Elegy Written in a Westwood Burial Ground

Recently I attended an event both sad and uplifting:  a memorial service for Frances Doel, who was Roger Corman’s right-hand woman for decades. The high esteem in which she was held by everyone who knew her was indicated by the who’s-who list of attendees, including producer Gale Anne Hurd, who credits Frances with being the very first to read and support her and James Cameron’s landmark script for Terminator.

 Frances’ celebration of life, wonderfully stage-managed by her sister Rosemary, was held at what is now called Pierce Brothers Westwood Village Memorial Park. As cemeteries go, it’s tiny, and tucked away behind office towers that make it hard to find. But it dates back to 1905, and has been an interment site of choice for many well-known members of the Hollywood community. That’s why it’s a popular draw for tourists. L.A. has several celebrated burial sites that attract looky-loos. Hollywood Forever cemetery near Paramount Studios boasts the celebrated wall crypt that holds the remains of Rudolf Valentino and for years was ritually visited by the mysterious Lady in Black. (Hollywood Forever also hosts an annual summer film series on its sprawling lawn.)

 Westwood Village Memorial Park is known, first and foremost, as the final resting place of Marilyn Monroe. I couldn’t resist seeking out her site, and admiring the fresh flowers in a vase next to her wall plaque. Famously, right next door to Marilyn is Playboy honcho Hugh Hefner, although his flowers are fake (which seems rather apt). On my leisurely stroll through the premises on a very hot day, I missed many other famous names: among them Burt Lancaster, Natalie Wood, Dean Martin, Ray Bradbury, and Billy Wilder. Still,  I saw some historic resting places, like that of early director Josef von Sternberg, celebrated today for directing Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel. Kirk and Anne Douglas share a simple space that also bears a poignant reference to their troubled son Eric, who died young. Screenwriter Ernest Lehman’s gravestone sums up a busy, fulfilling life; composer Ray Coniff’s boasts a snatch of one of his most popular musical themes. Carl Wilson of The Beachboys is memorialized as “the heart and voice of an angel.” Soul singer Minnie Riperton (mother of Maya Rudolph), is honored by the presence of some actual CD’s of her work. Any native Angeleno will be especially moved, I think, by the joint resting place of Harry and Marilyn Lewis, whose Hamburger Hamlet restaurant chain was the backdrop for our growing-up years.

 Most eccentric gravesites? Comic actor Don Knotts has a plaque etched with images of him in highly familiar roles, like Mayberry Deputy Barney Fife. The splashiest site I saw belonged to German-born filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen, whose most celebrated work was 1981’s World War II submarine drama, Das Boot. (His ample section boasts candles, a world globe, landscaping, and a lot of fabric roses.) I also appreciated the sites of more modest Hollywood figures, like one Jeff Morris, whose plaque describes him as fine actor, and records what must have been a favorite phrase: “weather permitting.”

 But of course not everyone interred here has a Hollywood connection. I don’t know who Rita Kaslov was, but her stone contains her photo, as well as the information that she was a psychic. At bottom, passers-by can read an advertisement for her services: there’s the image of a hand, fingers  outstretched, and the announcement that she offers $5 palm readings. It’s impossible to say where the late Rita is now, but I’m sure she has gained a lot of insights since she shuffled off this mortal coil.

PS I couldn't resist looking up the gravestone for writer/director Billy Wilder, famous for (among many others) Some Like It Hot.  It reads: "I'M A WRITER. BUT THEN .  . . NOBODY'S PERFECT." 

Losing the Invaluable Frances Doel

 It saddens me to report that Frances Doel is no longer with us. Frances, the right-hand woman of Roger Corman for many a decade, passed away last week at age 83. Late in life she had moved from Hollywood to Lexington, Kentucky to be tended by family members who loved her dearly. Honestly, she was dearly loved by everyone who knew her.

 Roger Corman met Frances at Oxford, where she was completing a degree in literature. Always a shrewd judge of character, he concluded she was smart enough and agreeable enough to make a good assistant. And so she was—learning from scratch pretty much every job involving a movie set or a production office. Her obituary notes that she ghost-wrote the first draft of many a Corman classic, and named among her official writing credits 1974’s Big Bad Mama, starring Angie Dickinson, William Shatner, and Tom Skerritt.  I was there, and I’m happy to share how this first Frances Doel screen credit came to be.

 Starting work as Roger’s new assistant in 1973, I immediately gravitated toward the New World Pictures story department, which was Frances. Roger wanted a seriocomic rural crime thriller à la Bonnie and Clyde. Back then, he was obligated to use WGA writers, and it was a lot cheaper to hire a union writer for a re-write than for an original script. That’s why he gave Frances an entire weekend to crank out a workable first draft. Of course she came through with flying colors, devising a story about a poor but feisty mother and her two nubile daughters who take up robbery in Depression-era Texas. She slapped a fake name on the draft, and we hired a veteran screenwriter to take over.

