But to my surprise (and relief), somebody finally made the decision for me. Samuel Goldwyn Jr. bought the rights to Nightlife, but demanded a rewrite to make it more commercial. He also demanded full-time writers, saying that if I stayed in school he would simply hire someone else to take over. What can I say -- the loss to the sculpture, illustration and animation worlds is the screenwriting world's loss, too. I jumped at the chance.

Calvin Yocum was the Head Reader for the Samuel Goldwyn Company. He was infamous for being the toughest reader in the business -- the man who panned Dr. Zhivago. He hated everything. But to the amazement of everyone at the Goldwyn Company, he loved our script. In fact, his coverage of our script was so positive that it got us our first spec sale. It was so gushing that Sam Goldwyn actually showed it to us one day after drinks at the Friars Club. I still have a copy. Here are Calvin's notes: COMMENTS: This script is absolutely hilarious, sort of a Rocky Horror Picture Show meets Blazing Saddles with a little Airplane! thrown in. No mere synopsis can convey the goldmine of humor. Besides the story itself, there are dozens of sightgags thrown in to keep things jumping. Literally, there is never a dull moment. It's no-holds-barred comedy that pushes the boundaries of good taste at all times, but it is exactly that kind of demonic energy that makes it all so inspired. The writers create a Fellini-esque vision of Hollywood that reeks not only of comic atmosphere but somehow captures and hyperbolizes our worst fears about the sleazy parts of town. It is a vision that balances precariously and triumphantly on a razor blade. It is funny, but with a few minor changes, it could be visually and intellectually serious enough to rival Satiricon or Coppola's Rumblefish. The high school takes all of the not so latent fears of our own experience -- especially the fear of ostracism -- and hyperbolizes them and satirizes them wildly. There are a half-dozen other bits like the disco gypsies and the Redemption Center that score too. In the right hands, this script has enormous commercial potential. Certainly it is 180 degrees from the serious and wholesome intentions of The Golden Seal, and it may not be the type of project that interests the Goldwyn company. Nonetheless, in its genre, Nightlife is superb. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

We were given an office two doors down from Sam Goldwyn Jr. himself (overlooking the Beverly Hills Country Club, with a view of the Hollywood sign in the hills behind it), and a hotel room at the fabulous Tropicana Hotel, just outside of Beverly Hills for the course of the rewrite. Other than having to listen to Joan Jett and Billy Idol trash their rooms next door every night, it was a dream come true.

Two months later, the young geniuses turned in their first big-time Hollywood movie rewrite. Unfortunately, Calvin Yocum's story notes had gone to our heads (after all, we were young Fellinis, damnit). Eschewing commercial concerns, we turned a light teen comedy about sex and vampires into a dark allegory for herpes, the dreaded scourge of humanity. (Ah, the good old days -- now people are relieved when they find out they only have herpes.) We decided that the look of our teen sex film was to be inspired by the dark, brooding artwork of Edvard Munch. I wish I was joking about this, but I'm not. (Side note: There is still a portrait of Lauren Hutton in the finished film based on a Munch painting that is actually titled "Vampire.")

... Whereupon in a complete lapse of logic, Dave decided this was the perfect time to get married and go off on a Disneyland honeymoon (apparently he preferred Fantasyland to reality). Meanwhile I sat through a story conference with the producers and Goldwyn execs. Actually I just got yelled at for two hours. The Unnamed Producer didn't even yell -- he just shook his head and dropped the screenplay on the floor like so much trash. (Can't say he was wrong, but still -- I'm a dopey 20-year-old trapped in a room with a bunch of angry film execs who want to end my career, dude -- I'm aware that I suck!)

Our tiny paychecks were canceled before they could clear at the bank, and we lived on nothing for the next three months until a suitable rewrite was turned in.

Over the next two years we went through four or five more rewrites -- amassing a grand total of about ten grand, combined. (Mom and Pop must have been so proud of their non-college graduate.)

Anyway, after a year of similar episodes the script was finally approved. We were broke, we were still agent-less and unknown, but we were going to get a real MOVIE made! Unfortunately, all of our allotted pay had been used up in financing the rewrites, so we were broke. There was only the satisfaction of having written a sex comedy about a 17-year-old virgin getting bitten in the thigh during oral sex from a female vampire, for an intended audience of 13-year-olds without parental supervision. I was quite proud. Generously, the Unnamed Producer gave us each a $6000 bonus on the first day of shooting from the remaining 30 grand he'd swiped. I imediately blew it all on a car -- a Dodge Daytona Turbo.

CUT TO:

A year later: The film, now titled Once Bitten -- and now heavily rewritten by the director and his own writer -- opened in theaters to embarrassingly negative reviews. Originally our script portrayed Hollywood as a seedy, scary place, with homeless people and Goth weirdos, where a vampire could blend in and never be noticed (the film still uses that explanation in a bookshop scene, but now it doesn't make any sense). The director, a TV veteran who had helmed episodes of Taxi and Mork & Mindy, got rid of the "Fellini-esque" elements in the script. He replaced the opening sequence in the seedy downtown Hollywood area with a splashy music video in Beverly Hills, and replaced my favorite carnival scene (Carrey's character is stalked by the vampire through the House of Mirrors in a run-dow amusement park -- where she can see him but he can't see her) with a single mirror in a changing booth at a trendy shopping mall clothing store.

