Right Pyramid, Wrong Season

So it was off to Mexico, land of the “sleepy senoritas with their eyes on fire……..” It was at this particular moment in time that I stumbled upon one of those mysteries of mankind, something so deeply genetically ingrained in each and every living human being that it knows no boundaries. It doesn’t matter whether you are rich or poor; black, white, brown, or yellow; an uneducated tribesman or a PhD in experimental physics from Michigan. Everyone is fascinated by the “movie business.” It was on this trip that I learned that mentioning the fact that I was “producing a movie” opened borders, squelched objections, dropped prices, and generally elicited the gushing of information about an unfinished screenplay at home or a relative in the acting business (everyone has one).

Being “in the movie business” provides allowances and leeway as to personal conduct, immoral behavior, overindulgence, and irresponsibility galore. In addition, everyone you tell is willing to drop their guard, their money and, at the drop of a hat, their own responsibilities to help you get what you need and more.

Case in point: I arrived in Guadalajara in the good company of Chris, owner of Crosby’s (see journal entry #2), and “El Coyote”. After the incredibly inane and drunken shenanigans that, I now know, seem to accompany all unescorted gringo arrivals on Mexican soil, all of which is described in hilarious detail in Bob Sabbag’s book, SmokeScreen, we got down to the business at hand: namely meeting with the farmers that “El Coyote” was to get the load of weed from and allow me a first-hand glimpse into the nether world of smuggling. That morning, armed with strong Mexican coffee and a glorious feeling of an adventure begun, we left Guadalajara in our rented VW for a clandestine rendezvous at, of all the picturesquely perfect places, the top of an Aztec pyramid. It turned out not to be one of the towering, well known pyramids, but more of a bump in the foliage that easily could have been mistaken for a small hill, except for the archaeological work that had been done on one side revealing that indeed this was a construct from a bygone era. Maybe these Aztecs needed a less rainy season. For whatever reason, this pyramid was the spot and, breathing heavily after a night at the Plaza de Mariachis, we struggled to the top.

Sure enough, there we were met by two Indian men who greeted “El Coyote” perfunctorily, or at least so it seemed to me, after the big build up of the last two weeks. In any case, a happy and unabashed “El Coyote” began a rambling discourse in Spanish which included Chris’ ownership of what was described as a marijuana mall in New York and my own career as a famous filmmaker. All of this made no apparent impression on the pair as they listened patiently. When “El Coyote” had run his course, the elder of the two asked, in a completely reasonable if somewhat puzzled tone, why we had come to Mexico and what did we want to see him about. Now, keep in mind that the overriding purpose of this trip was so that Chris could buy weed at Mexican prices and “El Coyote” would then bring it back to the States. Viewed in that light, the question, “why are you here?” strikes a decidedly sinister note. When the purpose of the trip was explained to him, the Chief, as I had come to think of him, laughed, not unkindly, and casually responded that, indeed, there was plenty of great weed to buy, only in four more months. This, in fact, was the planting season and the harvest was down the road a bit.

Things fell apart quickly after that and Chris and “El Coyote” returned to New York in a recriminatory cloud of verbal abuse and one-sided disenchantment. I elected to stay. Hey, I was in the heart of “weedland”. Why not, at least, try to begin the research I had come to conduct? I spent the night alone at the hotel and, in the morning, took a taxi toward the heart of the city. Along the way, I noticed a solitary American I had seen around the hotel earlier walking along the side of the road. I stopped the taxi and offered him a ride. It turned out that Carl was staying alone at the same hotel and was headed into town to look for some friends he had lost track of. At his suggestion we went to the Copa de Leche, a famous hangout in the old town, and I bought us a couple of shots of tequila and beers.

