Here’s an interesting story I discovered amongst the stacks of articles marking the passing of Joan Rivers.
It’s told by Roger L. Simon, novelist and screenwriter. Simon is best known as a novelist for his series of Moses Wine detective novels (which, I’m ashamed to say, have never made it off my TBR pile despite being on there for a decade or more), the first of which is The Big Fix. Simon also wrote the screenplay to the movie adaptation of The Big Fix, which came out in 1978 and starred Richard Dreyfuss. (Incidentally, Simon started on the Left, but developed into a sort-of conservative, while Dreyfuss stayed very firmly on the Left. Despite this political difference, Dreyfuss was kind enough to write the introduction to the latest edition of The Big Fix.)
As a screenwriter, Simon’s most famous credits are likely Bustin’ Loose, starring Richard Pryor, and Scenes From a Mall, starring Woody Allen and Bette Midler, directed by the recently-passed Paul Mazursky.
It was the former that got Simon this gig:
It’s the very early eighties and, as it goes in Hollywood, I’m in one of my intermittent hot periods, having just written Bustin’ Loose for Richard Pryor, ergo the powers that be thought I could be funny. (I’m not altogether sure they were right.) I got what was then a dream job, writing a script for Lily Tomlin. The premise was that Lily would play a “psychic detective” based on an Italian-American woman in New Jersey who was then doing clairvoyant investigations for the police. I met the woman. Lily told me she wanted me to write her as if she were Al Pacino. Cool, I thought.
It’s a very Hollywood story, and, rather than steal the whole piece, I’ll let him tell it here. The short version is, Tomlin got fired because the Powers That Be didn’t think she was a box office draw. Instead, they hired Joan Rivers. Simon went to meet with Rivers and it didn’t go well. Rather than being allowed to do rewrites with Rivers in mind, he was removed from the project.
The end of the story?
Joan had the good taste to hire the late Donald Westlake, one of the finest mystery writers in America, to rewrite me. But as you may not be surprised to learn, as with many Hollywood projects, the movie was never made.
So there’s a lost Westlake screenplay for someone to track down!
Rest in peace, Joan Rivers.
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I’ve read one of Roger L. Simon’s Moses Wine books, California Roll. Not bad, but it didn’t inspire me to run out and buy the others. I met Simon once at a mystery bookstore in Southern California’s San Fernando Valley, where he autographed the book for me. Seemed like a nice guy.
I have a funny anecdote from that day. It was a joint signing party with both Roger Simon and James Ellroy, who was riding high with L.A. Confidential at the time (this was about 1988). The two of them were seated side by side behind a long folding table at the back of the store. While Ellroy was signing my first edition of Blood on the Moon, another guy asked Simon if he had ever thought of writing a mystery set in the Soviet Union. Simon winced and replied, “The problem with that is, the situation there is changing too fast. By the time you could get a book into print, it would be obsolete.” The other man said, “But Stuart Kaminsky does it.” At this point Ellroy looked up, and with a mischievous expression, he said to the guy, “That’s because Stuart Kaminsky is a hack.” Then he went back to signing my book, looking rather pleased with himself.
I’ve read all of Simon’s Moses Wine novels, back in the 90’s, and they’re pretty well written and Moses is an enjoyable gumshoe. I was fairly taken aback at the swing he took politically, as he morphed into a pro-Bush the second conservative, and I watched one episode of his web show, the one where he interviewed Orson Bean, and he (Simon) seemed so humorless and rigid, I was sad.
Not to say all conservatives are humorless and rigid–P.J. Harvey is very funny, and I’m apolitical anyway, it was just a huge shock to see how far Simon strayed from his original liberal incarnation.
I think you meant P.J. O’Rourke, not P.J. Harvey. I don’t know what Ms. Harvey’s politics are. ;-)
I haven’t read it, but Simon published a nonfiction book about his political transformation and the reasons for it. One thing that intrigues me about the Moses Wine series (which I _will_ get to, one of these days) is that he apparently takes his protagonist through the same changes he went through over the course of the series. I doubt he’s preachy about it–it likely just reflects that people change.
Yes, thanks for the catch. P.J. Harvey is a great musician, O’Rourke is the conservative funnyman.
The Wine books are a bit different from the usual PI novel: Wine does, as you say, seem to evolve. He travels to China when that was a rare thing, Japan in another, and there was one, Raising The Dead I think, where he goes to Israel and ruminates on his own Jewishness. There was a line in that book that I still remember twenty or so years after reading it, where Moses questions where his loyalties lie. He says something like, do I owe my allegience to America, or Israel…? Somehow, I always thought it was to Justice. Something like that that. it made an impression on me.
Wine wasn’t the first Jewish PI–I think Arthur Lyons’ Jacob Asch was, although Asch was half-Jewish. (the Jacob Asch series is awesome, they, too, made a huge impression on me as a kid).
Wine may have been the first hippie PI, plus his having two children and being divorced was relatively new to the PI genre.
I’ll have to check out the nonfiction book; didn’t know it existed.