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  He’d read an earlier, unpublished novel of mine and thought I might be able to write something publishable.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.