Miller Time

UNITED STATES—The writer-director Everett Lewis called me up a week or so later and said he had read my screenplay. He said it was basically a mess, but his terms were much more genteel. Within that mess he saw the germ of something real in its treatment of Satan worshiping teens. I had touched on something that was truly...

UNITED STATES—Wylie had a big house on Sixth Ave., near Country Club Park. The neighborhood is just as peaceful as it sounds. The house actually seemed grand with a third story added on top, but they’d done it on the cheap with aluminum window frames and you could tell it had been a later addition, but there’s still something...

UNITED STATES—“It’s nearly noon.” “That’s amazing. I hadn’t realized,” Suzanne said. “Sunday morning evaporates.” Everyone was clustered at the door of the café and Daniel had to go. They were standing and staying and he was going. It had reached the point—there was a precise millimetric point every day when it was no good anymore, and he had to go. Then Peter came...

UNITED STATES—In “The Summing Up” W. Somerset Maugham rawly states, “I have never kept a diary. I wish now that during the year that followed my first success as a dramatist I had done so, for I met many persons of consequence, and it might have proved an interesting document.”  For me having a journal covering the dates in...

UNITED STATES—The Palmer House got all gussied up with the help of a threat from the city. Then came the big day of the inspection. I was busy that day showing rooms and spreading flyers around USC. I stopped by the office we shared with the boiler company on La Brea. Cheryl and I had a chuckle, “It’s Jim’s...

UNITED STATES—The revamping of the Palmer House, a fleabag of over 100 rooms, didn’t just occur out of the blue. Nothing ever did in Wylie’s world. The city was tightening the thumbscrews on landlords. There had been cases of landlords in Pico Union and Westlake, slumlords chained to their own apartments in punishment for renting substandard apartments. That said,...

UNITED STATES—The Wylie Empire included a hotel in a prime location on Skid Row—the elegantly named Palmer House on Wall St. (conveniently around the corner from the police station). A lot of work was going on in spring of 1991. It was being painted and refurbished after one manager had been replaced. His replacement, a sweet fellow who favored...

UNITED STATES—There I was a few weeks ago in my hometown, up north, trying to get waited on in a doughnut shop. A man is in there in athletic clothes of the casual kind worn by those who are seldom athletic. He is passionate, he is overwrought; he is passionately overwrought, barely kept in check by a forced calmness...

UNITED STATES—The property owner, Jim Wylie, was a gambler in a big way, but not in the literal sense. Jerry Segal, his colleague and fellow “slumlord” (they referred to themselves facetiously) thought Wylie the smartest real estate brain he’d ever known. Wylie could conceive mind-bogglingly complex deals, dazzling in their simple genius, and see angles where nobody else could....

UNITED STATES—My parents and sister showed up on my doorstep in Los Angeles to tell me Mick, my cousin had died.  I didn’t even know he was sick. No funeral, they told me; the preacher at the gravesite made mention of how young he was— the Savior’s age, 33. A lot of things have gone my way, but Mick’s going...