I Get the Full Treatment

As a freelance writer with an interest in film, I spent a pretty fruitless decade (late Sixties to late Seventies) trying to sell to Hollywood and/or the networks, first the idea for a grand documentary series devoted to the amazingly varied "Music of the South," then my script on Robert Johnson, then a host of other ventures--the subject of this post.

One of the directors at King Screen (which specialized in educational films when I was writing for the company in the early Seventies) was named Paul Preuss, who later enjoyed some success as a science fiction novelist. Paul and I teamed up to develop a few feature ideas, for which I then wrote treatments. Our Western was called Deadwood City--yes, the very place immortalized (trivialized?) by a raw and powerful series on cable TV nearly three decades later. The treatment I wrote had Calamity Jane as our scruffy and rowdy, in-need-of-a-bath heroine, residing in the sea-of-mud town of Deadwood trying to track down the killer of her (unrequited) love Wild Bill Hickok.

We also plotted out a Ross Macdonald-styled hardboiled mystery titled The Chinese Puzzle, with a disenchanted Vietnam vet who had stayed on in Southeast Asia to become a martial arts master (some bizarre combo of kung fu and Thai foot boxing!) and then returned to Seattle as a private detective; our case involved dark secrets in the past of a wealthy family, the pieces of the "puzzle" open to differing interpretations and wrong conclusions.

About then, Paul decided to move to the Bay Area, and we opted to split "ownership" of the treatments--he got Deadwood and I got The Puzzle, which I then had no luck selling anywhere. I hope Paul got something from the version of our gritty Western that finally made it to television, but probably not, since no one has a copyright on history. He'd have had to prove direct theft of our treatment somehow.

Anyway, I kept plugging away. With consulting input from a Black friend named David Carr, I wrote the pilot for a sit-com series, called something like The Arletha Jones Show, which had a pop/soul star as lead (sort of Diane Ross, Ella Fitzgerald, and Aretha Franklin combined), supported by her Phil Silvers-like manager; her backing-combo led by arranger/pianist boyfriend; and her richly varied, ghetto-but-cheerful extended family. It seemed promising as a concept, but I never managed to get it read by anyone important.

I also spent a long time researching and writing a full-length script I titled Union Maid, involving labor organizing in the Northwest logging industry circa 1920, by the I.W.W., with a firebrand woman--a "Wobbly" organizer from the Eastern coal country--as lead, accompanied by a Guthrie/Dylan folksinger guy as her (unwanted) sidekick. The first half had some fairly comic, character-driven stuff, sort of "tough, good-looking woman trying to persuade crude loggers to think," while the second got tragically serious, culminating in the notorious Everett Massacre and subsequent trial.

But Union Maid got put away before it ever circulated. I couldn't quite make the two halves work together effectively, with the late trial dragging the whole film down... (But I still believe today that the largely forgotten Everett Massacre would make a powerful feature, a saleable combination of action film, tragicomedy, and historical look back, with many visual horrors revealed.)

The last script I wrote back then was also promising, and it actually got produced. But almost no one's ever heard of, much less seen, the film titled Doubles--and that's a suitable review right there.

Here's the story: another wannabe director I knew named Bruce Something asked me to write the screenplay for an idea he had. A bored Seattle dentist decides to create a second life for himself, setting up another residence and dental practice north in the Skagit Valley; not yet satisfied, he then hires a hitman to "kill" that second persona. That was pretty much all Bruce offered, but I was intrigued, pretty confident I could make something out of it.

And I did, adding the plot twists and turns (how to put the killer on the trail without him realizing that he's to kill a guy who knows he's coming; how to manipulate the hitman through a series of near successes; etc.) as well as the character details, indeed adding several other characters to flesh out the bare bones idea. My biggest contribution was to make the hitman one of a pair of twins--second brother the by-telephone contact man who serves as go-between--doubling our idea of "doubles." So when the lead guy finally manages to turn the tables, killing the killer first as it were, he thinks he's avoided any repercussions, legal or otherwise. But he then finds that he is being stalked by someone else he doesn't know about and can't control.

The twin brother is no killer, however, so he tricks the dentist into a final deadly confrontation that he (the brother) expects to lose. Then he cleverly arranges for the local sheriff and others to arrive at the murder scene before the guilty dentist can escape, with all evidence pointing to him as cold-blooded murderer.

I've spent some time detailing this plot mostly to make the next point. I finished the script, Bruce loved it, and he set out to raise money for a small-budget feature shoot. But he circulated the script with only his name on it. And when I learned this some weeks later, he persuaded me that I'd get full credit eventually, but that his apparent sole ownership would make a production deal easier.

I guess anyone reading this can pretty much guess a lot of the rest. The film did get made, but Bruce chickened out on trusting the rather hardboiled script I'd written. Oh, he didn't change the plot or dialogue or my script writing at all, but he added a framing device, a stupid dinner party setting where the whole "doubles" plot was told merely as a story, with no visual attempt to make it seem true or real; the inner story's actors even wore the same clothing in every scene! So all suspense was lost and the new ending just lame.

When I did get to see the butchered film, I also learned that my credit had gone from "Screenplay by" to the meaningless "Script Consultant." But the film was so wretched I decided I was better off not connected with it. Rather than file a grievance with the Writers Guild, I just left Bruce to make what he could out of the mess. Which was nothing.

I pretty much gave up on the notion of a screenwriting career after that. Hooray for Hollywood and its hucksters, wherever they reside...

Some Days the Magic Works... (Part 2)

Around 1971-72, I had an idea for a Native American film, a dramatic short meant to join King Screen's group of educational films intended to introduce other cultures and ways of thinking to middle-class, mostly white schoolkids. The core plot was this: a tribal elder, a grandfather figure raised in the old ways, hauls his urban grandson, a clueless teen rebel, off to the wilderness to discover and possibly embrace his Indian heritage.

