This by all rights should be a short post, since the only Hollywood film I acted (as an extra) in was Jack the Bear, and my scene ended up on the cutting room floor. The three oldest kids were extras on the same set, and they too ended up cut from the final except for one fleeting frame where we can see Peter from the back, wearing an old shirt of mine, and throwing a piece of bread toward Danny DeVito, who was pretending to a seal. (Don't ask.)
First, (*) since there are no truly original ideas left, I like to pay my intellectual debts whenever I consciously lift something from another writer or artist. In the case of any post that begins "My life as..." I believe I am channeling Lincoln Steffens, whose autobiography is one of several hundred books that seem to have lodged themselves into my brain, feeding me phrases now and then. He titled his chapters in this way; which made enough of an impression on me that I'm copying him here...
Back to my movie career. I spent a lot of time behind the scenes in Hollywood as a writer -- 0ff and on for over a decade. I wrote pitches, story summaries, screenplays. Sometimes I got paid, sometimes not. Some stuff got produced, some not.
IMDB has got my career all wrong. As far as I know, I only scored one screen credit throughout those years, and that was for shared story credit on Rollover, an IPC Films/Warner Brothers release starring Jane Fonda and Kris Kristofferson, that came out in the early '80s.
Rollover (1981)
My old friend and writing partner, Howard Kohn, and I researched and wrote a pre-script document that was essentially a narrative story line, which was then turned into the movie by director Alan Pakula and screenwriter David Shaber.
The most vivid memories I have from that project were our working sessions with Jane Fonda and her producer Bruce Gilbert. We'd fly down to Jane's ranch at Santa Barbara or Bruce's house in Beverly Hills or to one of the studio lots for day-long brainstorming sessions.
These sessions were usually about three weeks apart, as Jane was acting in another movie at the time. Every time we got together, I found it remarkable that she was able to pick up exactly where we had left off, as if the previous meeting had been yesterday, not three weeks ago, and as if nothing else had happened to her in between our working sessions.
She had an impressive ability to concentrate. Part of the plot involved a character I'd developed based loosely on Walter Wriston, the then-powerful Chairman of Citicorp. We had decided we needed to develop a better idea of the psychology inside large corporations, and Jane or Bruce had somehow located a psychologist who catered to such clients; so this one night they invited him to have dinner with us.
As he was drinking his first glass of wine, I asked him who his biggest client was, and he said, much to our surprise, "Confidentially -- Citicorp." Jane became so excited I could see she was about to interrupt him and spill our beans. But I kicked her (hard) under the table, getting her attention just in time to cut her off, and we proceeded to find out what we needed to know for this part of our movie.
As I recount that incident, I realize it wouldn't make a bad scene for a movie in itself, perhaps one about Ms. Fonda's life.
Rollover was hardly a box office sensation, but I still get royalties every quarter, usually enough to buy, say, a basic burrito from the place around the corner...
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