HEY, I CAN DO IT BETTER THAN THAT!

Craig and I immediately started trying to figure out a plan for how we could make this proposed feature movie. We knew we would need a story, or even better, a screenplay. We were so clueless, we spent fifteen dollars and actually purchased an advertisement in Daily Variety, one of the Hollywood trade papers. It was a “screenplay wanted” ad. The response to this ad was our first indoctrination as to how flooded this town is in unproduced screenplays. There’s an old saying in Hollywood: “everyone and their brother has a screenplay under their arm.” It’s true. We must have received hundreds of them. And wow, were they bad! Of course, at that stage in our development as filmmakers, I’m not sure if we were even capable of discerning a good script from a bad one. We found one script mildly interesting, an escape story. Only instead of jail or a prison camp, this story was about an old man who felt abandoned and escaped from the old folks’ home he had been committed to. (Later in life I was able to explore this theme in much more detail in my film Bubba Ho-tep.) This led to our first Hollywood meeting and, of all places, it was actually right on the Paramount Studios lot.

The cowriter of the screenplay in question invited us to meet her at her office at Paramount Studios where we could discuss it. One day after school, Craig and I drove the thirty miles up to Hollywood for our big meeting on the studio lot. We were bubbling with excitement as we drove through the studio gates and were dazzled as we saw all the excitement and activity around the huge movie studio soundstages. We peeked inside and saw massive sets, extras in costumes, and movie cameras mounted on cranes. Here we were, seventeen-year-olds, striding across a real Hollywood movie studio lot to a meeting in the Paramount executive office building. This moviemaking was just too easy!

When we arrived at her office we were greeted by a very attractive woman, about a decade older than we were, all of twenty-seven. She looked like she could be an actress. She introduced herself as the writer and quickly suggested we exit the executive offices and have our chat over by the studio commissary. As we walked across the lot to the commissary it suddenly dawned on me that our screenwriter was not a studio executive, but rather a secretary for a studio executive. Evidently her boss didn’t like her exploring her writing career on company time. I eyed Craig—he had figured it out too. Bummer! The writer was nice, but then she hit us with the second big surprise: she and her partner wanted a minimum of ten thousand dollars, up front, for their screenplay. Our big Hollywood meeting came to an abrupt end when I countered that we didn’t have any money and that we were seeking a writer to defer any payment for a screenplay until the film was finished and profits came in.

On the long drive back to Long Beach, Craig and I examined our options. A bunch of scripts had come in and they were all terrible except for one that was just okay, but its asking price was ten thousand bucks. I think this was our introduction to that great Hollywood recruiting tool, that moment when you see really bad creative work and a little voice goes off in your head and says, “Hey, I can do it better than that!”

When we got home, we literally threw all the submitted scripts in the trash and set to work to write our own feature screenplay. I certainly didn’t have a clue where to begin. We were seventeen years old, what the hell would we write, and how would one even write a screenplay? Back then there were no books, classes, or web pages available with self-help knowledge on screenplay writing. We were completely on our own.

A lot of credit must go to Craig Mitchell. He had the drive, writing talent, and a sheer fearlessness to just do it. It started with us spitballing story ideas, and the next day Craig would arrive at my parents’ house with actual pages of scene drafts. It was truly inspiring!

The screenplay we were working on was about something we knew, life in a typical high school, and something we didn’t, which was a family melodrama about a young teen living in a run-down apartment with an alcoholic father and a younger brother. I know why we selected the high school part—we were both living it and had a lot of insight and frustration with that entire American high school experience.

We were keenly influenced by Peter Bogdanovich and Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show and a lot of that sentiment seeped into our story. Once we settled on the story of a capable young man forced by circumstance and responsibility to become father, mother, and brother to his young sibling, it was easy to imagine ourselves in this character’s shoes. Our protagonist, Jim Nolan, trapped in a world of loneliness and despair, was going to be an unlikely hero. Later, our future distributor would coin a tagline that truly summed up the story of our film: “IT’S ABOUT GROWING UP, WITHOUT GIVING UP.”

Craig’s older brother, Keith Mitchell, was a talented drummer and musician who years later would become an original member of alternative rock band Mazzy Star. Keith was pretty savvy about music and introduced us to cutting-edge musical acts at the time, and without his knowledge, we would “borrow” his records and repeatedly listen to very diverse artists, from John Prine to Roxy Music. Prine became a huge influence, especially since he passed through Long Beach several times, playing in a coffeehouse next door at Cal State Long Beach; we would always attend his shows. In particular, Prine’s song “Six O’Clock News,” from his first album, was a huge influence on the tone of our film script. To this day I am still a huge fan.

The writing process would take some time. We both successfully graduated from Woodrow Wilson High and did a lot of work on our screenplay that summer. The draft lottery for the Vietnam War came to an end that year, but even if it had not, we both rolled high numbers and were exempt. Then, in the autumn, I was off all of thirty-five miles away to UCLA. I was close enough to be able to commute home on weekends to meet with Craig and brainstorm our epic production.

*   *   *

The best thing about my year at UCLA happened on the very first day I walked in the door of my dormitory. I met Paul Pepperman, who, through serendipity, had been assigned as my new college roommate and who would go on to become my future collaborator and confidante in my early feature film exploits. Paul was a lifelong film lover and prospective prelaw student with a bright mind and a sharp, ironic sense of humor. We became fast friends and spent most nights in the Westwood film district watching movies together. We shared a mutual admiration for the outrageous indie filmmakers of the day and eagerly lined up to see new films from artists as disparate as Alejandro Jodorowsky, Robert Altman, and Robert Downey Sr. (Yes, the Iron Man star’s father was a brilliant indie filmmaker!)

I immediately tried to enroll in the esteemed UCLA Film School but was repeatedly told that I would need to be a third-year student before application was possible. Consequently I became a political science major but filled out all my electives with film study and criticism courses. On the UCLA campus stood a state-of-the-art motion picture theater, Melnitz Hall, and I watched movies there almost every day. At night, due to the proximity of Hollywood, the major studios would frequently preview their new movies on campus. I have wonderful memories of watching early screenings of great movies like Minnie and Moskowitz and Paper Moon with influential directors such as John Cassavetes and Peter Bogdanovich in attendance. My grades weren’t the best but wow, did I see a lot of films!