If Ruby-Spears marked the beginning of one era, moving out of 1901 Camden marked the end of another: the “post-student” era. The actual move-out was, in and of itself, a Mission: Impossible style adventure.
I moved back into the same apartment building in Westwood (the same neighborhood I’ve lived in the entire time I’ve lived in Los Angeles), up on Kelton and Wilkins between Santa Monica and Wilshire. I’d briefly lived in the building before, so it was with a reset that a sub-era had begun.
It was an all-white, well-designed studio apartment, and if this book were an art film, the sparseness of the white in that apartment would be the symbol of a tabula rasa, a blank slate.
Westwood was cool back then. Paul Schrader (Taxi Driver) would shoot American Gigolo there in 1980 and make Westwood look like Rome. Mel Gibson, Kurt Russell, and Michelle Pfeiffer would star in a cryptic movie called Tequila Sunrise set largely in the neighborhood, and a Curtis Hansen/David Koepp movie called Bad Influence had Rob Lowe living in a building catty-corner from my apartment. As a result, living in Westwood in the 1980s felt a little bit like living in a movie.
Whatever else that move was, it was the end of the post-student era and the beginning of the professional era for me. I’m not sure I ever met any of my neighbors except in passing, though I remember Vanity, one of Prince’s singers, lived in the building—I used to see her on the elevator. It was fascinating to me that somebody that cool and hip would live in the same building I did.
Then there was the cool blonde woman with the cherried-out ’63 Corvette convertible who parked next to me. The only time I ever saw her was when I’d be leaving really early or coming in really late and she was coming in. She looked like a vision from the new MTV network and didn’t entirely seem to live in the same dimension of reality that I did, let alone the same apartment building. She was more hallucination than anything. I’ve often wondered who she was and what she did. There was no way to know, and asking wasn’t an option. Without the Internet, people could be very mysterious in the 1980s.
It’s hard to see things when you’re actually living them, but in Campbell terms, after answering the call and crossing the threshold, often as not, the ordinary world changes. In a few short months, mine had changed dramatically, but I was too busy living to really notice it.
The D&D mansion wasn’t what you might expect. It wasn’t some gothic castle or a Beverly Hillbillies mansion or a “stately Wayne Manor” type of place. It felt more like a giant Craftsman hunting lodge somewhere in the Sierras than a medieval mansion. In fact, it was so high in the hills that from one part of the property you could look down at the San Fernando Valley, and on the other you could follow Sunset from downtown to the ocean.
The house was built by King Vidor, an actor and famous director from the early days of cinema. The house, I believe, plays a cameo role in a book called A Cast of Killers, a great early Hollywood noir about the real murder of William Desmond Taylor. If you read the book, it might be the house where he did his research on the murder. And if it’s not the right house, well, it should have been.
For our part, we knew it was the right place the minute we saw it. The front gates were wooden and wouldn’t sustain a heavy assault, but they’d serve as a deterrent, and I knew I was part of the family when I got the access code to the gates. Next to the gates was the caretaker’s house. It was staffed by Matthew and Christina. Matthew was a down-to-earth, all-American guy; Christina was his very inordinately pretty Swedish wife. While she didn’t exactly wear a uniform, she was always dressed like something out of Heidi or The Sound of Music. I vaguely remember John Beebe, who was the head of DDEC, thinking they should have uniforms so the place looked more like a business, but that might be a manufactured memory.
The gate led to a long oval-shaped driveway with grass in the center. The grassy area seemed like it was about half a football field, but things are rarely the size you remember them. The top of the oval was the front door of the mansion. It was a mansion, but it was one story, except for Gary’s master suite above and some storage rooms that were converted to offices below.
There was a reception area, which led to a lanai with a fantastic view of Los Angeles and the Jacuzzi area. I can’t remember whether the Jaccuzzi was already there or Gary had it installed. I’m guessing the latter, but I can’t be sure.
If you turned right, there was a warren of rooms where John Beebe and his wife Ingrid lived, as well as Gary’s driver/bodyguard. When Ernie and Luke (Gary’s two sons) came into town, they stayed in rooms down the hall.
If you turned left in the front hall, you entered the living room, which was also a screening room because there was a projection booth in there with a secret door in the wood paneling, through which was a large dining room where I remember playing D&D more than I remember eating, an enormous kitchen, and some more rooms for staff and visitors. The crown jewel of the mansion was the bar room. It had a sunken bar that looked like something you’d expect at the Playboy Mansion down the hill. That led to a sprawling cliffside yard and the pool at the corner of the property.
