"Taste Is No Object" or Writing with Richard

Brautigan was fascinated by how different everyone looks, and the little worlds they build. So he notices that western and gangster movies feature a dwarf—or child—as a messenger type then in Troutfishing In America he uses Troutfishing Shorty for that, boxing him up and shipping the dwarf to Nelson Algren—a writer whom Richard admired, for his hard-boiled style and desperate characters. That trippy novel has a cinematic effect, due in part to Richard's love of old movies gained from impoverished days staying warm in matinees. I collaborated with him on a screenplay, TRAILER, and from that intoxicating experience I can pass along a few ideas about how he worked, and what the effort cost him.

We had met in the kitchen of Ed and Jenny Dorn's house in Boulder, in the summer of 1980. Richard was in town for literary events, but to escape that attention we joined a redneck party in the mountains north of town for an amiable Sunday of drinking, loud Kinks records and some careful target practice. Following a fishing trip to his home in the Paradise Valley of Montana, my wife and I were convinced to move to Bozeman—it was, unbelievably, a cheap ski town then.

For the first year of our friendship we did not discuss his books. Dorn, my teacher, was an old friend of Richard's, so there was little of the wariness he had for fans or critics. Richard was proud of the fact that regular people read his books—he enjoyed talking to a carpet-layer from Livingston in a bar as much as Leslie Fiedler (his comparison). Like most self-taught geniuses, his reading was wide, intense, and happily unaware of "the Cannon." For instance, one afternoon, I mentioned my used bookstore scoop: a copy of Boris Pasternak's out of print memoir, I Remember. Richard knew it well, and recounted the poet's meeting his idol, Rilke, on a train in the story. Then Brautigan gave an extemporaneous lecture, fueled by a few glasses of whiskey, on Russian poetry, the limits of Mayakovsky, the political dimension injected by futurism, Akmatova's greatness then—an hour or two into things—his real concern: the debt a writer owes to a mentor. Richard was bothered by two things. The "sons of Hemingway" as he called the novelists of his generation, were getting Oedipal. And he regretted that he had not achieved success in time to send his books to William Carlos Williams.

Perception was Richard's thing, how people saw the world, and as he called it "the quiet dignity with which they put up with things." His method employed "going over the top" or accumulating layers of detail through revision. Usually, though, the additions are metaphors or images, not adjectives, adverbs or what he rejected as a tired convention, the accumulation of details to show a character's social status. He was viciously egalitarian, with a rebel's zeal. The attitude, and the technique, are in W.C. Williams' Spring and All and also In the American Grain.

So a trailer park is a natural subject for Brautigan—the last of the romantic transcendentalists, a nature writer observing our bizarre American landscape. He was renting the trailer next to ours in Forest Park, on the Gallatin River west of Bozeman. It was the summer of 1982. Richard had returned from a year of readings, and had taught at the local university. To escape the isolation of his ranch, he "raided on Bozeman." One morning, Richard's date from the previous night's foray was foiled in her escape by a dead car. I was busy threatening the old man across the road, for running his chainsaw at dawn. Obnoxious music leaked from junky trailers that could never be moved again. The landlady was driving a bulldozer around in circles, for no apparent reason. Richard walked up as the stranded damsel muttered, "Maybe this wasn't such a good idea." He laughed and offered, "One thing you have to give this place, these people are without any pretensions. They don't have anyplace else to go."

Later that day Richard and I were drinking in the Robin bar, in downtown Bozeman. He had written an introduction to the Beatles Anthology, a collection of their lyrics. It did not talk about them directly, but described the Yellowstone River passing under the bridge at Pine Creek, near his ranch. His times, and the hippie energy attached to him, were flowing past: I think the lesson was meant for me, who was between career hallucinations. A pretty co-ed chatted for awhile, but Richard was self-absorbed. He noticed the marquee across the street, for the movie Cat People. The co-ed did not go for a horror movie as a first date—smart girl. So Richard and I watched the movie, gripped by the mixed blessing of seeing Nastasia Kinski get naked then turn into a leopard and eat people.

We returned to the bar and evaluated the movie. This meant thinking how it could be changed. Richard saw its grisly potential as a comedy, preying upon all the man-woman encounters seen in movies. For example, the husband can listen to the young lover claim that the woman is misunderstood. Then, the "lucky" youth congratulates the world-weary husband for being open-minded as the feline wife lures the young man outside,"Let's go get a bite." We ran through a dozen classic movies, ruining their most sensitive moments. Richard said, "You know, you and I should write a movie." I asked why, was he serious? "There are two serious, artistic reasons. We will have some fun. And we might make a shit-pot full of money."

The next week saw me staying at the Pine Creek place, in the converted smokehouse used as a studio and guest room. The main house—a stucco covered hacienda-looking ranch—was shaded and cool. We sat in the kitchen, sipping the 11 am Chard. "So how does a movie start?" he asked. "A couple guys going somewhere to do something dangerous." I suggested.

"Like with a chainsaw?" Richard still chuckled about the part where I had offered to pull the string after shoving it . . ..

"Like in The Good, the Bad, the Ugly." The object, and the soundtrack, came first: no ideas but in things.

