A BLACK AND WHITE NIGHT

Back in 1987, I was a year into paying the bills full-time as a screenwriter, thanks to this other writer who was also representated at The Artists Agency, as I was. We got to be friends because he wasn’t just a screenwriter, he was also Tom Petty’s lighting and staging director - he basically created the use of theatrical stage lighting for rock concerts, which everybody has used for the past 45 years since he and Tom (friends back to junior high there in Gainesville) showed up on the rock scene in the mid 70s. Anyway, he had recently gotten a union gig that got him in the WGA, so when Clark and John came and asked him to write a movie for them he had to tell them he couldn’t do “Roger Corman work” (i.e., non-union) any more. However, since the proposed project was a Vietnam war movie and he had read my screenplay “In The Year of the Monkey” that was what got me “discovered,” he told them he knew a guy who was even better for the job. Clark and John read “Monkey” and agreed, so I ended up getting hired for what would become my first produced credit, “Saigon Commandos,” based on a series of novels about MPs in Saigon, written by a guy who had done that.

His name was Jim Lenahan. He and Tom had a falling out a few years before Tom passed, sadly, but he is still out there doing lighting andstaging for A+++=list rock shows.

So anyway, it was late August 1987 and I was working on the project I’d gotten after “Saigon Commandos,” which would become “The Terror Within.” The phone rang and it was Jim. “Call KQED - they’re having their fund-raiser. Tell them you’re donating $100 and you want tickets to the show at the Ambassador next month. Do it. You’ll kick yourself if you don’t. I can’t say more.”

Well. Getting a call like that from a guy like Jim, you follow instructions. So I did.

And that’s how me and my girlfriend ended up in the back row of this show, September 30, 1987, which put us about a whole 25 maybe 30 feet from the stage. It was the last show ever at the Coconut Grove in the Ambassador Hotel before they tore it down (that’s the hotel RFK was assassinated in back in 1968 - it was never the same afterwards).

It was the best rock show ever. Jim was doing the lighting. PBS has made a fortune off the film that was shot, showing it on fund-raisers across the country. I just ran across it up on YouTube.

Roy Orbison and friends: the backing band was the TCB Band, which accompanied Elvis Presley from 1969 until his death in 1977: Glen Hardin on piano, James Burton on lead guitar, Jerry Scheff on bass, and Ronnie Tutt on drums. The friends were Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, Jackson Browne, J.D. Souther and Steven Soles and T-Bone Burnett (who organized everything). The female background vocalists are k.d. lang, Jennifer Warnes, and Bonnie Raitt.

I just noticed that the opening of “(All I can do is) Dream You” there’s a shot of the audience at the tables. We’re just off-screen to the right.

The next morning, somewhat the worse for wear from the party afterwards, we were awakened at 7:42 a.m. by what is now known as The Whittier Quake, the biggest earthquake in LA since the 1971 Sylmar Quake, exceeded 7 years later by The Big One, aka the Northridge Quake, on Martin Luther King Day. Our street on Mount Washington was blocked most of the day from boulders that rolled downhill onto the street, but they missed our car. Somehow that all fit together.

Roy Orbison and Friends

This is guaranteed to take your mind off the troubles.

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