My office was a converted stable situated hard left from the entrance gate at the front of the property, a minute’s walk from the main building. In its day, the stable had room for three horses, a bathroom, and big doors at the front. We threw down carpet and did a few other minor things, and I had the coolest office anybody will ever have. My office took up one of the original stalls, and the largest ex-stall became a guest bedroom that I don’t remember anybody actually using.
There was a large open area, which had a couch and chairs and an assistant’s desk, and Matthew built us a giant hundred-square-foot sand table. There were some cubby shelves that contained Gary’s three thousand Elastolin medieval miniatures, which we used for playing Chainmail.
Gary lived in the suite upstairs in the main house, directly above the entrance. There was a master bedroom and an office with an epic view. There might have been dressing rooms off to the side. He had a huge baronial desk with all sorts of interesting artifacts on it.
Gary and I realized early on that we were like the old joke about an atheist funeral: all dressed up with nowhere to go. We knew we wanted to create something together, we just didn’t know what. We needed a project. Something tangible.
As it happened, TSR had optioned Conan the Barbarian from a colorful fellow named Arthur Lieberman and produced a Conan role-playing game. Gary and I were interested in writing a Kull movie, but for now, there was a slot for Conan Endless Quest books, and Gary and I took it on with the goal of designing a more robust gamebook system that involved combat and dice, something that moved beyond the Endless Quest pick-a-path formula.
So we had a clear, defined, real project that we could start on. But we also needed something BIG. Hyper-ambitious. World-changing.
Also, very early on, we came up with the movie/game idea called The Sceptre of Seven Souls. We knew that would take a while to develop.
Gary and I got the opening scene early on in the DDEC mansion days. We were sitting together at my Mac, which was a terrible thing to write screenplays on but looked really cool. We would come up with an idea. Laugh. Write it down. Top it. Come up with another idea. Write it down. I’d delete it. He’d complain. I’d hit “undo,” and it would come back. That seemed like magic to him. Seemed like magic to me, too, but I tried to act blasé about it.
We decided to lead from strength. Hollywood would trust Gary Gygax with a sword-and-sorcery scene, so the opening scene was a dungeon crawl.
The MacGuffin of the series was a sceptre forged by seven ancient sorcerers that divided into seven parts. Each part was a portal to a different world. I have no idea whether we thought we could fit all of this into one movie or we were selling them on seven movies or we had a “back pocket” idea of a TV series. We just thought it was a cool idea.
Our hero was tentatively named Dart. He was a rogue/bard kind of a character. I had this goofy idea that he infiltrated enemy kingdoms guised as a magician with a traveling group of cutpurses with magical musical powers: one could hypnotize with their instrument, another could charm animals (like a snake charmer, but also birds, lions, dogs, whatever animal was necessary). Of course, all the wrong people were immune to his charms, and other wizards could turn his charisma into negativism.
This band of loveable, musical, medieval thieves would always get wind of some treasure or some tyrant who needed assassinating or something and go on a mission. Of course, they’d always get in way over their heads and a desperate adventure would follow.
We even figured there was a musical tie-in. After all, what are synthesizers, fuzz pedals, and the like other than magically enchanted musical instruments? So it was a heavy metal take on A Hard Day’s Night set in a D&D world. Except the world changed. In fact, the genre changed. The only constant were the characters and the quest.
The following is my reconstruction of our teaser scene. It’s funny how I can forget all sorts of details about the life I actually lived but remember, beat for beat, a script from thirty years ago. I think that’s because the fictional takes effort to create while the real just happens. Here’s a reconstruction written in the feathery, fragmented way we’d beat out stories:
OPEN ON—DART, OUR HERO
Is being chased out of—
A LOST TOMB
by DISGUSTING DARK ELF ENEMIES and looks like he’s going to be trapped at the edge of a cliff but suddenly jumps—
It looks like he is going to fall to his death. The pursuing Dark Elves…
Fire arrows at—
DART
—anyway.
He spins in the air and fires his one-hand crossbow, killing one of the Dark Elves.
Then, Dart activates his cape, which spreads out to control his descent until an arrow pierces it—
He is losing altitude. Going to die for sure until—
HIS FLYING DRAGON
Swoops down and snags him out of the air.
Just as we think they’re safe.
A blast of fire nearly engulfs them.
Behind them is a bigger, nastier fire-breathing dragon ridden by some truly terrifying-looking guy.
No match for this foul beast, Dart’s Dragon seeks refuge in—
A MAGICAL CAVE
And races through its seemingly endless tunnel.
THE EVIL DRAGON
Follows.
DART
Pulls out a piece of the sceptre he’s just received and activates it.
(We didn’t know how he would do this. Magic words. Rubbing it. Twisting it. We’d figure it out.)
