My assault on my five-year screenwriting career began as I pored over the documents, records and stories of family members during a long genealogical research project. Being a writer, I couldn't help but dramatize in my head the events that I read about in the their lives. There were dozens of documents from which to pull great stories
However, as rich as the data I had before me, they were daunting, and truthfully I was ambivalent about genre. How shall I get these tales told? A novel, short stories? It wasn't until about six months into my research that I was wakened in the middle of the night in full sweat following a dreadful nightmare. As vividly and brightly as the sun rises in the east, I realized the dream was about my great grandmother, a Quaker, who lived in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and her father, who was born there in 1670. The ramification about the truth of her life was a compelling story and a changer of material facts in our family tree. The truth was a story-and-a half. It had to be told.
It was then that I decided I would attempt my first screenplay, and it would be a suspense/thriller.
To start, I bought every screenwriting book on the shelves, the latest screenwriting software and enrolled in as many premier screenwriting seminars as I could afford.
Getting my presence out in Hollywood, I searched for and discovered the most popular online forums and message boards, becoming more than just a lurker. Soon I was participating in screenwriters' online conversations, discerning who knew what and whom. The pros became easy to spot. I was beginning to get excellent assistance and guidance from other writers who traded war stories--and even making a fool of myself on the message boards; but, I was learning nonetheless. I got caught up in a few arguments and found out who my friends were.
I devoured the trade magazines and each day was consumed with writing and rewriting, outlining and rewriting.
Did I mention rewriting? It seemed endless. Still does. This is when I remember Dorothy Parker's saying that no one loves to write, he only loves having written.
Finally, the finished product, or what I was convinced was a finished product, “Disowned and Dismembered” (D&D) was ready for its “coverage.” Coverage is what Hollywood calls reading and critiquing in order to receive one of the following actions:
Pass,
Consider, or
Accept. I paid a consultant (reader) for my coverage; some writers do and most don't because they really can't afford it. Studios have their own coverage/reader departments.
It’s here I need to say that what most newcomers don’t know, and don’t want to know, and don’t hear is screenwriters usually don’t have a
Consider or an
Accept until he's written twelve to fifteen scripts, if at all. By that time, the wife has left, or the writer has died, or the house has been repossessed and the family is gone, leaving nothing but peanut butter, crackers, Fido and a notice from Southern Cal Ed that the computer will be cut off in two days. I was blessed to be supported by a great husband who understands the creative process and is kind of a workaholic himself. But writers never should kid themselves; it's more than a full -time job and it takes every minute of the day.
Besides placing the script on a service that allows producers and other developers to read my log line (a 25- word or less synopsis of the plot), I also sent it to my cousin, a director who had a few movies under his belt. He liked it a lot; it was about his family after all. But in Hollywood no one sends scripts on to their Hwood pals from unknowns unless he’s really sure. It’s just not done. I sort of knew that, but was hoping anyway. My work of art got stuck at the bottom of his own personal pile of other masterpieces. In fact, I don’t know if his pile consisted of the scripts that he wrote or the rest of the scripts he got from friends and his other cousins who fancy themselves great screenwriters. He finally admitted to me that "he didn't know how to get a movie made."
Dang.
I got many hits on my log lines, but still no takers. My coverage was good, but no takers. I got great notes. I got read by five producers. They all said it would not sell at the box office, but
they loved it. Still. It was too American. A story about a rape of a Quaker girl in 1723? No one would come to see it, except my relatives. Well, duh. That's why I added all the thriller stuff. Duh.
I didn't care about their take on the American thing. I knew the American thing would always sell. How ridiculous. I know America. It probably just wasn't very good, not well written enough, a mechanical problem, a technical issue with the plot, I told myself...arrogantly.
So, I threw D&D on the shelf and started research on another American screen play. This one was called “Shock Tx”, an-in-your-face American action drama set in pre-WWII Indianapolis.
My dream cast: Matthew McConaghey is my leading man, the Indy race car driver in 1937, whose need for do-it-yourself shock treatments between races in his Gasoline Alley garage becomes a problem; Jon Voight is his aristocratic physician father; Jessica Lange is Voigt's wife; some gorgeous blonde ice queen I’ve yet to decide on plays a Nazi psychiatrist; and Ben Affleck rounds out the cast as Matthew’s alcoholic shrink brother.
