With Scott Fivelson, co-writer of "American Reel" and "Route 666"

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November 25, 2007

The Writing Show (WS): With the writers' strike in full swing, the timing of this interview with a writer and producer of independent films couldn't be better. Find out why work-for-hire gigs may not be enough for the ambitious screenwriter. We recorded before the strike, but the insights still apply.

Scott Fivelson is a screenwriter, novelist, and musician whose stories and satirical pieces have appeared in Chicago magazine, The Chicago Tribune, Playboy, Los Angeles magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The L.A. Weekly, Tales from the Heart of Hollywood, and other publications. In a satirical tribute to Steven Spielberg, he wrote Guess What’s Coming to Dinner? The Extraterrestrial Etiquette Guide, from Bantam Books.

Scott co-wrote and was a producer on the film "American Reel," starring David Carradine, Mariel Hemingway, and the distinguished British actor Michael Maloney ("Truly, Madly, Deeply," "Henry V," "Othello," "Hamlet") and directed by Mark Archer (producer, "In the Company of Men").  He also co-wrote the sci-fi/action movie "Route 666" for Lionsgate.

Scott's new novel, Tuxes, is a satire on the classic summer beach book. He also wrote tunes for and performs on the jazz CD "Awesome in New York" by The Mishka Spiro Trio.

Welcome to the Writing Show, Scott. It’s a pleasure to have you with us.

Scott Fivelson (SF): Well, thank you, thank you. It’s good to be here via the phone and the Internet and all.

WS: We’re going to talk about Hollywood today, which is a wonderfully fun topic. How about a little background on your career in Hollywood. For example, how did you get started?

SF: Well, you know, I’m from Chicago originally, and I went to a school at Northwestern, and coming out of Northwestern I really caught some luck. I was writing a lot of humor pieces, which is something I’ve always loved to do, and I managed to start placing those pieces in some pretty good publications coming out of school.

I was publishing a lot in Chicago magazine at the time. There was a great, wonderful editor there who really supported my work. Playboy magazine, I sold some things, and the Times and the Tribune.

I shot amateur films in Chicago. I made a one-hour movie a year after I graduated that actually got on PBS in Chicago. The film was called Johnny Passé, and it was a film noir satire that I wrote and directed with my college roommate, Kim Clevenger; it was a really cool little movie. It played at the Art Institute at one of their festivals and PBS showed it.

So I realized I’m good at raising $2,000 in Chicago, but that’s about it. So when I came out to Los Angeles, I had one script, my spec script. Everybody said have a calling card script, and I got lucky. I ended up meeting a gentleman named Jack Schwartzman. Jack’s no longer with us. Jack passed about twelve years ago, not too long after I came to L.A. But he was first of all a champion entertainment attorney. Jack once said to me that if there had ever been an Olympic team of entertainment attorneys in L.A. he would have been on it, and to testify to that, his clients included Stanley Kubrick and Ringo Starr.

So Jack was a major force in entertainment law. Then he became a producer, which was his real love. He made the film “Being There” with Peter Sellers, and he made the one Bond film that was not made by the Broccoli family, something called “Never Say Never Again.”

Anyway, Jack and Talia Shire were married through the end of Jack’s life. I met them just the way you accidentally meet people in L.A.--not through an official meeting or anything--I just ended up meeting them through someone. They read my script, which was a country music satire called “Slim Chance.” They really liked it, and they ended up optioning it four times in a row. The first of many people who wanted to be on board starring as this down and out country singer trying to make a comeback from the bottom of the world in Texas was actually George Hamilton. Consequently when Jack couldn’t get it made with George attached (because he didn’t really have that much juice in a lead at that point), we got Kris Kristofferson who was interested. Later Leslie Nielsen showed some interest, and a whole gamut of people. Anyway, that really sort of opened the doors, and I got an entertainment attorney. So that was my first of the options. That script now, all these years later, seems to be close to getting made, shot in Texas with a whole new cast. So it shows that you always have to keep trying.

WS: That sounds similar to “American Reel.” How similar is it to that? Maybe we should talk about “American Reel” a little bit.

SF: Sure. It’s interesting. It’s true, I have two movies that I have written about singer/songwriters in crisis, so to speak, and they’re both comedies. But the difference is I’ve always felt that “American Reel” was sort of like a Woody Allen comedy/drama. It’s something more like “Annie Hall” than “Bananas” or “Take the Money and Run.” It’s sort of a serious comedy/drama, and in the case of “American Reel,” it’s about a singer/songwriter who makes it late in life but who’s an overnight success, but it’s not overnight, he’s a twenty-year overnight success. He’s been trying for years, and suddenly he makes it with a real question in his mind about was it worth all the trouble it took.

David Carradine brought a great wry kind of disgruntlement to the role and was really fun in the part. In fact, when David was first approached about this--the name of the movie was “American Reel,” and I co-wrote it with a wonderful writer named Junior Burke--David of his own volition went into the studio and wrote and recorded a song called “American Reel” and came back to us with it. He didn’t even tell us he was doing it--just did it, which was really tremendous--and that got that going.

Anyway, it’s a comedy, but it’s a more serious “life” film. “Slim Chance” is more like the earlier Woody Allen. It’s “Bananas,” it’s “Take the Money and Run,” or maybe more accurately, you might compare it to “Raising Arizona” in its tone. So as opposed to “American Reel,” which is the story of a singer/songwriter who’s just made it and now how does he feel about it and what’s it like to try to conform or not conform, “Slim Chance” is about somebody who’s as far down in Texas as you can be, and that’s pretty far. And it’s about this widow woman who gets him on his feet again with her little boy, and he learns to go for the big time again.

So they’re two different kinds of films. I probably should write a third so it could be talked about as some kind of trilogy, but I don’t think I will. I think this is enough.

WS: Do you have a particular interest in country music?

SF: Well, it’s interesting. “American Reel” wasn’t originally going to be country music. Tom Bishop, who’s just a world class songwriter--he’s been hailed by Downbeat and The New York Times and those sorts of people--I really wrote the movie with Junior Burke around a lot of those Tom Bishop songs. And then when David Carradine came in, he’s a wonderful songwriter himself, so we decided let’s use some of David’s songs and Tom’s songs, and Tom Bishop ended up producing the sessions. They were done at RCA Studio B in Nashville where Elvis used to play, which we used to record, which is great.

Anyway, the point is, the original music in “American Reel” was going to be really more Sting-like or Paul Simon-ish, James Taylor, something like that. But when David came in, David Carradine’s music is by its own nature more kind of an earthy, country, folk blues, and that sort of took the music in a…I don’t think of “American Reel” as being about a country musician per se, but it really is a country folk musician, so ultimately it brought the music closer to “Slim Chance.” The difference is David’s songs have a lot of charm and character, but they’re serious songs. There’s a little humor to them. The songs in “Slim Chance” are utterly preposterous and are meant to be, and I can’t wait until people get to hear them.

