#24 Shifting into Second Gear

I could tell Andy was pleased after the CBS meeting. Things had changed. I was valuable to him and Jean.

When we got back to the studio Andy said, “Go see Lori,”

Lori Crawford was sitting behind her perpetually cluttered desk in her sunlit office with a big smile on her face. Knowingly, she said what she already knew. “Judy liked your scripts.”

I nodded, adding, “And I think she actually read them.” Lori nodded.

Now that we’d gotten the small talk out of the way, I asked, “What’s up?”

Asking a question she knew the answer to, Lori said, “You want to write more Littles scripts?”

I took a seat in a chair across from her desk. “You bet.”

“Write up springboards for half a dozen episodes and get them to me. Jean will pick out two for you to write treatments for. After he approves the treatments you’ll go to script.”

I had moved into second gear now, getting assignments for two scripts at a time. It meant three thousand dollars. Nice, but not enough. Not nearly enough.

I saw Lori looking straight at me and I said, “Something’s going on.”

She leaned forward, her voice lowering. “You’re a smart guy, Jack. I think you’re gonna do okay. But leave the business to Jean and Andy. Stick to writing scripts.”

I nodded. I got it. When the elephants are working, mice stay out of their way.

#23 How I was Molded – Pt. 2

Once, after a speech I delivered at the River Bend Film Festival, an attendee asked how I had survived and thrived so long as a writer. I said “I earned an MBWA.”

One day in 1972, my father, my brother and I were walking along Chicago’s State Street in Chicago. As we neared the massive S.S. Kresge’s store, Dad said he wanted some candy.

We went in and walked to the twenty-foot-long candy counter, my dad saying, “We can get this store.” Kresge’s, which would later become K-Mart, was a retail giant. When my astonished brother asked, “What makes you think that?”, my father answered, “The candy bins are low.”

My brother laughed. Dad handed him a dime and said, “Call them.”

Eventually, my brother got Dan Burdick, Kresge’s VP of Real Estate, on the phone. Dan said Kresge’s was indeed moving out of downtown areas and that the Chicago store could be had.

My father leased the five-story building for $10,000 a month, sectioned off a third of its first floor and leased that to an electronic store, netting $2,000 a month before he even opened for business. When Dad’s store opened, he looked at what he had created and told my brother and me, “Ya don’t figure this out while earning some MBA. Ya figure it out earning an MBWA.” When we looked questioningly to him, he said, “Management By Walking Around.”

I’d use a lot of what I learned in the clothing business after I moved to L.A. Most writers forget it’s called show business. Not me.

#22 How I was Molded – Pt. 1

America’s first great novelist said, “When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

At ten and twelve, I was getting tired of being lectured. The never ending bromides my father would hammer into me: “You must struggle.” “You must make it happen.” And his favorite story – The Twenty Dollar Man and the Forty Dollar Man.

In this scenario, one worker carries buckets of coal out of a coal mine one at a time and earns twenty dollars a week. (My father’s stories always featured manual laborers.) Another man carries buckets of coal out with one bucket in each hand. He earns forty dollars a week. At the end of the story my father would ask, “Do you want to be the twenty-dollar man or the forty-dollar man?” I’d dutifully answer, “I want to be the forty-dollar man.” My father would nod. “You become the forty-dollar man by doing more than is expected.”

I didn’t have a choice when it came to doing more than was expected. When I was fourteen, on Saturdays my dad dragged me to his clothing stores and put me to work in the gloomy, musty, dusty stockrooms while my friends were all out in the sunshine playing basketball and baseball and football.

I was surely “suffering”, but I couldn’t see my how working in a stockroom was going to “make” anything happen. I just didn’t get why my old man was putting me through all this. But then I was fourteen and my father, like Mark Twain’s before him, was still “ignorant”. Over time, that would change…