Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  Before dinner Andreas took enough meds to ensure that he was relatively free of pain, and we spent the night eating, laughing, and telling stories. The conversation was sufficiently profane that in a more polite century it would’ve gotten us burned at the stake.

  Toward the end of the evening Andreas sat back from the table and smiled. “Do me a favor,” he said, “tell me all the stuff I never knew about the show, all the dirt, the secrets, all of it. I mean, who am I gonna tell?”

  And we did.

  As Andreas began to tire we decided to take our leave. He escorted us to the door, then paused to look at each of us one at a time. When it was my turn, he held my gaze and I saw in his eyes that he was burning the moment into his memory, and mine.

  Without speaking the words, he was saying good-bye.

  Then he gave each of us a hug, and we stepped out into the night.

  It was the last time I saw him alive.

  Andreas Katsulas passed away on February 13, 2006, and to this day I remain profoundly moved by his equanimity, courage, and humor. Faced with a similar diagnosis I would have collapsed into a fetal position and never gotten up again. If I can approach my end with even a fraction of his grace, I will account myself a brave man.

  By 2006 I had been out of full-time television for three years, and my savings were nearly exhausted. Friends urged me to sell the house, move somewhere else, and give up this whole Hollywood thing, maybe go teach instead. Quitting made sense; when you’re shooting craps at a casino and the dice turn against you, the smart move is to cash out and run, because if you stay at the table when you’re vulnerable, you could lose all of it.

  I chose to stay, even though that meant taking out a second mortgage on my house and borrowing heavily from my pension plan. Alarmed by the precariousness of our situation, my accountant put pressure on me to make something happen fast or face dire consequences. He was especially grave the day he, I, and Kathryn met to authorize the last possible loan I could take against my retirement fund.

  “I hate saying this,” he said, “but you had a great run as a reporter, another solid run in television, then comics . . . very few people in this town ever get a third act, let alone a fourth.” Then, though obviously well-meaning, he made the mistake of joining the You’re Done chorus and said, “Maybe it’s time to get out of the writing business, do something else.”

  I blew my stack. It would’ve been one thing if I’d failed as a writer, if I wasn’t telling good stories anymore, but I was writing as well as I’d ever written, maybe better. The problem was that none of my work was getting out because a handful of people had decided I was done as a writer and were doing everything possible to ensure their prediction became reality.

  “I’ll get through this,” I said, louder than intended.

  “How?” he asked.

  “Goddamnit, I don’t know! I don’t know how or where or when but sooner or later I will write my way out of this! I just need you to believe that!”

  He didn’t.

  I signed the papers. The loan would have to be repaid quickly, and I had absolutely no idea where that money would come from.

  Afterward, Kathryn and I adjourned to Mel’s Diner in Sherman Oaks. I was furious at my accountant, at myself, and at the people who had decided that my career was over. As my temper cooled I glanced across the table at Kathryn, whose financial fate was inextricably linked to my own. If I stayed in the game and failed, I’d take her down with me; we’d both go bankrupt. She was entitled to a voice in that decision.

  “Is he right?” I asked at last. “Should I just admit defeat and get out of the business?”

  She sat back and crossed her arms, head tilted in the signature way that told you she was clicking through responses with laserlike speed. “You said back there that you can write your way out of this,” she said. “Do you honestly believe that?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Then keep fighting,” she said. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  From Kathryn, much later: “I must have looked at you like you had the proverbial two heads because of course I didn’t think you should quit! Never have, never will. It’s not only what you do, it’s who you are. And that’s a good thing, in my opinion. It’s what makes you so good at both writing and producing. It’s what lifts you out of the ordinary.”

  Just in case anyone was wondering why we’re still friends.

  By now I had arrived at the kind of cold, clinical understanding that comes with any terminal diagnosis that if I didn’t do something soon to jump-start my career, I would no longer have one. When a writer, actor, or director is unemployed for three years, he passes from he’s in a transitional period to he’s hard-core unemployable, he’s been off the market too long. Not only was I at the far edge of that timeline, I was fifty-two. By that age the studios figure they’ve seen everything you have to offer, so they wander off after the next shiny object, secure in the belief that you have no more surprises left, no new colors left to show. You are what they think you are, and if they think it’s over for you . . . it’s over.

  Nearly all the TV writers you knew during the ’80s have fallen by the wayside, a part of my brain whispered. They’re either out of the business completely or their careers are on life support. Why should you be the exception? Why put that kind of pressure on yourself? They’re right, the odds of you getting a fourth act are pretty slim. Maybe you should just let it go.

  Suddenly I was right back in that ambulance in Chula Vista, racing toward a hospital after six guys tried to kill me. I’d gotten angry that night, angrier than I’d ever been before, because I still had stories to tell. Now that rage returned tenfold. I hadn’t come so far, worked so hard, and sacrificed so much of my life to the work only to see it end in this humiliating fashion.

  Never let them stop you from telling the story you want to tell.

  Fucking A.

