SLUTTY GIRLS, SLEAZY AGENTS, AND HOLLYWOOD NIGHTS

My Mostly True Adventures in the Screen Trade (With the Names Changed to Protect the Guilty)

Author, writer and historian Steve Travers

My life changed forever on August 12, 1994. The immediate impact of the events of that date were negative. My career ended and my business dissolved, which I describe as “Jerry Maguire without the happy ending.” These events propelled me in equal measure to pursue a career in screenwriting that was half desperation, half inspiration. Eventually, I found my way, and today I can report the events of the following years with the clarity that comes from experience and achievement.

First, Jerry Maguire. We all know this popular 1996 movie directed by Cameron Crowe. Tom Cruise starred as Jerry Maguire, a high-powered sports agent controlling the lives and destinies of the most finely-tuned athletes in the world; that is, until he writes a “mission statement”  that advocates his firm concentrate less on profit and more on human potential. This earns him a pink slip, at which point he loses all his clients except Rod Tidwell (Cuba Gooding, Jr.), a “shrimp” wide receiver for the Arizona Cardinals with a bad attitude and a loud mouth wife.

Jerry’s future hinges on Rod’s next big contract, which he will never sign if he gets hurt or falls on his face. If this happens, Jerry will not get a big commission and will have to find another line of work. The film breaks all the normal screenwriting “rules.” Rod is a wholly unsympathetic figure the audience has no reason to root for, and Jerry’s whole notion of success, no matter what his “mission statement” reads, is based on making a lot of money. Nevertheless, it is a well told, well acted film that works and of course has a “Hollywood ending” when Rod wins the big game, is rewarded the big contract, meaning Jerry gets a nice cut, which will lead to top stars gravitating their business to him, all of which results in his riding off into the sunset beyond L.A.’s Griffith Park with the girl (Renee Zellweger).

So what does this have to do with me? On August 12, 1994, my partner and I were sports agents. Our company was founded on $30,000 provided by my dad, an attorney. We were in business less than a year at the time.

I was 35. I had on paper what looked like an excellent resume. It was a bluff. Most of it covered up the various failures in my life. I had played professional baseball in the Cardinals and A’s organizations, but had failed to reach the Major Leagues.

I had graduated from the University of Southern California and Western State University College of Law, but my legal career was for the most part a bust. I had been fired from a prestigious workers’ compensation firm I worked for as a paralegal all through law school. I had worked in my dad’s law firm handling mostly probate work. While Dad did not fire me, he did not exactly encourage me to stay on or even keep working in the legal profession.

I had worked as a paralegal in the Judge Advocate General’s office (JAG) in Washington, D.C., since the Army had paid for my way through law school, but the JAG Corps never made me an actual attorney. By 1994 I was near the end of my stint in the Reserves. The Reserves were as happy to bid me good-bye as I was to leave them.

Before all of that, I had worked on Wall Street but was somewhere between an abject failure and mediocre, with emphasis on the former. I had been a political speechwriter working with Republican candidates in “Reagan country,” Orange County, California. My boss with the workers’ compensation firm was a big shot in GOP politics and decided I had a big future in politics.

He introduced me to everybody who counted at that time: California Governor George Deukmejian, U.S. Senator Pete Wilson, state senator John Seymour, Congressman Ed Royce, and many others. My uncle had been political and knew both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan very well. His best friend was Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger. I was plugged in.

It was decided by the brain trust that I would run for Congress in the 38th District, in Orange County then also extending into sections of south Los Angeles County. I was a resident  of Garden Grove, part of the district. The sitting Congressman was “B-1 Bob” Dornan, one of the most hawkish, conservative members of Congress.

At the time, George H.W. Bush was gearing up for the 1988 Presidential elections. The plan was for him to win, of course, then win re-election in 1992. In the mean time, everybody knew we were facing a census, and therefore district re-alignment, after 1990. The 38th District would become substantially more Latino. Dornan was a hard-liner on the subject of immigration, believed to be a weakness running in a re-aligned election.

Therefore, the plan was for Caspar Weinberger to retire at the end of Bush’s first term, to be replaced by Dornan as Secretary of Defense. I in turn would run and win election as Dornan’s successor in the U.S. House of Representatives. I would be 33 in 1992. I was good looking, had the aforementioned “strong resume,” at least on paper, was married, had a daughter, owned my home in Garden Grove, had gone to USC (golden in the O.C.), and played pro baseball. You would vote for me, wouldn’t you?

But I had just started a losing streak, one that would last about seven years. It started when my wife decided to leave me, and eventually divorce me. She was not a Republican and no fan of my politics or the prospect of being married to a hardcore conservative on Capitol Hill. My daughter Elizabeth was just two or three and suddenly my world was torn from under me.

Knowing I was separated, the secretary for a colleague I knew in politics asked me out. She took me to a party in an expensive part of the Orange County hills. As soon as I walked in I got strange vibes. It was a swing party!

My date took me by the hand and led me upstairs. She opened a door and there I saw a sight I cannot unsee. It was a member of the Republican Party - I will not identify this man beyond that - naked, having sex with a hot girl, and at the same time giving oral sex to another man!