Both brothers are in love with the Nazi doc. I can’t say what balances this story out, but something happens to keep the family’s name and reputation in tact. This story is full of wonderful race scenes in the 30s at Indy, plus some fantastic bad guy action and old rivalries. Many scenes take place in a creepy old mental hospital.
I guess that script wasn't very good either. It must have been the writing and the presentation. I still believe in the story. Maybe they didn't like the Bugattis, Mazerattis and other ancient Indy cars or the crowd scenes where the flagpole is struck by lightening and the huge American flag gracefully falls on the grandstand full of spectators.
One reader, a woman 38-years old, told me she didn't think people today would relate to WWII stories. They seem too unrealistic, she said. Another mentioned she thought they were too far fetched—she didn't think that people actually took their sons to the train station to see them off to war as I had portrayed it in a scene in Shock Tx. I mentioned that that particular scene was from my own experience when my family took my older brother to Union Station in Kansas City in 1951 to send him off to Korea. I was six at the time. I remember also picking him in 1952 when he returned.
Good thing I didn't model the departure after the time my next brother went to war and was sent to Vietnam. In 1963, my mother and I traveled to New York and saw him off on a huge troop ship full of soldiers. I'm afraid the reader wouldn't have believed that one either. As I recall, afterwards we had dinner at the Dixie Hotel and enjoyed The Johnny Carson Show at Rockefeller Center.
When I used the name “Christopher” in D&D, one of the readers told me to change the name because it was too “modern” for 1670. I replied I couldn't because that really was my grandfather’s given name—in 1670.
All right, then. I finally believed them. There’s no market for Americana in Hollywood. They had me convinced! After four or five years, I gave up on the art of screenwriting.
I stopped writing for Hollywood. Instead, I started a successful blog, Planet California, and began writing for America about American culture, politics and me. That was thirteen years ago.
The Sentinels
My father, Andrew A. Layman, who weighed 13 pounds when he was born on the 4th of July of 1905, got drunk once. My father gambled to excess. Once. His doctor told him to quit smoking once at which time Dad threw the near full cigarette pack into his dresser drawer where they remained till the day he died twenty years later. My father did nothing to excess.
As a little girl, the fondest memory I have is sitting on my dad's lap and leaning up against his barrel chest, listening to his heartbeat. There was no greater security in my world, and no greater fear that is would someday go away. His massive presence was so powerful that I was never afraid when he was around. No sane man would start a fight with my father unless he could finish it. I never realized that power until when I was around weak men when I got older. I also found out through him that there is more to strength than muscular power.
There was no one like him. I was able to point to him proudly as my father; he was so different than the others in his looks, his gracious, elegant dress style, his impeccable manners and who he was as a man. He never embarrassed me in any way.
Local Sports Hero
My father made a vow that none of his children would ever have to pay their way through college. None ever did. That’s because he came from a family who did not value education and success. Rather they were professional farmers who had no time for niceties and anything resembling warmth and love. My father, the oldest of nine siblings, decided early in his life that he simply was not interested in the hard work of a corporate farm. He escaped that life and never looked back by putting himself through school and earning two degrees.
When you were as popular, handsome and talented as Andy, you got yourself a ticket to Purdue University at least for a year. To this day, I'm not quite sure what caused him to leave after the first year, but it might have something to do with doing things at least once. What that once was never became clear to me. That was back in the days when kids like me had to mind their own business and didn't ask their parents a lot of questions. He probably ran out of money.
Dad spent the rest of his college career at Indiana Teachers College in Danville, Indiana where he made his way through working in a hotel firing furnaces and earning four varsity letters and receiving two Bachelor of Science degrees. He also set the state collegiate record for shot put one year, a couple of other records and was able to maintain his grades. In addition, he was eligible to go to the Olympics, but the teams did not have the money to send the athletes at that time.
Following his graduation and then teaching a couple of years, he married my mother, Lois Spray, in 1928 after having met her three weeks earlier. That is probably the rashest, most impetuous, most immature action my dear father had ever taken in his life as well as probably the happiest and best decision he ever made.
Mother had an interesting way of telling the story that he was engaged to someone else when they met. By the way, it's from her side of the family, the English, anti war one, that I fell heir to the smug gene. Sometimes, I use it as well as she ever could.
I remember Mother often referring to Tom Wolfe's novel,
You Can't Go Home Again as she spoke of those days (before they met) and Dad’s more unfortunate choice of schools to debut his coaching career was his own alma mater. I'm afraid his time there was short lived as his teams had not lived up to the hype of the home town hero's own press clippings.