Next we had to decide what kind of movie it would be, which is tougher than describing Richard's novels. His ambition, during the previous few years, was to recombine popular genres of fiction, to gain a hybrid energy. So our "concept" was to write a white-trash Steinbeckian comedy with a boy-girl plot, two buddy stories, a dash of Disney, lots of slapstick, and some UFO's. Richard called it, "a goofy blue-print for a house that might not get built," and that seemed a good day's work. We made up a list of character-types, a group of people you would never invite for dinner. We "cast" the roles, in order to visualize the actors. Margot Kidder (a friend of his) was popular, and Jamie Lee Curtis was on the cover of the Enquirer, so she was in. Richard suggested that we see Peter Fonda and Jeff Bridges as the two guys. They lived nearby, and I had seen them around at get-togethers. But I was more than a little surprised when Richard told me the next day that we had a meeting scheduled at Fonda's and we should get to work, pronto. For me this represented a step up from small-town reporting or reading poems to drunks.

Our way of working together was like a Tin-Pan Alley movie, with fortune lurking in the wings as the two songwriters try out lines, reject them, then add to the hits. Together, we made up a dozen scenes, to introduce characters and to create plot problems. Our intent, as far as cinema goes, was one stupid sight gag per page. Dialogue was to show how people felt, not to convey information. We each picked the scenes that seemed interesting, and wrote out individual drafts—Richard long-hand, me on his Smith-Corona. Then we swapped drafts, and added material, going over the top. In conferences we read these additions aloud, and took turns typing a 20-page pitch, with an outline and sample scenes. Richard usually tried to make each scene more open-ended, like in a soap-opera. Most used the repetition of key lines to shape the moment, like in a poem. Throughout, there was an effort to subvert expectations, by mixing genres and setting up the viewer for a pratfall. There were no rules to follow. We claimed the sky was the limit: "Taste is no Object."

Fonda and Bridges were very enthusiastic about the project and treated Richard, and me too, with friendly respect. Thus encouraged, we knocked out 100 pages in a month, reading drafts into a tape recorder that were transcribed by a slightly perplexed secretary from Montana State University's English department, named Jane. When Jane liked our stuff, we knew we had the normal vote. The abnormal vote was in the bag. Our show featured an All-American girl in love with a loser, the world's most beautiful repossession agent, some dwarfs, a Nazi landlady, Ma and Pa UFO nuts, and a main character whose "business" was to constantly borrow stuff. How could we miss? Each day after work we toasted ourselves with pride, and chanted the screenwriter's psalm: "We'll be rich!"

For about a year, we waited for the phone to ring. Richard went to Japan for some readings, then to Amsterdam. Fonda promoted the script, including a try for MTV play. (The episodic plot makes for a good, short-format series. TRAILER may have been the first reality show). Richard also pitched the screenplay to friends, such as Robin Williams and Francis Coppola. However, when the phone did ring, on a slow morning at our house in Livingston, it was Becky Fonda calling to tell me that our friend was dead.

Looking back, I wonder how Richard got to be the most successful experimental writer in American letters: he sold millions of book that defied convention, that were ignored by the critical establishment on their way to a world-wide audience. And there is a resurgent interest in his work. I get e-mails from young who people who dig it. He favored the common person, distrusted phoniness, portrayed the daily weirdness of life with a gently dark humor, and mastered the American tongue. It occurred to me there was another writer who ran away to California, cleverly made himself famous, lectured to packed halls, and re-invented the novel: Mark Twain. Go look at the pictures. Both, you might say, came in, and went out, on a comet. Is this Richard Brautigan—Mark Twain convergence proof of reincarnation? Such an idea he would have described, as he labeled his own work, "One man's opinion of moonlight."

I looked the other day at the screenplay link on your site, and was proud to see my little memoir there. If you want to put Trailer on your web, that's fine with me. A few years ago, the Denisons, who bought Richard's house, found some handwritten notes [from early work on this screenplay] (in my writing and in Richard's) in the old smoke house. They gave them to Gatz [William R. Hjortsberg, who is writing a biography of Brautigan].

I worked with Hal Ashby on Tom Robbins' Another Roadside Attraction, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Thomas Berger's Vital Parts, Saul Bellow's Henderson the Rain King, and Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster. When Richard wouldn't do a second draft, Hal asked for my input and I wrote several new scenes. I thought your readers might like to know he [Ashby] had Jack Nicholson and Dustin Hoffman lined up to play the cowboys.

Kate Jackson (the smart Charlie's Angel) was behind that project. Richard got a kick out of the association. He also received $30,000 for the option and first draft. Later, he tried to apply for unemployment in California and listed his earnings as a thousand bucks a day, just in case the state could find him suitable employment—a story he told with glee.

Long before he moved to Bolinas, he would visit us at our home on the Mesa and if memory serves after all this time, he lived in our house for an extended period at least once. This would have been 1966-1968.

I was in high school at that time and our home was in Bolinas, California. Bill Brown was my father and my sister Maggie is married to Jim Koller.

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I took a film class in my senior year of high school and was part of a small crew. We tried to make a short movie and Richard was in it at his home in San Francisco. I wish I knew what happened to that film.