Our eyes caught. He knew it was me. I rushed out of there. “Why did you take me here?” I said to my date.

“I wanted you to see your hero isn’t what you think he is,” she said. She was slutty and evil, not a good combination.

Needless to say, the man I saw blackballed me and my name was removed from consideration as a future political candidate. Other things were done against me, but to go into too much detail would possibly arouse suspicion among the in crowd as to who he was, so let’s leave it at that.

I was on the outs, which is not fun, especially after experiencing what it is to be in. I had entered what Richard Nixon once called his “wilderness years.” For me, part of my wilderness years included living in Berlin, Germany for a year. For the most part I got drunk at a place called the Irish Pub with another American ex-pat picking up on hot Deutsche madchens. Let me just say that between two world wars and Communism, Europe had lost its Christian way, and as a result their women were ready to go pretty much at a moment’s notice.

Jerry Maguire Without the Happy Ending

There was no “Hollywood ending” in the real-life Jerry Maguire tale Travers experienced

In 1994 I decided to try to succeed at something again, and went into business with a friend who had an insurance business in which many of his clients were professional athletes. It looked promising. Our main client was Al Martin, who had replaced Barry Bonds in left field for the Pittsburgh Pirates after Bonds signed a free agent contract with San Francisco.

Martin was a real talent who hit 18 homers with a .281 batting average his rookie year, and was having another solid season in 1994 when he decided to bring us on as his agent. Manager Jim Leyland loved his hard-nosed, scrappy playing style. He was an ex-football star and played the game with grit.

For us, he was gold. If he could keep playing well and stay healthy, his arbitration year was approaching, but the Pirate management told us they were open to locking him up before that. The Pirates believed he was their future. This would mean two key things: a big commission for our agency, plus referrals of Martin’s teammates and others in the league. A career. Success. Big money and fame.

But there were hurdles. For one, Al had one helluva temper. A couple of times I had done something to displease him, and he responded by leaving five-minute tirades on the agency answering machine, screaming and yelling, threatening to kill me or anybody who did not do exactly as he demanded.

Then there were the groupies. Al was married and a father. That did not stop him from fooling around on the road. It got so bad that I found myself acting as a travel agent for his sluts, booking flights and hotel reservations. At one point the Pirate wives started calling the hotels the team stayed in to check on different suspicious names.

But it all came crashing down on August 12, 1994, when the MLB Player’s Association announced they were going on strike. This was the second time the player’s striking had caused me personal anguish.

In 1981 I was about to be drafted by Boston in the 10th to the 12th round, to be offered a bonus of around $12,000. When the union struck the Commissioner announced all bonuses except the first couple rounds would be disallowed and the draft would be drastically shortened. St. Louis did sign me but for far less than I was worth, and when I hurt my arm, instead of sending me to the Kerlan-Jobe Clinic, which they would have done had they had more money invested in me, I was released.

Now, this strike stood the baseball world on its head. Needless to say, the Pirates completely rescinded any talk of a new contract or arbitration, leaving my partner and I high and dry. Al Martin returned to his old agent. All “referrals” were gone. The company disbanded.

As for Al he had several good seasons. Around 2000 he made headlines when he went to Las Vegas with one of his girl friends, not his wife. I did not recognize her from the girl I had to make travel plans for in order to hook up with Al on the road six years earlier.

Apparently, this girl and Al got roaring drunk in Vegas and went to an overnight wedding chapel where they were married. This was bigamy since Al was apparently still married.

The next day they woke up and when Al realized what had happened he demanded that they go back to the chapel for an annulment, Hangover-style. The girl resisted at which time Al put a gun in her mouth and told her, “I’ll O.J. you.”

This was all public, getting him arrested, the story making the rounds.

What happened to Al after I knew him I cannot say. It was obviously not good. Later his son, just a little boy when we represented his dad, died in his sleep.

1966 Playboy Playmate of the Year Jo Collins

I knew Bo

While the break-up of the sports agency seemed a terrible disaster, coming on the heels of a series of personal failures, it ended up being my big break. It would take a while to come to fruition, but good things happen for those who wait.

I have written of Bo Belinsky extensively, in Angels Essential (2007), on my old Redroom blog, and here on Substack (“Bo Belinsky and Me”). My partner was friends with him and introduced me to him. Our firm had some small association with him.

He was an ex-Major League pitcher for the Los Angeles Angels, more famous for dating beautiful Hollywood starlets and hob-bobbing with movie stars than for his pitching. But a 1962 no-hitter vaulted him to fame. The press ate his story up with a fork and spoon, but as he faded away he drifted into drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicidal tendencies.

He managed to right his ship through Alcoholics Anonymous and was working, oddly enough, as a PR executive for Saturn of West Sahara in Las Vegas when I met him in 1994. He liked to joke, “I came to Vegas and found Jesus Christ.”

In my initial conversation with him, Bo told me he met Robert DeNiro “who remembered me and said he wanted to make a baseball movie about my life; a baseball Raging Bull.”

