> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# No biz like showbiz
- URL: https://www.smdp.com/no-biz-like-showbiz/
- Published: 2008-04-18T15:00:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-24T19:19:03.000Z
- Author: Jack Neworth
- Tags: Opinion, Santa Monica, #archive-import, Homeless

FOLLOWING MY RECENT COLUMN about procrastination, I received a number of e-mails. Readers, who previously disagreed with me on Bush, the war, global warming and the death penalty, found sim-patico about procrastination. There’s a lesson there. Now if I could only get around to writing about it.

Some asked how I got started writing screenplays, and could I share marketing tips. While I’ve had four scripts bought or optioned, none were ever made, so I regret there’s not much to share.

As for how I got started, in the ‘70s, I was, for lack of a better term, a hippie. I lived in the mountains, drove a garbage truck for the Forest Service and wrote for the town paper. A Hollywood agent read a column about my mother who, from my birth, had wanted me to be a lawyer. Exclaiming I “could be the next J.D. Salinger” the agent insisted I write it into a screenplay. Salinger drove a garbage truck?

In six months I finished “An Eight Pound, Six Ounce Lawyer.” To my dismay, the agent answered his door in a bathrobe he hadn’t been out of for a month. Chronically depressed, he basically threw me out. Even with that, I was hooked on screenwriting. Good-bye Forest Service hello Babylon.

My first paid job was pure luck, or pure bad luck. A producer wanted a script for his girlfriend, Kelly, a former Playmate of the Year and I was to weave details of her life into a script. But essentially all Kelly had done was let her blond hair grow to below her butt, and take off her clothes (Not that I have anything against either one).

When I suggested Kelly’s character might need to be more sympathetic, the producer angrily opened her nude centerfold, “That’s all the sympathy we need.” During story conferences he would putt golf balls on the carpet into a machine that spit them back. (I once pitched a script to a studio executive who began misting her plants. At that point I just hoped she validated parking). I sensed trouble when Kelly and the producer began coming out of separate bedrooms. Surprise, surprise, the movie was never made.

The following year I got a rewrite job from a famous (if over-the-hill) director. He didn’t putt golf balls or mist plants, he drank. When I asked how much of the original script he wanted to save, he ripped out the first page and threw the rest in the trash. Larger than life (a la John Huston), he said that, in 50 years of making movies, my sample script was the funniest he’d ever read. Before I could bask in any glow, he quickly added, “but there’s not a chance in hell anyone’s every going to make it.”

His was a comedy set in the ‘50s about a group of hapless Mafiosi who get deported back to Italy. Following the director’s stern warning not to “get silly,” I wrote a script reminiscent of “Zorba the Greek.” It too wound up in his trash can.

After months all he could say was, “I’ll know it when I see it.” Finally he gave me a cassette of the soundtrack. The featured song was “Shuddup A Yo Face.” The lyrics went, “What’s a matta you? Why you look-a so sad? It’s a nice a place. Ah, shuddup a ya face!” So much for Zorba. So I wrote “The Godfather” meets “Blazing Saddles,” was paid handsomely, and promptly fired I still have “Shuddup Yo Face.”

Another rewrite was for Warner Brothers and paid $50,000\. The pitch was going so well that part of me was at a Mercedes dealership leasing a convertible. The producer broke my reverie, “So, what other movies have you had made?” Back at the dealership, I handed in the keys.

I hit bottom when MGM passed on a script it seemed certain they were going to buy. Even a jog on the beach couldn’t shake my mood. In the distance, I saw a man crawling in the sand like a Marine. It irritated me until I saw he was missing a leg. He finally labored his way into the ocean and floated contentedly, happy to be alive. Somehow I forgot about MGM.

A few years ago I saw him again. He explained, somewhat incoherently, that he’d lost his leg in Vietnam and was homeless. In a bizarre touch, he lived on the Hollywood Walk of Fame near his hero, Humphrey Bogart, whose star he cleaned with a toothbrush.

I’ve thought of him often. I haven’t written about it until now, but because of procrastination. I couldn’t bear describing him while some studio exec misted her plants. I’d rather picture him in the ocean, floating contentedly, happy to be alive.

*Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on April 18, 2008.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/041808.pdf?ref=smdp.com)