I knew nothing at all about computers until I bought a word processor in 1985. I had started writing screenplays so I could keep the ranch afloat, though I never had any intention of getting any of them made. In those days, the Hollywood studios were paying good money to have screenplays written so they could then retire the intellectual property. So I ended up writing four or five, and I was able to sell them for twenty or thirty thousand dollars each. This is rather ironic considering my subsequent feelings with regard to copyright.
Even though I saw screenplays as something easy I could do for cash, I was dedicated enough to quality that if I felt like I really had to make a change in a script, I would do it. This was no easy process. I was working on a typewriter, and making a change somewhere in the middle of a screenplay meant having to retype about forty pages of the goddamn thing, which made me feel completely and tragically overwhelmed.
I kept thinking, Screenwriters have been doing it like this all along? How did they not all blow their brains out? Then I ran across somebody who said, “We now have this thing called a word processor that will allow you to make corrections as you go.” And I said, “I will now have this thing as well.” I think the first one I ever bought was a Compaq luggable that weighed about thirty pounds.
Around that time I was approached by a crazy, powerful, and mean movie producer named Ray Stark, who had produced Funny Girl, The Way We Were, The Sunshine Boys, and The Electric Horseman. He was quite the old monster from way back in Hollywood, the kind of dragon who comes out from underneath the hill every hundred years and is not pleased by how things are going.
Ray offered me and a big-time Hollywood television producer named Philip DeGuere the gig of writing a magical realistic musical about Neal Cassady on the road in America. Phil was a serious Deadhead who had helped film the 1972 show that was eventually released as Sunshine Daydream. A lot of the time, I didn’t like him all that much. He often manifested aspects of human nature that set off my squeamishness, and even worse, behaviors that I was only too susceptible to myself.
But the Dead said they really wanted this movie to happen and were going to give us their music to use in it. So Phil and I started working on this screenplay together and actually had a good time doing it. He would write a scene and I would write either the scene before or after it and then we’d see whether they fit together at all. The working title was “Asking What for Across the Morning Sky.”
When we finished the script, the Dead decided that they didn’t want to have any of their songs in it after all. Or, as Jerry Garcia said to me at the time, “This is why we call the Grateful Dead the storehouse of broken dreams.”
My career as a screenwriter went on for some months after that, but it was a really hard time in the cattle business, and the ranch was in absolutely hemorrhagic financial morbidity. I had never thought I could keep it going forever and didn’t want to be forced to sell it on the courthouse steps. So even though I had been offered a lot more for it in the past, I wound up selling the ranch in 1987 for $1.5 million.
The two guys who bought it were Alejandro Orfila, the former head of the Organization of American States and someone entirely comfortable with the ruling junta in Argentina, and Marshall Coyne, who owned the Madison Hotel in Washington, D.C. I told them both that they couldn’t ranch the Bar Cross as sort of a plaything. It would be like buying a real spirited stud horse and expecting to ride him three times a year and not have him act like a bronco when you did.
No one could manage a ranch like that from a distance, because it was a very hands-on proposition. So I agreed to run it for them for another year, and that was when I finally got to fix up everything that needed to be repaired. It was kind of a wonderful gig because I had spent so many years thinking about doing just that without having ever been able to afford it.
As a functioning business, the Bar Cross was entirely valueless and so I thought these guys were going to take a bath on the deal. Between the interest payments and all the improvements, they put a hell of a lot of money into the ranch. I never thought they would get it back. Then, in 2012, the Bar Cross was offered for sale for about $22 million. Just recently, it went back on the block for $38 million and someone snapped it up.
In 1988, Elaine and the girls and I moved off the ranch into a house in Pinedale. Once we did, I suddenly realized that most of the people now living in the valley were worth huge amounts of money. A whole new class of people had made a lifestyle choice and were coming into Sublette County in business jets. They didn’t give a shit how much money they made from their ranches because they saw them as fishing holes where they could build a $10 million house and have all their fancy friends out in the summer.
At the time, I had no idea what I was going to do to earn a living. Fortunately, the Grateful Dead finally produced a studio album, In the Dark, for which they actually knew the songs. Previously, Grateful Dead songs had been like infant marsupials that had to be protected in the pouch that formed between the band and the Deadheads during the three or four years it took for them to become real songs.
From the time of Go to Heaven the band had been too messed up to get into a studio and record an album. But now, they were suddenly all bright-eyed and in possession of a whole album’s worth of songs that were fully ready for life outside the pouch. I wrote three songs on that album: “Hell in a Bucket,” “Throwing Stones,” and “My Brother Esau.”
As a consequence of the commercial viability of In the Dark, the Grateful Dead were suddenly being asked to fill fifty-thousand-seat stadiums instead of the five-to-eight-thousand-seat venues they had played before. And it occurred to me that now, seemingly overnight, the band was making money like real rock stars, whereas Robert Hunter and I were still scuttling along the bottom of the royalties stack.
So we went to the band and said, “You know, it’s a drag for us that what you’re putting out there is water from our wells.” Their response was kind of a forehead slap: “Jeez, yeah, you’re right! We see your point and we’ll start paying you both a songwriting retainer.” They agreed to pay us a regular fee, and I think I began getting six grand a month from them. This allowed me to be completely experimental about what I was going to do next in my life.
And then, as a result of a commitment Bobby Weir had made for us both that I knew nothing about, I staggered into the computer industry.