That didn't last long. By that time he was married to Mother a year, he had a new baby and was in another inky dinky Indiana small town. Mother was pregnant again with my sister. It was the Depression. I don’t think anyone was too happy.
Dad and his little family moved to a few other towns and by the time my next older brother was born in 1940, my father had taught for fifteen years, coached a number of championship basketball, football, baseball and track teams in Indiana high schools.
Teacher first, coach second
Separated by less than fifty miles and ahead of the famous Coach John Wooden by just a few years, men like Coach Wooden and Andy Layman gave a generation of American coaching its identity and backbone. They made Indiana basketball the way ahead for lots of boys who didn't have another way out. If you've ever seen an interview with one of these kids, you’ll understand this basic theory of life: It starts with the clinic of how to put on your socks. You can't do anything if your socks don't feel right. Dad always said he was a teacher first and a coach second.
Those Indiana farm kids learned rules and gamesmanship, American history, manners, sportsmanship, honor, chivalry, how to become more by watching what their coaches did. They even learned how to dress, how to shine their shoes, how to treat a lady, how to talk. They learned everything by example. They also got a look at my mother and thought just maybe if they got off the farm went to college they could get a pretty, classy lady too.*
School rivalries grew as towns identified with their coaches and teams. The pressure was beyond great. If a coach won he was a king; if he lost he'd better move him and his family on. The good news was he had four chances to prove himself in many cases--most little schools had one coach for all four sports. However, there was no doubt Indiana basketball was king.
A young, popular, successful family man with a nifty family who had everything going for him, even in the depths of the Great Depression, defined my parent's entire greater generation and was expressed by their moods of cautious optimism. They had friends, played Mah Jong every Saturday evening, and yes, they even had some fun. They dealt with the same issues as we, yes, even fellow teachers who happened to be gay--I remember Mother and Daddy talking about a couple of "old maids" who were on the faculty, but as is typical, it was absolutely no one's business. There was always something going on because people are people no matter where they are. Mostly, other people's business was left at just that and gossip wasn't allowed in our house.
Yet a man with so much else who literally could not feed his family, who had to move them all to Gary, Indiana in the summers so he could slave in the steel mills, settle them temporarily in shacks--on the beach of Lake Michigan-- then they had to turn around and move back so he could coach the following fall. Or he painted barns to make ends meet. Now, it sounds like a fantasy when I hear about how poor people were in the thirties.
Mother, teaching third grade, was still circling the block on the way home from school so Mr. Smith, the grocer, didn't spot her and hit her up for the 15 cents she owed for last night's hamburger. She would probably be slicing potatoes and figuring how the heck she was going to make hamburger gravy taste good again tonight. At least they had the tomatoes from the weekend to keep everyone from getting scurvy. Even mailing that postcard to her sister was a luxury.
Things were changing. Mother would be going to Grandma’s in Indianapolis and stay because she was due to deliver my brother in August of 1940. It was so hard on Mother and Daddy to be apart, but they did what had to do.
Of course, that year Daddy had won another fantastic championship and Mother and Daddy still didn't have any money. Dad dearly loved his job, his boys, his teams and his town, and the town loved him; but, the time had come to do something different. I often think of the pain he must have felt when he said goodbye to that wonderful life.
He didn't really realize it then, but his most of his boys would soon to be off to Africa, to Europe and the Pacific and his heart would have been broken over and over again anyway.
DuPont Nemours
Hitler had invaded Poland in 1939.
The famous German genius/scientist, Albert Einstein, wrote an important letter of alarm to President Roosevelt informing him about an outrageously dangerous weapon technology and that our lives-- yours, mine, and everyone’s--would be changed forever because of it. He told him America had to do something and fast. That was when we thought America was good for something and had certain obligations..
Dad had the prerequisite education, major leadership experience to become part of something very important and special. His personal reputation was spotless and his way with people and steady demeanor meant that all they needed to do was plug him in and turn him on.
Dupont Nemours came after and hired my dad. They sent him to the FBI Academy for three months, and then in a few more months he was moved along the rest of the family to Richland, Washington, a tiny berg on the banks of the Columbia River in the desert. Mother said she thought they had arrived on the moon. They might as well have, according to my sister. Everyone lived in barracks for a while until their homes could be built, er, I mean, fabricated.
