AN OFFICE ON THE UNIVERSAL LOT

The big meeting was set and Craig and I loaded into my parents’ car and drove with them the thirty-five miles up to Universal Studios. The studio lot was so large that it had its own zip code and is officially listed on the maps as Universal City, California. Dominating the lot on Lankershim Boulevard was the sixteen-story executive office building of Universal Studios, notoriously known around Hollywood as “the Black Tower.” We rode the elevator up to the fifteenth floor and were ushered in to meet Mr. Sheinberg.

Sid had a large office with a spectacular view of the San Fernando Valley. Courtesy of the boss’s wife, Edie Wasserman, it was decorated everywhere with antique furniture much like the rest of the building. Sheinberg was much taller than I expected and younger, just thirty-seven, but Sid certainly had the commanding presence of a studio president. He talked a lot in the meeting and Craig and I pretty much listened. It was quickly apparent that he genuinely liked our movie and its young stars. However, Sid had serious concerns about the last act of the film.

Right around this time we learned that it’s pretty much common knowledge in the literary world that first-time authors frequently try to make their first works more important than they inherently are by choosing to either kill their protagonist at the end or have them go insane. Sometimes this can work and become a stunning artistic statement, such as in Dennis Hopper’s powerful finale in Easy Rider. Unfortunately, I think that is what Craig and I were shooting for when we fell right into this trap and chose the latter path. We made a choice to have our hero, Jim, go crazy and delusional from grief at the fadeout. In our defense, we had written ourselves into a corner and made a fatal plot mistake at the inception, which was pretty much impossible to rectify. We had killed off the charming young kid who costarred in our film! And there’s no worse box-office poison in Hollywood than having children die.

The simple plotline of our film was that Jim Nolan, a likeable and earnest young high school football player, was forced to be father, mother, and brother to his eleven-year-old sibling Kelly. Their father, a down-on-his-luck salesman, was frequently absent due to his battles with alcoholism. They all lived in a run-down tenement on the wrong side of town. Jim supports this family by working long hours at a local fast-food restaurant after school. He leads a double life as a popular kid in high school during the day and then as breadwinner and caretaker to his brother at night. The father takes his frustrations out on Jim’s younger brother and is frequently physically abusive. At the end of the second act he takes it too far and young Kelly is killed. And Jim subsequently goes crazy. And that was the part of the film that Sheinberg and others had problems with.

Sid’s plan was that Craig and I should start working right there on the studio lot with one of his creative executives and a top film editor to try to solve this story flaw. This sounded like a terrific plan and we left the Black Tower very excited to be working with Sid Sheinberg and Universal Pictures! A few days later we received notice that Mr. Sheinberg had assigned Universal Studios executive Peter Saphier to run point on the finishing of our film and to be our direct liaison with the studio.

A week later we had our first meeting with Peter in his office halfway up the Black Tower. Peter was a great guy, charming and funny with a wicked streak of gallows humor. Being a production executive at Universal was a notoriously tough job. Competition for advancement was cutthroat and there was a saying around the lot that Universal executives “had to walk with their backs to the wall.” (So a competing exec wouldn’t shove a knife in their back.) They were all overworked and pretty much lived in fear of Sid and Lew Wasserman’s ire. Peter was in his midthirties, enthusiastic about movies, and both Craig and I immediately took to him because he had this self-deprecating sense of humor about himself and his particular predicament as a Universal Studios junior executive. The first thing Peter said was, “You guys need to meet Spielberg. He’s been working on the lot here for a couple years now. I’m sure he’ll be curious to meet the new kids on the block.”

Steven Spielberg had been Sid Sheinberg’s first major director discovery. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the true story of how that came about, but legend has it that Spielberg wanted to make Hollywood movies and as a young man in the late sixties started sneaking onto the Universal lot. I guess at some point the jig was up, Spielberg was caught, and then Sid heard about it and wanted to meet this kid. At that point Spielberg began directing episodic television for Universal and the rest is history. Craig and I were huge fans of Spielberg’s TV film Duel, which was based on the short story by the brilliant author Richard Matheson, who also happened to be the father of our former sound man. We followed up on Peter’s offer of an introduction, but were told Spielberg was now on location in Texas.

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Within a few days Peter arranged for us to visit the Universal editorial department to start work there. At the time we arrived on the lot, Universal was the largest producer of episodic television for the major networks, responsible for eight hours a week of prime-time shows. Consequently, we found ourselves working in an immense editorial factory with literally dozens of postproduction crews laboring round the clock to create product to feed this hungry beast.

The Universal editorial department was run by William Hornbeck, who was an Academy Award–winning editor in his own right. Bill had started editing during the silent era at Mack Sennett Studios, cutting the famous Keystone Cops two-reelers. Prior to becoming an executive at Universal, Bill had personally edited many great films, including It’s a Wonderful Life, Shane, and Giant. Bill had been reviewing lists of his editors and had decided that the best choice for us was editor J. Terry Williams. Terry was another great guy who was an Oscar nominee for his editing work on Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming! Terry could be gruff, but he also had a dry sense of humor and even though he wouldn’t cop to it, I think he really was inspired by the challenge of working with these two teenagers on their rough cut and trying to solve its inherent problems.

Concurrently, Peter had managed to get us assigned our very own office, right on the studio lot. It was a funky old freestanding two-room office bungalow that composer Henry Mancini had just vacated. It was situated at the end of the main drag with all the vintage star dressing room offices. Right across the small street was a large dressing room complex for actress Lucille Ball. We never did see Ms. Ball during our entire tenure there; in fact we speculated it might all be for show. Every half hour a Universal Studios Tour tram would ride by and the tour guide would call out, “And right there on your left is the dressing room of one of our greatest stars, Miss Lucille Ball!” Craig and I would frequently be the only people standing there. We would smile and wave, the tourists would wave back, but they didn’t know who the hell we were.

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When the Universal deal closed I went with my parents to sign the contract up in a conference room in the Black Tower. The attorneys produced the documents and the signing ceremony was over quickly. The remarkable part was that I walked out of the Black Tower that day clutching a check in my hand made out in the nice fat sum of one quarter of a million dollars. Not only would my parents get their money back and Craig and I some cash, we would be able to pay the deferments that most of our cast and all of our crew had been working under. Yippee!