A life in front of the keyboard

One trouble with being a screenwriter is that it leaves you with a lot of time on your hands. In that sense, it is just like being any other kind of writer; you’re obliged to wait around for inspiration to strike, in the meantime filling the empty hours with bad ideas and false starts and a lot of glassy-eyed walking around, when you are present but not necessarily emotionally available to those near and dear to you.

To those problems you have to add the unique impositions Hollywood places on the writer. Mostly he is engaged in creating what the contracts charmingly refer to as “work made for hire.” This means you have to await the phone calls of the hirers -- be they studio development people, doodling inanities on the margins of your drafts, or smooth-talking producers trying to cadge a free rewrite for the price of a lunch, to which they habitually arrive late (more down time). None of this may be said necessarily to help your creative concentration. There is also, alas, the possibility that you may be in the midst of a cold spell, which means that you’ve been banished from everyone’s speed dial, that your Writers Guild health insurance is about to expire, that your go-to-meeting blue blazer is beginning to look like one of Willy Loman’s hand-me-downs and that the only thing on your calendar is an interview for the DVD release of one of your old movies, for which you will not be paid.

That’s pretty much the condition in which we find the aptly named Henry Wearie in the opening pages of David Freeman’s wry, observant and forgiving Hollywood novel, “It’s All True.” I’m not certain that it is, in the full sense of the word, a novel at all. It is more like a collection of loosely interrelated short stories about an intelligent, literate man trying to survive in a town where intelligence and literacy are -- let’s put this as gently as Freeman might -- not as highly valued as, say, the lettuce assorte salad the studio exec orders just before hearing Henry’s pitch for a movie in which aliens intervene, to good effect, in the life of a Midwestern counterfeiter.

“Oh me-oh, mi-oh,” as Henry frequently says to himself. He gets a development deal out of that one, perhaps a sort of pity-purchase from a woman who was once his good-natured lover. I am not at all certain if Henry actually works on this idea; there is no scene in the novel of him toiling over the script. We do, however, hear various ideas for its improvement: Perhaps the counterfeiter could be a baseball player losing his fastball? No, wait, maybe the hero could become a heroine.

But if we never see Henry settling down to his word processor, we do glimpse him burning his days. Most mornings start with him at the Farmers Market, having coffee and conversation with similarly middle-aged movie guys -- Henry is 53 -- whining about other people’s grosses, wondering about their own mortality. At one point he and his pals visit a foul-mouthed comic in “Tomorrowland” (their name for the Motion Picture & Television Fund retirement home in Woodland Hills), robbed of speech by a stroke, and a here-today, gone-ish tomorrow lesson to them all. Henry also devotes himself to cabinetry. He likes to make handsomely planed and joined bookshelves. He eventually has more shelf space than he has books to store on them.

But having reached the age when more of his life is behind him than before him, he devotes a good deal of time to ruminating about his past. The long-form TV dramas he wrote, the polishes he gave to other writer’s scripts and the screenplay for which he was well paid but which never got made are referred to only glancingly (he can’t stand seeing his work -- or rather its oft-revised remains -- when it turns up on TV). Many of his reflections are focused on his ex-wife, Madeleine. They met cute -- at a theatrical performance in the Terminal Island federal prison -- and for a while they lived cute, or optimistically anyway.

On a visit to New York, her good cheer and good sense almost effected a reconciliation between Henry and his terminally taciturn father. She also helped him through his most successful script, a true crime story that involves Henry with a true (and truly scary) criminal, who particularly terrorized Madeleine. They failed to conceive the child she, in particular, wanted, and a complicated attempt at adoption ended in a serio-comic mess.

Henry’s response to these marital challenges is, well, writerly. He is a more helpful observer than fully engaged participant. And so the marriage founders, with a touch of bitterness and a touch of rue, especially on Henry’s part. Here it begins to steal over the reader that Freeman really means his title. Everything he writes has the ring of quotidian truth about it -- small truths, not world-shaking ones.

By this I mean that he does not melodramatically force his milieu or his people. His Hollywood is not populated by coked-out crazies. It is rife with ambition, of course. And it contains its share of emotionally stunted and careless people. But not more so, one thinks, than any other town monomanically devoted to a single business. Even the one slightly faded movie star who wanders through the action (making sure he gets the restaurant chair with the good backlight) is not entirely a monster. He’s just a guy trying to avoid Tomorrowland for as long as possible.

What we have here is neither Nathanael West nor Jackie Collins. It lacks the bleak hysteria of the former and the latter’s breathless desire to put a glaze of glamour on trashy, preposterous behavior. “It’s All True” is more radical than that. It is a book about normal people engaged in an admittedly abnormal, even exotic, business but yet trapped in their ordinariness, their variously expressed needs to make their livings, make their lives, in a place that rewards them only grudgingly, with just enough success to keep them in its game.

This is bound to disappoint readers looking for malice and sensation -- which is what we want (or have been taught to expect) from “insider” novels about Hollywood. But David Freeman has been keeping his eye on the town for years, as a screenwriter and as one of its most patiently observing flaneurs. If he says this is the way most of its denizens live, we are obliged to take him seriously.

The papers these days are full of stories about rich and powerful people -- Michael Eisner, Mel Gibson -- whose eyes are firmly fixed on the ball and who doubtless believe they are in some way making history. Maybe so. But among professional historians there has been, in recent decades, a movement away from the study of big-shot history toward a concern with the diaries, letters and parish records of the anonymous folks whose eyes tend to wander from onrushing spheres, but whose thoughts may give us a better sense of what it felt like to be alive, groaning and chirping, in some interesting time or place. “It’s All True” is a fiction in that vein, the story of an agreeably distractible man who’d rather linger over a second cup of coffee at the Farmers Market than go home and work on a screenplay that probably won’t get produced anyway. No one’s ever going to polish up an Oscar for Henry Wearie, but in this epitaph for a small winner there is wit, poignancy and seductive grace.