WS: Music in film, when there are original songs in a movie, how often does a screenwriter actually get involved in writing the lyrics, say, as opposed to bringing in a musician to do that? In other words, if you know what the script is about and you want the songs to do certain things, to be on certain topics or reveal character or do something, do you get involved in that? Do other screenwriters write the lyrics?

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SF: I think it tends to fall one of two ways. On the one hand, the rule of thumb with a screenplay is to include as little as possible--a few parentheticals, as little description, to keep it as kind of bare-bones as humanly possible so that everyone else makes their contribution. On the other hand, you’ll often see films, especially in the last five or ten years, where you’ll see that the actors or the screenwriters also wrote songs that are being performed, all the way from “Spinal Tap” to Steven Seagal. There’s some coal miner movie, and Steven Seagal played these songs, and he’s written 92 songs for this film and all, because he is a singer/songwriter as well as a deadly martial artist. A lot of actors certainly cross into that. Because I really go at things more as a filmmaker than just like a screenwriter for hire, I really don’t limit myself. I’ve been a songwriter as long as I’ve been a screenwriter or fiction writer. I really enjoy all three, and I’ve been doing all of them since my little bedroom in high school back in Chicago. So if I think I can do a good job of it, I do. As you know, I’m actually happy that I’m in a jazz group with a CD that’s out now. The music has suddenly taken a life of its own outside of movies for me.

WS: I want to talk about your Renaissance mannishness in a minute, but let’s talk about filmmaking a little bit. You’ve mentioned a little bit about how “American Reel” got made, but one thing I’m very curious about and maybe you can provide more detail is, if you’re not just a screenwriter for hire, how do you end up involved with a film? I know you were one of the producers, for example, on “American Reel.” How did that happen?

SF: “American Reel”…. If you’re working in the independent world when it’s not simply a script that’s sold by an agent to a studio…even then I think being allowed to become part of a team is the best way to do it. But in the independent world, I think more and more you’ll find a group of people whose feeling is, “Let’s all bring as much as we can to getting this done.” Like in any good scavenger hunt, nobody’s going to complain about the person who in this case brings the money. So with “American Reel,” I helped put together the financing for the film, which is where I earned the producer credit.

WS: So you really started the whole thing going, then.

SF: Well, there were two producers, two fellow producers who were great to work with and good friends, Darrell Griffin and Jordan Rush; they had a company called Kimina Entertainment. The truth is they thought they had a particular funding in place, and then it fell out. You hear these stories all the time. I had a potential alternative, and when suddenly the money was gone but everything else was rolling, including interest from cast, I turned to my source and brought them in, and it worked, and we were back on track again.

But there is somebody I want to give some thanks to in terms of why “American Reel” exists, and I haven’t seen her in some time, but if she ends up hearing this podcast, I hope she’ll be glad to hear this. Ally Sheedy is really responsible for “American Reel” getting made. And the reason for that is that I had gotten the script to Ally to play the role of Disney Rifkin, who was a standup comedienne working as a girl Friday for the manager, Michael Maloney, who manages David Carradine in the picture, it’s really those three characters. Ally wanted to come on board and do the part, and originally I really was thinking of having Tom Bishop play the role and sing these songs. And she really loved Tom’s music but thought it was wiser to use an actor who had done a lot more on screen--Tom had done some great stage work, but his life is writing and music, and he’s not trying to pursue an acting career per se. So he felt fine, let’s get an actor actor to do this, with some juice to help get it made and all that.

And she said, “You know what? I want to get the script to somebody, and I don’t want to tell you who it is, but he’s going to love it, and I think you’re going to love him for the role.” And then not too long later, I hear from her, I get a call, and she tells me, “Okay, David Carradine wants to do your movie.” Apparently she knew David very well, and she knew he was a musician, which I guess I had heard, but I hadn’t been thinking about who else would do this role. And supposedly when David read “American Reel,” he said something like, “If I’d been a musician instead of an actor, which maybe I should have been, this would have been my story.” He made sort of a wry comment about that. So she brought David Carradine on board, and that really helped get the movie made. Ultimately, with typical Hollywood irony, she was booked and doing another picture during the little window where suddenly the financing came up and we had to sign our cast, so she actually wasn’t available to play Disney, and instead, we ended up getting Mariel Hemingway, who I want to thank for doing that role. But interestingly, it was Ally Sheedy who got the ball rolling and made this come together.

WS: That’s interesting. And you had a first-time director on the movie, right?

SF: Yeah. Mark Archer was the director of “American Reel.” It was his feature debut as a film director. Mark had produced the movie “In the Company of Men.”He was one of the producers, and I do believe he won the trophy at Sundance for that. I think he won best producer that year for “In the Company of Men.” He wanted to direct features. I think he had been directing some commercials already, and he came to the attention of our producers through this and ended up coming on board. I think for the money we had--we made this for under a million dollars--it wasn’t a hundred thousand dollars, but it wasn’t a million, either. We made this for under a million. I think for what he had, Mark really did a remarkable job. It’s not a perfect film, but I think it’s a very good little movie.

WS: Is there something about working with a first-time director that you can point to that’s particularly unique?

SF: Well, I’ll find out, because I’m planning on directing my film next year. They’ll find out what it’s like working with me. Well, I will tell you, some of the things that came up on “American Reel,” it’s been noted that there aren’t a lot of close-ups. Now, I don’t know that that has to do with being a first-time director. It was probably a money constraint. This was shot on the fly. Not as quickly as some. This wasn’t like Rodriguez’s film “El Mariachi” shot for $7,000. This was shot for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but nonetheless, it was a limited number of days, very long days, and so there weren’t a lot of close-ups. I know that was unique. I know that Mark tended to favor scenes done in one take where he could, and I actually like that. There’s a couple of scenes in particular that I thought worked very well. There’s a scene later in the movie, toward the end of the second act, where the two main characters, the singer/songwriter, James Lee Springer, and the manager, Jason Fields, they really have it out with each other because this battle between art and commerce has come to a head. It’s a nice long scene, and it’s all done in one take pretty much. Yeah, it was one take. It’s a really nice scene. It feels like theater, and I really like it. I think there are some other scenes where I had wished Mark had been able to do a little more coverage so we could have cut away, but that comes with the price of doing a low-budget movie.

WS: Is that because you just don’t have enough time to set up other shots?

SF: You just don’t have enough time. Actually, one of the fun parts of producing “American Reel” is I ended up arranging interviews with David Carradine and Michael Maloney, which are on the DVD of “American Reel,” which I hope everyone will run out and buy instantly from Amazon or anywhere on Google you can find it. Anyway, these two interviews, it’s like a thirty-minute interview with Michael Maloney, and about a seventeen-minute interview with Carradine. Of course, Michael has a wonderful background. He’s been in most of Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare films, like “Henry V” and “Hamlet” and “Othello.” He was in “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” “American Reel” is the only American film. He’s done some Canadian movies, but the only film in the U.S. he’s ever done. There’s a part where he talks about working on our film, and he says something about it being done on a razor’s edge, and he does it in a British accent, so it sounds much cooler than when I just said it.

WS: Those were very interesting interviews on the DVD. I didn’t know, for example, he started out with the Royal Shakespeare Company.

