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was.
    In my panic I began driving faster and faster up and down streets and boulevards, like a rat trapped in a maze. It dimly occurred to me that I would now be due for a fatal car accident in the wake of which all the authorities would find by way of identification would be my Colorado driver’s license with its nonexistent address.
    My parents would take it that I had simply disappeared from the face of the earth.
    In a sweat-stained condition bordering on all-out hysteria, I stumbled on the place somehow, driving past it at about sixty miles an hour, U-turned, parked, went in, and lay on the bed, hyperventilating.
    But things improved. The many and generous friends about whom Walter Mirisch spoke after Verna Fields’s funeral began to make their appearance. A young man living in the apartment across from mine, originally from Illinois, was a film critic for Variety . He was so good that they booted him off the paper for having standards that were too high.
    My little Love Story book came out, and that was a kick. They’d tried to make the cover look as much like Erich Segal’s source novel as possible, which was embarrassing, but still I had written the thing and it had paid my way to California. I remember seeing the first copy in the drugstore across the street from my apartment about nine o’clock one evening.
    A young mother was shopping with her child, stopping before the magazine rack. I pointed out the book and said I had written it.
    â€œYou wrote Love Story ?” Her eyes widened slightly.
    â€œWell, no, not Love Story ,” I explained. “See? The Love Story Story .”
    â€œOh.” She looked at me dubiously. “No kidding . . .”
    I pulled out my driver’s license, which had my name, after all. She brightened.
    â€œYou’re from Colorado . . . I went skiing there. . . .”
    This was getting too complicated. I just bought her the damn book.
    My first job was working for no money, developing a treatment for Elliot Silverstein, the director of the hit film Cat Ballou and later the amazing A Man Called Horse . I learned lots of stuff from Elliot, a former theater director from Boston who had staged the original production of Bernstein’s opera Trouble in Tahiti . Silverstein was a sort of amalgam between Bill Schwartz and Howard Stein, my playwriting teacher at Iowa. Like them, he did not suffer fools gladly. Elliot had a short fuse and piercing blue eyes that glared at you from behind steel-rimmed spectacles. Working for him I began to realize that my background in theater was actually a sort of impediment to screenwriting.
    â€œYou want to solve all your problems with dialogue,” Elliot observed bluntly. “But movies aren’t dialogue, they’re pictures. Contrast Star Trek with Mission: Impossible ,” he went on, ever the pedagogue. ( Star Trek again. What was it with Star Trek ?) “Turn off the video on both and listen. Star Trek works fine; it becomes a radio play—because it’s all dialogue. On the other hand, Misson: Impossible without the visuals is just a series of sound effects. Now try it the other way round: if you turn on the picture and turn off the sound, Star Trek becomes essentially a series of talking heads. Mission: Impossible , by contrast, looks like a movie.”
    Compare and contrast, and remember, neatness counts. Elliot lived on a largish motor yacht in the marina, an area I got to know well, as well as his friends, a collection of Hollywood types, good, bad, big (big bosomed), small, and no account.
    What surprised me was how generous Elliot’s friends all were, how interested in a newcomer. They plied me with questions and encouragement. Later, more cynically, I could place another construction on their amiability: if the new boy had something to offer, they wanted to get in on it sooner rather than later, when the line got long.
    But I don’t think it was that cut and dried. Los Angeles