“This is the saddest story I have ever heard.”  So begins Ford Maddox Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier.  Every screenwriter has at least one sob story.  This is mine.

Back in the early 70s, before I got my first screenplay credit, I wrote a spec script, “Almost Grown,” about a high school kid, Burdick (no first name).  (The title came from a Chuck Berry song.)  The movie never got made, but I folded the Burdick character into a young-adult novel, It Looks Alive to Me!, that Harper & Row published in the mid-70s.

In It Looks Alive to Me!, Burdick lives on 77^th Street in Manhattan, across from the American Museum of Natural History.  (Which is where I lived the first three years of my life.)  A moon rock goes on display in the Hall of Minerals.  The next morning, the moon rock is gone—stolen—and the museum has undergone some changes:  a Tlingit Indian is missing from the war canoe the lobby, the wild dogs who yesterday were only menacing a stag are now devouring it.  Only Burdick seems to notice the changes.  He hides himself in the museum.  Adventures ensue, involving, among other things, a giant centipede, elephant-hunting pygmies, and an Egyptian pharaoh.  In company with the missing Indian, the Transparent Woman from the Hall of Biology, and Charles Darwin, Burdick solves the mystery of the missing moon rock—hooking up, along the way, with Lola, a girl he unsuccessfully tried to pick up the day before (and who nearly ditches him for Ramses II.)

It Looks Alive to Me! was reprinted in paperback, and came to the attention of David Begelman, head of Columbia, who had his own production company, Gladden Entertainment.  Begelman bought the rights in perpetuity—i.e., forever, and for roughly 40 times what I’d made on the book itself.

Begelman starts ordering scripts.

I get the first shot.  There was no way to do the book as written—this was way before CGI—so instead of all the action taking place in a museum setting, Burdick would pass, Alice Through the Looking Glass style, through the plate glass of the dioramas, and then find himself in whatever environment the diorama represented:  Puritan America, the Serengeti plain, Montezuma’s Mexico.

No second draft is ordered.  Other writers get hired.  Begelman supposedly throws a million dollars at the project, which now appears to be dead.

So I ask for a meeting with Begelman to see if I can somehow get the book back.  Begelman was famous for his charm, but wasted none of it on me.  He calls my adaptation a “tuppenny adventure” (this was several years before “Raiders of the Lost Ark” made two-penny adventures respectable) and declares, without visible irony, “I’m still waiting for someone who can execute my vision of the project.”

In 1976, for reasons having to do with his gambling addiction, Begelman forges Cliff Robertson’s name to a $10,000 check.  He’s sentenced to go into therapy and make a documentary (about the perils of gambling, presumably), thus proving that one man’s punishments are another man’s privileges.  Eventually he goes bankrupt, and in 1995 shoots himself to death in his room at the Century Plaza Hotel.

I was told that, as a result of the bankruptcy settlement, It Looks Alive to Me! became the property of Credit Lyonnais, and then, through some fiscal twist, Polygram Pictures.  Through a series of maneuvers, my wife Carol manages to get the book out of hock and optioned by Disney (for a reported 50 times what TV usually pays to option a project) as a possible Wonderful World of Disney movie.

I’m not on Disney’s list of approved writers, but Carol fights to get me and our son Will Baum hired.  (We were writing partners in the 90s.)  We write a script.  David Seidler (Oscar winner for “The King’s Speech”) and his then-wife, Jackie Feather, are hired to rewrite us.  Their script, which focuses rather narrowly on Alexander the Great, a character we introduced in our version, doesn’t turn out well—but the project is given a flashing green light.

Until Peter Schneider, a Disney president, reads the script and kills it.  Carol isn’t surprised—but she’s definitely taken aback when Disney features starts developing a movie about a museum of natural history coming to life—and doesn’t attach the producer (namely, Carol Baum) who brought the company the project.  That’s show business, and Carol has little choice but to let go of a project she spent countless years promoting—many more hours than I spent writing it.

Disney’s version never sees the light of day.  Neither does a movie version of It Looks Alive to Me!  Around the same time, Fox starts developing their own museum-of-natural-history-comes-to-life movie, based on a picture book for children age 4-7.  In 2006, “Night at the Museum” comes out and, along with its sequel, grosses a billion dollars worldwide.

Carol has never seen “Night at the Museum,” and neither have I.  We once did a 180 back into a theater lobby to avoid the trailer.  At one point there was a billboard for the movie over the entrance to the Century City Mall.  We ducked as we drove into the parking lot.

Our granddaughter says it’s pretty good.