Carl asked me what I was doing in Guadalajara and that brings us to the point of this story. For I replied, “I am down here to do some research for a movie I am making on marijuana smuggling. I am looking for someone to show me the ropes. What are you doing in Guadalajara?” A look I have come to identify as “the movie glaze” came over the stranger’s face. His eyes first bugged then took on a dreamy nebulous almost cataract appearance, his lips quivered and his hands shook, as he withdrew a dime from his pocket and replied, “I am a weed smuggler and, although I’m a bit down on my luck now, I plan to turn this dime into a million bucks. Why don’t you make your movie about me? We’ll rent a place here and I will set up the scam while you film it.”

Voila! You see! In a world of paranoiac over compensation like the drug smuggler’s, to reveal your livelihood and current plan to a total stranger would be unheard of, verboten, lunacy, idiocy, all that …………………….unless………… he is making a movie about drug smuggling and you can be in it!

As you will see, and I came to rely on, “making a movie” is currency of a sort found only in the mind of man. It beats diamonds and gold hands down. Nothing can hold a candle to it for overcoming inertia, gaining cooperation, or fundamentally changing attitudes. If Walter Huston, in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” had danced around Bogart and Holt exclaiming, “Why you damn fools, you’re so stupid you wouldn’t know a movie if it fell on you!” as he revealed that they were standing in the middle of a movie deal, they’d have killed him then and the movie would have been a lot shorter.

Stay tuned. Next time we will visit those on high who actually produce and distribute films as I look for the next brass ring………………..or,

Hey, they made Woodstock, they’re gonna really love this!

Seven Years Ago......

Seven years ago I came to LA to “make the movie deal” for SmokeScreen. My first stop was the The William Morris Agency in Beverly Hills. There I was ushered in to meet, for the first time, my agent. When I say “my agent” it’s actually a misnomer. The woman I met handles the motion picture side of the literary agency in LA. Technically Robert Sabbag, the author of SmokeScreen, is the client at William Morris. As I later learned, she was seeing me out of the goodness of her heart, which I now know is as big as all outdoors, putting the lie to the prototypical “Hollywood agent.”

However, my first impression, which I will never forget, was of a diminutive, conservatively dressed businesswoman, wearing a small set of reading glasses which dangled from a tiny gold chain around her neck and a red cardigan style sweater. She was wearing a headset and in the middle of a conversation, pausing to say hello and motioning me to sit on the sofa across from her desk. My impression was of an attractive, sweet natured, soft spoken librarian.

Then she resumed her conversation to the anonymous person on the other end of the line in the harsh and abrupt manner of Michael Douglas explaining life’s bitter ironies to Charlie Sheen in Wall Street, “You tell him that unless I get that check for five hundred thousand on my desk by the end of the week, he will never see that screenplay.”

Carefully removing the headset, she came over and sat down on the couch, smoothed her skirt, cleared her throat a bit, patted me on the knee, and said in a cultured and personal tone, “Allen, honey, I loved your book. I think it could make a great movie. Now what sort of a deal did you have in mind?”

I answered that I wanted to be one of the Producers of the movie, credited as such. She looked down at her lap and smiled. Before she could respond, I added that I wanted “gross points” not “net points”, and active participation, a vote, in the selection of the screenwriter, director and major talents. Gazing at me out of sad, worldly, and slightly bemused eyes, she said, “Look, honey, in this town, people kill to get Producer credit. I’ve had clients choose Producer credit over cash. You’ll never get it. And, as for gross points, you’re not Brad Pitt or Bob Zemeckis. You’ll never get those either. What you get for the rights is what you get. Oh, you’ll get net points, but, you’re right, they hardly ever translate into money. And artistic approval? That’s why they buy the rights. So they can do what they want with the property. You can forget that, too. That’s not to say that I won’t try to get you the best possible deal, but you should know going in what’s possible and what’s probably not. Now, we have a lot of interest from some very important production entities and I’ll relay the offers to you after I’ve checked them out. What do you plan to do while you’re here?”

