all the jokes before I moved out here. But still, you think Hollywood will be different for you. You say to yourself, Sure it's a jungle, but I'm Dr. Livingstone.
I graduated from Columbia with a degree in English lit and went to work for a newspaper in Bergen County, just across the river from Manhattan, keeping my cheap apartment on West 111th Street, where I lived with my girlfriend. My thesis was a poststructuralist analysis of film adaptations of major American novels, and within a year I'd wangled the job of movie reviewer and entertainment reporter. I love the movies, always have. The idea of being a screenwriter came to me during a group interview with a writer-director who was in Manhattan flacking for his new picture. It wasn't the fact that he didn't seem particularly bright, or that he made his ascent sound so haphazard and effortless, but something more visceral—the way he looked sitting there smoking a cigarette with the light coming through the window of the fortieth-floor corporate tower. I could see the pores in his skin and the stubble of his beard, and there was something green stuck between two of his teeth. And I suddenly thought, That could be me sitting there with two days' growth and a green thing on my teeth.
I didn't quit my job that day or anything, but I did start writing screenplays, renting films I loved and studying their structure, thinking about what they had in common. I was abetted in this by my aunt Alexis, who once had been a contract player at Paramount. She'd been in a couple of Westerns with John Wayne and was briefly married to a director. After the divorce she moved to New York; the director had made her quit the movies, she said, and it was too late to go back, but she still talked as if she were a member of a warm extended family called “the business.” She claimed as friends some relatively famous folks, and she read Variety and the Hollywood Reporter faithfully. I knew from our actual family that she'd been somewhat badly used out there, but she wasn't bitter. Now she gave acting lessons and occasionally did community theater. When I moved to New York, she more or less adopted me. My parents were divorced, receding into the orange sunsets of Arizona and Florida, respectively.
Alexis lived in faded elegance in a grand prewar building over near Sutton Place, a duplex she'd occupied for years, the first couple with her third husband, and which she couldn't have afforded if not for rent control. Even with a severely depressed rent, she'd had to sublet the more luxurious lower floor, which was separated by two doors from her own quarters upstairs. The centerpiece of the downstairs apartment was a spectacular canopy bed replete with rose-colored chintz drapery. Alexis herself slept in the upstairs parlor on a pullout sofa. The lower floor was occupied by the manager of a rock group, who was burning holes in all the upholstery. Alexis knew because she sneaked down and snooped around whenever he wasn't home.
Alexis encouraged my screenwriting ambitions and read my earliest attempts. She also provided the only good advice I've ever gotten on the subject. “Dalton Trumbo once told me the secret of a screenplay,” she said, mixing herself a Negroni in the closet that served her as kitchen, pantry and bar. At six in the evening the dying light was slicing through the mullioned windows at a forty-five-degree angle—that second-to-last light thick and yellow with doomed bravado—and making the dust swimming through the apartment seem like movie mist. “He was a lovely man, much misunderstood. That McCarthy stuff—terrible. But as I was starting to say, Dalton said to me one night—I think we were at the Selznicks'—and I said,‘Dalton, what's your secret?’ and he whispered something in my ear, which I won't repeat. I gave him a little slap on the wrist, not that I really minded. I was flattered and told him so, but I was still married to the fag—before I found out, of course. So I said to Dalton,‘No, no, what's the secret of a great screenplay?’ And he said,‘It's very simple, Lex. Three acts: first act, get man up tree; second act, shake a stick at him; third act, get him down.’”
When she was really in her cups, Alexis told me she'd call Swifty Lazar or some other great friend of hers and fix me up, the exquisitely