The filmmakers, being wealthy middle-aged men, couldn't remember far back enough to explore how frightening it was to lose your virginity, and never ventured into the part of Hollywood that we described. They filmed their Hollywood -- or at least replaced our cliche with their own -- transforming it into a glamorous hotspot with bright lights, fancy cars, fast women and slow-witted teenagers -- like Beverly Hills -- and deal with the issues that THEY found threatening: Aging, gay butlers, supermodels walking lions, and teenagers breaking into spontaneous breakdancing routines on Rodeo Drive. This may be the LEAST scary-looking vampire film ever made. Nightmare sequences of vampires (stills from one deleted scene are posted here) were cut in favor of "modernized" versions with no comic ideas or punchlines. "Anemic" was the favored critical insight (I will say unhesitatingly that the three or four genuine laughs left in the film are from Dave and I).

The film starred Lauren Hutton and, in his first major (?) screen role, a young Jim Carrey. (You can see how the makeup department really went to town on this film: To transform Carrey into a vampire they... slicked his hair back!) The film debuted in the number one slot on the charts in Variety. Everybody called and congratulated me, telling me how proud they were. I was proud, too: I was at least partially responsible for a multi-million dollar endeavor, and millions of people were seeing my work. And I pondered that amazing fact every day of that opening week as I drove past the theater marquee.....

..... on my way to work at Sam Goody, earning minimum wage as a clerk in the video section -- feeling like the biggest friggin' loser on the face of the planet. (The drawing at right is from my sketchbook at that time.)

If that wasn't humiliating enough, the film came out on video six months later and my co-workers had to point me out every time the movie was rented by a customer ("See that guy vacuuming the carpet over there? He wrote it!!!"). Worse yet, if I concealed my identity then I had to listen to the customers' rotten reviews of the film when they brought it back (one unknowingly offered, "Whoever wrote this shouldn't be working in Hollwood").

When that became too embarrassing, I started delivering The Los Angeles Times -- tossing 300 papers every night in my brand new Dodge Daytona Turbo.

On the bright side, I've now made more money in residual checks from that film than I ever earned writing it (the Unnamed Producer did give us a point and a half of his royalties), and I have an agent now who once got me twenty times the amount I was paid on Once Bitten for a script that was never even filmed (you tell me that Hollywood isn't screwed up). Ironically, it was a project about a half-man/half-cartoon, but was finally canceled because a rival film had beaten us to the punch -- called The Mask... and starring JIM CARREY!

To really be honest, I've actually begun to enjoy telling this pathetic story -- I can always trot it out for sympathy if the girls aren't impressed with the writer/artist bit.

I also later learned that Jim Carrey had a much worse time on the film than I did: Terrible family trouble, career trouble, romantic trouble -- I just hope the poor bastard came out of it all right.

UPDATES: My writing partner has reminded me of a few more anecdotes that don't really fit into the above story:

ANECDOTE #1: I had originally campaigned for a different actor to star in the film. At the time, this actor was featured in a little-watched TV show getting killed in the ratings by Magnum P.I. The show was Family Ties and the actor was Michael J. Fox. I sent Sam Goldwyn Jr. a videotape of Fox, but Sam felt he would never carry a big screen film (Back to the Future opened about two months before our film and grossed $200 million, and the film Fox did instead of ours, Teen Wolf, grossed about $50 million more than our film).

On the bright side, they cast Carrey, an unknown comic, in Fox's place. At the time, the director wanted Carrey to co-star with Morgan Fairchild. I went ballistic, because Morgan Fairchild is about 4 feet tall, and could never convincingly menace Carrey -- about six feet, fourteen inches -- onscreen. Eventually they cast Lauren Hutton in her place.

My gripes about the snubbing of Michael J. Fox aside, when I finally visited the set it took just one scene for me to be totally blown away by Carrey. While much of the comedy in our screenplay had been removed or compromised (the director had even cut jokes to "give the audience more time to laugh" at the previous jokes), Carrey didn't need good writing -- the character was still there, intact, still funny without the punchlines. Carrey was the punchline. Afterwards, we were introduced and talked for half an hour about nothing in particular. Then as Dave and I were leaving, I spotted him near the catering truck. Still bitter about the director's script changes, I told him, "They butchered our script, this movie is going to suck, and you're the only good thing left in it." (Just what an actor wants to hear in the middle of a shoot -- that the film sucks. Hey, I wasn't smart, but you can't say I was wrong, either...)

ANECDOTE #2: The time during a story conference in a restaurant when one of the producers, wanting to keep a gag concerning a Black & Decker vibrator with a pull-cord, actually got down on his knees and loudly begged a studio executive to, quote, "put the vibrator back in."

ANECDOTE #3: The time I came close to physically assaulting Samuel Goldwyn Jr. after a preview screening when he removed a gag in a church confessional. The original gag had Carrey in a confessional, unknowingly admitting his sins to a homeless man. He asks, "What should I do?" The drunk answers from the next compartment, "Pass me the toilet paper -- I'm all out on this side." (It was actually my dad's joke, and he was at the preview waiting to hear his big contribution. So when a new line popped up instead it really pissed me off.) Goldwyn changed the gag to the bum just saying "You're in deep shit," or something, and claimed he had to do it, or the film would be condemned by the Catholic Church. (It was condemned, anyway -- it was a film about an atheist vampire deflowering high school kids, for Christ's sake)... Anyway, you can still hear the bum grunting as he takes a dump while Carrey talks -- and a variation of the gag was finally seen a couple of years ago in the Beavis and Butt-Head movie. Big laugh, by the way, Sam.