SF: Absolutely. You know, Kenneth Branagh’s a very good friend of his, and I can’t remember if he met Ken, well, I don’t know him—“Kenneth”--I don’t know if he met Kenneth Branagh at the RSC or elsewhere the first time. But Michael in the interview talks extensively about the regimen at RSC. It’s really interesting stuff. I wasn’t there to film it. I had commissioned a wonderful filmmaker named Mike Fox. Well, he’s a DP, cinematographer, who’s been around for years and years. He shot the film “Shadow of a Vampire” with Willem Dafoe here in his later years. When he was very young, Mike Fox was a gaffer on “Lawrence of Arabia,” and he’s told me stories about legendary carousing of Peter O’Toole and such. Anyway, he shot this interview with Michael Maloney right before he went to shoot some TV work in London, and Michael told these great stories. I will say it’s kind of funny. Somebody involved with our distributor watched the interview, and he says to me, “Wait a minute. There’s like ten minutes he’s talking about Kenneth Branagh.” He said, “What’s this got to do with ‘American Reel?’” And I said, “Look, this is my DVD, and I want people to hear about this, so we’re going to spend ten minutes hearing about Kenneth Branagh, and hopefully someday, Kenneth Branagh will have a DVD which spends ten minutes talking about me.”

WS: That’s interesting. I’ve never talked to anybody about how special features are done on DVDs before.

SF: The way they’re done is if you pay for them yourself, you can have them talk about whatever you want.

WS: He was very interesting. It’s a grueling routine they go through at the Royal Shakespeare Company. They just work really long hours. It’s almost like scrubbing floors, practically, for years.

SF: Almost like an acting priesthood.

WS: And some of the people who come out of there are just fabulous, but you don’t realize they’ve gone through that hell.

SF: And, of course, so many of them we’ll never hear of over here. Only a limited number make the breakthrough. They become the Clive Owens and Jude Law, Judy Dench. Meanwhile, if you ever catch any theater, even in small theaters in London, the level of the acting is so incredible.

But let me tell you about Michael Maloney. If things work to plan, the plan is for Michael to star in actually the first feature I’ll ever do which will be completely UK production, completely shot in Britain in London and outside of London. The plan is for it to shoot in the first half of next year, and it’s called “The Vicar’s Wife.” I developed this for a wonderful BBC director named Caroline Aylward. She’s really a brilliant talent and has been great to work with. We’ve developed this script together that I’ve written for her, and we did this story together. And Michael Maloney, we’ve wanted to work together since “American Reel,” and he’s wanting to star in this, and we have some other cast starting to get very interested. “The Vicar’s Wife” is a very earthy romantic comedy. It’s a big movie. It’s contemporary, but it’s an expansive movie, kind of novelistic, lots of characters, and I’d sort of say it falls into the genre of “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” although in this particular case, some people who have read it have said, “You might want to call it ‘Three Funerals and a Wedding.’” And people will have to see the film to know why. I’d like to say it’s like “The Constant Gardener” but funnier than “The Constant Gardener.”

WS: Well, it’s interesting that you bring that up, because I was going to ask you about the diversity of your work. You seem to write about so many different things and in so many different genres> For example, “Route 666,” which I’m dying to talk about in a minute, a horror movie, zombie movie, and “American Reel,” which is a story about a singer/songwriter, and you mentioned to me before the interview that you think of yourself mostly as a romantic comedy guy. So I’m just wondering, how are you able to work with such diverse material? Is it difficult? Is it easy?

SF: In terms of the diversity, I think some of it really comes from having appreciated so many different kinds of movies and books over the years. You’ve gotten that kind of pleasure from watching this kind of movie and that kind of movie, and then there’s something, there’s just this impetus to want to follow in those footsteps but in different shoes, I guess. So like Okay, I want to do one of those. Okay, I want to do one of those. I haven’t traveled as much as some people have in trains and planes and all that, but I think I’ve done that traveling in my writing, ironically. So it’s a way of going to different places.

WS: Does the industry favor people who specialize in one type of movie? I’m just wondering if they might look at you and go, “Well, gosh, he does all these different things, and we really want someone who specializes in this, that, or the other thing.” Or does that not happen?

SF: Probably the answer to that question is the expected thing is to specialize, but we’re not here to do the expected thing. What can I say?

WS: Do you think it hurts you?

SF: To tell you the truth, for all that I’ve heard about how people will like to see a write who’s just a thriller writer or comedy or whatever, the truth of the matter is, with the producers that I’ve been dealing with and such and casting directors and all, they actually seem to like it. Well, I guess because they like the scripts. But of course, some of the producers and casting directors I’ve dealt with have simply liked the material. They haven’t really made an issue of the fact that there’s been some variety to it. I think they’ve sort of appreciated that.

WS: When they buy scripts from you, do they buy the script, or do they buy you? And what I mean by that is, because the script gets changed in pre-production and production and then gets edited in post-production, how much of what they are looking for when they hire you or hire a screenwriter, if not you, if you’re not a screenwriter for hire, is based on what you present at the beginning, and how much of it has to do with Scott Fivelson, “reputation, blah, blah, blah,” or, “We know this guy can do such and such once we get going with him?”

SF: The thing that I think is helping me is the fact that I’ve become a producer as well. I’m a writer who became a writer/producer in order to aid the making of the films in order to be more of a filmmaker. A lot of my inspirations are the writer/directors or the directors who are real filmmakers. There’s so many people. There’s Scorsese and Coppola and Oliver Stone and Ron Howard. I was watching “Cinderella Man.” He didn’t write that, but he’s such a superb filmmaker in that movie. Ron Howard is somebody that I think doesn’t always get the same level of respect, and I don’t know that I always paid quite as much attention to his movies, but in “Cinderella Man,” I think he really nailed it. Really fabulous movie.

Put it this way. Because I obviously appreciate film as I do, I’ve never been somebody who wanted to just sell a script and walk away--not unless there was a real lot of money involved. And of course, if there is, I urge people to email you about that instantly. But the truth of the matter is, it’s not really been my goal or the way I’ve gone about it. So if you attach yourself as a producer and you hold on tight to that tree that you’re clinging to, because you’re attached as a producer, it attaches you more as a writer. Just the deeper you can come into a project in different jobs, the less expendable you’re going to seem. I try to help package with talent, I try to help raise the money. Writing the script is the be-all and end-all, but then once it’s written, I do try to take on as much of the rest as I can. And then I partner with people who are good at it, too. But as I say, by the end of it all, if you’ve brought enough to the project in terms of talent or financing or both, I think they just generally respect the fact that you’ve brought so much and don’t necessarily think in terms of cutting you loose from what you’ve written. So I think it’s a great way for a writer to try to shepherd his material through by going that extra step to help bring talent and bring funding to a picture.