Well that lit my fuse. I could always write in school. I got A’s in a couple classes at the USC film school, which produced the likes of Forrest Whittaker, Ally Sheedy and others around the time I was attending. One rumor had it that Tom Cruise was set to enroll at USC when Risky Business unexpectedly hit it big.

I had gotten a straight A in a competitive screenwriting course at USC. I had to write in law school and in composing speeches for politicians, so I had confidence I knew Bo’s story and could write the screenplay.

The day the player’s went on strike, I started in on the script. I used as source material “Once He Was an Angel,” an incredible Sports Illustrated story by Pat Jordan, and Bo: Pitching and Wooing by Maury Allen. Both men became friends and mentors, freely allowing me to use their work with a “good faith” promise that payments would come when the movie got made.

I met many of Bo’s old teammates, managers and friends. These included his ex-wife, Jo Collins, the 1966 Playboy Playmate of the Year, and sexy B-movie vixen Mamie Van Doren. Years later I taught a course as a USC adjunct and had Mamie on a panel talking about “baseball in L.A. before the Dodgers.”

Let me just say something about sex symbols: once a sex symbol, always a sex symbol. It becomes ingrained into their being, and it remains the only thing they know how to do well. ‘Nuf sed.

Of course, when I finished the screenplay, which I called “Once He Was An Angel,” identical to Jordan’s title, I had in essence 119 pieces of paper and nothing more. No agent, no contacts in Hollywood, no nothin’. I tried to reach out to DeNiro, but as with several other big names received only a stone wall. I did speak to Oliver Stone’s guy at CAA and sent it to him, but never heard back.

So I sent it to several screenplay contests, normally a waste of time, but the Beverly Hills Screenplay & Fiction contest actually mailed me a letter telling me I made the quarterfinals, a very encouraging moment.

Frank Capra, Jr., son of the It’s A Wonderful Life director

As it happens, one of their judges was Frank Capra, Jr., son of the It’s a Wonderful Life director, father of second unit director Frank Capra III (who was working with Rob Reiner, very hot at the time). He was a producer in his own right with a few credits (Stephen King’s Firestarter).

This led to my first professional moment as a writer when on the day before Thanksgiving in 1995 I signed a deal with Capra to develop “Once He Was An Angel.”

I quickly learned the power of Hollywood when I met a pornographic movie star at the bachelor party of a USC football player I knew. Call her Nancy. I told her, in perfect Swingers style, I was a “writer-producer,” developing a movie about a playboy baseball player.

“There will be many roles for beautiful girls like you,” I said to her. “I can guarantee you one in my movie, maybe a speaking role. You’ll be famous.”

Nancy immediately latched onto me like a shark and the next thing I knew I was carrying on a torrid affair with her that lasted several months. This included several menage a trois’ with her porn friends. This includerd a drive to Chatsworth and a porn set, where we arrived just in time to see a girl named Anna Malle “finish off” two studs.

Without so much as wiping off her face Anna ran to Nancy, hugging her, and spoke to both of us still not having cleaned her face. Later Nancy and I did some double action with Anna. Her husband, a swinger and porn star himself, sat watching an NFL game he had money on, nary batting an eye.

Finally Nancy invited me to the porn convention in Las Vegas, technically considered a tech convention. There I was surrounded by smoking hot porn chicks including a girl named Crystal Gold, an enormous star.

Crystal Gold mistook Travers for Steve Drake

Before cell phones, at one point during the convention I called my “girlfriend” in her hotel room at the Bally, only to have Crystal answer the phone.

“Hey, would you tell her Steve called,” I said.

“Oh Steve, I’d love to see you. Why don’t you come up to my room?”

Well, hey now!

So I went up to her room, only when I got there Crystal said, “Oh, I thought you were Steve Drake.”

Steve Drake was a very popular male porn star of that era. Nevertheless, she invited me in, at which point I showed her my screenplay and as with the other porn chick, told her there were many roles for hot girls, and I could see to it she was offered one.

At which point we had sexual relations, only right in the middle of it, my “girlfriend,” Nancy walked in the room and had a fit.

“Steve was just showing me his screenplay,” Crystal said. “He has a role in it for me.”

“What about me?” the other, now-scorned porn star said. “I thought I was gonna be in your movie, and now you offered my role to Crystal.”

“No,” I said. “There’s a role for both of you.”

Which of course was bull. I was the author of a spec script under a one-year option, not the “producer” of “my movie,” but these dumb porn sluts did not know any better.

Either way I was told to leave and that was the end of my relationship with at least these two porn stars, although there would be others down the road.

These were just some of my adventures in the screen trade.

A few months passed with no movement when I was told I needed to get Bo’s life story rights. I had the rights to Allen’s book and Jordan’s article, which was all I really needed at least to get to the next level, hopefully a studio deal, but this was insisted on.