  I didn’t leave the house for days, then weeks. I didn’t want to see anyone. I needed to be alone. Voice mails accumulated: Are you okay? Nobody’s heard anything from you in ages. I didn’t return them. I needed to let the anger build into a fire big enough to show me a way out.

  When I hit critical mass, ready to claw my own skin off, I went to Santa Monica and walked to an empty bench at the end of the pier. I sat there for hours, looking out at the water, running options through my head like a rat in a box, desperately trying to chew its way through to a solution. Nothing came. The afternoon turned to shadows. I stayed put. The shadows turned to cold night. Wearing just a light shirt, I shivered in the dark.

  Tough shit, we’re not leaving. We’re going to figure this out if we have to sit here all week.

  Then another voice came drifting up out of my subconscious, something Harlan Ellison had written years earlier, which I quoted in the frontispiece of my scriptwriting book.

  Don’t be afraid. That simple. Don’t let them scare you. There’s nothing they can do to you . . . a writer always writes. That’s what he’s for. And if they won’t let you write one kind of thing, if they chop you off at the pockets in the market place, then go to another market place. And if they close off all the bazaars then by god go and work with your hands till you can write, because the talent is always there. But the first time you say, “Oh, Christ, they’ll kill me,” then you’re done. Because the chief commodity a writer has to sell is his courage, and if he has none he is more than a coward. He is a sellout and a fink and a heretic, because writing is a holy chore.

  Writing is a holy chore.

  I stared up at the moon. Back in San Diego I’d spent every penny to buy writing supplies instead of food, determined to keep going despite starvation, failure, and all the people who refused to believe in me, ready to do whatever was necessary to make it as a writer or die trying.

  If you’re still there, I thought at my younger self, then we need to work together to get out of this. There are stories I still need to tell, and I refuse to give up on them. If that mean
s selling the house and everything I own to buy time to make this work, then that’s what I’ll do. I choose to stay and fight, to write my way out of this, but I need your help to figure out how.

  With that thought, a flare went up somewhere deep inside my brain. For the last ten years, a box had been sitting in my office containing hundreds of pages of letters, transcripts, and newspaper articles detailing the case of Christine Collins. I’d failed repeatedly to crack that story because I lacked the skills needed to properly honor what she endured while fighting for her missing son.

  Can I pull this off now? I wondered. I’ve always envisioned whatever talent I have as existing outside me, whispering into my ear from just behind my right shoulder, the connection between us thinner than a spider’s thread. I fired a question down the web. Do I finally have enough tools in my toolbox to write this?

  The reply came back, I think so.

  You think so or you know so?

  There’s only one way to find out. But it has to be a movie, not a television script.

  It made sense. Writing a feature script would let me go around my TV agent at the Creative Artists Agency (CAA)* to Martin Spencer, an agent in the film division. I’d never had much contact with Martin, so I had no way to predict how he would react to the material, but at least he wouldn’t be biased against me. I had no illusions about selling the screenplay, let alone seeing it produced, but if it passed muster with Martin, it would go to movie executives who wouldn’t know or care about my history or that I was “difficult” because once a studio buys a screenplay they’re done with the writer; they wouldn’t have to live with me. The best I thought I could hope for was that the script might give me a chance to pitch on other projects.

  It was nearly dawn when I finally stood, sore and shivering, and made my way off the Santa Monica Pier. I’d come there alone, but now there were two of us walking back. In the past, whenever the bullies, the muggers, and my father came at us we fought back until we couldn’t get up off the ground and we still wouldn’t back down. This was no different. The people who had put us in this position wore suits and ties and worked in expensive offices, but they were just another kind of bully. They were sure that if they kept pounding us long enough and hard enough sooner or later we’d shut up and they could say they’d won. But we’d never given them that satisfaction before, and we weren’t about to do so now.

  As I headed home, the title for the screenplay floated up at me: a term out of mythology for one child substituted for another. It seemed apt given what Christine endured when the LAPD brought back a child they insisted was her missing son but was in fact someone else. But it also applied to this attempt to reinvent myself one last time, to win a fourth act and replace one career, one life, with another.

  I would call it Changeling.

  Chapter 31

  What Was I Thinking?

  Over the years, I’d managed to accumulate several hundred pages of documentation about Christine Collins, but to tell the story properly I would need every bit of available information. So I returned to sifting through dark basements and microfiche reels at the Los Angeles Police Department and City Hall archives, the LA County Hospital historical files, the Los Angeles Times morgue, and the LA Public Library, gathering over two thousand pages of reference material. The crown jewel, the record that had eluded me for years, was the transcript of the murder trial. These documents finally allowed me to triangulate the three sides of the puzzle behind one of the most heinous crimes in Los Angeles history.

  On one side of the triangle was Christine Collins, a single mother who never aspired to politics or sought the limelight. But after her son was kidnapped and the LAPD tried to force her to accept a boy they mistakenly identified as her own, she went to war with the police, a battle that exposed a serial killer and brought down the chief of police and the mayor of Los Angeles.

