I’m sorry to learn of the closing of Hunger Artists Theatre in Fullerton, California, after 16 years of producing new work and brave revivals. They produced my play “Next Time” a few years ago, and many  plays by local playwrights, including scripts that came out of my workshop. I haven’t been down to Fullerton in a while (it’s 38 miles in distance from Burbank — but sometimes that translates into two hours of driving), but I liked knowing the theatre was there.

Here’s news of the announcement, and here’s a further analysis.

I get asked this sometimes. Here’s the answer:

Sometimes 46 minutes.

Sometimes a couple of weeks.

Sometimes a few months.

Sometimes four and a half years — as in the case of the play I just finished. Started it in 2008, and then oddly today I had the feeling that I could finish it. No, I don’t know why. Hadn’t even looked at it in years. But I cracked it open and looked at it and, yes, finished it.

(Which means there’s still hope for the play I started in 1990….)

When Ron Palillo died two weeks ago, it immediately brought to mind a one-act play festival we were both involved in back in 1989. Now I finally have time to tell you about it, and about the ironies of celebrity that I learned from the experience.

I was in grad school at USC, with a focus on playwriting. My play “Guest for Dinner” had been selected, along with three plays by three other writers, for the annual one-act play festival on campus. (A festival that, oddly enough, I became the producer of for two years about 20 years later.) This was a festival with fully staged productions — actors off-book, and with set pieces and costumes, with a three-night run, and this festival was a competition, meaning that one of us was going to be selected as a winner of something or other. As you can expect, each of us wanted to win, and at least two of us had all the arrogance and competitiveness rightly associated with male playwrights in their 20’s. (And, probably, most artists of any age.) One thing that the two of us agreed on was that the other two plays were terrible, and that we’d be happy to lose if we had to, so long as the other guy won. This is similar to the Oscar nominees who say “It’s an honor just to be nominated.” In other words, it’s bullshit. We both wanted to win. That said, I did think this other guy’s play was good, and perhaps better than mine, and that certainly ours were light years ahead of the other two.

But then Peter, the other guy, came up with an ace in the hole. He was able to cast a celebrity in his play. He announced excitedly one day that he had Ron Palillo (“Y’know, Horshack!”) in his play. I knew exactly who Ron Palillo was — I had grown up jeering at “Welcome Back, Kotter,” mostly, I think, because I knew kids like that at school and couldn’t stand them. At least, I now like to think that that’s why, because I’m friendly now with Mark Evanier, and “Kotter” was Mark’s first TV writing job. And Mark’s a good, clever, funny writer. Even though now, in 1989, “Horshack” was past his prime, 10 years earlier he had been a pretty big sitcom star, a guy whose face was on lunchboxes and board games and toys and on television screens around the world. Starring in my play I had a very good actor named Charlie Hayden who had once had a scene with Charles Bronson. (Quoth Charlie about working with Bronson: “Like acting with cement.”) Charlie was great, but he wasn’t on any lunchboxes.

During rehearsals, I would catch little breezes of trouble from Peter about working with Ron Palillo. I had no idea what any of this was about, but the general gist seemed to be that he was difficult and demanding. On the first two nights of performance, the plays came off without a hitch. Mine ran about the way it should, with laughs in the right places and the intentional anxiety of being made to wait in others, and Peter’s, about a troubled friend (or brother?) who had to be left behind, worked fine too, and the other two were still miserable to sit through. Occasionally, we would all comment on how lucky Peter was to have a celebrity in his, and Peter would accept that he was lucky indeed, at one point saying with consideration toward the inevitable judging night, “Well, yeah, and I’ve got ‘Horshack,’ too, so there’s that.”

On that judging night, a funny thing happened. For some reason, the sort of reason impossible to suss out in the theatre, that particular night’s audience really connected with my play. The laughs were bigger and the connection with the plight of our antihero was deeper. And, in Peter’s play, Ron Palillo came in on the wrong note, seemed angry and intense for no discernible reason as he tried his hand at “Acting!” with a big capital “a” and an exclamation mark, ran around the stage, and, when he jumped up on the bed on stage to make a point, he very loudly broke the frame of the bed, the bed cracking to the floor, Palillo tumbling off it, and the other two actors left first stunned then scrambling to regain some composure and continue. Later, much of the discussion was on Palillo’s antics and his on-stage calamity, and when the judges came back… I won.

Peter had thought he might win partly thanks to Ron Palillo. Now he was certain he’d lost entirely thanks to Ron Palillo.

After the performance and the announcement of the winner, one of my professors, Bill Idelson, who had written about a million hours of television and who I really liked and admired, told me what he thought of my play when I asked: He ripped it to shreds. And so, 23 years later, I still wonder if I did win because of Ron Palillo.