And with that I was dismissed, my dreams dashed, kicked to the curb without a thought. Or so I thought. Welcome to Hollywood, Tom Sawyer. But I was wrong. She was simply “telling it like it is”. To do anything less would have done me a disservice. And armed with that foreknowledge and her unceasing help, I eventually, albeit many years of swinging at the fences down the road, made a deal that reflected the essence of my dream, born in that apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side so many years ago. And since that day eight years ago, that person has proven to be a true friend through thick and thin and, despite my naiveté and bullheadedness, someone who cares about me, my dream of long ago, and my family and life today. She is the greatest. She asked not to be named so as not to be inundated by calls from people who are convinced that their lives, too, should hit the silver screen.

Belltower Films (www.belltowerfilms.com) is the production company I sold the rights to Smokescreen to and they've recently signed Paul Cuschieri to write the screenplay. Paul is writing the Allen Long part with Chris Pine, star of the latest Star Trek movie and new teen heartthrob, in mind. I spent yesterday with Donnie Bell, the CEO and founder of the company talking about the future of Belltower, SmokeScreen and the company's other film projects. Donnie is promoting Nina Yang, formerly a senior marketing analyst at Warner Bros., to run Belltower operations. Nina just completed production management of the 22 episode TV drama, “Flatland”, starring Dennis Hopper, with Academy Award winning producer, Albert S. Ruddy (The Godfather, Million Dollar Baby). Nina received her Masters Degree in Media Policy and Entertainment Management from The Annenberg Cinema School at the University of Southern California. She will be producing SmokeScreen for Belltower, which makes me happy, as she has been my champion through some tough negotiations on the way to making the eventual deal for the rights to my life story.

You've been intimately privy to the process thus far and, after Donnie headed back to Palm Springs, I thought of you last night as it dawned on me that I have many friends who have been supportive of me as I faced nearly insurmountable odds to reach this point.

So, I am starting a weekly newsletter, so to speak. Over the next year, as we attach the cast and director, begin location filming, move to post production (editing and soundtrack, etc.), all the way to the red carpet, I will be sending out a weekly journal entry delineating the triumphs and travails of "Allen in Hollywood" and how two guys with a shared vision go about getting a major motion picture made and distributed. I hope the readers will find it as humorous and entertaining as I have. To make it more interesting, the journey isn’t over. I intend to “cover” my experience as Producer of my own biopic over the next months as we make our way to the premier.

If you want to be included, let me know by responding to this email or calling me at 310.775.5173. If I get enough positive feedback, someone suggested today it should be a, I shudder at the thought, “blog”. I actually have never been to a blog. Is it a dance?

Cheers, see you on the red carpet.

Allen

How it started....

I went to Mexico to make a movie thirty-five years ago and never came back. At least not the same person, that’s for sure. I started out to film a true life rendition of the crazy outlaws, not criminals, albeit a fine distinction a valid one nonetheless, who populated the weed smuggling world of the early 70’s and their hilarious misadventures. Ironically, now decades later, the story will be told, only I am the subject and it will be my own misadventures that will be recounted on the screen. The Great Mandala rolls on.

Since SmokeScreen, Bob Sabbag’s wonderfully funny and painfully honest account of my smuggling days was published, I have been on a roller coaster ride through Tinsel Town trying to get “the movie deal” done. I sat down last week and began to write about the process starting with my first encounter with “my agent” and, thus, awakening to the reality of life in the movie lane. What started out as a paragraph took on a life of its’ own and when I finished I thought I should send it to all my friends and acquaintances who have expressed various degrees of interest and fascination with my involvement in the book and movie versions of my own life story.

Soon I began to receive responses, none negative, most of which contained the word “blog” and suggestions on publishing one. Like so many of my generation, I’ve gone from thinking of drugs as vitamins to only entertaining weed as an escape valve and from being an “early adapter” of technology to a change resistant hold-out. Until yesterday I had avoided either reading or writing blogs. Old dogs, new tricks, etc. Well, Live Here Now, people! A bloggin’ we shall go.

I went to Mexico to make a movie and……………………………………

So how did I get the money to go to Mexico in the first place and what made me think that a 22 year old night news cameraman for a CBS station could make a feature length documentary that would be a commercial success? Balls, stupidity, naivete, ego, blind ambition, or all of the above.

