Go West Young Scribe   

Whether driven by burnout or ambition, many reporters have gone Hollywood to write or work behind the scenes.

It wasn't so long ago that Joe Pichirallo was moving up the ladder at the Washington Post. It was the mid-1980s, and since 1979 he'd moved from covering the suburbs to City Hall to major stories from the national desk.

Then, in 1988, he and fellow reporter Arthur Brisbane had an idea. They decided to develop a television series based on their experiences covering then-Mayor Marion Barry--a "Hill Street Blues" about local government. They sold the rights to Warner Brothers to produce, and Pichirallo began spending his vacation days taking red-eye flights to Los Angeles to convince NBC to air it.

"It was my first exposure to Hollywood," says Pichirallo, and although the series was never made, the reporter found the experience "just as exciting as walking into the Post newsroom with Ben Bradlee and Bob Woodward."

Two years later, after taking a leave of absence to spend a year at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, Pichirallo found himself in a dilemma. "I had a real job and a paycheck [in Washington]," he recalls. "Why would I want to give that up for the great unknown? Was I a fool? Was I making the greatest mistake of my life?" The Post agreed to extend his leave, but Pichirallo, now a development executive for HBO Pictures, didn't look back.

Hollywood has convinced a number of reporters to make similar leaps in their careers, whether to make deals, write or produce. Journalists, like other creative types, have heard Hollywood's collective sob about the dearth of quality scripts, and for many, an Oscar or Emmy or blip in the credits has the allure of a front page byline. As one screenwriting teacher says, "It's the chance to have your name up there in lights so millions of people can forget it."

Many journalists also have noted the success enjoyed by such ex-colleagues as Kurt Luedtke, the former Detroit Free Press executive editor who won a screenwriting Oscar for "Out of Africa," or Cameron Crowe, the one-time Rolling Stone reporter who wrote and directed "Singles," among other films. The boom of scriptwriting courses on both coasts reinforces the notion that the medium may be fast replacing the novel as the writer's American Dream.

And then there's the money. Although it can take years to sell a script, and although writers are generally at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain, reporters took notice when former magazine writer Joe Eszterhas earned $3 million for his "Basic Instinct" screenplay – enough to bankroll a $600-a-week journalist for 96 years. Two Washington reporters earlier this year received more than half a million dollars for their first screenplay (the industry minimum is about $55,000). And television writers earn at least $22,000 for a drama episode and $13,500 for a sitcom, plus fees for reruns and syndication that could multiply their earnings.

Despite the predictably stiff competition, it's understandable why even accomplished journalists feel tempted to embrace Hollywood, particularly those who cover entertainment. After a report that Tom Shales, the Washington Post's Pulitzer Prize-winning television critic, might leave to write scripts, Shales said that he had been "a foolish old man babbling senselessly." And yet he babbled.

Others have made the jump with few regrets, just as they've done since the days of Ben Hecht, the former reporter who wrote the 1930s screenplays for "The Front Page" and "Nothing Sacred." Here are some stories from behind the scenes:

• Luedtke joined the Detroit Free Press in 1965 as a reporter and by 1973 had become executive editor. That presented a problem. "I had gotten the best news job I was going to get at 32," he says. "I could look forward to working another 27 years until retirement in the same job."

He considered television news, then scouted his prospects in Hollywood and sold the rights to what became his script for "Absence of Malice." The 1981 film, directed by Sydney Pollack, won Luedtke an Oscar nomination for best screenplay. In the eyes of Hollywood, he says, "I was launched."

His next script didn't go anywhere, but he teamed up with Pollack again in 1985 by adapting several books into "Out of Africa." That film won seven Oscars, including one for Luedtke, who is still writing.

• Andrea King left the Hollywood Reporter this summer ("I had written every story a million times, just with different names," she says) to launch a production company on the lot of 20th Century Fox. Fox pays her expenses and a not-unusual six-figure salary for the right to have a first look at her projects.

When she was hired, many Hollywood insiders were skeptical. "They were saying, 'What has she done? She's just a journalist,' " says King, 30. "But we're not talking about brain surgery. It has to do with access to agents, and relationships, and instincts – I knew I could do it. Things are going well, so I guess I was right."

• Peter Osterlund, 30, formerly at the Baltimore Sun, and Amy Brooke Baker, 26, once with D.C.-based States News Service, sold their script for "Countermeasures," a murder mystery set aboard a Navy carrier, to Disney's Touchstone Pictures last spring for $530,000 (plus $220,000 more if the film is made). Among other projects, they're now scripting "Capital Games," a book by Newsday reporter Timothy Phelps about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, for LifeTime Television.

Osterlund says "Hollywood provides you with the prospect of giving millions of people something to think about. When I was at the Sun, I don't know how many times I was sitting up there in the Senate press gallery typing out these stories and thinking, 'I wonder if anyone reads this other than me, the copy editor and the bureau chief.' You could write these wonderfully elaborate and carefully crafted stories on budget issues and tax issues and political squabbles, very important stuff, but when half of the readers buy the paper for the TV listings or the comics, you wonder."

• David Friendly, president of production at Imagine Films, worked at Newsweek for six years after graduating from college, then joined the Los Angeles Times to succeed entertainment reporter Dale Pollock, now president of A&M Films. Friendly took a job at Imagine under founders Ron Howard and Brian Glazer in 1987 and has since overseen several major films.

"My father [former CBS News President Fred Friendly] had a large interest in me going into journalism, but ultimately something else was brewing inside," he says. "Now he's more likely to ask me about the gross of my latest picture than what I thought of some opinion piece in the New York Times."

