Thousands of Photographs, One Locked Gate

I came all the way to Oz, and the wizard wouldn't see me.

That was the thought running through my head at the top of a brutally steep hill in Echo Park, five unanswered phone calls deep, on my way back down to find a coffee shop and sulk. Elliott Gould had invited me to his place at 4:00 p.m. I'd taken a train and two buses to get there, over an hour of transit. I'd climbed the hill. I'd found the gate locked, no aide waiting to buzz me in like he'd promised. Elliott and I have talked by phone, off and on, since 2012. We had never once stood in the same room. And now, five calls and fifty-five minutes in, it was starting to look like we weren't going to start today either.

I'd gotten about halfway down the hill, phone still in hand, resigned to the coffee shop plan, when it rang. Elliott. He'd fallen asleep and slept through every call. He apologized. I turned on my heel — moving with a purpose I hadn't had in me ten minutes earlier — and walked back up that hill to finally meet, face to face, the man I've spent fourteen years researching for a book.

That's the short version of Wednesday. There was a whole week on either side of it, and most of it was spent in a library.

Sunday. I flew into LAX, rode the FlyAway bus and then the subway — a real one, with real stops, which genuinely surprised me; the only time I'd ever seen an LA subway was in Speed, and some part of my brain had filed it as science fiction — and walked the last block to David Kittredge's place. David's a documentary filmmaker I met years ago through Jeffrey Schwarz, who'd heard I was working on an episode about Exorcist II: The Heretic and figured David, deep into his own documentary on the film (it eventually became Boorman and the Devil, which played Venice last year and is still making the festival rounds), would want to talk. He and his partner Craig picked me up and took me for Korean barbecue, which was the correct way to start this. Then they dropped me at my VRBO: pull-out couch, love seat, card table, a Roku TV I will regret not signing out of my Plex account on, and a bus stop fifty feet from the door. No frills. Exactly what I needed.

Korean barbecue, night one.

Monday and Tuesday were the Margaret Herrick Library, which is where I learned that the Academy's archive is actually two separate systems in one building. There's Special Collections, which you request weeks in advance and which the database barely distinguishes from anything else. And there's the core collection, which you request on a pencil-and-paper slip like it's 1965. I spent the better part of my first day hunting for materials I knew I'd requested, getting quietly more confused, until a staffer explained it to me four or five different times before it stuck. The library staff, I'm fairly sure, are used to watching researchers have this exact realization. Once I had it sorted, I put in a stack of requests for clippings, press books, and publicity materials that would eventually eat up most of my week.

The Margaret Herrick Library.

Tuesday was also the day I had to tell Chris Gore I couldn't make it to a free screening of Godzilla Minus One with him out in Burbank. Public transit was two hours each way; an Uber was sixty bucks one way. A hundred and twenty dollars round trip for a zero-dollar movie ticket is not a thing I could justify, and I hated saying no — if I'm in somebody's town, I want them to at least have the option of seeing me, the same way I'd want to know if someone was passing through Detroit. But the math on that one didn't work, so Chris and I agreed I'd catch him next time.

No Cakes Were Found.

That same day, over at the Pickford Center, I listened to a 1972 Hollywood Foreign Press Association press conference recording of Elliott, held while he was promoting The Long Goodbye — that one played fine. A second file, a 1974 interview with Elliott conducted by Jack Hirshberg, did not: over two hours I got about five minutes of actual audio out of it before it gave up entirely. What I did hear: Elliott answering in monosyllables, loud music blaring in the background like the whole thing was being conducted in the back of a moving car, until the interviewer finally says, on tape, I'm going to stop this and check if I can hear anything over the music. I'd already read the transcript and photographed it, so the audio wasn't essential — but hearing him irritated and trapped in a bad interview, thirty-some years before I'd ever talk to him myself, was its own kind of research.

Then there was the stuff I couldn't photograph at all — a handful of Special Collections items the Academy keeps roped off for copyright reasons, including an unmade Travis McGee script I'd known about since before I left Michigan and could only take notes on, and a huge continuity-and-editing file for 1985's Stick, apparently assembled by someone on the production, for a film that got substantially reshaped after its first cut.

