If you are a writer and have spent any amount of time near Los Angeles, you probably succumbed at some point to an urge to uncover unknown stories about its primary industry – the entertainment world. Stories that somehow help to explain how the people behind the mystery and magic of movies find their inspiration.
Screenwriter, playwright, radio show scribe and adjunct professor at Pepperdine University, Ken LaZebnik has done as much in his just-released first book, “Hollywood Digs: An Archeology of Shadows,” a collection of essays about some of Hollywood’s first writers, actors and second-unitdirectors of movie days gone by.
“Los Angeles is such a strange place of coincidence,” LaZebnik said. “I just met a woman today whose father-in-law was a grip on ‘Citizen Kane;’ a woman at my son’s school was the daughter of Sebastian Cabot (of television’s “A Family Affair”). There are so many connections to movies and TV of the past in L.A., I thought I would write essays prompted by a shard of evidence I came across of something no longer here.”
Accordingly, in one piece on F. Scott Fitzgerald, LaZebnik tracks down the celebrated jazz age author’s last residence—a cottage on the Encino estate “Belly Acres,” that belonged to Edward Everett Horton, the actor who portrayed a comic butler in dozens of Hollywood films.
The cottage, of course, was razed to make way for a huge apartment building backed by the 101 Freeway. LaZebnik couldn’t help but appreciate the irony of theman whose great American novel—“The Great Gatsby”—memorialized the wealthy elite of the country that would hire Horton’s characters, now living in Horton’s guest cottage, struggling to pay for his daughter’s college tuition and his wife’s support in a mental institution.
In another essay, LaZebnik explores the life of famed second-unit director and longtime Malibu resident Micky Moore, who worked an astonishing 84 years in the industry. But even here, LaZebnik only discovered Moore’s story through his shadows.
“I never met Micky,” LaZebnik said. “He had just died and left all his papers to Pepperdine and that’s how I found out about his remarkable life. I had no idea he lived just down the road.”
He also profiled Kathy Kohner Zuckerman, the original Gidget, and herself the daughter of an industry titan, after long interviews at Duke’s Malibu.
LaZebnik’s early writing experiences prepared him to appreciate the bigger story in these stories. His father was a creative writing teacher at a women’s college in Missouri. LaZebnik himself started off writing for a small theatre company called Mixed Blood Theatre (A mixed race repertory group, they were the first to try out color-blind casting of traditional plays more than 35 years ago.).
He ended up going to New York where he met his wife, and founded the Dear Knows Theatre Company, which focused on reading the classics of U.K. writers like James Joyce and Lewis Carroll. While in New York, LaZebnik met Garrison Keillor, the writer/producer of the long-running radio show, “A Prairie Home Companion,” for which LaZebnik wrote on and off for years.
“Garrison’s the most prolific writer I’ve ever known,” LaZebnik said. “I wrote for him, but his shows are 95 percent his writing.”
Eventually, LaZebnik found himself in Hollywood, working on episodic television and film scripts for people like Robert Altman. A few years ago, LaZebnik was teaching film and helping to book speakers into Pepperdine University when he met Bart Schneider, a fellow Mid-Westerner who published some of LaZebnik’s essays in a small literary magazine in the twin cities. Schneider suggested that a few more of LaZebnik’s essays would make a great book on Hollywood, so the project was born.
“Part of the joy of this process was taking on the personal lives of L.A. writers,” LaZebnik said. “I wandered into an estate sale for a writer named Mel Shavelson. He was once president of the Writers Guild and wrote for the Bob Hope radio show. Nobody outside the industry knows him, but he did a lot. You write in hopes that what you write will live beyond your time. Well, Shavelson’s work has lived on, even if his name has not.”
LaZebnik’s book is richly illustrated with photos of former Hollywood stars and industry insiders, including several from the photo gallery of Leigh Wiener, whose catalogue included a trove of some 400,000 images for LaZebnik to explore. Wiener passed several years ago, but son Devik Wiener said that the book was an honor and an opportunity for his father’s prolific work to gain a wider audience.
“Dad believed that photographs should be a revelation, not just a portrait,” Wiener said. “He one time was hired to do a portrait of J. Paul Getty, who was irritated with the number of photos Dad was taking. Dad just said, ‘Mr. Getty, do you only dig one oil well at a time?’ He got to shoot all he wanted.”
LaZebnik’s book is available at the publisher’s website, www.kellyscovepress.com and at local bookstores. He will be reading from his book at Diesel, a Bookstore on Sunday from 3:00 to 5:00 p.m.