Has anyone in real life ever uttered any of these sentences?

“And your point is?”

“And you’re saying that because?”

“That went well.”

“Why am I not surprised?”

“This is the part where you [leave, confess, whatever].”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“So that happened.”

“What part of [whatever] don’t you understand?”

(A tiny sample.  It’s a growing list.)

Overexposure.

Even the most experienced writers fall prey to naked exposition.  The line “We’ve been over this hundreds of times,” intended to take the hex off something the audience needs to know, must have been uttered hundreds of times in movies.

Needless narration.

Great narration is rare.  ( “Badlands,” “Jules and Jim,” “Sunset Boulevard,”  “The Bad and the Beautiful,”  “Double Indemnity,” “Out of the Past,” and the beginning of “Manhattan.”)  A lot of bad narration is added in post, as a desperate measure to clarify the story, just as music is ordered to pump up lifeless scenes.

Bad behavior doesn’t need excuses.

We automatically root for someone who’s trying to accomplish something—from a bank heist to an assassination.

In “Psycho,” after Tony Perkins cleans up Janet Leigh’s murder, we’re totally with him as he waits for her car to sink below water level.  In Ulu Grosbard’s great 70s noir, “Straight Time,” we get crazed when Dustin Hoffman stays too long while he’s robbing the jewelry store.  Extreme case:  in Todd Solondz’s “Happiness,” we’re waiting with child-molester Dylan Baker for the kid to eat the sandwich laced with sedative.  We want the movie to go forward, and we know it can’t until this terrible thing happens.

The best way to kill a story.

Killing off the most entertaining character is a sure way to sink a movie.  When Gregory Hines gets mauled to death in Michael Wadleigh’s  “Wolfen,” a lot of the air goes out of the movie.  (“The black guy gets killed off first” used to be an unwritten rule.)

To plot or not to plot.

“In the garden-variety novel,” said Norman Mailer, “the meaning of the action grows on every page.”  Mailer was being faintly disparaging toward the form, as some people (a dwindling number) belittle the “well-made play.”  (Jean-Luc Godard once called his ex-friend François Truffaut a “storyteller,” and he didn’t mean it as a compliment.)

Speaking on behalf of plots, E.M. Forster reversed the usual distinction between plot and story.  “The king died and then the queen died,” is a story.  “The king died and then the queen died of grief” is a plot.  In the garden-variety movie, actions have consequences.

Amoral plotting:  In the 1988 movie, “Dominick and Eugene,” a young kid gets pushed down a flight of stairs to his death, just so Thomas Hulce can have an epiphany about how his father’s abuse led to his mental challenges.

 Predictable?

Boy meets girl in a romantic comedy and at first they can’t stand each other.  (“It’s best to begin with aversion,” as Oscar Wilde said, “since everything wears off eventually.”)  Are boy and girl going to get together at the end?  Of course.  (Is Michael Corleone going to become a gangster like the rest of his family?  It’s totally predictable, and it’s great. )

The gold standard is “Roman Holiday”—because they don’t get together in the end.  And even that’s fairly predictable.

The one consistently predictable moment in movies is the last shot.  The characters walk away from us down a street, the camera cranes up—what used to be known as a “coat-grabber.”

Some people like to guess what’s coming, other people go with the flow, still others couldn’t predict what’s going to happen if you held a gun to their heads.  Like most things in life, it’s a bell curve.

1. “I love subtlety, so long as it’s obvious.”

Billy Wilder said that and it’s true.  The virtues of obscurity are minimal.

The earlier in a movie we know about the characters, and where the whole thing is going, the better.

If there’s a big surprise in the story, figure out when you want the audience to figure it out.  Some will get it sooner, some later, but it’s lazy not to care.  You’re supposed to be in control of the material.

Fantasy or reality?  Make up your mind.  Most people don’t love to be fooled.  (“The Sixth Sense” is a stellar counter-example…but then I walked out when Bruce Willis wasn’t behaving credibly.  Hats off to everybody who figured out he was dead at this point.  I’m slow to catch on to such things.)

The fake dream is a staple of storytelling, and often a groaner.  Exception:  Kevin Bacon’s dream in John Hughes’ “She’s Having a Baby.”  He’s dreaming about this girl he met, she shows up at his house, quite plausibly, and then Elizabeth McGovern walks into his dream and tells him to wake up.

But it’s not enough to be obvious—you have to keep being obvious.  “Once for smart people, twice for dumb people, and three times for the critics.”