Pencil and paper. No photos allowed.

Pink ink, decades later, eating the source material.

Wednesday was the gate, and the hill, and the two hours that came after. That was a horse of a different color.

Echo Park, on the way up the hill.

Once I was actually inside — a modest apartment, decorations on every wall, a big wooden E and G mounted over the main window — Elliott was on the phone with a friend, singing, making plans, forgetting he'd already made those plans, remaking them. Pure showman, even in his own living room with an audience of one. I sat down across from him at a huge partner desk cluttered with frog statuettes, a small alligator, stacks of books and papers, and — sitting right there in the pile — the copy of A Different Kind of Hero: Elliott Gould and New Hollywood I'd mailed him months earlier. He hung up eventually, and we talked for two hours. He did most of the talking. I didn't walk in with an agenda, and I mean that literally — there was no list of questions, no checklist of topics to get through. The point of the whole trip up that hill was just letting him see my face and register that I'm a real person, not a disembodied voice that calls on occasion and mails him books about himself. That part mattered more to him than it probably should have, given we've been talking for fourteen years; he still wants to get a proper release signed and make sure we're both covered, and this wasn't really the meeting where that happens — it was more a meeting of general understanding than a business meeting, the kind where you sit down specifically to establish that yes, this is in fact the guy.

Fourteen years of phone calls, one photograph.

He'd caught a couple of small factual errors in the manuscript a while back — Joseph Walsh is from Hell's Kitchen, not Brooklyn; a character got swapped around in my account of California Split — the kind of thing an editor's eye catches, not a smoking gun, but exactly the kind of thing I don't want sitting in a published book. I don't carry the title, but I consider myself some sort of journalist, and that standard doesn't bend for a good anecdote. He also asked about where the book stood. I told him I was close to done with the research — that I'd turned over every stone I knew how to turn over — and that the real work, the ruthless part, starts once I sit down with a red pen and read the whole manuscript like someone else wrote it. Charles Willeford says it in The Woman Chaser: the secret to writing is rewriting. I've believed that for thirty-some years, long before I ever thought I'd be applying it to a book about Elliott Gould.

Thursday started before I'd even gotten coffee: two filmmaker interviews, back to back, including a conversation about a Hungarian film I'd caught Tuesday night and genuinely loved. Lunch was technically with Janaé Rachel Ballot — a filmmaker who wrote and directed a film called Dissociated Me that I'll have a podcast episode on before long — except it wasn't really lunch. She swung by just to say hello and didn't even eat. She could be a therapist she was so nice to talk to. Then back to the Herrick. Then dinner at the Hollywood Roosevelt with Richard Hatem and Susan Lambert Hatem — Richard co-hosts our Harrison Ford podcast, Never Tell Me the Odds; Susan co-hosts 80s TV Ladies, over at Weirding Way Media. They showed me a mirror that supposedly once hung in Marilyn Monroe's room, told me about a phantom bugle that's said to come from Montgomery Clift's old floor, and the hotel's resident ghost girl, Caroline, for good measure. We grabbed ice cream after and just talked — about the Gould book, about the other five or six projects I'm juggling alongside it, about an embarrassingly funny firing I went through back in August. I don't think I've talked that much in one sitting in years. I felt a little bad hogging the oxygen in the room, but they seemed genuinely into it, which is a nice thing for two people to extend to a guy who usually asks the questions for a living.

Friday opened with breakfast with William Boodell, an editor working at Asylum who's also a filmmaker and podcaster. He told me at one point, apropos of nothing, I don't want to wax your car. Two hours later, a Herrick librarian — who turned out to be a listener of the podcast, home early from vacation specifically so he wouldn't miss me — used the exact same phrase. Twice, unrelated, same day. I guess it's better than the Australian version of this sentiment that involves peeing in someone's pocket, which strikes me as considerably worse than anything wax could do to your car. The phrase I usually use is “I don't want to blow smoke up your ass.” I believe that would cost $500 if you had a professional do it.

