Journey South

The saga of the screenplay you're about to read really begins the day that I broke my self-imposed rule about getting involved with "complicated" ( i.e. "serious" )subject matter in my hit-and-run career as a screenwriter for the movies. I had come to Hollywood in 1949 as an invited author of prize-winning fictions, ---and saw writing for film a good way to subsidize my profound commitment to the art of prose --- having learned that -in the majority of cases, -- the General Motors assembly line model of filmmaking --which Hollywood pioneered, ------------(and prospered from!) ---pretty much means that the pervasive confusion-- or collision between "Art" and Commerce---- which runs like a Wagnerian leitmotif through many aspects of mass film making, -- is apt to be trumped sooner or later by the pluses and minuses of The Bottom Line; thus, anyone foolish enough to take seriously the ongoing rhetorical (off-stage) palaver one tends to keep hearing about the unexploited "potential" of film as a medium to plumb the "enigmatic" depths of human experience etc..-is eventually going to hit a brick wall, as I witnessed, firsthand, more than once, ........In my particular case, I certainly DID work (under a pseudonym) on some favorite projects of various producers now and then, in both film and television --But on the whole, I simply found it more congenial to my temperament to follow a freewheeling (figurative) surfboarding life as a free lance, where, if you weren't able to reach success (i.e. pay dirt!) on any particular try, you could always try again.