The Chicago Conspiracy Trial

In 1979 I was among 600 actors in Los Angeles who auditioned for the Odyssey Theater Ensemble production of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial in Santa Monica, and was chosen to fill one of the 40 parts.

The play was a recreation of the trial of the “Chicago Eight,” eight political activists accused of fomenting riots at the Democratic National Convention held in 1968 in Chicago to pick a presidential candidate.

Based on actual transcripts of the trial, the play had wonderful actors. George Murdock who played many characters going all the way back to the Twilight Zone TV show in the early 1960’s and who was a regular on the Barney Miller TV show in the 1980’s as the vile Lt. Scanlon. He played the part of Judge Julius Hoffman.

Other notable actors in the cast included Paul Lieber as activist and trial defendant Abbie Hoffman. Also a member of the Barney Miller show, Lieber is today a radio poet and actor in Los Angeles. There was Hal Bokar as a government attorney, the suitably crazy Greg Clemens as activist Jerry Rubin and Kenneth Tigar, who appeared in numerous TV shows and starred in the film Phantasm II, Lethal Weapon and Hell’s Heart (2015).

They were only part of a great cast.

I played a sadistic court officer. I’m seen here (on the left) manhandling actor Logan Ramsey. Logan, who played activist and trial defendant David Dellinger, had a long career including appearances on the TV shows Star Trek and MASH.

Logan’s wife Anne Ramsey was an actress who starred in the movie Throw Mama from the Train (1987) with Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal.

In the fight scenes in the play where violent mayhem breaks out in the courtroom I had an important part. The scenes were very realistic. So much so that one night as I was battling one of the cast members (Lieber), a woman in the front row seated a few feet away screamed out, “Don’t hurt me!”

The scene where I rough Logan Ramsey up was eventually too much for him. Logan had a heart condition. He had to leave the show and was replaced by another actor.

The public was fascinated by this recreation of a historic event. The play was a sold-out smash for months. Lines formed around the block to get in.

Celebrities came to see the show, Jane Fonda and her then-husband Tom Hayden, (one of the actual defendants in the trial), Dom DeLuise, Andrew Prine, Allen Garfield and others.

The real activist and trial defendant Abbie Hoffman came to see the show disguised as a woman (he was on the run from the law at the time on a drug charge). He left a note behind at the theater after leaving saying how much he enjoyed the show.

The play ran for a year and is still considered a legend in Los Angeles Equity Waiver Theater (99 seats or less).   

This is me threatening actor J.D. Hall in the play “Void Where Prohibited” in 1979 at the Scorpio Theater in Los Angeles. I was often cast as hulking police officers. The play about an African American man (J.D.) who goes on a crime spree much like Humphrey Bogart played in The Petrified Forest (1936) had an extended run.

One of the more interesting unplanned things to happen in the play was the night I was readying to make my entrance on the stage. I would stand outside the back door of the theater and kick on the door so the audience could hear it and yell “Police open up!” Then push my way through the door in a forceful manner.

I was in my uniform kicking on the door and a real police car saw me and pulled over. Two real policemen jumped out with guns drawn and ran up to help me thinking I was a real police officer.

I had to explain to them I was not, this was just a play. They put their guns back in their holsters and looking sullen walked back to their squad car and drove away.

The audience meanwhile could not understand what had happened and the actors on stage who were waiting for my entrance had to ad-lib their dialog until I finally appeared.

J.D. Hall went on to roles in numerous TV appearances and films such as Fatal Attraction (1987), Father of the Bride (1991) and Jaws the Revenge (1987).

Much of Our Prior Unhappiness is based on Unrealistic Expectations

I tried to become an actor on a whim at the age of 28 with no training in college or otherwise, based on the belief I was beautiful, when there were hundreds of other guys who looked as good as if not better than me. I knew nothing of the scarcity of work for actors or what it takes to be successful. You have to be willing to park cars for 12 years to make an income while you try to “make it,” and most hopefuls don’t.

