moments later, she came back on the line. "I can connect you now."

Wolfe picked up. "Hey, my friend, where were you hiding?" Gene joshed.

"Believe it or not, I was out by the pool writing, but I came inside for privacy," Wolfe said.

He sounded much more like his usual upbeat self.

"Writing? Did you finally break through your writer's block and get going on the script?"

"Uh, well, not exactly," Wolfe said. "Actually, I've been goofing off. I just got to thinking about the last thing you said to me. You said I just had to find my own Cora, remember?

Well, that got me thinking, and I pulled up the Royal and started writing about you and your background and about Cora and her background, and how you met and then got together. Viewed strictly from a writer's viewpoint, it's a terrific story. I'm writing it as a story, but it would make a great screenplay. Gary Cooper would play you and Miriam Hopkins would be perfect as Cora, don't you think?"

"Whoa, hoss! That's all ... well, first off, Gary is too tall to play me. Maybe Fredric March would be better. Miriam Hopkins is a fine beautiful actress, but there's not an actress in the world beautiful enough to play my Cora. And besides, this is all well and good, but you're being paid to write the screenplay of River Gravers, remember?

"Well, this helps me forget what a flop I am at that."

Gene had to shake his head at that, forgetting that Wolfe couldn't see him.

"Ok, Wolfe, tell me what you feel when you're at the typewriter looking at the page. You do type now, don't you?"

"Oh, yes I hunt and peck. Let me see, how do I feel? Overwhelmed, mostly. I have one of the scripts propped up beside me, along side the studio script-writing manual. They both show me how to set it up in scenes and the conventions that they use for dialogue. It's the character's name in all caps and a colon, and then straight typing; no quotes or anything like that. Anything descriptive goes in parentheses."

"Ok, I've seen that in the scripts. Ok, so far, so good. So where do you think you're going wrong?"

"Gene, after the scene number, my parenthetical scene-setting covers two and a half pages!

I'm on page three and I haven't had anyone say a damned word yet! See why I'm freaking out? It's this damned descriptive style of mine. All the other scripts are about 90 percent dialogue and 10 percent descriptive. I'm bass-ackwards."

"I think I understand, ' Gene said. "I've been doing a little research of my own on scriptwriting, and have a few ideas that might help. Got the book there? Ok.

"Now, what happens in the first eight pages? You basically describe Elm Street.

Everything your memory could recall about the houses, the lawns, even the different kinds of fences in front of all the houses between Cameron Avenue and the Mason's house.

"Wolfe, you can parenthetically describe that in two sentences. You don't need to supply all the details; the set decorator will have River Gravers to work from. One short parenthetical summary and then the camera sees Temple on the porch.

"In the book you go on at considerable length to describe Temple lying sprawled on the porch glider, obviously in a drunken stupor, lying in his own vomit. There's a lot about how much Temple drank and who he took a shine to.

"You describe the orgy at Sue Ellen's party and how he wound up banging Ingrid, even though he hates her guts. And how angry Selma was when she caught him. With me, so far?"

Wolfe grunted.

"Ok, here is where you have to really start growing as a writer. Don't describe all that.

You have to either show it as a flashback or have your character convey it as dialogue.

"Now here's an example:

"Parenthesis: Temple wakes up, and his expression shows how disgusted he is with himself and the evidence of his debauchery: his clothes and the pool of vomit. End Parenthesis.

"All that's in parens, see?

"To show the moviegoer what happened the previous night, create a montage of mini- scenes where each one dissolves into the next. No dialogue, just silent action.

"Then write something like:

"TEMPLE: God, Selma will never forgive me. And with Ingrid of all people.

"Now look, what I'm tossing out here is pedestrian. A real writer like you will write it much better, maybe use his words and actions to reveal more of his character: his feelings of alienation and lack of decisiveness. Do you get the idea?

Wolfe hesitated before responding. "I'm ... maybe. I have seen things like that in the scripts. The way you describe it, it begins to make sense. Boy, I'm going to have to completely reinvent the way I tell a story.

"Gene, it's going to take me time to get the hang of this. I'll have to go though the book, page-by-page. And I just don't have the luxury of time. The studio is getting pushy, asking to see some progress. I don't know how much longer I can put them off."

Gene was silent, thinking.

"Wolfe, where are you calling from?"

"My office in my suite at the hotel."

"So this call is at the studio's expense?"

"I guess so. Nobody's ever handed me a bill to pay. They told me all the expenses were part of my contract."

"Ok, Wolfe, here's what I want you to do. Hang up and go to a bank and buy ten rolls of nickels. Then find a pay phone and call me from it. Have your book in your hand and be ready to work."

Mystified, Wolfe did as told. He called his friend back from a pay phone in his hotel lobby. He did that by jiggling the hook and asking for a Long Distance Operator

In that era, long distance phone calls were pay as you go. The Long Distance Operator would place your call and tell you to deposit a fixed amount for the first three minutes. He told her the number in New York and she told him to deposit 85 cents. So Wolfe put in seventeen nickels. The Ka-Ching-ing went on seemingly forever as the coins dropped.