Bo wanted $30,000 or $35,000 and Capra was unwilling to pay, insisting he would be paid when the studio made the film. Bo insisted and eventually I took off on another road trip from L.A. to Las Vegas with two of my old USC classmates in tow. One was an ex-baseball player, the other a hot brunette who looked like Wonderwoman. She was, simply said, promiscuous, and we discussed a worst-case scenario in which, if Bo refused to sign, perhaps she could “close the deal” with a little action.

“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse,” she said, licking her lips.

It never came to that. “I’m sorry, but I gotta snub ya,” Bo said, and that was the end, or so I thought.

Capra-esque

As it turned out, Capra liked me and hired me to write four more screenplays over the next few years. I hammered these out living in my little beachside house in Hermosa Beach, and frankly they were some of the best years of my life. Divorced, my rights as a father denied me, I was finally able to see my daughter on weekends and we enjoyed riding bikes down by the ocean, hiking the trails of Palos Verdes, even riding horses near the Hollywood sign.

The first screenplay was 21, which Capra had commissioned a guy named Jimmy Huston to write some eight years earlier. I was told to make Huston’s screenplay better, so you can call it a re-write.

Ken Uston may have been the greatest blackjack player alive

Originally titled The Big Player, the script was the true story of Ken Uston, one of the world’s greatest blackjack players. Married with kids, Uston was a high-ranking executive with the Pacific Stock Exchange in San Francisco who went to Reno and Lake Tahoe on weekends to play the tables. He developed an elaborate card-counting system based on the famed book Beat the Dealer, written by a UNLV math professor.

Uston had a photographic memory and developed a team system, using partners and hand signals. Mere card-counting was and is not illegal but is not allowed since the casinos are private clubs. The team and hand signal approach, however, could invite violence since the mob still controlled Vegas in the 1960s and early 1970s when Uston operated.

But Uston beat the system and became so successful he left his family, moved to Las Vegas, and employed a regular, rotating team of signal-callers to indicate “hot” tables and decks. I spiced up the screenplay far more than the previous version, inserting a beautiful love interest, turning Uston into a James Bond-type of world traveling playboy beating casinos in the Bahamas, Monaco and other glamorous places. There were confrontations with sword-wielding mobsters and lots of gorgeous girls.

Capra never got it off the ground. Then in 2006 a movie by the exact same name, 21, staring Kevin Spacey, about a card-counting team in Vegas, was produced. Unbelievable. Was it stolen? Was it stolen from me? Was it stolen from Capra? By that time, having failed to get a deal, Capra had not extended the option, but my screenplay was definitely out there, unprotected. What happened, exactly? I cannot truly say, but I got screwed.

The writer usually gets screwed (sometimes even by porn stars).

Capra did hire me to write a couple more scripts. In 1996 I finished The K Conspiracy, a fabulous story about a real-life miracle cancer drug that was literally saving the lives of terminal patients in Illinois in the 1950s, but was never given the “double-blind” test, or FDA or any kind of approval, because corrupt people in medicine and the Federal Drug Administration had a vested interest in old school cancer treatments such as chemotherapy and surgery be continued at the big hospitals, instead of a $9 ampoule created by the two doctors who discovered Krebiozen, known as “K.”

How good was this script? At the time I was taking classes in the UCLA Writers’ Program. Asked to read some of our work, I read the end of the screenplay, depicting a graveyard in which the ghosts of the thousands, then millions of people who died because they were denied Krebiozen, rise like specters.

The instructor just stared at me. “I have nothing to say,” he said. “That is perfect. I cannot add to that or make believe I can make it better.”

Compliment or not, Capra never got it made. I found him at some soiree in Hollywood and asked him about it. He just dismissed it, saying something like, “Is that still around?” or “It’s got too many coffee stains on it.”

What a tool.

He did, however, hire me too write one other script, called Bandit. It was the story of a San Francisco parole officer, Richard Bandettini, and his adventures. It was good, plenty of action, had some Dirty Harry elements, but nobody got anything made.

These were the mid to late 1990s. I made enough money writing for Capra, picking up some mostly freelance re-write work, plus covering high school football for the L.A. Daily News and the L.A. Times to pay my bills.

Then Capra passed away.

More slutty girls

I cannot say that working in Hollywood improved my morals much. I moved in with a high-class escort who would leave for two weeks at a time to tend to the “needs” of sheiks in Dubai or businessmen in Tokyo. I hung out at bars in Hermosa and Manhattan Beach, picking up on 30-something beach girls.

One night I was hanging out with my friend Brad Cole, a successful actor in Europe who later starred in A Guiding Light, at the famed Rainbow Bar & Grill on the Sunset Strip. A hot girl came up to us and used filthy, pornographic language to describe what she wanted us to do to her at a nearby hotel suite she had reserved. I was ready to say, “Check please,” but Brad was on to her.

“I suppose once we get there yer gonna drug us and have our kidneys removed,” he told her.

She was temporarily stunned.

“You’re too smart for me,” she said and left.

Another night at the Rainbow a gorgeous French girl sitting next to me at the bar got into conversation with me. She looked like Brigitte Bardot. She asked me for my number and I gave her my card. She actually called me a few days later. European girls did that sort of thing; American women insist men call them.