I had found work as the projectionist/gopher at Motion Associates on Madison Avenue. Motion made some of the most memorable commercials of the day ranging from Chanel #5 ads with Catherine Deneuve at the MOMA to all the Colombian Coffee commercials starring Juan Valdez, who, as it turns out, is actually Puerto Rican. Remember that little stutter on the road of reality as we wend our way to Hollywood where much is not as it seems. I was living in a third story walk up with two amazingly gorgeous women, Hani and Jan. Nothing happened, I swear! But try telling that to their boyfriends, all of whom could barely restrain themselves from strangling me when they realized that thee was only one king size bed in the apartment. Nothing happened, honest! More on this later.

At the same time I was hustling little moving jobs with my 1957 GMC short bed pick up. I met a white Rastafarian, yep, even in Manhattan in 1972, who, once or twice a week needed a few boxes of Jamaican weed delivered to various and sundry locations and individuals and they began to refer me to others, until I was in high demand (sic). One of these clients was Chris. Chris owned the first weed bar in NYC. It was located on Crosby Street before John and Yoko moved to the corner of Wooster and Prince and SoHo became cool. We all hung out at John Leon’s bar, 162 Spring Street and Chris’s place, known as Crosby’s, duh, was the worst kept secret in the city. You did have to pass inspection at ground level via video camera before being ushered into the elevator with a remote and taciturn Japanese guy (Ninja?), who glowered at you all the way to the 5^th floor. Then…….Amsterdam, my man! A bar that traversed the whole of the loft floor where happy tenders vended exotic weed from big bins under glass. Everything from Acapulco Gold to Afghani hashish laced with opium was available and the tables were filled with smokers excitedly predicting the proliferation of such businesses around the city, even around the country. It’s only been thirty five years, you wait and see.

It turned out that one of Chris’ suppliers was a Mexican American named Luis, who preferred to be known by the more romantic moniker of, “El Coyote”. El Coyote told me a story about swimming a couple of garbage bags containing weed across the Rio Grande with two broken ankles that had me laughing hysterically. A day or two later I went to see a highly acclaimed, feature length documentary by academy award winning director John Frankenheimer, Star, which was oddly fascinating and provocative, about a would be Roller Derby star. Somehow the two incidents became a vision of a commercially succesful, feature length film focused on the bizarre counter culture hero of the day, the pot smuggler. And who better to Produce/Direct?

Shortly after this epiphanous flash, I was sitting in the sumptuous living room of one Tom A. recounting with great relish the story of “El Coyote” and my resultant vision. Tom was heir to a significant part of the Sears and Roebuck fortune and was totally smitten with my roommate, Jan, who was endowed with one of the greatest senses of humor I’ve ever encountered, absolutely no fear of failure, and the finest pair of breasts man has ever been privileged to gaze upon. Not sure which of these traits Tom was fondest of, but I have my suspicions. When I breathlessly ran out of vision, Tom absently remarked, “That sounds like a great idea. I’ll back you. What’s the next step?”

Huh?

I went to Mexico to make a movie and, now, three decades plus down life’s road, I am going to see my vision become a reality. Thanks in large part to two amazing people, Donnie Bell, founder of Belltower Entertainment, Inc., and Nina Yang, producer of SmokeScreen and head of Belltower. They just signed one of the stars of James Cameron’s new, groundbreaking film, Avatar, to play Moe Norman, quixotic and legendary Canadian golfer in the Belltower production of Barry Morrow’s (Rainman), Dancing the Green. I am not at liberty to reveal the name, but you can check out the Belltower website, www.belltowerfilms.com, for more info on that and other productions in the works. As this journal of mine moves along you will get to know Donnie and Nina as I did and understand why meeting them made SmokeScreen, the movie possible.

Next week………”sleepy senoritas with their eyes on fire…….” Or…….right pyramid, wrong season, senor.