By the way, here’s what I won: a plaque. That’s it. A plaque that had my name and the title of my play engraved on it as winner. I’m looking at it right now on my wall as I write this. The following year, I was in this festival again, and this time I know I had the best play — and I lost. As they say, “You win some, you lose some.” The impact in this case was nil either way. Later that same year, I had a play in a festival run by Jerome Lawrence, the revered co-author of “Inherit the Wind,” “Mame,” “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail” and many other plays. One evening in the restroom, Jerry asked me what I thought of playwriting contests. Before I could respond he said, “I’m agin’ ’em.” He said we shouldn’t make playwrights compete against each other. He felt it was already too hard to be a playwright; why extend the suffering?

All this came back to me when I heard of Ron Palillo’s death — and then saw this piece on Mark Evanier’s blog. Mark doesn’t have very nice things to say about working with Ron Palillo either, and in my experience (and from reading his blog), Mark is generous with credit and good to work with. But I also wonder what it felt like to have been an enormous television star in 1979, and 10 years later to be performing for free in a one-act play festival at USC in the hopes that someone, anyone, from the film school, or perhaps one of the professional judges, or the next Spielberg in the audience, might spot you and give you again even the smallest taste of what you’d had so recently. And so that was the lesson of celebrity that I learned: that fame cuts both ways, for those who are famous, and also for those who expect things from association with it.

Various news sources have reported that Gore Vidal died today at age 86. He had been in declining health for some while. Over the years, I’ve seen him numerous times around town at various events such as the LA Times Festival of Books, and I recall seeing him somewhere a year or two ago where he mostly sat planted in a chair, slightly confused. In his final television appearance (at least, the final one I saw), on Bill Maher’s show on HBO, Mr. Maher was uncharacteristically gracious in trying to overlook Mr. Vidal’s slippage. I say all this by way of noting that I doubt anyone is surprised that he’s now died, and to recall the comment a friend made after we’d both seen that HBO show: “He needs to die now.” I like to think that Gore Vidal would have appreciated the candor.

A quick scan of my bookshelves reveals 13 volumes of his works, plus others that I’ve read that I know are misshelved: I read “Creation” and his omnibus of essays, and “Kalki” and “Myra Breckinridge” and I don’t see any of them there. All tolled, I’ve read many thousands of pages of his work, some of them twice, and have earned the right to say that he was not a prose stylist. (And so, don’t believe any obits that would have you think so.) What he was was a popularizer — someone who knew history, both ancient and modern, better than you did, and could spin an entertaining yarn about it that conveyed his firmly held opinions. That’s what he did in print, and that’s what he did on television, frequently with Johnny Carson but often with others: make a middlebrow audience feel smarter. To read Gore Vidal was to make connections between past and present, and between people here and people there, that you otherwise would have missed, and to think afresh about things that everyone else had considered settled.

This middlebrow reader will miss him. Not because I agreed with him (sometimes yes, sometimes no), but because his writing was informative, his opinions were usually countervailing, and his style was always entertaining. And also because he’s our last great literary celebrity, someone who was widely read and widely bed.

It begins with setting up a paper tiger you can knock down easily. Then it goes from there. Here’s how.

It was 22 years ago this summer that I met Ray Bradbury.

I grew up reading Bradbury, as many of us did. But for a couple of years, I saw him regularly at writers’ conferences where we were both booked in to speak and to teach. He was a main draw, of course, and I was listed in much smaller print inside the brochures, among all those other people whose names wind up as also scheduled to appear.

These writers’ conferences were produced by a woman named Joan Jones who was a real raconteur, a middle-aged live wire with a honeyed Southern drawl and a smooth persistence in getting what she wanted. Joan was what all of us want in a producer: a detail-oriented force of nature who paid on time. She also proved to be a formative influence on my life. I’ve been teaching writing for 22 years now—thanks to Joan, bless her soul, getting me started. Without Joan, my circle of friends and scope of accomplishments would be far smaller. And Joan was loyal: If she booked you once, and you didn’t screw it up, she kept booking you.

So it was that I met Ray Bradbury and saw him periodically for a time. He was 70 when I met him and a warm presence – gregarious, thoughtful, generous, and funny. He knew seemingly everyone and told stories about them not to name-drop but to share adventures, as when he talked about working on the film version of Moby Dick with Walter Huston and, well, setting Walter Huston straight about a few things. Bradbury was kind to everyone who wanted to talk to him, even when they were interrupting our lunch. (This sort of kindness – kindness during the interruption of lunch – is not the norm with well-known figures in Los Angeles.) And he was passionate about writing – about the value of it, about what it meant to be a writer, about sticking to your guns, and about plying your craft every day. On the subject of writing, he was evangelical. As a writer, and especially as a well-known, highly regarded, appropriately lauded writer, one who also had his own television show hosted by himself, he also knew he didn’t have to play by the rules. This meant:

1. That he didn’t have to drive. (Others always drove him. He routinely figured that someone would always give him a ride, no matter what time or to what place – and he was right.)
2. That he could show up every time wearing short white tennis shorts without the slightest thought that perhaps this was not what people would like to see him wear.
3. That no, he did not have to get off stage at the appointed time.