 William Norton, a very nice guy, seemed to enjoy story meetings with Frances and me. As we worked our way through characterizations and plot points, Bill started wondering aloud about the author of  the original draft. He went so far as to ask if this “man” could come in and discuss some story questions he had. At which point, Frances and I began to giggle. Eventually we couldn’t hide the fact that Frances herself was the screenwriter in question. A true gentleman, Bill insisted that she share script credit with him. It was the start of her string of Corman writing credits, which ultimately included such low-budget classics as Crazy Mama and Sharktopus.

 Did Frances get paid extra for her weekend labors? She couldn’t recall exactly, but suspected that Big Bad Mama earned her about $100. Over the years, her earnings increased, netting her $5000 each for quickie creature-features like Dinocroc. But she never entirely earned Roger’s full respect. As she told me in 2011, soon after her retirement, “Roger got very fed up with me,” because he didn’t feel she was writing fast enough. Ten script pages a day seemed to him a reasonable amount, even though she was putting in this work solely on evenings and weekends.

 Frances stayed with Roger in various capacities for decades, earning the genuine praise of such celebrated Corman alumni as John Sayles and Ron Howard. But the time came when she got a better offer, moving on to Disney, and then ultimately joining with Corman alum Jon Davison to produce hits like Starship Troopers. Eventually she hit on hard times, and Roger—in a burst of generosity—gave her my job as Concorde-New Horizons story editor. It hurt, but I couldn’t blame Frances. She was too gracious and too special for that.   

 And I could never have written my Roger Corman bio without her.   

Digging Deep into John Sayles’ "Matewan"

If it weren’t for Roger Corman, John Sayles may never have come to Hollywood. Back in the late seventies, Roger was looking for a bright new—and inexpensive—screenwriter for one of his low-budget genre flicks. He assigned his longtime story editor, my good friend Frances Doel, to comb through the best literary magazines, looking for a promising young master of prose fiction who could be converted into a screenwriter. In Esquire she discovered Sayles, a youthful novelist and short story writer who was eager to go west. His first screen credit was for the scripting of Piranha, a darkly comic take on the über-popular Jaws that featured, instead of one deadly giant fish, a whole lot of deadly tiny fish. He followed this with a screenplay for Julie Corman’s The Lady in Red, all the while immersing himself in the skills he’d need to succeed as a film director. 

It was not long before Sayles applied his Corman earnings to his own first film as a writer-director, 1980’s Return of the Secaucus 7. (White writing my biography, Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers, I was thrilled to speak at length to Sayles about how the lessons he’d learned from Corman contributed to his long career as a maker of truly independent films.)

 In the 1980’s, while writing increasingly impressive scripts for others, Sayles continued to pursue his own idiosyncratic career, exploring a wide range of genres. One of his greatest achievements has been 1987’s Matewan, a powerful drama about the real-life struggle of West Virginia coal miners to form a union, in the face of armed resistance from their bosses.

Walking a fine line between the realistic and the mythic, Sayles captures the downhome heroism of the striking miners as well as the stark beauty of their surroundings. (Legendary cinematographer Haskell Wexler, who surely appreciated the script’s clear proletarian slant, was rewarded by the Academy with an Oscar nomination for this film.)

 Though Sayles’ feelings for the union cause are self-evident, the central conflict in the film is hardly just black-and-white. The striking West Virginia mine-workers (some younger than fifteen) tend to start with a bigoted attitude not only toward the African-American scabs who descend on the town of Matewan but also toward the recent Italian immigrants trying to make their home in this locale. And they’re all too willing to use violence to express their feelings. (Everyone, including the local housewives and a teenaged lay preacher, seems extremely familiar with firearms.) This is a place, it’s made clear, that was founded on God and guns. Sayles himself has fun with the small role of the local minister: he’s appeared in many of his own movies, as well as in the films of others.

Over the years, Sayles has developed a small stock company of actors who return to his projects time and again. Several of them, including Gordon Clapp and David Strathairn, have been with him since campus days at Williams College. Matewan also has a key role for Mary McDonnell: this was only her second film, three years before she found fame and an Oscar nomination for her supporting part in Dances With Wolves. (In 1992, Sayles put her at the center of his Passion Fish, which brought her a Best Actress Oscar nom.) Late great James Earl Jones also plays a essential part in the Matewan action. But the most heroic character is the union organizer, a deeply committed pacifist, played by Chris Cooper, at the very start of his movie career.