Taxi driver and former member of the Blades Pat Larkin packs his film script - set in 1960s Ringsend - and tries his luck in Tinseltown
My normal day consists of driving a taxi through Dublin traffic in rush hour in the rain. So when I picked up the film director John Schultz, while he was in town making The Honeymooners, little did I know where it would end. I had taken him and his father to Ringsend, to sample some real Dublin pubs. After a few drinks I told them about my childhood there. He asked if I had thought of writing it all down. As luck would have it, I had. The next day I gave him The Pickaroonie, my film script, set in the late 1960s, about four teenagers who kill a tramp. He suggested I take it to Hollywood. Before you could say "John Wayne" he was collecting me at Los Angeles International Airport.
As we drove to his house he stopped at the Hollywood Bowl to show me the Hollywood sign, but it had been raining for three weeks, and mist was still covering the hills. We carried on up steep winding roads, past homes hanging precariously on stilts over the edges of dangerous-looking hills. "Do you see that gap in the hill there?" Schultz asked. "A house worth millions of dollars slid down the hill and smashed to pieces a couple of months ago." I prayed his house wasn't on stilts.
Later, I asked how he ended up in Hollywood. "When I was 13 I made a short film called Skateboard Story. At 23 I moved to Hollywood and got a job on Bull Durham. I was a driver. I drove Kevin Costner, Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon around. Then, after editing documentaries for a while, I was offered a job directing. I met Steven Spielberg and directed The Making of Hook and The Making of Jurassic Park . . . After that I made my first feature film, Bandwagon, which Steven Spielberg liked, and out of 900 features it was picked to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival. A producer called Amy Robinson, who starred in Martin Scorsese's film Mean Streets, asked me to direct two films. I ended up making Like Mike, which was a huge success."
It sounds like plain sailing. "No. Studios are like factories. The seven studios each make maybe 15 movies a year. They develop 200 and take maybe 45 right up to the day of shooting, but they don't get made. I spent over two years working on three films that never got made. That's just the way it is." What are my chances? "There's probably 10,000 scripts in play here, and now your script is in play here. Most don't get past the office door."
In the morning we flew to Phoenix, in Arizona. Schultz was going to Sedona, two hours' drive from Phoenix, as a guest director at the town's film festival. I was going to see the festival and Andrew McCarthy, the St Elmo's Fire and Mulholland Falls actor, who was directing his first short film, based on a story by Frank O'Connor, called News for the Church.
Sedona is a small cowboy town surrounded by red hills with names such as Bear Mountain and Thunder Mountain. I recognised them from the cowboy films I grew up with. Locals call it John Wayne country. This was also Indian country; Navajo were selling their wares in shops and from stalls. I met my first Native American. Her name was Audrey. What sort of name is that for a Navajo, I asked her. She told me she couldn't tell me her Navajo name. "It's a secret until I go to the next world."
We swapped stories of oppression and colonialism. She told me of her tribe's constant struggle with the US government. She told me she had an uncle in the FBI, stationed in Spain, and was going to visit him this year. We bad-mouthed our old enemies for a while. Then she gave me her e-mail address and the name of a Navajo website, www.navajoland.com.
I checked into Amara Creekside Resort, a place to "harness your positive energy". This may give you an idea of where it was coming from. It was hippy heaven. I decided it was time to look for a bar, especially when, at breakfast, the resort manager went around every table, looked at the guests and put down pieces of sculpture he thought reflected their moods. My table was given a deformed clown swinging from a trapeze.
The film festival was showing more than 100 features to a packed multiplex. Hundreds of students came to each masterclass. There were short films from all over the world, including McCarthy's film of O'Connor's short story. I asked how he ended up making it.
"I read a book of his on holiday in Ireland in 1989 and couldn't get it out of my head. The story is only seven pages long, and I said to myself, I would love to make a film of this. Finally, last year, I bought the rights from his widow, who was glad someone was taking an interest in her husband's work. The original story was about a girl confessing her sins to a priest, and I expanded it to include a boy who is beaten to death."
Why did he expand it? "I loved Frank O'Connor's dialogue, and his story happens entirely in a confession box, so rather than mess with his words to expand the story I wrote a separate scene outside the box. I was also making this as a showreel, my directorial debut, and I thought if I made it solely in a confession box it showed no action. I also loved including the idea of physical violence. I identified with the boy and the fact that when physical violence starts it's difficult to stop."
McCarthy's girlfriend joined us. She turned out to be a Dubliner called Dolores Rice, from Blackrock. McCarthy sat silently as Rice and I nattered about Ringsend.
After watching what seemed like a million films over three days, I was invited to an awards ceremony. I was a lone Irishman in the Rocky Mountains with a film script and a roomful of movie heavyweights. So I had a few drinks and weighed in.
As Linda Gray, the Dallas star, presented Ed Asner - aka Lou Grant - with an award I spoke to her partner, the writer Dan Gordon, who gave me some great advice and the names of producers he thought could be interested in my script. Gordon, who wrote Wyatt Earp, told me he was putting the finishing touches to his script for Rambo IV, in which an ageing Sylvester Stallone saves the free world again. He also made an appointment for me with a production company called Pamlico Pictures.
The next morning, on the drive back to Phoenix, we stopped at a store in the middle of nowhere run by a Vietnam-vet type wearing an army uniform and sharpening a huge hunting knife. "Can I have two bottles of water, please?" I asked, looking around at the biggest display of knives I've ever seen. He pointed at a fridge in the corner and asked if I wanted to buy a knife. "You never know when you might need a knife," he mumbled. I paid for the water and hurried out of the store.