I made plans to meet her on a Saturday afternoon at a private party being thrown by a movie producer/fashion mogul named Peter Nygard, right on the beach in Marina Del Rey. The plan was from there to take her to see L.A. Confidential.

What a scene. I arrived at the party and observed around 10 or 15 smoking hot models, most of them topless, hanging out on the sand in front of the house. In order to get into the house, I had to be on a list. My date had put me on it, so I was in.

Once inside, I saw many more girls ranging from topless to bikinis or lingerie. I recognized several well known porn stars. Some girls were giving blow jobs. Full on intercourse was also taking place in plain sight. Cocaine was being snorted. It was a bacchanal, pure debauchery. I was saying The Lord’s Prayer under my breath.

Finally I found my date, wearing a bikini. She changed into a summer dress and off we went to the movie at the Santa Monica Promenade. I went out with her a few times but it did not materialize into much of a romance. I think I was too straight for her. Brad called her a “typical bourgeois French girl, raised by an education system comparing Vietnam to the Holocaust.”

But, there was significant fall out from my short-lived romance with the French girl. I received an invitation from the fashion designer Peter Nygard to attend an Academy Award after-party at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

I RSVP’d yes, with a plus-one, a date. I rented a tuxedo and my girl friend, the high-class escort, dolled herself up with a form-fitting white mini-dress. We looked pretty damn amazing when we arrived, walking past flashbulbs and paparazzi who figured we had to be somebody.

This was the night Titanic swept the Oscars, maybe the last really good ceremony before the radicals and protestors took it over. We had a hotel near the party. I figured this was the night I would meet people who could advance my career.

We got to the desk where some guy was checking names on the invite list. I showed him my invitation and he welcomed me, but when my date tried to come in, he stopped her, saying she was not on the list. I argued that I had signed for a plus-one, but he insisted I had not. I went round and round with this guy for an hour. The dinner was served, the festivities well on its way, while everybody floated past us into the party. This included Nygard who entered with four magnificent models. I recognized practically everybody, many big names in Hollywood including the great Fred “the Hammer” Williamson.

My date was sobbing and I got mad. They practically threw us out of the building. We made our way back to the hotel without speaking, my girlfriend pissed that I had shown temper. I just meandered over to Barney’s Beanery where in my tux I ate chili and got drunk.

As for Peter Nygard, he got his in the form of sex trafficking and assault charges, and God knows what else.

Around this period in my strange but interesting life, I went to the Rite-Aid in Hermosa Beach where I saw a gorgeous blonde in a black dress. As soon as I saw her I knew I had to hit on her. All my usual worries and insecurities usually go out the window when I see a legitimate 10. A girl might be reasonably attractive and I might freeze up, but when I am around true beauty I flower and come into my own.

She turned out to be, you guessed it, still another porn star, Christina Angel, a major adult attraction in the 1990s. I told her, “You’re the most beautiful girl I’ver seen and can I ask you out?”

Christina Angel, another porn queen, enters the picture

She smiled and could not have been nicer. She invited me to the Jet Strip near the L.A. Airport, where she was dancing that very night.

When I got there, I plunked down $65 for a lap dance. She took me to the back into a private booth, where she started passionately kissing me on the mouth, then proceeded to blow me for a minute or so.

I asked for her phone number and she gave it to me. “Do you give everybody your number?” I asked her.

“What do you think?” she replied. “I only give it to guys I really like.”

It turned out she lived near me, and for about a year I had sexual relations with her when my girlfriend was off in Dubai or wherever the hell she went. I never felt like cheating. She was an escort. It was an arrangement.

Through the porn girls I was now “dating,” I discovered a house in Silver Lake, between downtown and Hollywood, owned by a gay man who was a make-up artist in the adult entertainment industry. He had quite a stable of some of the most popular adult movie stars of the 1990s working there, for only a couple hundred bucks a session. These girls did everything.

So I started going there, and soon I was friends with and having sex on the side with several of them. These included a porn chick who claimed she was married to Vince Neil, the incredible Holly Body, plus the equally incredible Heather Lee and her best friend known as Olivia, two smokers of the era. I used to get drunk with them at Barney’s Beanery, rent a room at the nearby Alta Cienega Motel where Jim Morrison once stayed, and go to town on them, sometimes both at the same time. Once the pornographer known as Max Hardcore accompanied them. The motel owners thought we were too loud but Max bribed ‘em to shut up.

One of the girls at the Silver Lake house was a Latino porn queen. I used to go to her house in the San Fernando Valley. Once a bunch of black guys were there. I honestly thought she had arranged a gangbang, but they were literally just there to help with her cable. I told her if she wanted to get gangbanged I was not going to argue the point.

Another time at a strip club I met Leanna Heart, another big star. She took me to the back room and performed oral sex on me. The next day the Latino girl called to say Leanna was her best friend, inviting me to that same strip club. I ended up partying with them at a nearby hotel.

Another time at the strip club I refused to pay one of the girls what she insisted I owed her. Two Russian mobsters threw me out the front door, pretending to kick me on the ground but not actually making contact.

