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I left NYC on Monday, June 1, 1987. After 42 years there, it was a huge move for me. I had worked in the broadcast advertising business for nearly 20 years. I was a divorced Dad with two young sons. I was ensconced in the indelible habits of predictability, while feeling more and more spiritually bankrupt. I look back now and can’t say for certain I know the person, who took the crazy chance of moving to Santa Fe, NM, with no plan, leaving pieces of his heart behind.

My 1980, blue Dodge Colt felt like a roller-skate sized, space capsule taking me on a journey to an unknown world, different from anything I had ever known. I landed on a five acre piece of land, with a small adobe house, in the middle of absolutely nowhere. My mailbox was at the end of a long dirt road, which fed into another dirt road. I could go on about the too many shocks to my system, but we’d run out of time and that’s not why I want to tell this story to you.

Again, I have no idea what ever made me think this leap of faith would possibly work out. Before much time had passed, I began living in jeans, wearing cowboy boots and bought a shiny, red pick up truck. I even had a hybrid wolf. For all my years in NYC, I alway felt like a Martian, uncomfortable and self-conscious, never feeling at home. No, I didn’t change my name to Cloud Walker, start wearing turquoise and silver, with a pigeon feather in my hair. It was still me and even more of me than my NYC persona. I was home.

Why am I getting into this part of my life now? Well, I am so glad you asked. For the past few years, I have felt the need to address all sorts of fairly weighty stuff, quoting the Buddha as often as I could. This has been a very difficult time for all of us and the idea of recounting one of my many adventures just didn’t seem to fit until now. I think I’ve had a fairly diverse, professional history and swear I am using understatement. However, this is definitely not the time or place to recount them all. 

Memory is a tricky business, with facts and details getting lost over time. However, the core of any experience never dies, at least for me. The longer your history, the more space it takes and that’s just how it goes. A bunch of months ago, I decided to record an oral resume for my just launched podcast. it was so long, we had to cut into two parts. I included most everything I could remember, at least those things worth sharing. Months later, I realized I left out one of my great stories and I have been thinking about it for a couple of weeks. It is a really good one.

After about seven years in and around Santa Fe, I found myself living in a kind of compound, with apartments and single houses. I had sold my little adobe, shoe-box house south of town and my three dogs stayed there. The wolf had run away years before, because they are not pets, simply a testament to wannabe, cowboy vanity. I had already done too many things to recount and I guess I was a fairly public person in the community. Anyway, I befriended a neighbor, Glen, who taught screen writing at the Institute of American Indian Arts, a fabulous facility south of  town.

He had written a solid screen play about a Native American, who lived in the Northwest around the turn of the 20th century. He robbed banks. He was considered a Robin Hood by many, because he would give money to tribal families, allowing them to buy their homes from the banks, who held the papers. As a result, he was protected and kept up his robbing ways. Glen showed me old newspaper clippings about him. He killed at least thirteen men in his escapades. Allegedly, he even buried gold treasure somewhere in the mountains. Earlier, I mentioned the loss of details in memory and the name of this guy is one of them, but I swear he was real.

Honestly, I am not sure why Glen shared all of this with me back then. I guess I still carried some of that Big City bravado and I had done a number of fairly high profile things in town. 

We decided we were going to make a low budget film of this story and I was going to be the producer. Here is where the fun begins. Somehow, I don’t remember how, Glenn made contact with an incredibly high-powered agent in Hollywood, by the name Hilly Elkins. Back in NYC, I had seen his name associated with all sorts major productions and stars. I couldn’t believe it.

We had a number of phone conversations with this guy, each one more precious than the next. We couldn’t believe that he had set up a meeting with Roger Corman, who was interested in the story. Corman is legendary in the film business and I don’t want to waste my words on him, but check him out and it will blow your mind, seriously. He is a bona fide legend in that world.

