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You won’t find a detailed autobiography here. Alice B. Toklas (or Gertrude Stein) I’m not and author websites, even with blogs, are self-promotional enough without more ego-driven blather. But I will reveal the following:

I was born in New York City at the tail end of a war. (A glance at the black-and-white of me in front of our apartment building should give you a hint which one.)

My father was a doctor, my mother a publicist who, in the Fifties manner, became a housewife after my two sisters were born. The family then moved to Scarsdale, a wealthy suburb, which, a true child of my time, I immediately pronounced bourgeois and decamped from on as many weekends as possible for Greenwich Village, my “spiritual home.” (Are you bored yet? It gets worse.) I next attended two privileged educational institutions, Dartmouth and the Yale School of Drama, the latter in the playwriting division, something I wasn’t able to do then and still am not.

Secretly terrified I was a big fake and would never be a writer, I considered quitting school, but couldn’t because I would lose my student deferment and go to Vietnam. So more out of a sense of panic than anything else, I wrote my first novel HEIR. I composed the book over a stiflingly hot summer in the front office of an African-American funeral home in Sumter, South Carolina, the only air conditioned spot available to a Northern white boy civil rights worker. The plot was a thinly veiled fictionalization of the life of a rich fellow Dartmouth student who accidentally killed his girlfriend with an overdose of heroin. The book was published for a small advance, got a couple of good reviews and sold about five copies; that includes to my family.

Subsequently it was made into an unwatchable movie, but I used the film sale as a bridge to Hollywood, and soon I was out in LA, trying to write screenplays, even make films, something I have been attempting with greater and lesser success ever since.

I also continued to write books. In the beginning, it wasn’t easy (in fact it still isn’t). My third novel didn’t sell and I was close to broke. I was also married by then with two little kids to support. But with my back to the wall, a joint bogarted in my mouth and with a miniscule advance from Straight Arrow Books (the publishing arm of Rolling Stone), I wrote THE BIG FIX. That was my first mystery about the then hippie private eye Moses Wine and it turned my life around. (The full story of this happy accident is in my introduction to a reissue of that book, linked with other introductions elsewhere on this site.) To date the novel has been published in numerous editions in about a dozen languages. It was also made into a pretty good film, starring Richard Dreyfuss, which I wrote. That launched my screenwriting career in a real way. In short order I was working on a movie for Richard Pryor.

Of course, in those days, many of us had mixed feelings about earning a lot of money, especially from Hollywood, so I donated some of mine to such things as the Black Panther Breakfast Program (don’t know now if that money really went for ham and eggs) and “medical aide” to assorted guerilla groups in Central America. I also attended meetings where people advocated the overthrow, violent and otherwise, of practically everything. I never went nearly that far myself, but I did put those ideas and characters in my books,

making research trips to exotic locales behind the Iron Curtain like the still-Maoist People’s Republic of China (for PEKING DUCK) and Cuba (with newfound leftwing crime writer pals Paco Taibo of Mexico and Julian Semionov of the USSR.)

In the midst of this, my personal life was going into the crapper—betrayal, divorce, depression, psychotherapy, a quick and shaky remarriage and plenty of angst. (Ah, now you’re interested. More, more, you say. Well, you’ll have to look in the novels for that.) But my screenwriting career was thriving, especially after I formed an alliance with celebrated director Paul Mazursky. Paul, whom I had been bugging for years to do a Moses Wine movie, asked me to do the adaptation of Isaac Singer’s brilliant Holocaust black comedy ENEMIES, A LOVE STORY. I could hardly believe what he was saying—you don’t get offers like that in Hollywood. But we worked on it and the movie was made to considerable acclaim, garnering Academy Award nominations for two of its actresses (Angelica Huston and Lena Olin) and for Paul and me for the script. At this point, over ten years later, the Oscar ceremony is a big blur to me. It even was at the time—and I imagine it’s yet more confusing and disturbing if you win.

After that, Paul and I wrote the less successful SCENES FROM A MALL with Woody Allen and Bette Midler and several other scripts, which were not made. Some of these screenplays are interesting and will be linked to this site as a kind of revenge against the studios; Hollywood screenwriters often tell you that their best work is unproduced.

In recent years, I have turned to filmmaking, directing the independent feature PRAGUE DUET from a screenplay I co-wrote with my present (and permanent) wife Sheryl Longin. It was quite a rewarding experience creatively, but about as remunerative as producing a banjo concert in Kazakhstan.

In recent years, I have let the novels languish far too long (I only wrote one—THE LOST COAST—in the Nineties), but I am back now with a new one—DIRECTOR’S CUT—which unites my two careers and is the proximate cause of this website. Its publication makes me feel like an old cowboy “back in the saddle again” and I have made a promise to myself not to get off for a long time.

My personal life has righted itself too. My two sons, Raphael and Jesse, have grown into extraordinary men. I have strangely fond memories of both my ex-wives. Sheryl and I have been married for eight years now. Our daughter Madeleine is five on June 18, 2003.

And with a wife who is twenty years younger than I and a daughter who will not be entering college until I have crested seventy, the only thing I know is that I better stay in shape!