I was mentioning partners, and I will say that particularly of late I’ve been fortunate to encounter some great partners. As I mentioned, this director, Caroline Aylward on “The Vicar’s Wife.” I think she’s going to really make a terrific picture. She’s already scouting locations in London and outside of London, so I think that’s going to work out really well on the film that we’re going to make--as the director--she’s not a producer. But it’s been a great collaboration. And there’s a producer named Tina Pavlides, and she’s done a number of lower-budget pictures in the past. Some of the projects we’re working on are lower-budget. One is a rather higher-budget project. And she’s about the best I think you could look for in the way she pursues trying to put a picture together. I think you could look for her name on one or more of my projects in the next year.

WS: Let’s talk about “Route 666.” I can’t wait to talk about “Route 666.” First of all, for those who haven’t seen it, could you explain what it is?

SF: “Route 666” is the brain child of writer/director Bill Wesley--William Wesley-- who I have sometimes referred to as “Wild Bill Wesley.” It is the brain child of Bill Wesley, who had earlier in his career done a film called “Scarecrows,” which acquired a cult following, which he shot down in Florida, I believe.

I met Bill at a point in the 1990s where he had a script developed, or two scripts developed, I think maybe he had two scripts developed at the time of Route “666.” He had this concept, but he didn’t feel it was right. He was looking for a writer to come in, and I had met him through a series of circumstances. I decided to write this with him as a total change of pace. I’d never written a horror film, had not really meant to go writing one. I like renting them, but I’d never really thought to write one, because it wasn’t my thing. But I had enjoyed films like “Aliens,” James Cameron’s film, and the idea of the kind of camaraderie of a group of characters in crisis, it seemed like, “Okay, this could be fun.” Sort of like Michael Biehn time-- Michael Biehn and Bill Paxton and those kinds of guys. I love those films where they’re in trouble, and Bill Paxton is going like, “We’re going to be toast, man.” And I thought, “This could be fun.”

So basically, Bill Wesley said, “We need to rewrite this, and it’ll take three weeks.” And any time I see him at this point in life, he holds up his three fingers indicating three weeks, because ultimately we spent a year. Those three weeks morphed into a year, despite promises of three weeks throughout the year. So I don’t know where that year went, but it became “Route 666.” And we wrote a truly phenomenal horror action sci-fi-ish, contemporary sci-fi-ish journey, which would have made a really phenomenal movie as opposed to the still-fun but not nearly so phenomenal rewritten movie that was ultimately made and released.

But there were some things in the original “Route 666”--it came very close to getting made for a bigger budget. One of the problems is it was made for about $2 million, and you really needed about $15 million. But there were elements that I could talk about that were not in that piece that were so wonderful. So I’m glad people like it, and the Sci-Fi Channel tends to show it on holidays. I guess they think it’s festive, and not just on Halloween. They show this on Thanksgiving. They’re so twisted over there, they’ll show it like… Well, they have those marathons, like “Children of the Corn 12” and “Evil Dead 16” and “Route 666,” and it’s right there in their cavalcade of horror on Thanksgiving and Arbor Day. So we get seen. I don’t know if they play it for Hanukah. I hope they do.

WS: Tell us a little more about the plot.

SF: The plot. Well, I will tell you what the plot was supposed to be. The plot was supposed to be the story of a group of car rallyers; that is, some college-, grad student-age people. And they’re driving these fancy restored cars through the desert on a stretch of Route 66 on their way to the town of Kingman to a big car rally. On the way, a series of circumstances happen that lead them to go over to a no trespassing sign in a blocked-off stretch of road. And it’s a stretch of road where there used to be so many accidents… It was an old stretch of Route 66. Route 66 crossed the country, and there were all sorts of different arms and legs of this road, and this was a condemned stretch of Route 66. Once there were so many accidents on it that it came to be called by the locals Route 666. And they decide they’ve got to make time to get to the car rally, and they were avoiding a speeding ticket from a motorcycle cop who they have evaded. So they break the chain, go off down the no trespassing road, and, of course, this is like opening the door of a haunted house. It’s like, “You shouldn’t do that there, guys, don’t do that.” And as soon as they go down that road, they’re in for a whole lot of trouble.

That was the original plot, and what we lost is, in the revision that was done by some other folks on “Route 666”--a revision of what Bill and I had done--we had these car rallyers, and there were some really nice relationships among the characters, including this young boy. The main character, sort of the Sigorney Weaver heroine of the piece, she had a younger brother named Billy. He was about twelve or thirteen years old, and he was reading from a Route 66 guide book. These were all passages that Bill and I wrote. They were original passages, and they were sort of quaint and mysterious and full of a little bit of nostalgia for what the road used to be through the ’20s and the ’30s and the ’40s and a little sense of foreboding.

So you were sort of seeing the road through this young boy’s eyes, this twelve-year-old kid’s eyes. And you would see these ghostly images of the past from the ’20s and the ’40s alongside the road in these old abandoned diners and such, and it was really kind of haunting and touching. And all that got swept away because we were making this for $2 million. And before we know it, the Billy character got swept away as well. And what this ended up becoming was the story of an accountant on the run who was supposed to testify against the mob. He gets picked up by some federal marshals who then go on that detour, and then, in either case, they encounter a certain horror. But in our case, I always felt that the twelve-year-old boy with his guide book who loved Route 66 and his relationship to the sister and the other people in the cars, the young people in the cars, that always felt more fun to me than the federal marshals. But let me say in defense of the current film, Lou Diamond Phillips did do a pretty cool portrayal of the federal marshal. And I actually heard that midway through the project, Lou Diamond Phillips asked to return to the original script and wanted to shoot it.

WS: Can you do that when you’ve already started?

SF: Well, I’m not sure at what point he asked. I don’t know if he asked on a daily basis. But anyway, I got to meet Lou at one point. He was a terrific guy, and I appreciate that he had liked our original draft.

Anyway, certain elements of what we did certainly survived. I’m glad that people enjoy it. Interestingly, there was actually a point a couple years after the movie was shot where I got a group of actors together over at my place, and we did a theater-like reading of the original script, and we really had a good time with it, and there was actually talk of maybe trying to do it onstage in L.A., calling it “Route 666.” I mean, nobody had ever done that, “Route 666, The Original Screenplay.” But there were rights issues and such, and so we never did it, but for one night in an apartment in Los Angeles, the true “Route 666” lived.

WS: Was the horror part of your script the same as what actually got made?

SF: Well, there was the horror part of writing it.

WS: I mean the zombies.

SF: The horror part of making it. The zombies. What did you want to know about the zombies?

WS: What I’m saying is, what ended up on the screen as far as the zombies, the characters of the zombies, these old prisoners--is that what you wrote?