Glen and I flew to LA for the meeting. We drove to Hilly’s house in Beverly Hills. He lived in a huge home. His living room was filled with Napoleonic era memorabilia, no joke. Hilly, a fast talking, very short, Jewish guy, clearly had vertical issues and was surrounded by antique affirmations of his compensatory behavior. He admitted to being surprised we got the meeting with Corman.

Next, was the drive to American International Pictures offices. The three of us squeezed into Hilly’s white, sports car. He drove like an absolute wild man to Corman’s office. He went from lane to lane, down shifting, punching the accelerator and jamming the brakes with abandon. Somewhere, during the course of this kamikaze ride, he shared that Steve McQueen taught him how to drive.

We arrived and immediately went into Roger’s sprawling acreage of an office. The four of us sat around a low table and talked about the film, with a budget of about $600,000, incredibly low for a film, but right in his incredibly, successful film making formula. Roger said he wanted to do it and we all stood up and shook hands, the official stamp of a done deal in show biz. On the supersonic ride back to Hilly’s, he kept repeating he couldn’t believe it had been so easy to make a deal. 

When Glen and I drove away in our rented car to our cheap motel, we were both hyperventilating.  It was huge for him, busting wide open the glass ceiling that prevented Native Americans from directing films. It meant the world to him. As for me, I couldn’t stop crying, feeling I had lifted my long, deceased father on my shoulders, succeeding, while he had spent a lifetime trying to make a go of it and died trying. We both could have flown back to Santa Fe without the help of a plane.

Once home, we had several conversations with Hilly, who was acting like we were part of his family of budding super stars. After around a month of swimming in the deep end of unimaginable success, we got word from Hilly that Roger wanted us to do one film before ours. Holy shit, I was going to produce two films and Glen was going to shatter the ceiling. 

Roger was an incredibly crafty marketer. Back then, WTBS, Ted Turner’s experiment, proved that people all over the country would watch an Atlanta based station on national cable television, incredibly new at the time. He started producing original programming, which would air nationally, then get put in a box to be sold at Blockbuster. He announced he was going to do an autobiographical film on the life of Geronimo, starring Wes Studi. Not to be outdone, Roger wanted to knock out a quick, down and dirty, bio film that would go right to video, capitalizing on the confusion it would create. 

The script was sent to us. It was written by two guys from LA, who had never seen an Indian in their lives, modeling their story on the films that had lead actors like Anthony Quinn and Victor Mature, ethnic looking guys, portraying the demeaning stereotypes of drunkin’ Indians along with their abused “squaws”. 

Look, I was a hardcore City boy. I had never seen a Native American, much less gave a shit about them. I had been spending some time around the Pueblo Indian reservations, befriending a couple of folks and it became normal to me. I felt respect, not superiority or inferiority, just a sweet connection, comfortable in their presence.

In telling this story, I don’t want you to think there was anything special about me, some tribute to my character and ethics. At the time, it didn’t seem like a big deal to be offended by how these people were portrayed in this story. It just felt wrong to me and even now, I don’t have some high minded explanation. I told Glen, we couldn’t do this second film without some script changes, because it was just too graphically demeaning to Native Americans. Could you believe it? I am actually telling this to Glen, who initially disagreed with me and for all the right, professional reasons. To him, the most important thing was to be that first Native American film director and the story didn’t matter that much.

I don’t know what got into me, but I just couldn’t do the film. Mind you, I would have been the producer of this film, plus the one we wanted to do, which really was a great story, worth telling. Glen and I ultimately agreed there were just a couple of scenes we had to change. Well, Roger and Glen had only one conversation on his suggested changes. Roger abruptly hung up on him and refused all subsequent calls. Our close, personal compadre, Hilly Elkins, wouldn’t to take a single phone call from either of us.

So, I could’a been a producer. 

This is one of my world-class adventures and the idea I could have left this out of my history  means either my memory is failing or my past has been so incredibly full that taking inventory is more challenging with the passage of time. Who knows?

All we have are our stories. Thanks for listening to this one.