Despite this ignorance and silliness, despite my total unpreparedness and ineptitude, I appeared on the TV show General Hospital as a gangster and in a David Carradine sci fi biker flick, Deathsport.

I was actually called in to try out for a Tarzan movie starring Bo Derek and didn’t get it. A much better looking man did. I could have been the first pot-bellied ethnic-looking Tarzan but hey, how many men do you know who could claim to have tried for such a role at all?

Making a living at this? It was clear I wasn’t.

Then I decided to become a writer. I didn’t know much about this either, but I was really determined this time. I wanted to do something creative, something notable and interesting. I did not want to be the salesman that I was.

Have you ever heard the saying, he or she is a “late bloomer?”

First of all, don’t make the dreadful mistake of thinking that you have ownership of misfortune because no matter how bad you think your life is, there are other people out there millions of them who have it much worse. You learn to be thankful for what you have.

It took me a long time to realize this.

I used to think of my life as somewhat of a disaster. I’m not going to dwell on the negative, but I used to have two sayings, “This wouldn’t happen to anyone but me,” and, “Nobody has bad job experiences more than me.”

I was in sales and had jobs literally one after another where the bosses were often dishonest and abusive. The boss would set a sales goal for you impossible to achieve because they were greedy. The only way to make the sales goal was to cheat the customer by selling them more than they needed.

Because I was honest I didn’t sell as much as the more crooked salesmen. I would only raise the customer up 10 percent to renew their product/service for the year over what they paid last year. Other sale people would raise them 80 percent.

At sales meetings, these 80 percent sharks would get applause. I was greeted by stony silence. The company bosses would start the process of getting rid of me.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who was wrongly forced out of a job, started up a new company with others from scratch which became a success; that company was purchased by the same company that earlier forced me out of my job and then I was forced out of my job again.

Forced out twice by the same people.

I had to learn to laugh at this, which was the beginning of the new life of me.

I had always wanted to be a writer. Long before computers I began writing a book in the old-fashioned way with a typewriter. While I was working in these sales jobs I didn’t like, I would sit in my garage at night and write out a 120,000-word novel, much of it nonfiction, with pen and paper, free-hand.

Then I typed it on a typewriter. Anyone who has not had the experience of typing a book using white paint called white-out to cover typo errors, and then endlessly typing it all over again page by page (400 pages) to get it error-free, doesn’t realize the depth of commitment. Regardless of the book’s quality, this alone was quite an achievement.

Then mailing the book out to publishing houses in big manila envelopes only to have it rejected time and again and returned in an envelope placed inside the mailed envelope, and paying the postage back and forth---this should earn someone a medal for endurance.

This book is today for sale at Amazon.

Here’s the point. It took me until I was 65 to become a full time successful freelance writer achieving royalties from my books. I worked at it in my spare time at night and on weekends for 35 years.

I hung in there. I never let the negative sales jobs destroy my desire or the sense of who I thought I could be. I never gave up. But I realize today even when I faced adversity I was a lot better off than millions of other people.

I am blessed. It took about 50 years for me to realize it.

If you haven’t already, you should realize that you are blessed too. I believe I am a better person today than I was when I was 40 or 20, more level-headed, less selfish; even less cowardly.

I’ll fess up. I went from being a person who despises himself to a person who is proud even with the figurative warts, the weaknesses, I still have.

You too can feel good about your life.

How you view yourself is of enormous importance and you can have the wrong idea about yourself. Your interpretation of yourself, your worth, your value as a human being if it’s a negative image, is all in your head.  

Authors and Reviews

It is my intention to use this blog weekly to talk about being a writer and an author, the ups and downs of this curious profession, hopefully using a little humor and entertainment.

I would like to start with the subject of nasty reviews.
If you’re like me among the more obscure of writers, you don’t get numerous reviews for a book. You perhaps only get one.

What if that single review is bad?