2. Gibble gabble.

You don’t see it as much anymore, and mostly on TV:  the yak-and-track scene in which two or more characters speak in the jargon of the movie’s subject—medical jargon, law jargon, aerospace jargon, political jargon, whatever.  The intent is to impress the audience with the movie’s authenticity.  You sense right away you’re not supposed to be grasping all that’s being said—and where’s the fun in that?

Names can get on audience’s nerves as well.  In life, people don’t call each other by name—unless they’re trying to sell them something.  (“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.”)  Whenever a character’s name is Charles or Charlie, that name gets said over and over again.  (Two charming counter-examples:  Colleen Camp repeatedly calling John Ritter “Charles” in Peter Bogdanovich’s “They All Laughed”; Ray Liotta calling Jeff Daniels “Charlie” in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild.”)

Numbers can be as problematical as names.  Phone numbers in movies (after the “555”) almost always contain four different digits.  Room numbers, three different digits.  The writer’s trying to achieve an effect of randomness…but is actually being anti-random:  roughly 30% of all three-digit room numbers have a repeated digit, and nearly half of all four-digit clusters have repeats.

3. Research on parade.

One of the last things to go in a heavily researched script is the research.  The writer has put in too much effort to give it up, enjoyed too many hours of procrastination, learned far too much not to pass the information along to the audience.  And then the research crowds out the drama.  (“Lincoln”)

4. Busy business.

In the 90s, Shane Black made a name for himself with scripts for “Lethal Weapon” and “The Long Kiss Goodnight.”  He also created a vogue for cute description.  (“I think we lost my mother on page 46.”)  That’s over, as a quick glance at the Oscar-nominated scripts of recent years will show.  Attention spans have gotten shorter, and so have the action paragraphs.  Once the characters have been introduced and the thrust of the story is clear, most agents, execs, and producers only read the dialogue.

With parentheticals too—less is more, and nothing at all is best.  A legendary soap actress had it in her contract that none of her lines could contain instructions on how to say them.  Other actors make a practice of crossing out the parentheticals.  If the line needs a “softly” or an “angrily,” there’s a good chance the line itself needs to be tweaked.

5. The ceremonial table read.

The first table read is usually the last reading as well, and has as much practical effect as the table read in “All That Jazz,” where all the actors are laughing their heads off while Roy Scheider checks out and goes temporarily deaf.

6. “When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?”

That was Allen Ginsberg’s question, in his greatest poem (“America”).  These days, writers can’t expect to be handed assignments on the strength of their track record.  Even writers with movies about to be released are told to generate their own material.

One of the assignments I did land was the TV movie “Witness to the Execution.”  The story I was given was about a pay-per-view network that televises an execution to save itself from going under.  In order to get the job, I had to assure the producers (and therefore NBC) that I had no objections to the death penalty.  Actually, I was against it, but I kept my mouth shut.  In the script I wrote, the network exec (played by Sean Young) auditions a bunch of death-row inmates to see who’s the most telegenic.  By the end of the story, everybody (including the inmate) wants to see the execution go forward—except for the network exec herself.  The movie got me a couple of plaques from the Writer’s Guild, but was denounced on the floor of the Senate as liberal propaganda, and Blockbuster refused to stock it—because whatever the filmmakers’ intent, any time you show an execution in a movie it’s automatically taken as a statement against the death penalty.

7. You don’t always want credit.

Back in the 80s, I was hired to write a TV pilot for a sci-fi series that was eventually shot in Canada.  Canadian writers were hired to rewrite the script, but since they weren’t Writer’s Guild writers, they weren’t entitled to screen credit.  Nothing of my script had survived.  It felt weird to sign my name to it, so I created a pseudonym:  Nolan Powers, after an evangelist character Gary Busey played in a Hitchhiker episode I’d written.

Several years later I wrote a TV movie for Gerry Abrams (father of J.J.).  It was shot in Canada, and again, a Canadian was brought on to rewrite it.  This time half my script survived, but I wasn’t willing to take all the blame.  So I proposed to the Guild that I share credit with Nolan Powers.  The Guild scratched their heads over that for a few days, then said no.  So I went full pseudonym.  The press kit came out—and my name was still there as the writer.  Major violation, financial penalty, and I was $6000 richer.  Eventually the situation was corrected, and Nolan Powers is listed on IMDb as the writer of “Drop Dead Gorgeous.”

Of course, when you do deserve full credit, there will often be other people suing to share it.  Some writers go slack at the thought of defending their work to the Writer’s Guild arbitrators.  This is a major error.  The more care taken with the arbitration letter, the more specific your arguments, the better chance you have to win.  I’ve been challenged on several projects, and I’ve never had to give up a credit to anyone.

