Turning Right at Hollywood and Vine. Roger L. Simon

anyway. I don’t know if I was so sure, caught up as I was in very conventional bourgeois feelings of guilt about leaving my first wife and children—though almost all of that guilt was about the children. As for Warren, he, of course, never played Moses Wine. By that time, The Big Fix had already been a successful film starring Richard Dreyfuss.

      Considering all the ups and downs of the previous attempts to make a Moses Wine film, the production of Fix, as it was called on the set, came about relatively easily. I’d stayed in touch with Dreyfuss, who’d always wanted to do the character. By 1978 or so, his power in the business had reached the level of a “bankable” actor, someone with so much box office clout that he could pretty much pick his project, as long as it wasn’t a dramatization of the phone book. (With some “bankable” actors, like Beatty in those days, it could be the phone book: “So, Warren, are we talking the Yellow Pages or the White Pages?”) Richard and I got together with his buddy Carl Borack—a commercials producer who would take the lead in the production area—and formed the Moses Wine Company. We took the package to Universal, where Richard had made Jaws, through Verna Fields, the film’s editor, who had gone on to become a studio executive. Verna, everybody’s den mother, passed it on to Ned Tanen, the head of Universal.

      It was an easy sell, not only because of Richard but also because Ned identified with Moses Wine. I was at first astonished that a rich and powerful studio chief could identify with a hippie detective living in a working-class and Chicano barrio of LA. But it didn’t take me long to understand that I had created a kind of mirror for people’s counter lives. A studio head was in his soul a down-at-the-heels gumshoe out to buck the system and to save the poor and downtrodden. Never mind that he was experiencing these feelings in a multi-million-dollar ocean-view home in Pacific Palisades, a home adorned with museum-quality Navajo rugs. Ned was married at the time to Kitty Hawks, the daughter of director Howard Hawks and fashion icon Slim Keith (later Lady Keith)—not exactly the company Moses Wine traveled in.

      I didn’t realize it then, but I was witnessing one of the first cases I would see of the bifurcated Hollywood personality. In Ned Tanen’s case it was relatively benign, because he had a sense of irony about his position. In many other cases it was far less so.

      The studio left me alone with Dreyfuss for the writing of the film. In fact, I was treated remarkably well by them the entire time, contrary to the fables of Hollywood’s cruelty to writers. Part of this was that the star protected me, but it was also because I had written the book and they had heard of it. I wasn’t just a screenwriter. I was a novelist who might not even need them. (I learned to encourage the studio executives’ belief that I earned much more money from my books than I did; it made them insecure about their hold on me. It was a lie, of course. I badly needed the screenwriting money to support my family.)

      Even then, novelists in Hollywood were a diminishing number. Most of the writers were film school grads using their screenwriting as a wedge to get a directing assignment. This didn’t make for exceptional writing. It’s not by accident that the films from the Golden Era were better written—many of them by Broadway playwrights.

      More surprisingly, the studio didn’t interfere with the film politically, to the extent that the roll-up at the end shows Moses Wine marching off away from camera, his arms around his young children, jocularly teaching them to sing the “Internationale,” as if this were the way any All-American dad would behave. This was never mentioned in any of the reviews—most of which were favorable—nor did anyone at the studio ever speak of it to me or anyone else I know of. It was also never referred to in the numerous market research cards turned in by the audiences in two large preview screenings in San Jose and Denver. Perhaps no one recognized it—or, if they did, they didn’t want to say.

      The script was peppered with liberal-left one-liners, including references to the Russian anarchist Bakunin that couldn’t possibly have meant anything to 99.9 percent of the audience. Some of these were added immediately before shooting because Dreyfuss broke his wrist in an accident a month before the start date. We had the choice to shut down and wait until he healed or to write something that would cover his character being a private dick with his arm in a cast. We chose the latter, and I was able to turn this into a plus with some liberal wisecracks Moses makes whenever he’s asked about his fractured arm (“Bar fight with a Bircher”). The truth is revealed at the end: It was just a dopey accident from trying to learn to skateboard from his kids.

      Dreyfuss, Jeremy Kagan (the film’s director, brought on pretty late in the game), and I shared the film’s politics—in retrospect, a rather sentimental vision of the Sixties as seen from the late Seventies. One scene shows Dreyfuss looking at television clips of the old days—Chicago 1968—with tears of nostalgia in his eyes. This wasn’t particularly my kind of thing—and I resisted writing it—but it played well with the audience. Much of Hollywood politics is at root sentimental. It’s about feeling good about yourself without having to do much more than sound off—or make a “touching” scene in a movie. My heart (and writing) was even then more in black comic mockery of the Sixties, as in the scene when the Abbie Hoffman-Jerry Rubin character is revealed to have turned very comfortably into a bourgeois ad man while supposedly in hiding as a dangerous underground revolutionary.

      Richard, whose father was a socialist, and Jeremy, whose father was a rabbi, were more emotional about those days, although I undoubtedly participated in radical politics more directly than they did. One of the more effective scenes in The Big Fix movie, when Moses goes inside LA County jail to obtain information from the Linkers (Yiddish for “leftists”), a couple based on Bill and Emily Harris of Symbionese Liberation Army fame, came from my own experience with the Harrises only a few years before.