IRVING PAUL LAZAR, my agent, happily took on Diana too, and as a team we began to get jobs. Not great jobs, perhaps, but jobs.
There remained the problem of my defective post-surgical brain, but Diana’s wasn’t post-surgical and she dug up lots of stuff that might, with careful pruning, be filmable. Moreover I liked working in partnership with beautiful smart women—I had done it already and was still doing it with Marcia Carter in the rare book business. We soon even found another Ozark story—the violent, sad story of Zeke Proctor and Ned Christie, who were more or less the last two Cherokee outlaws. Once we did a book signing for Zeke and Ned, and several of the people who turned up claimed kin to one or another of the outlaws.
We liked scriptwriting, even when the scripts didn’t get made. Our script for Pretty Boy languishes in the Warners vaults, probably not far from my script of Cantrell.
It’s been a while but there’s still the chance that some powerful hand will lift them out.