On one TV movie I wrote, “Kidnapped:  In the Line of Duty,” the director changed exactly one speech and then asked for shared credit.  (He also said, on the day I visited the set, in front of the crew, and me, “I didn’t write this shit.”)  He lost the arbitration, and years later tried to friend me on Facebook—the only friend request I’ve ever denied.

Eventually I got fed up with these nuisance suits, and proposed a Three Strikes rule to the Guild:  if you lose three arbitrations, you lose your privilege to sue.  The Guild didn’t go for that either.

8. Bite your tongue.

You may hate the notes you’re getting, but don’t fight back.  They may even be right.  And if six people tell you you’re drunk, lie down.

If they pass on your spec script personally, don’t ask why.  As my wife tells her fellow producers, chances are they haven’t read it.  They’re working off a reader’s notes.  Man up.  On to the next.

9. Plagiarism happens.

It’s the least of your worries, and you’re probably doing it without realizing it.

At the one of the post-production sessions for the animated musical “Hugo the Hippo” (my first screen credit, and the only movie I’ve ever written with its own website), the composer played and sang all the songs.  “Wherever you go, Hugo, we go,” was one of the refrains.  Some weeks later I was asked to write wild lines for the crowd scenes.  I came up with one I thought was really terrific:  “Wherever you go, Hugo, we go.”

If you do get caught plagiarizing, console yourself with T.S. Eliot’s adage:  “Bad poets imitate, good poets steal.”

10. The zeitgeist.

Judd Apatow:  In a weird way, you’ve always been a bit of a futurist.

Albert Brooks:  I would read that early on.  “He’s ahead of his time.”  Then I learned that would in no way be a plus in this business.  I realized I should at least take it as a compliment, because that’s all it was good for.

In the mid-70s, Harper & Row published my young adult novel, “It Looks Alive to Me!”, an adventure about New York’s Museum of Natural History coming to life, and a brainy kid who spends a night there.  The book was bought for the movies, in perpetuity, by David Begelman, for 40 times what I made on the book.  Later, the book almost became a Wonderful World of Disney TV movie, and Fox made a series of museum-comes-to-life movies that grossed billions, but that’s another story.  Suffice to say that at the time, there was no CGI, so no way to do the feature properly.

But then my friend Marshall Brickman showed me a New Yorker article about all the nuclear material lying around ready to be grabbed by terrorists, and suggested there might be a movie about somebody who builds a homemade nuke.  I said maybe it should be a kid like the kid in “It Looks Alive to Me!”  We both sparked to the notion, named it “The Manhattan Project,” but in the mid 70s nobody was financing movies with kids at the center, so we shelved the idea.  Then came the 80s, and John Hughes.  In 1985, no fewer than three movies with science-kid themes were released, known collectively as “My Real Weird Genius Science Project.”  By the time “The Manhattan Project” came out, ten years after we’d had the original idea, the genre was exhausted.  We were like a horse that finishes next year.

Three years or so later, I was hired to write a two-part miniseries for HBO about the TV business.  In the script, “Sweeps,” the network’s talk-show host gets wounded by a crazed fan.  The co-stars of the network’s cop show join the police to find the stalker, the star of the network’s medical series helps treat the talk-show host—the entire network abandons scripted TV (“We’re Getting Real”), and starts airing highlights from “The Harry Channel,” a 24-hour cable show that takes place in Harry’s house, outfitted with cameras in every room.  HBO eventually passed on “Sweeps”—too fanciful.  Eight years later, Ron Howard directed “EdTV,” with Matthew McConaughey as a guy whose entire life is lived on television.

Well, these ideas are always in the ether, and the zeitgeist always catches up.  In the 90s, TV movies were my bread and butter.  Then the networks mostly stopped making them, in favor of the Reality TV that “Sweeps” had, in its modest, unaired way, anticipated.  I went back to writing novels, published a thriller called “Out of Body,” and started writing plays, nine of which have now been produced, in L.A., N.Y., and places in between.  So no hard feelings, much fun along the way, and very few regrets.

      1. There is always one character too many.

Changing a character’s gender or ethnicity can often unlock a story.  More often, eliminating a character is the answer, and better to do it now and save everybody else a lot of work.

2. Every movie contains its own review.

“This is terrible.”  “I don’t believe this.”  “Why are we here?”  Lines like this should be avoided, lest they cue the answer:  “Yes, it is.”  “Neither do I.”  “Good question, let’s leave.”