We flew back to Hollywood, where my jet lag went ballistic. Unable to sleep, I flicked between 100 television channels with nothing on except weird adds, like one for stool softener and a spooky one for funeral parlours.
The next day I went to Paramount in my rented Oldsmobile, armed with an introduction from Schultz and copies of my script. I met some of the studio's executives. They were very curious about my story, and promised to read it and get back to me. After lunch in the Paramount restaurant, surrounded by extras in all sorts of costumes, we went up to an editing suite, where I watched The Honeymooners being put together.
The following day Schultz, his dad and I drove to Malibu Beach, to meet Richard Gibbs, a musician and music director on many films and television shows, including The Simpsons. We visited his music studio, built in the grounds of his house, around the corner from Bob Dylan (whose garden was like a rubbish tip) and Martin Sheen (who owns a neat and tidy family home).
Gibb took us to lunch at Paradise Cove Beach Cafe, a restaurant on a stretch of sand famous for nude bathing. The restaurant is also a regular haunt of Hollywood's elite. So there I was, sipping cocktails, and not a nude star in sight. What a rip-off.
That evening Shawn Maurer, The Honeymooners' cinematographer, his wife, Margaret, and son, Dillon, invited a group of friends, including Eric Stoltz, who was in Pulp Fiction, to a pool party. Stoltz came with his Irish girlfriend, Bernadette Moley, a very pretty singer-songwriter who started her life in the US as an animator with Disney. Her album, All I Want, was a number-one iTunes download. So it was music, hot tubs, Hawaiian shirts, shorts, bikinis and margaritas until dark. Someone had to do it.
The next night I went to the oldest restaurant in Hollywood, a place called the Musso & Frank Grill, with Howard Franklin, who wrote Someone to Watch Over Me, and his wife, Anne Litt, a DJ on a Santa Monica radio station called KCRW. The waiters, all men in their late 60s wearing red velvet jackets, served us Martinis to start an evening of star-spotting. The huge rooms were full of old money and old Hollywood, sitting in private booths. I was expecting to see George Raft or Humphrey Bogart at any minute. Franklin had read my stories; Litt had heard of The Blades, my old band. Four cocktails and a few glasses of wine later I was the only one as high as a kite. Americans have only the one drink.
I also went to the House of Blues, on Sunset Boulevard, to see Flogging Molly, a band fronted by a Ringsend man called Dave King, who were finishing a 17-date sell-out tour of the US. They're coming to Dublin this summer: look out for a seven-piece band who are a cross between The Clash and The Pogues.
It was St Patrick's Day the next day, when Flogging Molly played to 20,000 fans and I went to meet David Friendly, the producer of Dr Dolittle and Big Momma's House as well as The Honeymooners, at the production offices of his latest film, Big Momma's House 2. He was on a conference call, so I sat down, opened a bag I had brought with me and laid out a box of cigars (a gift from a friend of his in Dublin) and a couple of CDs (a gift from me). When he saw them he announced to his callers: "Right, gentlemen, we'll have to wrap this up. Something important has come up."
It was too early to talk about my script, so I asked how he got into films. "I began as a journalist - I worked on the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek - then the director Ron Howard, who had a company called Imagine Films, approached me." Why approach a journalist? "I was covering the film business, and there was a trend in the early 1980s of recruiting journalists into production companies. It's not all that different between looking for stories for the newspaper and looking for stories for film."
I thought this was as good a time as any, so I handed him my script. He smiled and flicked through the pages, listening as I told him the story. "Well, Pat, I'll definitely look at it," he said. Delighted, and my hard sell over with, I asked how he ended up making films in Ireland.
"I became a partner with a guy called John Davis, and we did four movies: Courage Under Fire, Out to Sea, Daylight and Doctor Dolittle." Were they hits, I asked, having only seen Doctor Dolittle, which I didn't think much of. "They were all pretty successful. . . I then made Big Momma's House, and that was the biggest success of my career. I formed a company called Deep River Productions, which brought me to Ireland for the first time. . . We had a great crew in Dublin - they worked really hard - and that's one of the great advantages of filming there.
"I suggested to the Irish Film Board that we make a short film showing scenes that were shot in Ireland that look like anywhere in the world, with a producer like myself hosting it, so American studios can see Americans are really comfortable filming in Ireland." Is it being done? "Well, no, the film board didn't want to do it."
Another producer rushed into the office and began talking millions again, so I said goodbye and went to Venice Beach, where I watched Angelinos parade along the shore. As I walked past muscle-bound men and bikini babes it occurred to me that, having met the Irish in America, the one thing I'm sure of is that, if you're at the bottom, with nothing but an idea, this is a place where you can still get a break.
My last trip before the dream ended was with Margaret Maurer. We went to the desert to see the Joshua trees, which were blooming for the first time in years because of the heavy rainfall. Our surroundings looked barren until you got up close and saw the incredible trees, Indian wall carvings, roadrunners and rattlesnakes.
On my last day in Tinseltown I got word from Pamlico Pictures that it wanted to option The Pickaroonie but set it in the US. I was thrilled it wanted my script, but I did not see it as an American story. I said I'd think about it.
Heading for the airport, Schultz turned on KCRW. Anne Litt was playing the Blades single Ghost of a Chance. She dedicated it to me.