I used to get invited to Raiderette parties at a private club at the Redondo Yacht Harbor. One of my wilder flames talked a Raiderette into coming home with us for some late night action.

So between hookers, strippers, porn stars, Raiderettes, models, just plain horny girls at the karaoke bar or the copy place where I brought my screenplays, not to mention my hot escort girlfriend, I was getting more than a man could ask for.

Then it all came to a head, for lack of a better term. It was October of 1999, and by this time I was working for StreetZebra, a magazine in Marina Del Rey, where I handled the USC sports and baseball beats. One night I was in the office getting ready to go to a restaurant in Santa Monica to interview UCLA basketball coach Steve Lavin along with his two assistants, Steve Spencer and Jim Saia.

Then the phone rang. It was my girlfriend. “Don’t bother coming home,” she said. “I won’t be here. If you want to be with hookers and porn stars fine, but I won’t be with you.”

I never got to the bottom of it, but I think Christina Angel called the house (before cell phones), my girl friend answered, and Christina spilled the beans.

The whole thing was a ploy. That night I came home but my girlfriend, while furious, dressed in a very provocative low-cut tube top, her massive jugs just bustin’ out. She did that to make me want her more, and it worked. We went to a bar and there I completely fell for all her B.S., and asked her to marry me.

A date was set, but God intervened, preventing what would have been a disaster. StreetZebra folded and when I lost that job, my girl friend bowed out of the picture. When I hit it big later she was gone and had no intention of coming back.

Years later she started to extort me for money, threatening to tell my mother, church and daughter about my wild life with hookers, porn queens and the like in the 1990s. It got so bad I had to go to the cops, who advised that I tell her I had contacted them and put in writing my intent not to continue paying her extortion demands.

She became very angry, ratcheting up her hate, when an incredible thing happened. Right in the middle of one of her rants on Facebook message, she wrote, “Forgive those who trespass against me. God comes for sinners. I forgive you.”

This girl, once a high-end escort selling her body to rich oil sheiks and wealthy businessmen, who was the wildest sexual dynamo I had ever been with, had found the Lord Jesus Christ and decided to forgive me.

I forgive her for extorting me, too.

God works in mysterious ways. It is called “amazing grace.”

Sleazy agents

All the time I wrote for Frank Capra, Jr. I never had an agent. One guy who worked with us promised to get me one but he failed to do so. One guy, call him Peter, claimed to have been Tom Hanks’s agent. He woo’ed me, until one day in Santa Monica he asked me to pay him.

Good-bye.

Another guy, call him Dan, told me how impressed he was with me. He even talked his way into my parent’s house, where after regaling them with his high opinion of me, asked them for money.

Good-bye.

It got so bad I even started writing for industry trades warning writers to avoid sleaze balls employing this practice.

I met with many agents, sent out many scripts, worked the phone constantly, and asked for referrals from anybody I could find. Some of the agents I spoke to you were legitimate. Some just were not very good or powerful.

Aside from the Capra projects I wrote a script about an African hunter for one of the actors in Amistad. I did a re-write of a script written by my friend Tim Silano, one of the editors on Apollo 13. His wife kept insinuating I was trying to cheat her husband, out of what I don’t know.

Tim worked with the son of Joseph Barbera, the son of a comic strip icon. He acted like some sort of hot shot. I never told him that I hung out at a bar he was known to frequent, where he was laughed at constantly as a total coke head who wandered around the place asking people, “Wanna get high? Wanna get high?”

The surfer, the skateboarder and the agent

While working on The Lost Battalion, I read an article in the local Hermosa Beach paper about a guy named Dennis Jarvis, a former pro surfer who owned a string of surf shops up and down the coast. He had a surf movie playing at the local outdoor festival, so I took a shot and contacted him.

Ex-pro surfer Dennis Jarvis

He and his partner, a skateboarder named Donaldson Miele, both took a liking to me and soon we were hanging out together. Dennis asked me to write a script that I called Summer of ’62. A pro surfer argues with his girlfriend when she tells him she is pregnant. He goes to a big competition in Malibu but while riding waves is struck by lightning. When he wakes up he is on his board, which he paddles in, but the competition is over.

It is 1962.

He must adapt, hooking up with local surfers, where he realizes he has lost his original love of surfing in a bid to make money and succeed.

Eventually he makes it back to modern times, now resolute to surf for love, and of course he marries his girl friend who has his baby.

I wrote a spec script for free, but Dennis loved it so much he paid me $15,000, which was a lot of cash to me at that time.

Frankly, it was outstanding and should have been made, but it was not, mainly because of my own stupidity, but I will get to that.

For some reason, Dennis said he was not ready to “go out” with Summer of ’62. He asked me to write Burning Snow, kind of a Karate Kid rip-off in which a young L.A. skateboarder has to move to Colorado when his mom gets a job there. He must learn how to snowboard, falls in love with the girlfriend of a local snowboarder who also runs a drug gang, and of course beats him in a competition, getting the girl.