3. Duplications.

In Judd Apatow’s “This Is 40,” both Albert Brooks and John Lithgow play men who’ve married young women and had children late in life.  It’s a minor flaw in a movie with many flaws and much genius, but duplications like are often a sign that an obsession hasn’t been fully worked through, especially if the screenwriter has failed to hang a lantern on the situation—have the characters themselves note the coincidence.

4. “I don’t want to be the guy who learns. I want to be the guy who knows.”

Actors want to have somewhere to go with their performance.  But not every character needs to grow and change, unless it’s an old Lifetime project.  Steve McQueen, the author of the above quote, knew people came to see Steve McQueen.

5. Invisible Martians.

Jorge Luis Borges observed that H.G. Wells wrote one novella about Martians attacking the Earth, and another novella about an Invisible Man.  What he didn’t write was a novella about Invisible Martians attacking the Earth.  (He also didn’t write “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”)

6. Premise-fighters.

In Oliver Stone’s “JFK,” Sissy Spacek, playing Kevin Costner’s wife, accuses him of caring more about John Kennedy’s assassination than he does about his own family.  Yes, and so does the audience.

When the protagonist is the premise-fighter, the situation is even more annoying.  Once “Manhattan Murder Mystery” gets down to business it’s amusing, but Woody Allen wastes a lot of screen time telling Diane Keaton she’s crazy for suspecting their neighbor has killed his wife.

7. Naming names.

The screenwriter knows the characters’ names.  So does the director, and the actors.  The audience doesn’t.  All too often, characters will talk about “Bill” or “Emily” or “Jimarcus,” and the people watching the movie have to guess who’s being referred to.   (Sometimes, owing to cuts in the editing room, the character’s name has never been spoken.)

Same goes for dates and times.  We’ll be informed that something happened “a month ago” or “last week” or “this morning,” and our own sense of how much time has elapsed is totally different.  Movies create their own sense of time, and screenwriters get specific at their peril, often cramming several scenes into one “longest day,” when they could easily have been spaced over a week or more.

8. Auteur, auteur?

Screenwriters often complain that directors get credit for things that are spelled out in the script. In the old Z Channel magazine, F.X. Feeney described a sequence in “The Sender” as “one of the most bizarre scenes in movie history,” and gave sole credit to the director.  When I told him the director had pretty much shot what I’d written, he apologized—but with a shrug.  There’s nothing to be done about this.

9. Scenus interruptus.

Quentin Tarantino got started writing scenes for himself to act in acting class, and in addition to his other gifts, he’s a born playwright.  His long scenes—the bar scene in “Inglourious Basterds,” the dinner table scene in “Django Unchained”—are masterpieces of discursive tension, and a far better model for today’s screenwriters than the old-school laconic style perfected by Robert Towne.

And in too many movies and TV shows, the scene stops just as it’s getting underway, leaving the viewer to wonder, “What did she say to that?”  “Downton Abbey” was a typical offender—to keep a bunch of stories going, it tended to skimp on each scene.

10. “The gloom of the first draft.”

When I was starting out, as a novelist, I used to have a good day followed by a bad day, and fell into the trap of thinking that if only I could solve some writing problem that was plaguing me, my anxiety, depression, or bad temper would evaporate at least for a while.  Maybe it was all those years of psychoanalysis, but I no longer funnel my neuroses through my writing; now writing is my heroin, and I’m easier to live with.  I used to console myself with the knowledge that Norman Mailer suffered gloom in the early stages of a project–“Il faut souffrir,” Fritz Lang tells Michel Piccoli in “Contempt”—but I’m relieved to say I no longer suffer.  When inspiration fails, I go on to the next, the way you were told to leave a tricky SAT question and go back to it later.  Or check my email.  Writing, like acting, ought to be enjoyable.  And not a substitute for figuring out what’s really bothering you.

“None of the editors I deal with would like this book.”

Before Lynn Nesbit became one of the most powerful literary agents in N.Y., with clients like Nora Ephron, Toni Morrison, Oliver Sacks, Tom Wolfe, and Joan Didion, she was my agent.  She represented my first hardcover novel, “Counterparts”—and then flatly refused to represent my sophomore effort.  She may have been right (eventually I shelved the manuscript), but at the time I was puzzled.  Why not send the book to editors you haven’t dealt with?

“See how you like it out there.”

Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Jodie Foster, Ridley Scott, Tony Scott—before he turned producer, Harry Ufland had the most impressive client list in Hollywood.  Without Harry’s input, his aggressiveness, and his clients (Keitel in the early stages, Jodie Foster later on), “Carny,” the first non-cartoon feature I wrote, would never have gotten made.  Harry hooked me up with his other clients—Elio Petri, Marty Brest, Cher—something few other agents do, and sent me on interesting meetings, including an audition to rewrite Norman Mailer’s 250-page script for “Once Upon a Time in America.”  But I was low on his totem pole, and eventually he handed me over to one of his under-agents.  I took it amiss, and demanded that Harry be my principal agent, or I was leaving.  The ultimatum fell on deaf ears, Harry got pissed off (he had a legendary temper), and I was on to the next.

“I don’t know how to sell you.”

The next turned out to be William Morris, which was the only agency I’d ever heard of before I got into the business.  I was proud to be a client, happy to be represented by Marty Bauer—who promptly left William Morris to co-found a new agency.  I was one of the clients who went with him.  We hung out, we played poker, we were friends.  Marty’s methods were unorthodox—he liked telling producers how cold his clients were.  One day, at a party, he told me he didn’t know what category to put me in.  “I tell them you wrote humor pieces for the New Yorker.”  I’d never done any such thing.  “You’re thinking of Marshall Brickman,” I said.  Never one for details, Marty had confused me with a former client, Marshall Brickman, a close friend and collaborator (we’d created the story for “Simon,” and later the script for “The Manhattan Project”), who had actually written humor pieces for the New Yorker and whom Marty was hoping to re-sign.    Soon after, I left the agency Marty had co-created—UTA, which became one of the powerhouse agencies in Hollywood.

“I thought you wanted to be a director.”

Melinda Jason gave off sparks.  She was famous for her energy, her enthusiasm, and her hyperbole.  “You’re my Luis Bunuel,” she told me.  I’d directed an episode of “The Hitchhiker” I’d written, and gotten Ace nominations (the pre-Emmy version of cable awards) for both writing and directing—but any resemblance to the genius Spanish director was purely rhetorical.  Melinda got me a deal to write and direct a TV movie for Fox that never panned out, and I attached myself to a couple of other scripts I’d written, but balked at the episodic TV I was offered.  (Any authority I felt on the “Hitchhiker” set flowed from the fact that I’d written the script.)  When I left Melinda for the Artists Agency, she accused me of not following her plans for me.  And I did more or less give up the idea of directing.  So maybe Melinda was right, or maybe we were both right.  I had trouble giving orders to the cleaning lady.

“Pick one thing you’re good at, and keep doing it.”

By and by I was back at William Morris, but now with a manager as well—Todd Smith, a former CAA agent who’d represented the likes of Jimmy Woods, Sean Penn, Madonna, and Sam Kinison.  Todd was a man who’d go to any lengths for his clients, and, unlike the agents I’d been with, got me a lot of meetings with actors.  Nothing really came of these meetings (not Todd’s fault), and we didn’t see eye to eye on the spec material I gave him.  He had a philosophy about the business I didn’t share—don’t spread yourself too thin.  But we were friends, and we parted friends.

“The phone isn’t ringing.”

I had three feature credits in the 80s, and a number of movie assignments, but in the 80s, the 90s, and the early aughts, TV movies were my bread and butter.  Then cheaper-to-produce Reality TV came along, and the networks stopped churning out TV movies.  Shortly before leaving the business herself, Carey Nelson Burch called me into her office and told me William Morris was “rethinking my representation.”  I was anything but surprised.  The writing was already on the wall.

“I greet you at the beginning of a great career.”

Geoff Sanford, a gentleman and a scholar, was my agent in the early 80s.  We broke up shortly after he caught me having an exploratory meeting at CAA; he was there that very day to discuss sharing talent with the larger agency.  His dad, Jay Sanford, as much a gentleman as his son, had represented me ten years earlier (which made me feel old at the age of 40).

When Lynn Nesbit refused to agent my second novel, she passed me along to Jay Sanford.  On my first novel I was Tom Baum.  Jay insisted Thomas Baum was more distinguished, and that’s who I was for the next thirty years.  (Now that I’m back to Tom, I realize I should have stuck with it—not that it made much difference one way or the other.)  And it was Jay Sanford who, the first time I walked into his office, welcomed me with “I greet you…”

A “great” career, maybe not, , thanks in no small measure to the agents I’ve mentioned, as well as those I haven’t, a varied one.  I’ve written, and been paid to write, marginalia, ad copy, jacket copy, speeches, filmstrips, newsletters, novels, children’s books, YAs, short stories, After School Specials, arts specials, movies, movie trailers, underground movies, TV movies, TV pilots, TV episodes, TV promos, and now plays; plus articles, acrostic puzzles, blog posts, and sample tests for social workers preparing to get their license.  Richard Rothstein, show runner on “The Hitchhiker,” when asked if he’d ever take an ordinary TV staff job, replied, “I’d rather take my life.” Find one thing and stick to it?  For better or worse, I’ve always been with Rothstein.