SF: You know what? What the characters were, that was, again, part of Bill’s original LSD trip, that basically hidden under the road, buried under the road was this chain gang which years earlier had been working that road, had tried to escape, had been mowed down with shotguns by the evil road boss, and then buried right under their own asphalt on Route 66, because then it was Route 66. And then he had put false grave markers in graves near the road so everybody thought it had been a so-called road accident, whatever that was supposed to be. No, it was like a chain gang road accident. We always thought that whole expression was hilarious, like what did that mean? But anyway, so the cover story was there was an accident, like six guys accidentally got caught under a steam roller, these prisoners, and now they’re buried off the road. The truth is, the Cool Hand Luke-ish boss had mowed them down, shot them down, buried them under their own road, but now, because that was bad karma, any time blood hits the road, it reinvigorates the road, and these chain gang dudes come back, and now they have one thing and one thing only they want to do, and that’s to put you in the road using their road tools. Pretty crazy. So that’s still in the film, but it’s like in our movie minus $10 million’ worth of good special effects that we didn’t have, so it’s just kind of cheesed out to a certain degree compared to what it might have been. If Michael Bay, if he had directed it or if Bill Wesley had simply had Michael Bay’s ATM card, this would have been a very different movie.

WS: You mentioned a minute ago that you met Lou Diamond Phillips on one occasion. Am I correct in assuming that you weren’t there during filming?

SF: I was there for one day.

WS: One day.

SF: Yeah.

WS: Is it common for screenwriters to be on set?

SF: It depends. Our director really wanted very much sort of a closed set, so I got a one-day pass like to Disneyland. It varies, but you know, on the film I’m planning on directing, I am definitely going to be there every day.

WS: What about during editing? Are screenwriters ever there during editing? Obviously, if they are the filmmaker, they would be, but if they’re for hire, would they normally be there during editing?

SF: Honestly, I think the rule of thumb is to keep the screenwriter away from the process as much as possible, anywhere from rewriting, keeping him away from re-writing, keeping him away from the set, keeping him away from editing, and yet if you’ve got a good writer then that’s somebody you want around. WS: Are you saying that it shows that you’re not a good writer if they don’t allow you near the movie?

SF: No, it shows they’re not good producers if they don’t want you around.

WS: I know this is a generalization, but how much do most screenplays get changed from the time that the writer finishes what they think is it to the time that they wrap the movie?

SF: For some screenwriters, I think they feel that as long as they just keep your margins, you’re lucky.

WS: Really?

SF: Yeah. Basically, if they keep the margins and the white space on the page, you’re lucky, and you should feel grateful. I think that the profusion of writer/directors over the last ten years just shows that there’s another way of thinking here.

So on “Route 666,” as you could see, the dialogue, for instance, that Bill and I wrote together, it appears spottily and sparsely throughout the picture. There were chunks where it was like, “Okay, we wrote that.” Actually, in particular, there’s some reading from the guide book that was stuff that we wrote. There are some scenes up at the cemetery that was really our scene, and it’s a really cool scene. Dale Midkiff, originally from the show “Time Tracks,” outdoes himself when he discovers the grave markers and tells the history of this chain gang up there. But most of the dialogue in “Route 666” is not ours anymore.

Now “American Reel,” a good percentage of it is what was written by myself and Junior Burke. Not all of it. Mark Archer had the actors do some improvs, so there are some bits and pieces that aren’t ours, but the movie is largely our dialogue and our work. That’s why I feel like “American Reel” is my film and “Route 666” is a film that I contributed to.

WS: If your scripts get changed a lot beyond all recognition or not beyond all recognition but a lot, does that affect your reputation as a screenwriter?

SF: I’d say yes and no. It’s kind of a funny thing. On the one hand, you’d think if you have your name on ten really God-awful movies that everybody’s got to figure, “What an insipid writer.” On the other hand, I think it’s so accepted that writers get bumped out of the process and elbowed out of the process that I think sometimes people could feel like, “Well, you’ve got ten credits, and that outweighs everything.” I think it sort of depends on a degree. We all know what some of those films are that you never would want to be associated with. I think it sort of depends what those particular credits are, but I think any writer who believes in their work and knows in their heart that they’ve done a great job has really got to try to get that work to the screen.

WS: Would you try to lobby to keep the director and the other people involved in making the film not to change your script? Do you have any power to do that? Is it a bad thing? People say, “Oh, you don’t want to work with them because they’re just a pest or something?”

SF: Well, I’ll tell you honestly, going at things as I do, which is really as a filmmaker, making a movie is really not unlike “The Magnificent Seven” or “The Dirty Dozen.” And in fact, I think, I’ve felt this for some time, put it this way: since someone like John Sturges, who did “The Magnificent Seven,” was never really an outlaw and was never really a cowboy, he knows nothing about that, but he knows a lot about trying to put together a group of actors and funding and make a movie. I think I am making multiple points here, but my point is, movies like “The Dirty Dozen” and “The Magnificent Seven” are probably at some level a metaphor for the filmmaking process, for the directors who made them, whether they know it or not. It really is about trying to hand-pick people and, to carry on the western metaphor, hand-pick people who won’t shoot you in the back. So as a filmmaker, you try to pick your magnificent group, and you try to pick people who are like-minded enough but at the same time independent enough to bring something great to it. And that’s the way I think you really defend your material is you try to pick the right partners.

WS: It sounds very political.

SF: I thought you were going to say poetic.

WS: No, it doesn’t sound too poetic. It sounds political.

SF: Well, the metaphor part was kind of poetic.

WS: No, the metaphor was lovely, but it sounds like it’s very, very tricky as far as relationships are concerned and you can easily do the wrong thing. Is that true?

SF: Well, you know, you’ve heard the circus called the greatest show on earth. Well, this might be called the trickiest show on earth. No, it’s very political.

WS: Just to beat a dead horse one more time on this screenwriter thing and then I’ll go on to something else….

SF: Let me ask you, Paula, what is it you are trying to find out here? There’s something you want to know.

WS: I’m trying to find out the status of the screenwriter and what people should do if they either want to be screenwriters or are screenwriters.

SF: Okay. If you want to ask a full-on question for a full-on answer, I think the answer is, in some ways nothing has changed. Historically writers are a low man on the totem pole seen as a necessary evil. If the script just appeared on a desk magically or grew from the ground and you didn’t have to thank or pay a writer, I think plenty of people in the industry would find that a fine state of affairs. You know, with exceptions. It’s all really always been like that, and traditionally the writer fights for his day in the sun to become a writer/producer, to become a writer/director.

I think it’s changed in terms of numbers, though. More and more people are getting to stay with a project to its completion, becoming the writer auteur of the project. And the best answer, ask your dad for $50 million, and then you can go and make “Transformers” and write it yourself. It’s the bigger budget version of YouTube. I haven’t really been involved in the YouTube notion of grab a home movie camera and make a little movie, because once you’ve shot on 35, it’s hard to go back. But just the way the directive there is do-it-yourself, I’d say for the bigger budget, do it yourself, meaning try to stay at the heart of it and put it together yourself, build a team that will help you stay there, try to raise the money, try to get the cast, try to make a movie, and that’s the way I think a writer stays involved.

WS: Why are writers seen as so lowly?

SF: You’re getting at some very touchy territory here. People who hate writers, they feel they hate them for a good reason. I think that creating something, being the person responsible for the creation, it’s kind of a precious thing, and I think those who come on board the project later perhaps resent the fact that there was anyone who really was at the start of it. They’d like to sort of think that from here on out, this is really the start of it, rather than somebody…this wouldn’t exist if not for this writer doing this work. There are certain directors…I’ve read that Robert Altman was like that, God bless his soul. I’m really sorry he’s gone. I loved his work, but I hear that he perhaps was a little hard on writers because he wished he had been the initial writer, and I think that’s an issue.

