London Review of Books 45 (2023), 12

In April​ 1973, on a Pan Am 747 jumbo jet from London to LA, I took my seat in the upstairs dining room opposite a Cincinnati salesman and his wife. He sold screws – really. Just as improbably, I had sold my first novel to the movies. The tablecloth, the silverware, the crystal wine glasses, the Chateaubriand being carved in front of us at five hundred miles an hour felt extraordinary, a swank unreality that matched my elevated mood. I was 32. I was going to Hollywood. I was making a movie. I was going to be a screenwriter.

I thought about Dad up there among the clouds and hoped he was looking down. He could finally stop worrying about me ‘making a buck’. A couple of years earlier, Sticky My Fingers, Fleet My Feet, a short film I’d written with the director John Hancock about touch football in Central Park, had been nominated for an Oscar. (It played with Woody Allen’s Bananas at New York’s Baronet Theatre to brisk business.) In a giddy moment, we’d even taken out one of those bow-wow fuck-off ads in Variety thanking ‘the Industry’ for our nomination. My trajectory seemed as straight and clear as the plane’s flight path on the cabin TV screen. The days of word counts, deadlines, kill fees, dud plays were behind me. From now on I would spend my literary life alternating between writing novels and adapting them for the silver screen. As the song says: ‘Go out and try your luck/You may be Donald Duck/Hooray for Hollywood.’ America had always been a percentage play, and Hollywood was the fabulous embodiment of the nation’s faith in pluck and luck. To a society that fancied itself a Redeemer Nation, the bonanza of stars, paydays and lush life were proof positive that the system worked. I liked my chances.