How to Write a Dirty Book and Other Stories

He was down and out, living in one of those turning-to-seed bungalow courts on Whitley, just above Hollywood Boulevard. It was 1959, and things just hadn’t panned out the way he’d hoped.

Oh, he’d written a couple of produced screenplays for a couple of those low budget sci-fi and horror things, those Grade Z movies that ended up playing the bottom half of double bills in second-rate fleapits and drive-ins.

But his good scripts (and he had a drawer full of them) hadn’t had any takers and even the Grade Z films had dried up. He read the trades daily, hung out at all the right watering holes and restaurants that directors and producers frequented, and he hung around his agent’s office. According to his agent, it was just one of those things, one of those dry spells that screenwriters occasionally went through. Unfortunately, he’d been going through it for over a year.

His agent had suggested he write a play and try to get it done in one of those tiny little theaters down on Santa Monica Boulevard, like the Player’s Ring or the Cameo. So, he’d written a play and had given it to an actor friend, and it had gotten done, and no one cared. At twenty-eight, Charles G. Laskey (Charlie, to his friends), screenwriter, was a 5’7” slightly balding nebbish with no prospects, who had watched as his savings dwindled down to almost nothing.

In the evenings, he hung out with his cronies, mostly out-of-work actors. They’d go to Lucy’s over on Melrose, or Oblath’s, across from Paramount or, if they were feeling especially poor they’d just meet at Coffee Dan’s or Hody’s in Hollywood, and sit there for hours, commiserating about their hard times. Gone were the days when he’d do the Brown Derby/Nickodell/Musso and Frank circuit. At Coffee Dan’s or Hody’s he could have a cheeseburger, french fries, a coke and, with a dime tip, still be out of there for under a buck.

After they sat for hours, he and his pals would sometimes wander over to C.C. Brown’s to have a hot fudge sundae just to have something sweet to counteract all the sour bellyaching they’d just done.

He decided it was time to knock out a new script. Rather than trying to write something good, he began writing a horror movie called The Monster of Pacific Ocean Park. He thought Pacific Ocean Park, the low-rent Disneyland of Santa Monica, would be an interesting location to shoot a monster movie.

He typed seventeen carefully carboned pages on his trusty Underwood (he’d bought his trusty Underwood years ago at a pawnshop on Western and he loved it dearly, battered and beaten as it was). He felt really good about having typed seventeen carefully carboned pages on his trusty Underwood—that is until he read them. Then he didn’t feel really good, because he thought the seventeen carefully carboned pages were really bad. Bad bad. Awful bad. Worse than the Grade Z dreck he’d written before. He gave up on the script.

On days when he’d done his rounds and seen his agent, he’d walk down to the boulevard and go to the movies. He’d check out the lowrent theaters like the Admiral or the Academy or the New View, but if he couldn’t find anything that interested him he’d splurge and go over to the Iris or the Vogue or the Hollywood. For the time being, the Egyptian, the Paramount, and the Chinese were too rich for his blood.

His agent finally managed to get him a meeting on a picture at Warners—some cheapo gangster movie they were doing. It needed a dialogue polish. Dialogue was his specialty, the meeting went well, and he got the job on the spot. It was only going to pay a few hundred dollars, but a few hundred dollars was manna from heaven at this point.

On the way home, his ’54 De Soto stalled on Highland near the Bowl. He couldn’t get it started, so he called the Auto Club and they towed it to a Richfield station on Sunset. The battery was shot, kaput, as dead as his career. Wasn’t that just the nuts on the sundae? He got a new battery, which brought his current bank balance down to $162.41. Hopefully, he’d knock the script polish out in a couple of days and get his check and get his bank balance to a more comfortable level.

He met up with some of his out-of-work actor friends at Lucy’s to celebrate his job. There were always interesting people at Lucy’s. On this particular early evening, Chuck Heston was there, and so was Bill Holden, happily drinking away. He didn’t see any directors or producers that he knew, so that was a drag. Sometimes it just helped if you were lucky enough to see a director or producer in Lucy’s, because it jogged their memories and occasionally resulted in a job.

He and his friends shot the breeze. Beatnik pictures were popular, and a couple of his pals had the beatnik “look”—dirty sweatshirt, torn jeans, short messy hair. One of them even had a goatee. They sat there, doing “beatnik”—talking the lingo (or whatever their idea of beatnik lingo was—their conversation was peppered with words like “cool,” “man,” “daddy-o,” and “squaresville”), spouting bad poetry, and just making fools of themselves. They were pretty rowdy, but it was really funny and they laughed and laughed, while downing quite a few beers.

At some point they grew tired of doing “beatnik,” and they just started complaining about how slow things were. Charlie’s actor pals all had similar going-nowhere careers, but they all still had that hope that actors have inbred in them that things would turn around. The real common denominator amongst them was that they were all barely making ends meet.

“You know what you ought to do?” Charlie’s friend Joe asked.

“Drive off a cliff?” Charlie replied, taking a swig of beer.