WS: Do you think Netflix should let you search by screenwriter?

SF: Absolutely. I think that would be a wonderful development. I’m sort of joking. I can’t even picture them doing it, but sure, that’d be fun.

WS: Wait a minute, why wouldn’t they do it?

SF: Because we’re not actors.

WS: Yeah, but you can search by director.

SF: This is true. This is true. Put it this way, being able to search films by a screenwriter at Netflix I think falls into the category of Tony Bennett singing “If I Ruled the World” or Eric Clapton “If I Could Change the World,” but until that happens, I don’t think we’ll see that.

WS: That’s a shame.

SF: It is a shame. I guess maybe what you’re hearing in me is a reluctance to believe in things. Like you’re asking me to believe in the tooth fairy, and I just don’t know that I can, but I sure want to.

WS: Well, let’s talk more about the writing process a little bit. What’s the hardest part about writing a screenplay for you?

SF: There’s really nothing hard about it.

WS: Really?

SF: No. I really enjoy it.

WS: Wow. Nothing hard.

SF: Well, yeah, selling it. The hardest part of writing it is selling it.

WS: Nothing about the writing?

SF: It’s work. It’s work, and it’s hard work, but it’s not hard if it’s what you do. Like if somebody drives a cab, which is what you end up doing if your writing doesn’t sell, but if somebody’s driving a cab, it’s like, what’s hard about driving a cab? Well, nothing’s hard about it, it’s what you know how to do.

WS: Well, that’s fantastic, because I think it’s very hard. I think driving a cab might be hard, too, but…

SF: I tried driving a cab once, and I want to tell you, that was hard.

WS: Well, you’re just lucky, then, that it’s easy for you. All right, let me ask you another question, then. How do you decide what to write about? Do you consider commercial viability when you pick a subject or pick your characters?

SF: My good friend and wonderful co-writer, Junior Burke, with whom I’ve written two scripts, “American Reel” and a new ’40’s big budget film noir, the one that Tina Pavlides is producing, we don’t do all of our projects together, but every once in a while we have an idea that we bounce off each other, and it’s time to work together again, because we really enjoy it. And he’s always given me the advice, he said, “Write what you want to be writing if you could never write a script again. If this was the last script you could ever write, make sure that’s the one you’re writing.” In other words, he just means make sure you really care about it. Now, even he, I think, would allow that--yeah, I know he understands where commerciality plays a role—and we’ve discussed that too. I often have promised myself to write, to just jump in and write an ultra-commercial script. And I think that some of my projects are actually rather commercial in their way. And I guess even “Route 666,” when I took that, that was a work for hire, and I took that as a commercial prospect, and yet, there was something about it that really intrigued me, and before I knew it, it was like, this is scary, I’m starting to really care about this thing. “Route 666” that was. So I certainly think about commerciality. I contemplate doing something for only those reasons, but I never do it. I always end up writing something I care about. Put it this way, I try not to write a script that I think has no commercial appeal.

WS: Well, it’s good that you care about it. I mean, you can care about something that’s commercial.

SF: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. But I guess I’ll say, if you’re prolific, you might have a number of ideas, and there may be certain ideas that strike you as a blockbuster idea> And maybe you care about it, maybe a 6.0 out of 10, but then there’s another idea that doesn’t seem like a blockbuster, but it seems like a perfectly viable movie that can find an audience, and you care about that 10.1. It seems to have been my practice to go with those. So I always tend to pick the things that I’m more driven to write, even if it’s not as sort of doggedly commercial. That’s just not been the prime mover.

WS: Did you go to film school?

SF: I wasn’t enrolled in film school, but I minored in film at Northwestern. The reason being, why it was a minor is I always wanted the writing part to be sort of front and center, so I majored in English, minored in film. The irony is, the last two years where you were able to take these film courses, I really spent so much time, I literally lived in the editing room a lot of those two years, so I sort of unofficially was majoring in film even as I was trying to avoid majoring in film because I was really drawn to it. But I’m glad I majored in English nonetheless.

WS: Why?

SF: For the foundation. I was serious about my writing even back in high school. At least in my head I was serious about it. I don’t know what anybody thought that read it, but I’ve always been publishing things.

WS: When you say you majored in English, do you mean English literature or creative writing?

SF: I majored in English composition and then minored in film, and actually, most of the films that I made at Northwestern during those two years, my last two years in the classroom, and then a film I made within two years of graduating afterward, most of those got onto PBS on a show called “Image Union,” which is or was the longest-running showcase of independent filmmakers on TV. It was on PBS, WTTW. That’s where they showed this film, Johnny Passé, which was a one-hour movie then actually got cut down to a half-hour. Unfortunately, there were a lot of mood shots in it, so we were able to do it, but it was a half-hour show. There’s actually been talk recently, I’ve been talking to somebody who might want to do this Johnny Passé as a radio theater piece, and that’s something that might happen in the future, as well.

WS: Let’s talk about your book. Tell us about Tuxes.

SF: Tuxes is my first novel--my second book but my first novel. My first book had been, I should throw that in, during the height of my humor piece writing early on getting out of college, I was fortunate enough to have a first book published. It was fiction, but it wasn’t a novel. It was a concept humor book, and it was published by Bantam, actually, of all people, and it was interesting. It was a send-up of science fiction in the form of an etiquette book. This had never been done. It was called Guess What’s Coming to Dinner: The Extraterrestrial Etiquette Guide. It is the one, the only, there is none other, you could search the Internet, you will never find it, it is the only etiquette guide for dealing with extraterrestrials and alien abduction ever done. I’m the expert on that. I’m the author, and no, I’ve never seen one, I’ve never been abducted, it was all parody. But nonetheless, it was fun to be the expert on that during the time of its release. The book’s no longer in print. I think probably Bantam was afraid we were angering alien life forms on other planets with this, sort of ticking them off with the jokes in this book. So it’s not in print, but Amazon has an enormous number of copies. Actually, British Amazon. I don’t know why this is, but up until recently, someone was selling a copy on Amazon UK for over 3,000 pounds: $6,000. So that was my first book, and like I said, it can be found on the Internet.

But Tuxes was just published by Beachside Press, which is a really terrific small literary press out of Palo Alto, California. A great editor named Ron Packard, a man with some real vision, runs this publisher. I should say they have a Web site where you could read about Tuxes and their other books - Beachsidepress.com.

As to what Tuxes is, it’s a satire. And it’s certainly the longest piece of sustained satire I’ve ever done. So it felt like a kind of culmination, Paula, because I had done the writing of these humor pieces over the years, like I said for Chicago and The Los Angeles Times and Playboy, and more recently, I’ve done a lot of humor pieces for Farmhouse magazine. Farmhousemagazine.com is an online literary publication, and they’ve got a lot of my stuff online there.