THEN SOMETHING MAGICAL HAPPENS.
The world begins to change. The flapping of wings turns into the roar of a steam locomotive. Same happens to his pursuer’s dragon
WHEN DART
Emerges from the tunnel, he’s on the top of a steam locomotive. His hand-held crossbow is a six shooter.
The evil wizard is a DESPERADO.
They’re firing at each other.
Sword and Sorcery suddenly turned into Enchanted Western.
(/end scene)
And it works the other way around...
The end of the act is that he’s on a train, activates the Sceptre and comes flying out on his dragon, back to his world, where he has to find the next part of the Sceptre.
I think I wrote both of those scenes, and they were matching scenes. We were showing that magic helped our hero move between genres and that genres were really just different props and costumes. In the middle, he’d find his musicians in dance halls, traveling carnivals, opera houses, wherever. He’d reassemble the team, and they’d go hunting for another part of the Sceptre. Of course, the big bad guy was always a step behind him or even a step ahead of him, and he’d lose pieces of the Sceptre as quickly as he got them. And he’d face the same ambient villain and his endless minions in numerous different worlds, whether as an enemy spymaster in a Top Secret world or Fu Manchu in the Gangbusters world or as a demented computer gone mad in Gamma World or the XXVC Space World.
As whacked as this was, there was a practical business hook to it. The marketing piece of The Sceptre of Seven Souls was designed to be a genre-morphing story that connected all of TSR’s franchises at the time: Dungeons & Dragons, Boot Hill, Top Secret, Gamma World, and Star Frontiers. Players would twist the sceptre, translate the stats and characters to another world, and continue the adventure. For instance, I remember in Gamma World that a warrior’s shield morphed into a stop sign scavenged in a post-apocalyptic world. The Sceptre of Seven Souls was a wild idea in some ways and a natural eighties progression in another way.
And, yes, this is frustrating, but I can’t put my hands on a copy of The Sceptre of Seven Souls. I’m not sure how many scenes we had, but we had enough that we were able to pitch it to Gary’s first choice for Dungeon Master, Orson Welles, at the Magic Castle.
Here’s the weird thing, and it gets back to what I was saying about the unreliability of memory. I’d utterly forgotten about Gary and I meeting with Orson Welles until I was reading Gary’s blog after he died. Even now, the meeting at the Magic Castle is a hazy memory, partly because of what happened later that night.
But, still, how do you forget something like Orson Welles? Memory plays strange tricks. And, of course, that memory would be utterly overwritten two years later, when Orson Welles came in to play Unicron in Transformers: The Movie.
So, under normal circumstances, you’d think that The Sceptre of Seven Souls was just another fool’s errand. I mean, really, how would you have produced it in 1984? It was never finished. I might have a copy somewhere in storage, but it has never left my mind, and various bits and pieces of that idea forged at the dawn of my career have been stuck in there like a puzzle that I’m trying to solve. It’s not so much the actual execution that mattered. It was pretty ridiculous stuff. But it was the engine that started turning, the reactor core of Sceptre that started burning that has, one way or another, fueled half of what I’ve done since then, from Diablo to Ingress.
The idea of shape-shifting worlds is lurking somewhere in the background of Transformers, which is just a metal shape-shifting idea. It would continue to be this unresolved thing in my mind but somehow inform everything I do. And though I’m not a superstitious person, I do have this strange fear that if I finished Sceptre, I’d never write or design anything again. The concept of the “essential unfinished” is as close as real life comes to a magical concept that I sort of believe, and I both love and fear it.
John Beebe is a guy I appreciate more in retrospect than I probably did at the time, and that’s no slight to John. He was the most conventional corporate person in this mad world. He was on the last stop of a long corporate journey, much of which was spent at Sears. I’m not too sure whether it gets all the way to cynical, but he would offer up wisdom that most of the time I didn’t want to hear. Of course, he had an annoying habit of being right. I remember him chastising me once for speculating on the budget for The Sceptre of Seven Souls.
“What do you know about making budgets?” he asked.
Okay, he had a point; I’d never done a film budget in my life for more than student films. Nevertheless, I stuck to my guns. “Not much, but I do know what’s already built on Universal’s backlot. We shoot the western sections on the old west town, the ancient in Spartacus Square, the gangster stuff on New York Street. We go to lots of different worlds, but on that lot they’re only about a hundred yards from each other.”
“That’s clever. I’ll give you that,” he said.
It was a test of sorts. And while I hadn’t aced it, I hadn’t flunked it, either.
“And if I can figure out how to throw in the psycho house for a horror bit, we’ll use that,” I said.
He laughed, but the weird thing was that I did find a use for the psycho house.