Some notes on projects I’ve gotten over the years: The good, the bad, and the ugly.   

Good.   In the late 60s, E.L. Doctorow, then an editor at Dial Press, gave me a $1000 advance to write a novel on any subject I chose.  He’d read an earlier, unpublished novel of mine and thought I might be able to write something publishable.  I scribbled furiously for several months, making up the story as I went along, and handed the manuscript in to the designated editor, the late Joyce Engelson.  Her note:  “Start over with a fresh stack of paper.”  I went into a minor depression, wrote an outline, followed it closely, and the novel, “Counterparts,” was published in 1970.

Good.   In the mid 70s, Harper & Row gave me an advance to write a young-adult novel on an idea I’d brought them:  New York’s American Museum of Natural History (which I lived across from as a toddler) comes to life, and a kid in his teens (who lives across the street) spends a night there, trying to figure out who stole the moon rock that went on display the day before.  When I handed in the first draft of “It Looks Alive to Me!”, my editors said, “Your story doesn’t have a villain.”  No third act.  So I added a character:  Charles Darwin.  He’s supposed to be helping the kid solve the mystery, but it turns out he’s the one who stole the moon rock, because its magical powers are making hash of his theory of evolution.  Why I ever thought the novel worked without a villain is another mystery.

Good.  In the mid-90s, NBC hired me to write a TV movie based on an HBO documentary about “Barb,” a young woman with multiple personality who was struggling to be a proper mother to her two children.  I went to Seattle and met several of Barb’s self-described 52 personalities, as well as her therapist, who specialized in treating Dissociative Identity Disorder.  I was intrigued by their relationship, and handed in an outline that focused on her therapy.  “I’m not doing a movie about a shrink,” said Lisa Demberg, the NBC exec.  There is always one character too many, and in this case it was the therapist.  The movie, “Shattered Mind,” got made, starring Heather Locklear, who was the main reason it finished in the top ten the week it was aired.   (“None of her personalities could act,” one critic complained, which was as wrong as it was unkind—I thought she was pretty good in it.)  And I salvaged the shrink for a novel, “Out of Body,” based in part on what I’d learned from my friendship with Barb and her therapist.

Bad.   Well, insulting anyway.  I wrote several short stories for Playboy in the 70s.  The fiction editor, Steven Aronson, called me on the phone after I submitted the first one.  “You’re not very good at endings, are you?”  The ending required only a slight adjustment, but he had his shot at me.

Bad.  Or just unnecessary.  In the mid 80s I wrote a script for a CBS movie, “Secret Weapons,” about  a Russian girl recruited to be a sex spy.  The producers were worried that the network would think that the descriptions were too dry.  “Put in the adverbs,” they told me.  (“She looks at him longingly.”  “He reacts angrily.”)  The movie got made, not, I’m sure, as a result of the adverbial pass I did.  More likely it was because Linda Hamilton agreed to star.

Bad.  Not in the sense of being wrong, in the sense of passive-aggressive.  When I handed in the first draft of “Carny,” Robbie Robertson, the producer, said not a word to my face.  But on the back of the script he scribbled one sentence:  “Van Cliburn plays the blues.”  I knew what he meant.  In some of the dialogue I was “reaching”—a term I learned from my first editor, when I was a copywriter in the NBC advertising department.

Ugly.   In the early 90s, Wes Craven and I co-created an NBC series, “Nightmare Café.”  Neither of us had any series experience, so NBC assigned us a show runner.  “Nightmare Café” was a weird paranormal thriller, and this guy was from the Michael Mann school of sentimental macho.  I foresaw trouble, but nobody much listened.  The first script I wrote for the series, he gave me a note on the very first page:  “Don’t like the name ‘Iris.’  Please furnish five alternatives.”  Seriously?  I felt like bailing.  But I stuck it out, because my deal said I could direct the seventh episode.  The series was canceled after six.  By this time, much of the staff had turned against the show runner.  I may have been the only one to talk to him at the wrap party.

