An Idea Man Lives His Own Dark Drama

Sometimes the stories Hollywood lives are more dramatic than the stories Hollywood tells.

The one-room guest house behind a pleasant home on a cul-de-sac in Tarzana looks like the carefully arranged museum of one man’s life.

Every square inch of wall space is covered with photographs, stills, documents, placards. Movie posters--�Johnny Got His Gun� conspicuous among them--and enlarged photographs hang from the ceiling like flat stalactites.

There are five trunks of organized memorabilia, stacks of copies of “Breakfast of Champions� and other works by Kurt Vonnegut. Every flat surface is covered with promotional buttons and other objets de vie. There is a near-life-size picture of a young Steve Martin in a travelogue called “The Funnier Side of Eastern Canada.�

A telephone and a typewriter fight for breathing room. Miraculously a couch and a bed (almost obscured by the artifacts) are available for sitting.

It is not a museum, Bruce Campbell says, it is “a living presentation.� And with pointer and clicker he goes at it, to give the visitor a candid and often harrowing narrative of a life in show business that has known more erratic turns than a rigged wheel at a carnival but still carries hope on every spin.

At the moment there are signs that the wheel is about to click into a winning space. Campbell and his producing partner, the veteran film executive Max Youngstein, have a very good script (by Paul Golding and Peter Bergman) on Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions� and a commitment from George Harrison and his Handmade Films to make it once the principal casting is set.

The change of luck will not come any too soon. In 1985, Campbell had some mailers printed (he is nothing if not a high-impact visual stylist) that said “Good day. My name is Bruce Campbell. I am 53 years old. Single. I am homeless, and virtually indigent.� He then cited some of his credits and his references and concluded: “I sure could use some help. Thank you for your time.�

The worn 1968 Buick that sits in the driveway was his home for a year and a half from that low point, Campbell says. Then, proving the old adage that things look darkest just before they get totally black, Campbell discovered a few months ago that he has a form of cancer called lymphoma.

Meanwhile, Campbell had seen Dick Shawn’s remarkable stage performance “The Second Greatest Entertainer in the World,� and had interested Youngstein in co-producing it as a film or, more likely, a special for HBO or another television entity. He had also brought Vonnegut west to see the show as a possible writer for the project.

“Vonnegut promised a treatment in three weeks and delivered it in three days,� Campbell says. Only then did Shawn remember that he had dealt off the film and television rights to someone else years before. (“He just said, ‘I forgot.’ �) Not long after, Shawn died in mid-performance in San Diego. Some years the dark is darker than others.

But the associations with Youngstein and Vonnegut went on and led to the present possibilities with “Breakfast of Champions.� Youngstein found Campbell a guest room at a home in Beverly Hills for several months, and Campbell located the guest house in Tarzana a year ago.

Chemotherapy temporarily cost him his reddish beard and hair but they have returned and, although he is still frail, he remarks with customary buoyancy that his is a cancer that responds well to treatment.

His father, he says, was the 10th employee of MCA and was an executive of the agency for more than 40 years. Campbell thus grew up, mostly in San Francisco, in a climate where promotable show business ideas were the currency.

He went to UCLA and says he urged classmate Carol Burnett on stage in 1953. Campbell was drafted in 1954 but discharged after a few weeks as a pacifist. He went to New York where Burnett was already seeking her fortune. She found hers; Campbell returned to Los Angeles, found work as a production assistant and eventually became producer of an adventure show called “Bold Journey.�

His first film as a producer, “Piranha� in the ‘60s (no relation to the Corman film written by John Sayles), starred Edward G. Robinson Jr. and, Campbell says, was never released. A later film, “Picasso Summer� with Yvette Mimieux, had similar bad luck.

Campbell’s vicissitudes have been without number. In the early 1970s he produced two short films with Steve Martin (borrowing $10,000 from a friendly chauffeur to help finance the first). It was, he says, too early in Martin’s career, although the films would play well now.

He launched a production company in San Francisco, but his backers withdrew before he had done much more than sketch some of the (very interesting) ideas he had.

Campbell has ideas the way others have hiccups. Max Youngstein says, “Ten of them may be crazy and terrible, but the 11th is sensational.�

For a brief time Campbell was one-third of Campbell-Silver-Cosby, a production firm with Roy Silver and Bill Cosby as the other partners and Cosby the principal asset. The firm was doing an annual business in the millions before Cosby withdrew.

In 1971, after a long battle, Campbell produced “Johnny Got His Gun,� directed by his then father-in-law Dalton Trumbo from Trumbo’s 1939 anti-war novel about a World War I soldier who has lost his limbs, eyes and ears.

The film, with Timothy Bottoms as the boy, Jason Robards as his father and Donald Sutherland as Christ, won some critical honors for the power of its theme but it was so unrelentingly depressing that audiences stayed away by the thousands.

Undaunted, Campbell borrowed the money to fix up a van and toured the film like a medicine show. “The ‘Johnny Got His Gun’ Traveling Road Show� is one of the hanging placards in Tarzana. Nothing worked, and Campbell ended up bitterly estranged from the Trumbo family.

There was more, much more. He had dazzling promotional ideas--he borrowed $2.5 million worth of rubies to dramatize for investors the money he needed to produce Rita Mae Brown’s “Rubyfruit Jungle.� Between ideas, there were spells of clinical depression. (He was actually hospitalized, and it was during a patients’ outing that he first saw Shawn’s presentation.)

But in the land of the unimaginative, ideas are still king, queen and aces, and from his memorial thicket in Tarzana, Campbell continues to have ideas, even as he waits for that magical sound, the last faint plock as the wheel of fortune slips past the final rubber flange and stops at the pointer where the big money is.