But Tuxes was a full-out novel. What I was trying to do here was, I think it’s a literary piece. It’s light, but I think it is a literary performance, I’d like to think. But at the same time a satire of a very popular genre that I think richly deserved being parodied, and that’s the beach book bestseller. It’s like the classic rich family saga/soap opera as written by Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins, as you’ve seen on TV, “Dynasty,” “Dallas,” but done as a satire. And in this particular case, the rich family isn’t an oil family or a cattle family or stockbrokers, it’s a formalwear conglomerate, because I figured I want to pick a business which just smacks of all the luxury of their lives, so they not only wear formalwear, they make formalwear. It’s a formalwear conglomerate in Texas, so it’s called Tuxes. We have a play on words there: t-u-x-e-s.

I’m getting some really nice reactions. Somebody I know, I have to admit it is someone I know, but nonetheless, they’re a hard nut to crack, and they read the book and reviewed it on Amazon and compared it to Vonnegut and bought some copies for their friends, and for this person to have done that meant a lot to me.

WS: Why don’t you give us a little taste of it? Why don’t you read a little bit for us?

SF: If we have a little time, I’d like to read a couple of selections. Now one of the things that makes Tuxes unique, like these beach book, rich sagas which often cover large expanses of time, they might start at the Civil War era, the antebellum era, WWI, Hester Street that’s [unintelligible] thing, my book actually starts in the Stone Age. This is about the original money, so it only makes sense that it starts in the Stone Age, so the book begins with Prologue: Texas 1,000,000 BC. And I read the beginning of Tuxes:

[Reads from the book]

And of course, that’s the character, that’s the cave man who is going to found the dynasty and then be followed by his ancestors into the present-day Texas. Now, if I may, I would like to jump to the start of chapter one, and now we meet the man, the man who is at the end of this bloodline, a 70-year-old Donald Trump-like mogul named Price Bundleworth, and we see what his life is like.

[Reads from the book]

WS: That’s great.

SF: Thank you. That’s Price, that’s Price’s life. And I have one last little section that I think would be nice to share with everyone. One of the things that I think is really fun about the novel, I must say, is it actually is a family story, and this family, as utterly screwed up as they are, classic to the genre, “Dallas” and “Dynasty” and “Peyton Place,” it is still in the end a family, and they do ultimately kind of unite. Early in our story, we learn that one of the things that grieves Price despite his billionaire position is the fact that his son is dead, his son Cad. Well, he’s not actually dead, he’s just been declared legally dead because he went into the arts. Who knows where I got that idea, but so the son is declared legally dead, went into the arts, disappeared, went into the Peace Corps, but then finally at Price’s 70th birthday party, somebody arrives. A mysterious stranger arrives. And if I could share this last passage with you. So this is from a chapter early in the novel but where Price has been celebrating his birthday at a big blowout at his mansion in Texas, and this is a surprise guest who is going to cheer Price up immensely.

[Reads from the book]

WS: That’s fantastic. Let me just ask you a little bit about humor.

SF: Sure.

WS: Obviously, you don’t find it difficult. I was going to ask you how difficult you find it, but you obviously don’t.

SF: That’s right. None of this is hard to write. We’ve already established that.

WS: Right. We know that already. Well, maybe my other questions are moot then, but let me just ask them anyway. How do you come up with jokes and humorous situations? Do they just pop into your head, or do you work at it a particular way, or how does that work?

SF: Well, to start with, you need to lead a funny life.

WS: But how? What’s the secret to that?

SF: You know, I think you either do or you don’t, and I think if you do, you know you do.

WS: So you’re saying you have to be born that way, right?

SF: Yeah. Well, it’s the nature-nurture argument, right? I think you could be born that way, or you could be raised that way, one or the other, but at the end of the day, as they say, you know if you have a funny life. And you know, honestly…put it this way, most of the best ideas I’ve ever had, to me, are not ideas that I got by staring at a blank piece of paper trying to figure out what to write. Sometimes, you look for the first sentence staring at the page or staring at the computer, however you do it. But in terms of the concept for a short story or a poem or a book or whatever, usually those things do not happen just summarily deciding, “I’m going to write now. Okay, what should I write?” Usually, those things, yeah, they just happen, so you’re in the middle of your life, you’re walking down the street, you’re in a conversation, you’re reading a copy of Time magazine, and then the idea happens.

WS: And you get all these funny ideas, obviously.

SF: Apparently.

WS: Well, I mean, when you were writing your book, you weren’t walking down the street writing your book and grabbing things as they happened. Obviously, you were sitting at the computer.

SF: Right, obviously for the actual composition, yeah. For the actual writing, then you’re sitting there faced with endless decisions and endless pauses--endless pauses where you decide what next. But I just mean in terms of the big question of what should I write a book about, what should I write a film about, I don’t usually just put a piece of paper in front of me and decide. I’ve already got the ideas that have happened, other moments, but then once you’re in the process, absolutely, then you’re staring… Yeah, believe me, you do enough staring. You end up staring at the paper or the computer screen, and you’re six sentences into it, and it’s like, “Okay, now what?”

I like outlining. I definitely like collecting notes before I start anything longer than four lines, I definitely like to have notes. Many times, Paula, while I’m writing a given project, if it’s a script or a short story or something, usually while I’m composing that, writing that, I’m on the side collecting notes for one or more other projects. So basically, by the time I’m done with one thing, there are piles of notes for other things building up, and usually the way I decide what to write next is what am I driven to write sort of combined with what’s ready. So often times, by the time I’m done writing a certain script, there’s some other project which, because of the desire to write it, has been acquiring a kind of critical mass in terms of notes. So you’ve finished actually the last page of something and then there’s just something else that’s really ready, because it’s pretty well outlined, and you just have lots of raw material. But then on top of it, when I get to starting, sometimes there’s some additional outlining process that happens. I definitely like preparing, doing homework.

WS: So when you were writing Tuxes, before you started, you had most of the jokes, most of the funny situations?

SF: Actually, I had the broad strokes of it, I mean, about who this family was and the fact that it started in the Stone Age, and now it’s happening in the present but the Stone Age is going to sort of come back to haunt us, which it does in this story. Am I giving too much away to say that the cave man is found frozen in the Arctic and inherits everything and just thoroughly disrupts the family’s lives?

WS: Well, that’s up to you. You decide. That’s pretty funny.

SF: You know what? If you think that will appeal to your listeners to know that about the book, go ahead. Leave it in.

So the basic premise there was that this was old money. It starts in the Stone Age. Let’s take these bestsellers, which have been done to death, where they start in the Civil War era or the Revolutionary War, and let’s go back. Let’s go way back. So I figured I’m going to start in the Stone Age. But I didn’t want to travel through all of human history, because it was going to take too long and stretch the joke too far, so I figured we’ll have a prologue in the Stone Age, then we’ll jump to the present, to the modern mogul billionaire family. But we’re going to throw them a curve ball because this progenitor, Stone Age progenitor, is going to be found and defrosted, and he’s going to inherit everything through a loophole in the bylaws, which are described in the book, very aware of the appropriateness of contracts. The contract that screws up the family is talked about in the book. So the cave man inherits everything, and Price Bundleworth is not happy about that at all. But BC Bundleworth, as the cave man is ultimately dubbed, he takes the helm and starts running the corporation into the ground, but everything works out very nicely in the end. The family learns to play together, work together.