Though a couple of other people appeared at the beginning of the story, it was really a two-character plot, starting in the city (Seattle) and then moving out to the Olympic Rain Forest on Washington's Olympic Peninsula and then finally to the actual Pacific coast. The script I wrote, titled Our Totem Is the Raven, would lead to a 20-plus minute work if all went well during filming.

Casting was the primary concern. The teenager could probably be found at some local school, but who could credibly play the grandfather?

Shortly before writing the script, I had seen a wonderful actor named Chief Dan George featured in Arthur Penn's movie Little Big Man (starring then young Dustin Hoffman). Remember the magical, twinkle-in-his-eye delivery of that tribal chief with the flowing white mane of hair when he says things like "My heart soars" and "Some days the magic works, some days it doesn't"? Well, that was Chief Dan George, whom I assumed was a newly discovered Hollywood star, because he was also appearing memorably about then in Clint Eastwood's excellent film The Outlaw Josey Wales.

I thought to myself, Now, that's the actor we need... But of course I also figured we had no chance of hiring him. So where could we find our man?

Then one night not long after, Chief Dan appeared on the Johnny Carson Show and revealed that he actually lived near Vancouver, B.C.--he was a chief of one of the Coast Salish tribes up there--only 150-some miles from us in Seattle! I decided that trying to reach him was now imperative; chances of his saying yes were likely slim to none, but it was worth a shot just to find out, if nothing else, how much the services of a major actor would cost us.

Through Vancouver friends, we were able to learn that his agent/manager was a producer with the Canadian Broadcasting System right there in Vancouver (where, it turned out, Dan routinely appeared in television productions). We reached the manager, he agreed to look at the script to see if it was suitable for Dan, and off it went. I paced the halls of King Screen and gnawed my fingernails waiting to hear back.

Then the word came: Dan actually liked the script, and he was available during March, just a month or two ahead. Moreover, the manager informed us, Dan's beloved wife had recently died, and he needed to be working to take his mind away from grieving...

I gulped and went to work, now as line producer, organizing things for a two-week shoot in Seattle and out on the Peninsula, near Kalaloch. The King Screen director assigned was named Paul Preuss (who later went on to a solid career as science fiction novelist). We found some native carvers and got special Northwest Coast tribal props made--a raven-topped staff, a salmon sort-of-plaque, and a special wood-carving knife with shaped handle. We searched the Greater Seattle area and found a surly, slightly chubby 14-year-old Native American teen to play the grandson, then rehearsed him a lot since he was not an actor. We also squeezed in a preliminary whirlwind visit north to Vancouver, but only for Paul and I to get acquainted briefly with our 70-year-old lead.

Then Chief Dan arrived in Seattle. What a wonderful, kindly gentleman he was too! Not as bubbly or cheerful as the roles he'd played had made us imagine, but of course he was still grieving too. (And as we soon learned, drinking somewhat more than he normally would...)

No need to revisit the entire film shoot, but after some rough first days getting the grandson up to speed and comfortable with Dan as we were shooting the early urban scenes, we headed out to the Pacific coast. And then came the Olympic Rain Forest's spring rains! Not just light showers but water "pissing down" (as the Brits say). For several days, we had nothing to do but sit at the lodge playing cards and waiting for the sun to shine again. It quickly became the main task for Paul and me to keep Dan busy and surrounded by cheerful people. The whole crew of eight or so wrapped the grand old man in a blanket of friendship, becoming his students, listening to his stories and his quietly offered wisdom (some of those thoughts can be found in My Heart Soars and two other books that appeared over his name later in the Seventies)... and working to keep him from drinking too.

When the rain let up, it became a classic rugged shoot: fewer days available (meaning longer hours), lots of scenes filmed along forest trails, in icy-cold streams, on the rocky beach, and so on, as the grandfather talked and showed his reluctant protege what was what. I particularly remember the sequence where Dan had to stand waist deep in a river to catch a salmon with his bare hands. Washington's rivers are cold all year but truly frigid in the early, glacial-melt springtime. To protect Dan we had him encased from the waist down in a black wet suit; we then shot carefully to hide it. And to prove that we were "with" him, literally, both the director and I stood in the freezing water as well for several hours! (Yes, we had on wet suits too.)

The last quarter of the film has the grandson finally catching his own salmon a few hungry days later (using his shirt as a net), which grandfather then shows him how to cook on an alder-woven grill over an open fire on the ocean beach. He bids a ceremonious thanks to the fish for sharing its flesh, they eat, the exhausted teen nods off, and grandfather--in the smoke from the fire--then seems to wade out into the ocean and disappear.

When grandson awakens next morning, he is alone. The implication is that he must find his own way in the world--back to the city, or never returning to it, who can say? (Since I haven't seen this script or film in 30 years, my memory is a bit hazy about the ending.)

At any rate, Chief Dan George went back north, and we went to work on post production. It was a breeze! Excellent visuals; a great, firm-but-loving performance by grandfather Dan, and okay work by the kid; footage that came together well in the editing room. Our Totem Is the Raven was soon a fait accompli.

Copies of it sold fairly well, and in fact are still to be found three decades later in collections around the U.S. (and maybe elsewhere) devoted to Native Americans on film. Chief Dan lived another ten years, a much-honored "First Nations" leader, and he continued to act, mostly in television (including a role in the major series Centennial), right up until his death.

And I moved on to a new life as freelance writer trying to sell feature scripts, and when that didn't work out, reluctantly settled in as a writer-producer in television advertising. But that's another story.

(Here's the amazing P.S.: right after writing all of the above yesterday, I Googled the Raven title for fun and actually found a copy being sold at auction! Which I immediately bought. Now if I can just find a 16mm. projector...)