Then Dennis invited me and all his employees to Big Bear Lake, where he shot a trailer of Burning Snow. It is a masterpiece, starting out with highlights of snowboarders performing “big airs” to the tune of Iggy Pop’s “Lust for Life” (also the lead-in for The Jim Rome Show). In it, I played Uncle Steve, whose nephew was the young snowboarder. I am a mountain man living off the grid in a cabin, and I drive a truck approaching the local 7-11, where the drug gang, Black Ice, is teaming up on my nephew, 10-to-one. I come flying out in cowboy hat, Pendleton, and boots, fists flying, jacking the hell out of punky Gen Xers with tats and pink hair, in a right wing fury that would make John Milius proud.

When the scene ended, the cops showed up. The local drivers thought it was a real fight and called them.

I decided to take matters into my owns hands and used whatever contacts I had to try and find a production company that would get Burning Snow made. I pitched it to a black exec at some production company in Santa Monica, telling him all about how the hero defeats “Black Ice.” He finally asked me, “How come the bad guys are all black guys?” He mistook “Black Ice” for “black guys.”

Eventually I found an interested party, Vin da Bona productions. My contact there kept me informed as the screenplay made its way up the ladder at Showtime.

This was quite an accomplishment in and of itself, as most screenplays are turned down by the initial readers. Each level that it moves up means higher and higher company executives see something worthwhile in it. Finally I was told that it had made it all the way to the president of Showtime, Jerry Offsay. Then came word on Offsay’s decision.

“I’m not gonna make any Goddamn snowboarding movie,” it was reported to me he said.

My contact at Vin da Bona was just as disappointed as me; if Offsay had given the project a “green light,” he would have been one of the producers. But he liked me and thought I had talent. I told him I still did not have an agent, so he recommended I call Lloyd Robinson.

Literary agent Lloyd Robinson in the film Bruno

Lloyd’s grandfather had been vice-president at Universal during the silent film era. He was born, raised and weaned in the movie business. After graduation from USC and then the USC Law Center, he became a talent agent.

He liked my USC pedigree and agreed to meet Dennis, Donaldson and myself in our effort at getting either Summer of ’62 or Burning Snow made. It was March of 1999, a key point in my career.

Dennis had treated me very well. He had paid me fairly well, at least by the standards I was being paid in those days, to write two screenplays. He agreed, and signed a contract, to have me as the writer on another project. I began working on it and was perhaps one-third of the way through when he had an abrupt change of heart, deciding to have me do a re-write of Burning Snow.

I was happy to do a re-write, even for free, but it seemed to me that in asking me to stop working on the project he had made the first of three promised payments on, he was reneging on our contract.

I worked on the Burning Snow re-write for a couple of months when he said, “I think Donaldson and I can handle the rest of the work on this script.” Instead of telling me to go to work on the project he had made the first payment on, he left things at loose ends.

I wanted to finish the project and get paid, probably $10,000 or $15,000. So, I went home and finished the screenplay, delivering it to Dennis with a bill for full payment per the contract. At this point Dennis became very hostile, refusing to pay me even though I had a contract.

It was around this time that I started working full-time as an employee of StreetZebra magazine. My efforts at getting paid by Dennis were getting no where, so I did something I regret to this day.

I sued him in small claims court. I was absolutely in the right, presenting the evidence - the signed contract, the first of three payments, and the completed screenplay - to a judge. Dennis, who was wealthy, went all out to stop me, paying big money to his attorney. But the law was on my side, and contracts had been my best subject in law school, not to mention my specialty as a sports agent.

I won and he was forced to pay me in full, but it was a pyrrhic victory. His friendship was lost. Not only that, had we stayed on good terms, he probably would have had a lot of other work for me in future years, but I had blown all of that in a selfish attempt at proving I was right. While technically I was, and it was a victory, it was a shallow one.

The good news is that Dennis was a Christian who forgave me my trespasses, just as my ex-girl friend eventually would, and a few years later we were back on good terms.

As for Lloyd, he was unable to land a deal on the screenplays I wrote with Dennis, and after our fall out all of that was off the table anyway, but he did become my friend.

The Lost Battalion

In 1998 I was approached by a former comic who had worked the circuits with Robin Williams and Kevin Pollack. This guy’s wife was apparently director Terence Malick’s cousin, so he was at a birthday party for Malick.

The comic asked Malick, “If I wanted to become a producer, what kind of material is Hollywood looking for?”

“Well, Hollywood is going to war,” Malick replied. “Spielberg’s doing Saving Private Ryan and I’ve got The Thin Red Line. Don’t do World War II, it’s done. Steer clear of Vietnam, but World War I has a lot of great, dramatic moments that were never really told because World War II came so soon after.”

So this comic invited me to go see a man named Frank Jordan, the field goal kicker whose 37-yarder beat Notre Dame in 1978, giving USC the national championship. Jordan worked at Northwestern Mutual Life, but unlikely as it may seem, was a World War I buff who in the summers gave tours of French battle fields.

“The story you want to write is ‘the lost battalion,’ ” said Frank. It was explained that they were an American battalion composed mostly of Irish and Jewish immigrants from New York City, combined with some German-Americans from Milwaukee whose patriotism was being questioned, along with some rough ’n’ tumble Texas boys just itching to fight.

