In the meantime, watch one of the greatest documentaries of this year, “Abducted in Plain Sight.” ​

Now, back to your regularly scheduled blog post. 
 
A Hooker’s Praise: The Ballad of Wiley Bowman Pt 2
 
Decades ago, I was at a strip club. As our party filed in, my bachelor party compatriots were immediately greeted with seductive compliments in hopes of being lured off into the back room for expensive table dances. The practical stripper who approached me, looked me over thoroughly and, after careful contemplation, could only manage to come up with, “Nice glasses.” 
What can I say? I’m a sucker for complements, whenever I am lucky enough to stumble upon one.
 
The call came after work. I was in downtown Portland coffee shop and the voice on the other end of the line was laid back, confident, smooth as a perfectly aged scotch and extremely complimentary. His name was Wiley Bowman Jr and he promptly reported that during his reading of my script, he laughed so hard that he had to immediately talk to the writer. Needless to say, it had been an extremely long time since I had received a literary compliment and, like the nice glasses line (which happened to work by the way), I had been smitten with the promise of a revived career. We chatted for a several minutes, Wiley reporting that he was casting another project but would get back to me soon. 
 
Things happened rather quickly from here. A deal memo was signed, and Wiley started assembling his crew. Keep in mind, all signed had at least one foot into the business we call show and knew a thing or two about getting movies made. There was a Producer, a Director of Photography and a Stunt Coordinator. While not heavyweights in the industry, these were individuals with produced work and solid resumes. 
 
WARNING #1 No money had exchanged hands, and all of the major players in this story were waiting until funding had been secured. 
 
In a matter of couple months, several other people signed on and a series of auditions were announced. These auditions took place in LA and were videotaped for prosperity. I still have a copy. Some of the faces of the hopefuls are even recognizable from film and television (twenty years ago). But why the hell shouldn’t they be? We were a speeding train, on the fast-track of successful independent filmmaking. How could we not succeed?
 
Keep in mind, all this happened without a single penny. Wiley believed he could round up his crew, his supporting cast and lure some upper grade talent from the major agencies and then proceed and get all the funding he needed. From where? Only he seemed to know. But he was confident as hell about it. So, there’s that.  
 
In going over the research material for this blog, I am struck by how far Wiley got with his plan. Not only did he have a crew and some of the cast, he also had a budget worked out. 
 
If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is. But I wanted this so bad, I refused to look at the whole situation realistically. Independent filmmaking is guerilla anyway. How was anyone to know what the rules really were. Wasn’t that the point? You make them up as you go along. Do anything just to get the project off the ground?
 
When it came down to casting leads, Wiley wooed one of the top agencies in LA and managed to sign some significant names to deal memos. 
 
Not only had he gotten through the door, he had been invited to the top floor for a meeting. Wiley told everyone involved that he was close to finalizing this whole deal. All he needed was to sign the leads and the financial backers would be lined up outside his door. The meeting was scheduled at the Beverly Hills Agency and Wiley requested that a few of the key players be there. I remember asking him, “we’re close, aren’t we?” He assured me we were very near the finish line. I, ever the optimist, announced in FB that I was going to be famous. The next day, I jumped in my car and drove the 1,100 miles to Beverly Hills.
 

The view from Beverly Hills

To be continued (in a few weeks)

Art by Tadd Galusha

​We had finally turned the corner on the millennium, I was back in Portland and had not heard so much as a peep from anyone in the film industry. I had exhausted most of my contacts, managing to piss off the few good leads left in the entire City of Angels. The year was 2003 and I felt my only course of career action was to start from scratch, this time revisiting some of the older material in my portfolio in hopes of reworking into a commercially viable candidate. The screenplay I chose, “The Touristers.” 
 
A bit of historical perspective is in order. “The Touristers” was the second of my stories to generate a small bit of, eh, Hollywood heat. The logline for this masterpiece is as follows:
 
Leading a caravan of RVs, filled with a riotous assortment of tourists, through Baja is not the relaxing vacation, middle-aged gym teacher Marion C. Carlson hankers for.  His rebellious, high-spirited teen daughter, Carolyn, and his mutinous "Touristers" are the least of his worries.  South of the border, Carlson incurs the wrath of a bloodthirsty tribe of outlaw bikers and circling the wagons may be a classic western case of too little, too late.
 
Back in the day,“The Touristers” was represented by an East Coast agency, Manhattan Artists, and optioned for $1000.00 by none other than John Ratzenberger (Cliff, the mailman on the hit NBC show “Cheers”). I know, right? It was the early eighties and I was naive enough to think my stellar career as a Hollywood screenwriter was only just beginning. Reality hit when I drove the 1000 miles to LA to meet my television star benefactor, only to be literally turned away at the door. Anxious calls to my agent in New York were not returned, and it seemed that a life-long dream had stalled before it had even started.
 
Flash forward, twenty-some years later and I had reworked the script and spruced it up for a promising new decade. I thought the rewrite went well, taking the needed time necessary to flesh out some of the father/daughter relationship, tighten up some of the gags and come up with a “Magnificent 7” style opening to the story. Finally, after weeks of work, I was ready. But who would I send it to? There were only a couple of names remaining on my contact list and I was pretty sure that they had either forgotten who I was or wanted nothing to do with me. I was desperate, with only place to turn.
 
Still in its adolescence , the World Wide Web had once been a Gold Rush for screenwriters, featuring hundreds of sites where you could publish your logline, pray that it wasn’t stolen and unrealistically expect email offers and options from creatively starved and morally bankrupt producers to come pouring in. Much like the Yukon over a century ago, it did not take long for this so-called rush to exhaust itself and, over the years, most of sites dried up. I know as I spent hours desperately searching the survivors out in the Ethernet. I was about to give up entirely when I finally came upon it. One site had survived like an angry weed or persevering cockroach. The site was administered by a man named Wiley Bowman and it was called, “All Things Entertainment.”
 
A quick note about the “All Things Entertainment” website. There were plenty of simple, easy to use customizable website templates available for any wannabe webmaster. Apparently these were ignored as this website had the virtual look of Spawn Ranch shortly before Charlie Manson moved in. Never-the-less, despite the warning of inferior web design, I submitted my logline. Why not? It wasn’t like anyone else was asking for my material. I knew it for what it was, a Hail Mary. I also felt that I had all my protective and legal bases covered. The material was copyrighted and registered with the Writers Guild of America West (Several times in fact). It wasn’t like someone on the internet would ever think of ripping me off. Right?   
 
(To be Continued)