THE SECOND BOOK Diana and I were offered for scripting was a Western called The Stand, or St. Agnes’ Stand, about some nuns who are trapped by Apaches in New Mexico. A Clint Eastwood–type loner shows up out of nowhere to save them but does not have complete success. I don’t think we were the first writers on The Stand and I’m sure we weren’t the last. I mention Eastwood only because of the rather similar picture, Two Mules for Sister Sara, in which Eastwood starred with Shirley MacLaine.
Indeed, most Westerns have at least a few similarities to other Westerns, if only because they ride horses and do whatever they do in the West.
After The Stand failed to attain a green light, we decided to try something a little lighter, in short to make a feature film out of the long-gone but once-popular series Father Knows Best. Its star, Robert Young, had passed away, and the rights at last became available. Father Knows Best was a good show for its era, but this is not its era. After a draft or two its producer, Sean Daniel, abruptly fired us. The man who had the task of actually doing the firing turned out to be the nephew of my old friend Joe Alsop, the acerbic columnist.
So it was goodbye, for a while, to the Universal lot.
About this time it began to strike me that the executives at the various studios where we might be hired or fired were becoming younger and younger; and more and more of them seemed to be female. At some of our meetings there would even be two females, one to be the boss and the alternate to take notes. Occasionally the alternate would be black.
Since we were mainly at the studios to pitch Westerns, it was a little disconcerting to find that the executives who were to relay our pitch had never heard of such Westerns as The Searchers or Red River.
Though we did a lot of pitching: two rounds at least at every studio, plus a number of blind stabs at likely production companies.
Very soon it became obvious to me that my name had little pull. My books had belched out several winners—The Last Picture Show, Terms of Endearment, and Lonesome Dove—but none were then current—and it takes little acquaintance with Hollywood to learn that current is critical.
By the mid-90s I was simply not current enough to get us even a tiny job. The entertainment industry’s link to professional sports is quite obvious: an athlete is only as good as his last at-bat, his last touchdown run, etc. My own last at-bat had been, in Hollywood terms, a long time ago, even though in real time it was only maybe five years.
The heat from a hit film or series is very hot while it’s hot, but in the experience of those who have been really hot, slack off a little and a chill will descend very quickly.
During the sad dégringolade of Irving Lazar we protected ourselves from his destructive caprices by hiring two crackerjack lawyers, Robert Thorne and Greg Redlitz, and we have them still. They had great respect for writers of what they called “our status,” but the fact was, status or not, we counted for zilch in the world of feature films.
That being the case, the only place to go was television, which is where the two of us went next.