I first met Richard at a screenwriter’s group called Deadline Junkies. Richard was one of several talented and generous actors who showed up every week to do cold readings of screenplays submitted by the writers. I cast Richard as the patriarch of a wealthy Connecticut family, who owns a rare bird that my main character accidentally lets out of its cage and then very nearly crushes with a squash racquet while trying to shoo it back inside. Richard was excellent in the part, providing the needed arrogant gravitas as well as the requisite white-male-privilege-y overtones. But in real life, he was nothing like that character. He was a keenly sensitive artist with a deep inner life of his own, which he was able to draw upon to breathe life into a bunch of silly words on a page.
I didn't really get to know Richard well in the Deadline Junkies because I ended up leaving soon after he joined. But a little while later, when a friend of his named Len was looking for a writer for a new television project he was working on, Richard set up a meeting. Len had envisioned Richard as one of the main characters in his one-hour TV drama, a motorcycle-riding, combat-veteran-turned-chief-surgeon in a busy downtown Los Angeles hospital. I did my best to do justice to Dr. Pierce Thatcher while writing the two-hour pilot script.
About a year later, I ran into Richard at a Fourth of July cookout at Len’s place. Richard told me he had read the pilot script I’d written and was very impressed with the results. His approval meant the world to me. I began consulting Richard from time to time for insights into his character and motorcycles, and life in general. Richard had a lot of insights.
A few years later, when I was down on my luck and living on credit cards, Richard came up with a project for the two of us to work on. It was a script about the many years he had spent in the movie business – and the best part was, he wanted to pay me to write it. Richard had a history of supporting fellow artists, not just financially but with his time, his talent, his vast knowledge of movie-making, and on more than one occasion, his own home. By giving me the gift of hiring me to write a screenplay for him, Richard made my longtime dream of becoming a professional screenwriter a reality.
Our idea was to tell the story of his life through a series of films-within-the-film, depicting the various stages of his career via some of the dozens of movies and TV shows he’d worked on. Over the course of many phone calls, lunch meetings and in-depth story sessions, we came up with a number of sequences highlighting the major turning points in his life in and out of the movies – each one to be filmed in the style of the particular film-within the film representing that era. The different sequences would be stitched together with a present-day story about Richard desperately trying to get to a friend's house in the middle of the night, for an emergency cash loan, but his Harley suffers a blowout on the 405 and he nearly careens into a Peterbilt truck, just like the one in the movie Duel. He coasts to an all-night gas station off the freeway where, in the wake of his near-death experience, he looks back on his years in Hollywood, while waiting for a flatbed tow truck to rescue his Harley.
While most of our brainstorming sessions were fun and creative, there were also a few times we butted heads. There was one scene in particular that Richard wanted me to change. It was based on an experience he’d had with another actor on one of his many location shoots. In the scene, a famous TV actress, who is playing one of the leads in the film-within-the film, swallows a bunch of sleeping pills and Richard is called upon to revive her. He manages to do so using his boundless ingenuity coupled with his natural empathy, and afterwards the TV actress tries to seduce him. I had written it with a fairly comic tone, similar to the rest of the script, but Richard felt that my take was too broad and not appropriate for the subject. We went around and around as I tried to understand where he wanted to take the scene. At one point he referred to my ‘frat-boy’ style of humor and that felt like a slap in the face.
We continued our discussion from the restaurant out into the street, and eventually to my apartment, where Richard got down on the floor and started acting out the scene. He was curled up in the fetal position, like the actress had been, kind of whimpering as he voiced her thoughts. It was pretty intense. I sat on the floor next to him and took notes as he walked me through the scene. I could see that he wasn’t just playing the scene, he was reliving it. He needed me to understand that the place she was in was real and not just a manufactured moment in a script. He needed me to feel what she was feeling.
“I think I get it now,” I said.
“It’s the heart of the movie,” said Richard, his eyes welling up with tears.
“Yeah,” I nodded. ”It is.”
“The heart of the movie.”
The last time I saw Richard, we had french toast at Joey’s Cafe in West Hollywood. French toast had become kind of a tradition between us during our story meetings. After breakfast, we walked up the hill to DeLongpre Avenue, one of my favorite blocks in the neighborhood, with its wide front lawns and many flowering trees. There was a pretty young woman walking her little doggy in the lush grassy space in front of her building. Naturally, Richard started up a conversation with her. She told us the dog had cancer and she was running out of options. She wanted to keep up the treatments but she knew it wasn’t really going to make any difference. Richard knelt on the grass and played with the dog, showering him with every ounce of his attention and love. The little guy was in heaven. We wished her good luck and walked back to my place.
In the parking lot across from my apartment, Richard got onto the Harley and started it up. He rang the bicycle bell he’d attached to the right handlebar and grinned that devilish movie-star grin. It was a perfect moment: the childlike chime of the bell ringing out above the badass rumble of the Harley captured Richard’s spirit to a T. He popped into gear and rode out of the lot, swinging onto Havenhurst Drive and waving goodbye as he thundered out of sight.
Richard and I had plans to meet my cousin in the Valley for an al fresco French toast brunch date, but we never got the chance. Len called me one afternoon with the mind-numbing news that Richard had taken his own life the night before. We didn’t have any more information than that, but we were, in Len’s words, gutted.
Since then I’ve met with Richard’s friends, neighbors and his sister and learned a little bit more about what happened, but none of it can explain to me why he is gone. On one hand, it really seemed like Richard was doing well and looking forward to new projects and opportunities. On the other hand, there was always something just below the surface, maybe the same thing that made him such a sensitive and honest actor, but that always seemed to be pulling him in the other direction. Or maybe it just seems that way now. I don’t think I will ever know what really happened, but I do know that I miss him and that French toast will never taste quite the same.
As Hamlet said, “I shall not look upon his like again.”