Gene told him that he would have to keep feeding the coin slot whenever the Long Distance Operator told him to. That was what the nickels were for.

When his paid-for time was up, the Operator would come on and say, "Kindly deposit twenty-five cents for another three minutes."

Gene told his friend to pick up the book and start telling him the story of River Gravers over the phone. Wolfe barely got to the middle of page two before he had to deposit coins to keep the call going.

"Gene, this ain't gonna work," he said. "I'll need a wheelbarrow full of nickels."

"Yep, I guess so," Gene said. "Why don't you try to skip most of the description? Pretend that there's a camera, and it can look at the things that you spend so many words describing. Cut out all the description; just give the cameraman a few hints at what to film.

Now go back and start reading."

After three minutes, the operator chimed in again.

Wolfe muttered "Shit," and Eugene heard more nickels dropping in.

With the frequent interruptions to deposit money as a spur, and his own dismay at the paragraphs of description he had to wade through, Wolfe realized the impossibility. To actually read through his book aloud would take a long, long time.

Wolfe began to pare down the words, often with tears in his eyes. He always loved all of that description; even felt it was the essence of his unique writing style. Now he had to keep killing it. He couldn't afford it.

He said as much to Gene.

Who replied, "Wolfe, you are a storyteller. When you write words on paper, you tell a story one way, and it has been very good for you on the printed page of a book. But you don't talk to everyone that way. You don't go though that to tell your doctor or dentist where it hurts. You didn't tell Eulie what your day was like that way.

"Now you are pressed for time by the Bell Telephone Company's charging methods.

"Think of how much money you are wasting. Time is money. Just imagine telling me the story. Simplify, boil it down, and think of what the camera can see and record, and stop dwelling on it descriptively. I think what you will wind up with is a rough draft of what will be the script.

"Your descriptions will be spare: only what's needed to set the scene to be filmed. The camera will film what you think needs to be shown. Like: (Camera pans over vines overgrowing the fence.) Then back to the story: what the people do and what they say.

Tell the story that way."

So Wolfe Webber learned how to write a spare, taut, clean script by feeding handfuls of nickels into an insatiable coin slot and retelling an old tale to his publisher, editor and friend over the phone. The interruptions by the operator gave him a chance to look ahead and plan what he was going to cut.

After almost an hour, Gene broke in. "Wolfe, that's enough. Do you get it?"

"Goddamn if I don't. Gene, you're a fucking genius. I'm gonna hang up now and go to my room and write down what I just said. And then I'll picture your ugly mug on the wall in front of me and keep on telling you the rest of it. In the end it may not be any better than those other seven damned lousy scripts, but at least it'll look like a professional script."

And he was partially right. It did look quite a bit like a professional script, although he was still too inexact about some of the niceties of format. But those prior seven reject scripts had looked professional, too; they were written by some of the most accomplished pros in the business.

But where his differed from theirs, was in the content. River Gravers, for all of its length, was at heart a delicate, elusive tale of hard-won self-awareness, hidden beneath a rich descriptive style. When the pros had tried to boil it down to the confines of a script, they'd boiled away the essence as well. What was left was a conventional coming-of-age story.

Wolfe Webber boiled the story down to its quintessence. And even the businessmen- visionary-Philistines who ran the studio dimly realized that as soon at they read his screenplay.

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To clean it up, they brought in a young script doctor named Sarah Jubinsky.

When she was introduced, Wolfe felt her presence like a blow to his heart, only what a very pleasant, lovingly padded punch it was. He was smitten, and didn't even quite realize it yet.

Sarah was nothing like the starlets. She was a quiet deeply tanned brunette with a lean, almost boyish figure, or at least that's what Wolfe thought he saw. It was hard to tell from the loose layers of tops that she wore.

She did not flirt. He had nothing in the way of influence that she wanted. She was there to work. She had a typing speed of nearly 80 words per minute, even while navigating the quirky rigid format requirements of a major studio script. She tore though his typo-ridden pages. En route, she said she cleaned up some little niggling format niceties, but she barely touched any of Wolfe's dialogue or action descriptions. She told him she couldn't find anything to change.

She told him that he had a good natural script-writing style, which made him laugh. He offered to buy her dinner while he told her what a fake he was. Honesty being almost unheard of in Hollywood, she took him up on his offer, just to enjoy the novelty. She was almost certain that he was feeding her a line of crap to try to get in her pants.

Over dinner at the Brown Derby, Wolfe soon had her in stitches. He went back to the beginning and made his travails to get his first book published sound like a script for a modern movie comedy, while giving Gene Tolliver the lion's share of the credit.

"They called it the Heap," he explained. "A twelve-inch high stack of writing pads. I had to ship it in a carton. I sent it to every publisher that I thought might be interested and got back a perfect string of rejection letters. On my instructor's salary, it was costing me a small fortune just to ship the damned thing out with sufficient return postage. I only had the original and the one handwritten copy, so I desperately needed to get it returned if it was rejected.