Last Summer At The Marmont

For reasons that remain unknown and mysterious to me — perhaps challenging myself as a writer, I’m not certain — I took a brief excursion into the world of playwriting in 2004. The first play I wrote was titled Last Summer At The Marmont, a three-act drama chronicling the last days of an obsolete Hollywood movie producer. The lead was modeled on Howard Gottfried, who earned a stellar reputation as producer of Paddy Chayefsky’s brilliant screenplays for The Hospital (1971), Network (1976), and Altered States (1980). When Chayefsky passed away in 1981, Gottfried sunk into sort of an oblivion, producing dreck such as Brian DePalma’s “Body Double” and the big-screen adaptation of Harvey Fierstein’s “Torch Song Trilogy”.

A few months after completing Marmont I teamed up with playwright/songwriter Tom Flannery and together we wrote Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller. From a reader review at Lulu Publishing:

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“I’ve been interested in the life and work of the playwright and actor Jason Miller for some time - “That Championship Season” is the play that got me interested in theater, I grew up in west Scranton, I met Miller briefly (in a bar, of course), and, well, there’s more than a few spectacular Irish flame-outs in my own family…

“There’s not much biography available on Miller, other than the basic facts in Who’s Who (of which I’m aware, anyway), and Miller himself shunned autobiography. Other than the plays that remain in print and the filmed performances, there isn’t much primary source research available.

“Mr. Jacobs conducted extensive interviews with Miller’s friends and associates when writing this one-act play, and it shows. It’s a well written piece, and insightful on the self-destructive mythology of the Irish-American writer, I’d disagree with his dramatic assessment of Miller’s final years - I suspect that Miller was probably the happier for “turning his back on Hollywood” and returning to his hometown, which probably was a more fertile creative environment for Miller than L.A. (a sentiment that Mr. Jacobs has Miller himself proclaim in the play). I also suspect that, despite the effects of alcoholism on Miller’s career and relationships, he was respected and liked by many in Scranton, and was not the stereotypical “town drunk” but was enjoying something of a creative resurgence at the time of his death.

“That aside, “Go Irish” is a well-written play, and I’d like to see it performed on the stage. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in Jason Miller, and anyone interested in Irish-American writers, and how the need to live up to an image can overtake one’s self.”

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“Go Irish” enjoyed a five-day run at The Northeast Theater in Scranton in September 2006. I was too busy struggling for sheer survival in North Beach at the time to attend the run but I’m told the play was well-received.

Cass Paley, with whom I co-produced the award-winning documentary “Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes”, has been casually shopping “Marmont” as fodder for a low-budget “art film” for a couple of years now, with my blessings, of course. Yesterday I received news that a friend of Paley’s, a retired development exec at Paramount to be exact, read “Marmont”, loved it, and asked if I would have any objections to seeing the play produced as an Off Broadway production. Are you freakin’ kidding me? Objections? Two days ago the play was sent to the legendary Nederlander Organization in New York for their consideration. Keep your fingers crossed.

Incidentally, my favorite passage from “Go Irish” was written by neither Tom or myself. It’s Miller’s own words, from an interview that we were permitted to use, in which Miller discusses F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood:

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“Fitzgerald — When he tried to get into films, he never felt he belonged. He never fucking belonged in Hollywood. He began to feel the fire was starting to go. He had monetary problems, a smashed marriage, a sick wife. All this, plus as ebbing talent. And the guilt. Didn’t tend to his own garden. A lot of weeds got in there.

“Curiously enough, as much as he wrote about the rich, I really believe he hated them. I believe he despised them in some other level of his being. His decline really started with the Wall Street Crash in 1929. You can time it. The world was no longer interested in the rich as escapists. The rich put this country goddamn near the brink of destruction. The rich were jumping out of windows. They no longer the myths that fascinated people. We were beginning to question these people, and we weren’t liking what we found. But this was his milieu. And when that world collapsed, his talent collapsed. He couldn’t find other fertile ground to lay his seed in. He was trapped within his fatal attraction to the rich, not only in their life-style, but in their literary value to him. He mined that vein, and when that vein went, he went.

“The beautiful thing about it was that he made a desperate lunge in Hollywood, a tragically sad attempt to change his life. He endured incredible humiliations to try to get back on top. The man who had been the center of the fucking world was slipping into anonymity and obscurity.

“He had that kind of romantic fatalism where women became myths and goddesses to him, and then they became all too human. There was no balance. Fitzgerald was a total extremist. He was one of the last of the true romantics. His skull should have cracked open on a pyre in Malibu. He and Zelda flew too near the sun, the both of them. They flew too fucking near the sun, and whoosh!”

(Photo: Heidi Klum on the balcony of the Marmont penthouse, MSNBC)