August 1st, 1985
Stumbling Upon Memories
I'll have the monthly(ish) Story and Pictures in another week or so, with all the usual Open Tabs, essays, and Photographs. But for today, which is also the date MTV premiered (1981), I share this stumbled upon recollection.
Onward.
I don’t have the note or script anymore. They burned in the Tubbs fire with everything else.
I posted some of these pictures and the commentary (below) to Facebook on October 1, 2017, just eight days before nature deleted the original script and author William Kotzwinkle’s note.
I’m putting it up today because in coming across the photos, I noticed the copyright date on the script's cover page is August 1st. I don’t remember the specific reason I first posted this to Facebook in October of 2017; it could've been that I had only recently rediscovered the note, placed in such a secure place that I couldn't find it for decades.
Some of what follows is from that original post but augmented considerably:
I've only had three writing collaborators in my writing life – Mick Anger was the first. In 1985, as I was just beginning to write corporate video scripts and learning the craft of screenwriting, Mick and I collaborated on adapting a short story collection to create a (then) new kind of TV production, a concept where a different cast every week presented adaptations of short stories.
Mick had been an artist/designer all his life but came to California as a roadie with The Tubes. For y’all who either haven’t heard of the band, haven’t heard the band, or never had the chance to see them live, they were a great band with an over-the-top, overly tall, and overly boundary pushing lead singer, Fee Waybill. Their best selling album was The Completion Backwards Principle (the tour which I first worked for them), with its songs Don’t Want to Wait Anymore and Talk to Ya Later (co-written by David Foster and Steve Lukather). Al Kooper produced their first album in 1975, which included the song for which they first received notice and became a great live performance piece for them, White Punks On Dope (WPOD). Prairie Prince, the Tubes’ drummer, came thisclose to being Journey’s drummer, but decided to stay with the Tubes. He and Tubes’ keyboardist Michael Cotton have for decades also collaborated on design, graphics, and animation projects.
Mick was part of the Journey family when I came in, but at the time not consistently working for them. We first met backstage at one of Bill Graham’s Day On the Green concerts. He was in the common area of band trailers and offices, selling his latest design project, The Acme Scientific Seed Separator, a one-inch high cardboard rectangle of a box with a lid (with reinforced “rhino corners”). It came with ‘instructions’ and an Acme playing card used to separate marijuana seeds and stems. No, really. It was fun art, yet practical. I can attest that over the years, several Acme Boxes became the property of some law enforcement agencies across the country. We all had them (note that Journey’s original management name was Weed High Nightmare, shortened later to Nightmare…nuff said).
In the late ‘70s Mick became one of the two original video directors for Journey’s separate production company, Nocturne (the he-never-seems-to-age Paul Becher being the other director, who’s still on the road occasionally with some musician named Paul McCartney), and went on to direct concert videos for many of the world’s most popular recording artists. It’s during that time and into the ‘80s that we became close friends and I worked camera on his shows. Stories like these, especially during those times and in the music industry, often contain a degree of “but then things changed…” and that happened with Mick and our common boss at the time. There was a falling out, Mick was gone, I was still in, and that caused me some trouble too. Word got back to our boss that I was developing a project with Mick, and that didn’t sit well with the boss. It wasn’t a secret, but even in our earliest days we knew talking about things still in development served no great purpose. Regardless, come mid-’85, I was unwilling to “choose a side,” and so I was out too.
We called it ACME Theatre. Mick had a copy of The Fan Man by William Kotzwinkle, a crazy, sometimes hilarious and surreal story that Mick loved, and we talked about what a nutty film it could be. After becoming part of the Journey family in ’76, I had (finally) moved to the Bay Area in ’81 and one of the first neighbors I developed a friendship with was a screenwriter. I shared that I’d dropped out of art/film school to go on the road with the band years before, had a screenplay idea that I’d outlined…and outlined, and he encouraged me to bear down and write.
By the time Mick brought me The Fan Man I was already well into torturing myself, I mean writing my earliest stuff. In a prototypical example of "don't know what the hell I'm doing but going to do it anyway..." I got a referral to an L.A. attorney and he inquired as to The Fan Man film rights, only to find that Kotzwinkle had given them, gratis, to a friend from college (the friend owned a company known for some of the funniest national radio commercials at the time; he also was never able to get the film version of the book produced). Undaunted, Mick had another Kotzwinkle book he loved, a story collection called Elephant Bangs Train. I did successfully option four stories from the collection and subsequently we put the first adaptation together.
Kotzwinkle may not be a generally ‘well known’ author, but he is one of the most respected and enjoyed authors of our time. His novelization of E.T. is still one of the few book-based-on-film novels to become a best seller in its own right. Much later in his career he had a New York Times bestseller with Walter the Farting Dog, the first of an illustrated children’s book series.
Mick and I worked our ass off even though we were babes in the scriptwriting woods. At Kotzwinkle’s request through his agent to my L.A. attorney, I had called him at his northeast home to talk about our project idea — I think that was the stated reason — but I also think he just wanted to get a feel for the guys working with his stories.
A requirement of the option was that we let him review the adaptations, so we sent off the first script while the typewriter was still warm, A Most Incredible Meal, a melancholy piece involving a hunter, a wooly mammoth, and flowers. We started on the next. I don’t remember when I received Kotzwinkle's mailed response, I think it was within a couple of weeks.
The picts show the script’s cover page (with a small sticker from my first agent’s office) and Kotzwinkle’s note. While I never could get the project produced (the concept was way ahead of its time, even though it had been done a few times, sometimes live, during television’s embryonic years; the newbie thing; a lack of enough money; and not being in L.A.), that note from an established, respected author indicates, at least to me, that Mick and I had it as a writing team, at least for that moment.
As to my other esteemed, cool collaborators, author-producer-screenwriter Lorraine Evanoff and I co-wrote a script for an upcoming project, while longtime friend and author Mark Osmun and I worked together on projects and tossed around more than a couple good story outlines.
Writing collaborations are a special kinda thing; for me, they need to naturally come together. For some writers it’s a workman-like partnership. For others, it’s more about the personal relationship. The experiences and work in my early days were foundational, important, and fun. That I had been part of the music and concert industries, and exposed to how creativity at the highest levels morphed into success, or didn’t, was invaluable.
I've never known anyone with Mick's creative perspective and design ethos. I will always love him and his wife Linda; The man had a very special place in my life. He's been gone awhile, having left this blue marble suddenly and way too soon, and I miss him to this moment.
MWH