The town of Richland started out at about 3000 people in 1943, the little county seat of Benton. The Manhattanites liked its remote location nestled down in the valley along with that nice power resource of the Columbia River. It was a perfect place to make plutonium for a bomb. No one knew that but a “couple of people” like Enrico Fermi (our neighbor), and his scientists, General Leslie Groves, and of course, Dad.
When Uncle Sam moved in, there was little the townies could do. The population of Richland, Kennewick and Pasco, a tri-city area, grew to about 30,000 in a little over a year. The Mahattan Project was in full bloom.
Typical problems occurred with fast growth, disparate people and quick planning. Law enforcement was handled as well as could be expected with two departments—the Civil and the Federal run by the same people—my Dad’s. It was a tricky job as it entailed more than just law enforcement. It also consisted of extreme security issues near and on the plant reservation. The security division even had to deal with Jim Crow laws on the books, an impossible and immoral issue for good men like my dad.
Lots of personal and human interest stories came out of that time in Richland. I've heard so many of them. My family was quite happy in Richland. One of the tales involves a bunch of my older brother's friends and him placing one of the security vehicles on the roof of one of Dad's stations. My sis told me Dad just laughed. That sounds like Dad. Since I'm the baby of the family, I feel like I got snookered by Mother Nature out of sixteen years of my folks' life, so hearing these stories are bittersweet for me and I always wished I had been there too.
Rumors were rampant as to what was being manufactured at Hanford. Speculation was strong that it was toilet paper. No one could talk about it because of the security issues. They were serious about it. Toilet paper worked just fine.
The dangerous post war period
That war was over. A new one had begun. The Cold One. Research at Hanford continued and things nuclear moved at a breathtaking pace. In the meantime, I joined the family. I was born one week after the second bomb had been dropped on Nagasaki, Japan.
Later, one day in 1949, Dad called Mother, and asked her how many clean shirts he had in his drawer; he was off to Kansas City in an hour.
Dad became the security executive for the Bendix Aviation Corporation, a major contractor for aviation systems employing 8000 people. It was not until much later, after he was gone, that I discovered the scope of his civil defense responsibilities. I knew none of this until years later and only until I read about different events in the newspaper, or searched in newly released unclassified documents.
My father shielded our family from every bit of it. I learned my politics from my experience and through reading and debating others, not from anything he ever said or imparted or inferred from his experience on the job. Furthermore, I never noticed a difference in manner or mood if he knew I was around. "Steady" had a new exemplar in my dad.
The musician, writers, intellectuals, poseurs
It is in Mother’s family that the political ambivalence and anti war strain comes through even though it is her father, a staunch Republican who is my guiding light in my political writing.
The Quaker and mainline Protestant antiwar roots run deep, even to the point that my great grandfather, family legend has it, threatened my grandfather that he would not send him to college if he enlisted in the Spanish American War. My poor great grandfather’s stiff-necked promise came true, much to the shock of many in the family and without;
Regardless, my grandfather simply sloughed off the his unkind gesture and kept up his part of bargain for his country by becoming a remarkable citizen, after he served in The Philippines and contracting chronic malaria. There was no antiwar "nonsense" for that Republican.
There are some in my extended family who have always carried the anti war bug. They talk about the heroism of the protesters of war and those who avoid war at all costs. I've heard them say they think America is a terrible place because we dropped the bombs on Japan. They would do so with full knowledge that my father was in the same room at the time.
Everyone is entitled to his opinion.
Maybe they haven’t figured it out the same way I have, that sometimes you must give up something big to keep something bigger. That there are things you might have to lose, like my Grandpa did when his old man said no to his patriotism.
Andy always kept silent during the political rants and hollers emanating from the dining room. I still can picture him as he stands on his front porch from which he gazes across his rolling northeastern Kansas limestone hills and pastures of cattle and grass. Yonder in Missouri lay silos with nuclear war heads destined to be pumped up to the top, huge bombers at rest in their hangers, other man made secrets and truths Hollywood once said, "you can't handle!" With his years of experience and knowledge, one can only imagine what he thinks of the rest of us.
What I know for sure is this: artists dream and talk while the sentinels guard and watch.
Thanks for the read.
*What I didn't know until a year ago is about the time my dear, classy mother was kicked out of a gymnasium at a basketball game for a mouthy exchange with a referee. The story goes that Dad's boss, Mr. Albright, the principal of the school, simply told Mother, "Now, Lois. We can't have this." Nothing more was ever said. What my dad said--or didn't say-- is not known.