Friendly says that money is a critical factor for him and many other journalists who have come to Hollywood. "I couldn't have achieved what I wanted [financially] for myself and my family in print journalism," says Friendly, 36. "Had I been able to, I would have stayed."

• John Riley, a former freelancer and correspondent for Time, Life and Newsweek, broke in with a script in 1981 for NBC about male exotic dancers. He's since worked on several feature films and co-wrote a Fox TV movie airing this fall about a computerized office building that turns malevolent.

"I haven't done a piece of journalism since 1985 and I feel spotless as a lamb about it," he says. "I found the challenge of screenwriting even more congenial."

• Morgan Gendel, who covered entertainment for the Los Angeles Daily News and then the Los Angeles Times until 1987, is now a freelance television writer. He has written multiple episodes of "Hunter" and "Wiseguy," and most recently penned an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and its upcoming spin-off, "Deep Space Nine."

He says many reporters become Hollywood writers because it's so similar to what they're already doing. "If you're covering the science beat and you interview a physicist, you don't say to yourself, 'Hey, I could split some atoms,' " he says. "With the entertainment beat, you're in the same ballpark."

"My lifestyle is exactly what it was as a journalist, no more or less glamorous," adds Gendel, 39. "The only difference is that I don't have to tell the truth so often."

• Michael Cieply, who recently left the Los Angeles Times, says that only a few years ago he would have scoffed at joining the industry he covered.

"Being a journalist was infinitely more fun than what I saw [film] people living with," recalls Cieply, a veteran of the Wall Street Journal and Forbes who for the past year worked with film producer Steve Roth. "Then I turned 40. Journalism is a wonderful life in your 20s and 30s, but it's a little tougher when you're in your fourth year of pulling down the highest pay raise you can get and it's still lower than inflation. I was doing what I loved, but I couldn't find any prospects in it without leaving Los Angeles."

In September, Cieply launched his own firm, Byline Films, at Columbia Pictures. "[The news business] was so meaningful to me, I thought I'd like to have it up on the door," he says.

• Reporter Lee May agreed a few months ago to write an episode of ABC's "Civil Wars," which focuses on three divorce lawyers. His episode, scheduled to air later this season, involves a politician who sues a reporter for libel after being accused of adultery.

A former Washington and Atlanta-based reporter for the Los Angeles Times, May says he isn't ready to abandon journalism altogether. In July, he became an assistant national editor at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Many executives believe reporters are naturals for Hollywood because they possess the same skills as successful screenwriters: conciseness, an ear for dialogue and fresh ideas. Scriptwriter Timothy Wurtz says his 12 years in broadcast news was invaluable training. "We always had to look for a hook," he says. "That's a benefit for screenwriting because there really is nothing new out there."

Whatever their talents, Hollywood newcomers learn quickly that the odds of becoming a "bankable" talent are slim.

"A movie script is the single hardest literary form there is in terms of construction," says Peter Bart, the editor of Variety and a former New York Times reporter who has also worked as an executive for Paramount and MGM. "You don't just write. You rewrite 15 times until you are sick of it. For someone who is used to instant gratification, it's a bitch."

Even assuming a reporter can write a decent script, "this is not a career to choose if what you want is [big] money," says Charles Slocum, director of industry analysis for the Writer's Guild in Los Angeles, which has 7,000 members. "Half of our members will make zero this year as a writer. Of those that work, half make less than $50,000 a year."

A newcomer also needs contacts. "Hollywood is about relationships and information and, particularly if you're a trade journalist or at the L.A. Times, you have both," says Andrea King. "You couldn't pay for the access [such jobs] give you. That's never your intention, but..you get offers."

Journalists rely on contacts for all types of beats, including politics and business, and many have migrated to careers other than movie-making on the strength of their Rolodexes. But the especially murky relationship that can develop between Hollywood and those who cover it has long raised eyebrows (see "Why News From Hollywood Wears a Tan," WJR, July/August 1989). In an article this past summer, the New York Times confronted the issue again.

Reporter Bernard Weinraub detailed the media's sometimes incestuous relationship with the entertainment industry, including reporters peddling their scripts or production aspirations to studios they use as sources or whose products they review. And several film executives told WJR of instances where reporters pursuing critical stories have been distracted by offers of screenplay deals. The executives say tough questions from reporters during interviews have been sidetracked with comments such as "You're awfully smart. Have you thought of writing screenplays?" More often than not, they have.

Not everyone goes West, however. Disturbed by what he says is Hollywood's devotion to "mechanical plots," former newspaper and magazine reporter Steven Beschloss recently launched a New York-based firm, Laughing Man Films. He and a partner plan to soon begin filming a Beschloss screenplay about a writer forced to hole up in his apartment after there's a violent reaction to one of his books.

Beschloss, 34, began his journalism career 10 years ago as a reporter for the 45,000-circulation Beaver County Times in Pennsylvania. Since there wasn't much else to do in the rural community where the paper is based, he saw several movies a week and enrolled in film courses at the University of Pittsburgh.

"I realized for the first time that when the lights go down you [can] communicate with people who are not distracted by anything else," he says.

Beschloss, who later wrote for other newspapers and freelanced, says that several years ago he concluded, "I no longer simply wanted to report and write other people's stories... I have stories of my own..."

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Joe Pichirallo has settled in at HBO, searching out ideas to mold into movies to air on the cable channel. His journalism career seems distant. "I could easily have stayed in journalism for the rest of my life, but I had achieved all I wanted to do," he says.

Last May, the same month Pichirallo joined HBO, former Post colleague Arthur Brisbane took over as editor of the Kansas City Star. Unlike Pichirallo, he believes his glitter days are over, at least for now. The only Star he's interested in is in Kansas City. "Hollywood," he says, "will have to wait."