Ugly.  In the late 70s, Aaron Stern, a psychiatrist, was tapped to run the ratings board and also given a chance to develop three movies at Columbia (then run by his friend David Begelman), thereby earning himself the title, “The Psychoanalyst with the Three Picture Deal.”  On the strength of my novel “Counterparts” (rather than any script I’d written), I was one of the three writers hired to work with Stern and his director friend Irv Kershner, at that point down on his luck (before George Lucas gave him “The Empire Strikes Back”).  Stern and his wife were very kind to me and and my wife when we moved to L.A. (they welcomed us with a set of glassware), but the meetings on the story, which centered on voodoo, went on forever.  Not for nothing was Kersh known as “The Rabbi without a Cause,” someone who, in the common phrase, could turn a go picture into a development deal.   “Please,” I remember asking him, “no more first principles.”  Eventually Kersh backed off, and I wrote a script.  Stern not only inundated me with notes, he ended up dictating the entire second draft.  The movie was never made, ditto the other two projects in Stern’s deal.  Stern eventually resumed his practice in New York and published a book, “The Narcissistic American,” possibly inspired by his experience in Hollywood, or exhaustive self-analysis.

I’ve sold three projects off of pitches.  One, “The Sender,” actually made it to the screen.  A second pitch, “Louie Louie,” about a guy who duplicates himself using a 3-D printer he’s invented, got bought for the movies and eventually died as an ABC pilot.  A TV pilot pitch, “Area 51,” also went to script, but was never shot.

Though I had some success with pitching, I basically hated the whole process.

I remember driving to NBC with Faye Dunaway to pitch an idea we’d worked out together.  In the car she asked me to rehearse the pitch.  I couldn’t do it.  It was bad enough to have to do it in the room.

Nobody really likes to hear someone tell a story, unless (even if?) the speaker’s a born raconteur, So how did this dread ritual get so out of hand?

In the silent era, directors worked from ideas scribbled on the backs of envelopes.  Actors made up stories as they went along.  “The Birth of a Nation” had no shooting script.  Freelancers submitted “scenarios” through the mail, got paid $15 a pop, and staff writers took it from there.

Even when writers flocked to Hollywood—the Hechts, the Wodehouses, the Algonquin crowd—they were little seen and rarely heard.  Some did nothing, some worked their asses off, but basically nobody was pitching anything except for the homeless guys buttonholing Irving Thalberg in the MGM parking lot (“Irving, I’ve got a great idea for a movie”).  Darryl Zanuck never bought a pitch in his life.

By 1950 things were starting to change. “You’ve got five minutes,” Fred Clark says to William Holden in “Sunset Boulevard.”  “What’s your story about?”  But the hour-long pitch meeting was still a gleam in some unborn junior exec’s eye.

The first young execs came into the business in the 60s, and Peter Bart, who was one of them, told me about  a guy who used to pitch tons of originals (so many he handed in the wrong scripts to the wrong studios).  Tony Bill, who became famous for hiring writers who’d never written a script before (Terry Malick, Paul Schrader, John Patrick Shanley), heard “The Sting” from David Ward as a pitch.  “And the ending will be a surprise,” Ward told him.  That couldn’t happen today.

Back in the 70s, Robert Altman could pop in at the studio, say he wanted to do a movie about country music, and get a go-ahead in the room.  At United Artists, specs, books, articles, and remakes were the rule in the 70s, pitching the exception.  And in the case of “Fist,” the pitch was a mere notion—Jimmy Hoffa as the Godfather.

“Jaws” changed everything.  More money poured into the movie business.  Multiplexes got built.  Conglomerates bought up studios, Ivy League MBAs invaded Hollywood.  Suddenly every studio had development reports that ran to 30-40 pages.  The Disney creative-exec staff expanded from three to 40, and spent a huge amount of time hearing pitches.  Writers went into studios with three or four ideas at a time.

But just as pitch-happiness expanded in the 80s, it began to fizzle thereafter.  Inflated movie budgets shrank development funds.  The junior execs are still there, but now they spend more time overseeing franchises than hearing pitches.

Dwindling or not, the pitch process is here to stay.  Hearing a pitch is easier than making a decision about a screenplay, and safer—a pitch is a Big Lie that postpones the Moment of Truth.  And what if the guy sells his pitch and you didn’t have him in?

So what’s to be done?  In the history of Hollywood, there have never been so many people complaining about the state of the movie business.  Maybe what everybody should do is get together and form a completely different movie business.  That, combined with a renewed commitment to the 15-minute guitar solo, might bring about a new age of enlightenment.  It doesn’t hurt to dream.