  On another side was Gordon Stewart Northcott, a psychopath who kidnapped young, defenseless children and brought them to a ranch in Riverside where they were assaulted and killed, their bodies dismembered, burned, and buried.

  The final side of this story was occupied by the LAPD, which in 1928 was infamous for its brutality and lack of accountability for violent acts committed against the citizens of Los Angeles. The police owned Los Angeles and were willing to do whatever was necessary to maintain control. This led to protests and a demand for reform by newspapers and private citizens. The LAPD was desperate for some positive press, and returning a lost child to his tearful mother would give them exactly the boost they needed. So rather than admit their mistake when they brought back the wrong child, they threw Christine into an asylum to pressure her into accepting this interloper as her own. The LAPD’s refusal to acknowledge the truth allowed a serial killer to continue his work unimpeded.

  Once all the research was in place I set out to write the script as fast as I could to avoid second-guessing myself. Drawing on my experience as a reporter, I hewed closely to the facts, quoting dialogue verbatim from articles, letters, and public records because the events were so bizarre that if I got even one thing wrong it would call the whole story into question. I threw every bit of myself into that script: my background in psychology informed the scenes of her incarceration; the memory of my mother’s institutionalization propped up Christine’s time in the asylum; and for one of the most disturbing scenes, in which Northcott tries to entice a young boy into his car, I hearkened back to my experience of being chased by unknown parties through the streets of Paterson.

  For two weeks I barely ate or slept, writing in white heat to the exclusion of everything else until I typed Fade Out. Since the story was so unbelievable, I took the unusual step of seeding the screenplay with photos and newspaper clippings designed to prove that yes, this actually happened.

  At three in the morning on the last day of that writing jag, I printed the final version of the script, bound it with brass brads, and just looked at it for a long time, too scared to send it off. In the past I’d whined that my work could’ve been so much better if not for the interference of networks and studios. Now the universe had called my bluff: this time there had been no compromises. More than anything in years Changeling represented who I was as a writer. If it was good enough to draw positive attention, then I’d been right to stick it out. But if the script wasn’t good enough, if it hit the wall and bounced, then maybe I didn’t have what it takes and should find another career.

  Physicist Erwin Schrödinger postulated that if you place a cat in a box containing a vial of poison gas with a 50/50 chance of being released, the cat is not alive or dead but simultaneously alive and dead, existing as two quantum possibilities. It’s only when you look inside the box that the two quantum possibilities fold into one reality: a live cat or a dead one. As long as I didn’t attach the script to an email and hit send, my career was simultaneously alive and dead. But the moment it went off, one of those quantum possibilities would emerge as my new reality, and I was terrified it would be the wrong one.

  Get it over with, I thought, and emailed it to Martin Spencer’s office with a note to his assistant asking her to print it and leave it on his desk so he’d find it first thing when he came in. I hadn’t told him what I was working on, fearing that I might not be able to pull it off, so when he called later that day he was surprised and intrigued.

  “What’s this?” he asked brightly as he scanned the title. “Changeling . . . science fiction? Horror?” It was a reasonable assumption. Both genres were popular in the marketplace, the title sounded SFish, and I was known almost exclusively for working in those arenas.

  “It’s a mainstream drama,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said. It obviously wasn’t the answer he’d hoped for, but he remained chipper. “Contemporary though, right?”

  “Actually, it’s a period mainstream drama.”

  “Ah.” The enthusiasm left his voice. Those three words are considered the kiss of death since they usually result in the script never being
bought at all, or at most a small sale to an independent producer who might never make the damned thing.

  “So what’s it about?” he asked, rising to the challenge.

  “A serial killer.”

  “Lots of serial killer specs making the rounds these days. Really needs to be something special to compete with that. Who does he kill?”

  “Children.”

  If it’s possible to hear someone wince over the phone, I heard Martin wince.

  “It’s the story of the mother of one of the boys who gets kidnapped,” I added quickly. “She goes on a crusade to try and save her son.”

  His voice brightened. “So she finds him?”

  “Umm . . . no, actually, she doesn’t.”

  In the voice of someone who doesn’t want you to know he feels a headache coming on, Martin thanked me for sending the script then promised to read it that evening and get back to me.

  Idiot, I thought. I’d just blown my chance to enlist someone who might believe in me and my work. Why hadn’t I written a big SF movie? Or a horror film? Or anything other than a depressing period drama about a woman who gets thrown into an asylum after her son goes missing and is presumed sliced into little pieces? What the hell was I thinking?

  In my head I turned to the twelve-year-old version of myself for support.

  What’re you looking at me for? he said. I don’t even understand girls yet.

  I barely slept that night, worried that he might not respond positively to the material. And even if he did like it, the odds of one script having a significant effect on my career were somewhere between slim and none.

  He called the next day, very excited, to say that the script was one of the best he’d ever read. “I think this is a Ron Howard film,” he said. “Is it okay if I give it to him?”