This latter point led more than once to a scene where an irresistible force (Joan) would meet up with an immovable object (Bradbury). As someone who has produced conferences himself, I fully understand the importance of sticking to the schedule of events. But Bradbury would have none of it. If he was giving a talk of some sort and wanted to make more points, or field more questions, he was damn well going to do it. Joan tried everything: signaling him from the back of the audience, then signaling him from the side, then signaling him from the front of the audience, then trying to call for the last question, until she was edging her way up onto the stage, and then, standing directly beside him in a proximity that would make almost anyone else flinch, and still he wouldn’t stop until he was ready. In this way, Ray Bradbury was a rock star. I’ve never seen any other writer get away with this. (Although I’ve seen Werner Herzog do nearly the same.) As much as I felt for Joan Jones who, after all, had hired me to do this, had brought me into the circle of teaching writers, who made an enormous impact on my life, I had to admire the way Bradbury wielded power while retaining an aura of gentility.

At some point, Joan stopped producing writers’ conferences—she’d talked of doing them on cruise ships, which I was keenly interested in, but then changed her mind when she figured she could make more money running more private classes, her own and those of others. (And she encouraged me to start my own. So: no Joan Jones, no “Words That Speak” playwriting workshop, now in its 19th year. Thank you, Joan.) And so although I would run into Bradbury around town – at the theatre, mostly, and I have numerous friends who worked with him the past 35 years in the theatre – it was only every few years.
Over the past five or six years, the encounters with Bradbury were far less satisfying. I understand that he was older, and unwell, and I’m going to do my best to be charitable here, but the more I saw of him the less I wanted to hear from him.

The photo above was taken in December of 2008 when my friend and colleague Sid Stebel, who was a close friend of Bradbury’s, hosted a small dinner party in Chinatown. Bradbury was 88 at the time, and in recent years had been making appearances at Comic-Con in defense of the Bush administration, its “war on terror,” the invasion of Iraq, and other viewpoints that were difficult to reconcile with the man—and the writer—I thought I’d known. I have friends of all political persuasions, and I tried to take Bradbury’s support of the war in Iraq in the way that Christopher Hitchens supported it: as a defense of liberty and an attack against militarized theocrats. But there was no way to make anything good of his unfortunate and loudly expressed views about “minorities” both racial and non-Christian. When a mixed-race friend of mine walked out on a Bradbury appearance at Comic-Con, I knew why.

Thinking about some of Bradbury’s stories now, I’m reminded that he was a romantic—someone nostalgic for the blessed days of the 1930’s and 1940’s. Science fiction writers are futurists (even when that future is dystopian), but Bradbury, who was mislabeled an SF writer, was fixated on the past, and how we might bring it with us. (One bit of evidence: This quote, from a BBC interview in 2011: “We have too many cellphones. We’ve got too many internets. We have got to get rid of those machines. We have too many machines now.” That’s the voice of someone extremely out of touch.) And what do we call a wounded romantic? A cynic. That’s something I never thought I’d see in Ray Bradbury. The Ray Bradbury I had known thought that even if the government outlawed books, thinking people would memorize them and confound the authorities, that ultimately we could always triumph over oppression and small-mindedness. That doesn’t quite equate with cheering on jingoism years later.

So my feelings about Ray Bradbury are now complicated. Do I regret having been present when he said so many of the things he said in his later years? Yes. Am I glad I met him? Yes, because of those early experiences, and because it was nice to know even a little bit someone who inspired so many writers, and also because, obviously, I can say I met him. It makes for a good story, and I know that’s something he would have appreciated. I just wish I had a photo of myself with him from years before, when I could still recognize him.

Merrill Perlman on “Why ‘Amercia’ needs copy editors.”

Many years ago, I was a copy editor at a daily newspaper. Since leaving that post in 1988, I’ve remained a copy editor — but in my mind only, and without getting paid. It’s impossible to ignore how badly writing standards and proofreading practice have slipped, in all areas and in all forms. It’s not that people have gotten dumber — as Perlman notes, it’s that the Internet has sped up the transmission of information, and that print publications have laid off the copy editors (and many digital outlets never hired them in the first place). Over the years on this blog, I posted some of the most glaring errors I found, errors of typing and errors of fact, because I was astonished that they’d actually gotten published in places such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Los Angeles Times. But at some point, I just stopped. There were so many of them that it no longer seemed remarkable. If you see one cow while you’re driving through Pennsylvania, it’s notable. But when every hillock is festooned with them, everybody stops talking about it. That’s what’s happening with errors.

They rewrite great novels. Here’s what happened to “War and Peace.”

In no particular order, drawn from research performed over lunch with theatre people, and including solo shows:

1. Four neurotic New Yorkers complain about their lives.
2. I’m emotionally wounded and you should be fascinated / amused.
3. College professor gets divorced!
4. Three women complain about men.*
5. My life story — it’s so wacky!
6. Dad abused me and I can’t get over it.
7. (Family member) is dying and I feel sad.
8. Ugh, the relatives are coming over and dinner is ruined and we suck.
9. Clever college grads hang out and talk!
10. You don’t understand this, and that means it’s good.

*submitted by a female friend (thank you)