You just spent four months of your life or longer pouring your heart and soul into a literary work that (pardon the pun), literally represents hundreds of hours of effort.
You get a single review and it says your book is lousy.

Here is a review I got:

Just a bunch of Talk
Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2020
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
I would not recommend this book. If you like reading tons of yak, yak, yak then this is the book for you.
It starts out not bad but then it goes downhill from there . I guess by looking at the picture on the cover I thought it would be a good read...boy was I wrong.
There is pages and pages of dialogue between 2 or three people and its like it never ends.
I liked when Zeb and the indian girl got together but then the author has him meet a giant being and he has to defeat this. So far fetched...I kept skipping more and more pages.
Then there's the chapter about Calamity Jane....more inane dialogue...I just closed the book and quietly walked away.

Now, I’m not against reviews even negative ones and I hardly ever respond to them.
However, if the reviewer seems to cross a line in my judgement and be mocking or insulting, or stupid, if the review misleads, then I feel any author can respond and should.
If the author of a book doesn’t expect immunity from criticism then the reviewer should not expect it-----that’s if a review is not constructive.
What is constructive?
To me it’s a reviewer pointing out what he/she feels is the book’s weakness and remember, always remember, what is good or bad is the most subjective of all calls.
What one person thinks is garbage the other person will see as gold.
A constructive review is specific.
Here is an example:
“I thought your story needed a hero I could root for. It needed something about the hero I could sympathize with. Instead he’s a rather ruthless person I can’t feel pity for.”
That’s specific.
What’s not specific?
“Your hero is a jerk. This book is sh’t.”

The reviewer is not specific, did not explain how, why, where?

Perhaps the reviewer is lazy. Possibly the reviewer only read one page.
There’s also what I like to call the “vandal reviewer,” a naysayer who just likes to do put-downs.

One of the main foibles of a reviewer is the delusion that if they think it’s bad, everybody else will too.

Let’s go to the review I received (Just a bunch of Talk - see above).

The reviewer says, “I would not recommend this book.”
That’s fair, no response from me.
The reviewer says, “Looking at the cover, I thought it would be a good read…”
Does cover art equal the quality of the writing inside? The publisher picked the cover art. He didn’t write the book.

The review says, "There is pages and pages of dialog." Correct usage should be, "There 'are' pages and pages of dialog."

She then adds, "between 2 or three people" (uses a number and then spells out the word three).

Obviously the reviewer doesn't have the time to edit-check her own work. Maybe she needs a bonehead English class.

By the way I must say the book she is reviewing is a box set with four complete books inside it. She only mentions two of the four and calls Calamity Jane a “chapter,” when it’s a full-blown book.

This tells me she didn’t bother to read all of Calamity Jane, or she can’t get her facts straight. If you’re a reviewer who says something wrong, I as the author have a right to point it out.
In that case I can do a review of your review.

The main criticism is that the book is all talk, or “yak, yak, yak” as the reviewer puts it.
This becomes a petty form of sarcasm. A simple “has too much dialog” would have sufficed, and would have generated no response from me.

I'll give the reviewer credit for saying that if you like too much dialog, "This book is for you." She unintentionally gave me a good review in spite of herself.

I tend to write introspective character-driven books with characters who have troubles, weaknesses, inner torments. I also believe dialog makes the characters come alive. But how many books or movies are the same that have become classics from Wuthering Heights to High Noon?
If it’s not the reviewer’s cup of tea, it’s probably somebody else’s.

Reviewers often fail to understand the concept, that like politics, other people think otherwise.

Then to top it off, the reviewer said, “More inane dialog (she doesn’t identify how it’s inane), I just closed the book and quietly walked away.”

Well isn’t that special?

The reviewer acts like the book is a sexy man who spurned her advances.

Who cares if you walked away quietly? Walk away yelling obscenities if you want, hell, you spent .99 cents for four complete books.

Authors should follow this credo. Believe good reviews, not the bad ones.
Two other readers gave this book a five-star rating.