Honey, what's wrong? You're not eating your drive-thru spaghetti?

Lunch was Kevin Sukho Lee — a friend from Michigan who's been out here since the late nineties, worked on Yo Gabba Gabba, does music and visual art on the side, a genuinely talented guy. We've been talking for years. I genuinely could not tell you, sitting across from him over Cuban food, whether we'd ever actually met in person before. Ask me who the second guy from the left is in a 1974 studio lineup photo and I'll have an answer in two seconds. Ask me if I've met a person I talk to all the time, and apparently I need a minute. I have a lot more empathy now for Elliott asking me the same question back in that apartment on Wednesday.

Friday was also the last library day, which meant the last-minute scramble: I discovered around five o'clock that one of the Herrick's databases would let me download digitized material directly, started pulling what I could, and ran straight into the 6 p.m. closing bell with files still queued. I'll probably spend the rest of my life mildly regretting what I didn't grab in that last hour. There may be a library in metro Detroit with access to the same database. I intend to find out.

Dinner was Rich Edwards and his wife Vanessa at the Formosa Cafe, seated — appropriately, given the week I'd had — in the Marilyn Monroe booth. Vanessa worked as a Foley artist on the old MGM lot, right next door, and told me the restaurant is where the Foley-and-sound-editing crowd known as the Formosa Group got their name — a group I've actually interviewed people from, including Mark Mangini, who happened to be the working partner of Vanessa's ex-husband. Small town, this business. It was Rich's birthday weekend; he and Vanessa had gone to the George Lucas Museum earlier that day, which by every account sounds incredible, and which I skipped entirely, because I'd come out here with exactly one job and wasn't going to let the finish line slip for a museum, however good.

The Formosa Cafe, Rich's birthday weekend.

Saturday. A Waymo — my first ride in one, discount and all — to the LAX/Metro Transit Center, because, it turns out, Waymo doesn't go all the way to the terminal yet; then the free shuttle the rest of the way to Terminal 3 with enough time to write this post.

Los Angeles City Hall. No Martians seen.

The ride to the airport was less than the coffee there.

Somewhere in that last library day, a thought I'd been circling all week finally landed: there was no smoking gun on this trip, and there was never going to be one. I've been working on this book for fourteen years. Most of what's in the archive, I'd already tracked down in one form or another, by other means, over a decade of chasing it. What this week actually gave me was closure on the research itself — and saying goodbye to that phase is harder than I expected. There's always a nagging feeling that one more document would reframe the whole story. But I've done the due diligence. I want the people whose work set the bar for this kind of thing — Joseph McBride, Patrick McGilligan, Daniel Kremer, Max Evry — to look at what I've built and see one of their own. My angle's different from theirs; I'm less interested in Elliott the man than in Elliott's films, the ones that got made and the ones that almost did. There's a whole chapter on Glimpse of Tiger, the picture that was eventually, unrecognizably, remade as something else. There are a lot of almost-weres. The Travis McGee script I could only take notes on is me closing the loop on an essay I wrote years ago and am finally finishing.

And there's a ticking clock under all of it that I don't say out loud, not even to Elliott: he just turned 88. I want him to see this book finished. I'm not the kind of person who says that kind of thing directly to someone's face. But it's there, driving the urgency, whether I name it or not.

Fourteen years ago I started this because I wanted to understand Elliott Gould's career better than anyone else had bothered to. Twenty years before that, I was mailing little homemade newsletters through the U.S. Postal Service and writing to pen pals in Hiroshima and in Findlay, Ohio, because I've apparently always wanted to reach out into the world and see who grabs on. The zine was me doing that. The podcast is me doing that. This book is me doing that, except for the first time, the thing I'm asking people to pay attention to is partly myself, and I don't love that part. I'm working on it. Ask me again once the book's actually out and I have to talk about it for a living.

Right now there are thousands of photographs sitting on a hard drive, a few pink-ink-stained clippings I could only take notes on, and a flight home with a wheels-up time I'm about to miss writing this. The research base is closed. The red pen comes out next.