WS: Let’s just take that one example that you made: BC Bundleworth, okay? How did you come up with his name being BC? Obviously, there’s a comic strip “BC,” but did that have anything to do with it?

SF: No, not the comic strip. And you’re right. That was one of the pieces I had before I started writing the book: the title, the formalwear, the Stone Age, that he would inherit it, the name. There were key comical elements and plot elements that were in place, and I didn’t sit down to write it until I had enough of them in place. I guess that’s what I do. And then once there’s enough to feel like the engine’s going, I think most writers thrive on the improvisation that is part of writing. You set up some of it, and then you wing the rest as you go along. So you have preparation, and then you have surprises, and I think that’s a nice blend. In terms of BC, he was born before Christ, and he’s a Bundleworth, so he became BC Bundleworth.

WS: So you take elements of the situation and maybe consciously, maybe not consciously, just sort of riff on them. Would that be accurate, the BC part? I mean, you think of terms that apply to the Stone Age. Well, BC would be one of them.

SF: And also thinking of terms that apply to wealth, wealthy families, wealthy characters in stories. Well, J.R. Ewing in “Dallas.” There have been so many stories. Paul Newman in the late ’50s, early ’60s, he did a couple of movies, I believe, that were about being young and wealthy, “The Young Philadelphians.” It really is this time-honored genre of the life of the rich and famous. So I saw that a lot of times the wealthiest character was known by the initials, and then here are two handy initials, BC. It just sort of had a ring to it, BC Bundleworth.

WS: So you just said something really important. You said that you really have to know what came before, particularly in the case of satire, obviously, or there’s nothing to satirize. You have to be familiar with the literature.

SF: Oh, you mean in terms of the examples.

WS: Right, when you’re satirizing something, you have to know that material well enough to make fun of it.

SF: Absolutely. That applies to when you’re doing something serious, because not all of my work is comedy or satire. As you pointed out, I tend to be attracted to other genres. I mean, more and more as I keep writing, I get fascinated by genres that I’ve enjoyed, and I want to do something in them> So there’s a big-budget ’40s film noir in the tradition of “Chinatown” and “L.A. Confidential,” and we think there’s a pretty decent chance that it may be shooting in 2008. I think it’s going to happen then. And Junior Burke and I, we definitely did our research on the period. We read a lot of mysteries and a lot of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Mickey Spillane, even, the great Mickey, to get the voice and the verbiage, read a lot of historical books about the period. So it’s true with serious work, as you might guess, but also with satire, too. It’s really important to go back to the original sources and really look at the language and the elements, because you’re only going to make nothing from nothing. You’ve got to have a base to build on.

WS: Any other thoughts, Scott, about writing or movies or anything?

SF: Well, of course, one thought I’d like to reiterate is that Tuxes can be purchased. Tuxes can and I hope will be purchased by all sorts of interested readers. It’s easily acquired through Beachsidepress.com, where you could just order it right online at the Beachside Press Web site. You could order it from Amazon. You just look up “Tuxes novel,” and it comes up all over Google, but also, bookstores. The novel is being handled by Ingram and Partners West. We have a couple of different distributors, so it’s coming into more and more stores, and anyone who doesn’t have it can simply order it. I will say, in L.A., some of the bookstores carrying it right now are Chevalier’s Books on Larchmont, Skylight Books has it, some of the Barnes and Noble, Village Books in the Pacific Palisades, and I appreciate all their support.

And also, I appreciate Farmhouse magazine very much, which was kind enough to read the book very much in advance. I mean, as soon as the book was done, they read it and wrote a really lovely review, which became the first page inside the novel and is quoted on the outside of the book. Farmhouse, some good guys. I mean, they print my writing, but it is a lot of other wonderful writers there that are printed in their bimonthly installments at Farmhousemagazine.com. I wanted to say something about them.

WS: I would like us to leave with a couple of little bits of music of yours. Do you want to tell us what we’re going to be listening to?

SF: I’ve always loved music. I’ve played guitar since I was a kid. I play a Gibson ES 335, for guitar-lovers out there, on these recordings. Beautiful electric guitar. BB King style, sort of. And basically, I’ve played in groups over the years, and I’ve done some singer/songwriter stuff on my own in Chicago and L.A.

But about a year ago, I had the good fortune of walking into what was a very popular but sometimes hard-to-find club because it didn’t have a big sign. It was called Guys. It was on Beverly Blvd. in Los Angeles with a tiny little sign next to Jerry’s Deli in Beverly Hills. And I walked in there, and they had a Sunday night jazz night. Now as it is recently, this was terminated temporarily, but the Guys club is going to be thoroughly rebuilt and restored, and around next June, it’s going to open again with different themes different nights, including this classic jazz on Sunday. And they had a great, great band. Some of their members included a piano player named Tommy King, really young kid. I don’t know if he’s 21 or 22, but he plays like Bill Evans. He’s amazing. And Zane Musa, who became a very good friend of mine, and he is just, and I always tell him, he is a sax genius. Zane is the best, and Zane and Tommy and some of the guys from this band often play on the Carson Daley show in their band and play lots of sessions and gigs around town. Zane, of course, has his own album out at ZaneMusa.com. Just a last few plugs here before we hear this music, Paula.

Anyway, Zane introduced me to a singer named Mishka Spiro--an Israeli girl, who sings with no trace of an accent. Lives in Israel but visits L.A. and records here with us. And we fund something called the Mishka Spiro trio. And it was really simple. It was just vocals, being hers, me on guitar, and Zane on sax, alternately soprano and alto. And the guys were great enough to like my songs, so we have recorded three of my tunes and then one tune that I wrote with Mishka and another fellow. And we have an EPCD now that is out, and people can read about it, go on our mailing list at beachsiderecords.com. It’s actually a branch of my publisher, Beachside Press. Beachsiderecords.com. Or you can hear any of these songs at a number of Web sites where people can download the music. So it’s the Mishka Spiro Trio, or you can look up by the name of the CD, which is simply “Awesome in New York.” “Awesome in New York” is at iTunes and Rhapsody and eMusic, and let’s hear some music, if you like.

WS: Thank you so much for being with us today, Scott, and I want to hear more about that movie you’re directing.

SF: You can look for this to be shot in hopefully the first half of 2008. It’s the first film that will ever take place at a particular eatery and bar/grill sort of place in L.A. The whole film takes place in and around one location, so it’s a little bit theatrical in that sense, a little bit like a [planned?] film. I think we’re going to have some really strong performances. But there’s a thriller aspect to it, too. I have a great producer, Tina Pavlides, on board, and we have some great talent, and look for it next year.

WS: Scott wanted me to mention that he can be reached through Beachside Press or through me, Paula@WritingShow.com, and now I’ll leave you with “Swan Song” by the Mishka Spiro Trio.

© 2007 Paula Hollywood, Inc.

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