Yeah, I actually wrote a couple of screenplays. Fup was optioned for the screen for 27 years. You know how options work? People buy the rights, and if they don’t produce anything, the rights revert to you, and you get to keep the money. That’s a great, great gig for writers, I love that. I love it when they don’t get anything, and you get the money, especially in considering Hollywood. Anyway, I wrote a couple of screenplays for Fup, and I wrote one for Not Fade Away in conjunction with another — with a guy that had purchased the option. I forget his name. And that was fun, collaborating on something.

And I found it amazingly easy, I knew the story. And all you have to do is write dialogue, really. You don’t have the exposition, you know, instead of describing a hangar at Moffett Field at night, you go hangar, Moffett Field, night. What could be easier? It’s ridiculous. Yeah, you can’t believe how much money that little book made me, Fup especially. That’s the thing about Hollywood. They have absolute — this is my experience, right? The art of Hollywood is the deal. It doesn’t have anything to do with art. You can buy artists. Some young playwright said, that’s why they give you so much money, they’re going to humiliate you, and your humiliation should be expensive.

So, that’s the way I looked at it. They have absolutely no imagination, but they buy these properties, and then try to develop them, and then they make deals. I mean you can’t believe Hollywood contracts. One that I got — and this is the truth, it said — it’s something about the rights. It was like the rights — world rights plus any universe that may be discovered. And I went what the hell, why would you put that in there? I mean, if somebody landed on this planet, and he said, “Wait a minute, you can’t make a movie out of that, we have the rights”. I want to hear that explanation.