They were led by a pacifist lawyer from New York, Charles Whittlesey, who had read about frontal charges wasting the lives of soldiers over the centuries, figuring if he commanded he might same some lives.

During the Argonne, his battalion was “lost” behind enemy lines, but if they could fight and hold on long enough for General “Black Jack” Pershing’s reinforcements to arrive, it could win the war. That is what happened.

I wrote that screenplay and knew immediately it was the best thing I had ever written. If ever I was going to hit it big in Tinseltown, this was my ticket. In 1999 Lloyd was my agent, and it was at that time that I was reading the Sunday Los Angeles Times when I came across on article on James Woods in the Parade supplement.

“What’s next for Woods?” the author writes near the end of the piece.

“I am producing, directing, and starring in The Lost Battalion along with my friend Edgar Scherick,” says Woods.

Edgar Scherick (above) and James Woods (below) agreed to use Travers’ script The Lost Battalion before ICM “blew up” the deal

After I picked my jaw up off the floor I called Lloyd and told him to get to the bottom of this.

A few days later he had arranged for me to meet Edgar Scherick in his West Los Angeles office. Scherick was a legend, having practically invented sports television. He had started ABC’s Saturday baseball Game of The Week, giving Howard Cosell his first big break.

Then he started Wide World of Sports, credited with making Cosell and Muhammad Ali household names, while transforming boxing from a New York mob operation to a legitimate global athletic spectacle.

Then he founded Monday Night Football, only to lose out in a power struggle with Roone Arledge. After that he moved to the West Coast and became a successful producer of television and film, with credits including Raid on Entebbe, The Stepford Wives, The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three, among many others.

I was ushered into his spacious office where he immediately “big leagued” me, loudly barking orders at somebody on the phone while I sat there. Finally I got up and looked at his photos, which included Edgar with Cosell, Jackie Robinson, Frank Gifford, and many other heavyweights in sports and politics.

Finally he hung up.

“Are you here to sue me?” he said, gruffly.

“No, sir,” I responded. I told him I believed the fact he was producing a film based on the same subject matter I had written about was a coincidence, and urged that he read what I wrote; perhaps he would feel there was something there he might like to incorporate into the existing screenplay he had by James Carabatsos (Hamburger Hill).

At this point his attitude totally changed. He asked me about a move made by Dodgers’ manager Dave Johnson in the previous night’s game, and I gave him an expert baseball analysis.

Then he saw a quote in one of my scripts from William Shakespeare. “Ah, an educated jock,” he said of me.

We spoke amicably for half an hour or so and I left. 10 days or two weeks later Lloyd called.

“I don’t know what you said to Edgar Scherick,” he said. “He loves you and your screenplay. He wants to buy it, incorporate your dialogue and character back story into his script.”

I was in, in every way. This meant big money, credit on an enormous blockbuster film, think Zulu meets Saving Private Ryan, and on top of that I had just been hired by StreetZebra. I had a day job in sports writing and a career in screenwriting.

I called Brad Cole and we celebrated at a bar in Hermosa Beach. Brad knew a lot about James Woods. He knew Woods would hit on my girlfriend, the hot blonde high end escort, but he also knew Woods would have a smoking girlfriend of his own.

“Let him hit on your girlfriend, but don’t hit on his,” Brad said.

No sooner had my ship come in when it quickly set sail. Lloyd called.

“Bad news,” he said. “The Lost Battalion is being ‘packaged’ by ICM. Since you’re not an ICM client, it blows up the whole project.”

It was explained that since International Creative Management represented all the “above the line” talent - star, director, producer, screenwriter - since I was not with them it “gummed up the works.”

Scherick was so pissed he left the project to do Path to War for HBO. Woods was just as angry. He left to do Dirty Pictures. The Lost Battalion was made by A&E, a low budget film starring former child star Rick Schroder, and was not terrible, but lacking a studio production missed its potential.

I stayed friends with Edgar, occasionally dropping by his office. He told me when he was finished with Path to War he wished to hire me to write a script about Sonny Liston, who he said was “the last of the mob-controlled fighters.”

Unfortunately, Edgar, who was already in ill health, passed away.

By this time I had worked as a sports columnist for StreetZebra magazine in L.A. and the old Hearst-owned San Francisco Chronicle. I was done with Hollywood.

Hollywood was not done with me.

One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation

September 11, 2001 had a profound effect on me. I was baptized and had been a born again Christian since my senior year in high school, but that had not stopped me from having sex with hookers, porn girls, various bar sluts, not to mention living in sin with a high class escort.

After 9/11 I found myself changing. By no means am I attempting to say that I did as Christ commands and “sin no more,” but I became a better man. I started going to church every Sunday. I was a regular at Bible study. I began delivering meals to needy people. I stopped living the kind of crazy life described in this article.

God rewarded me with a son-in-law who showed my daughter that her mother had long been lying about me. Through my son-in-law, who I say really is my son, my relationship with Elizabeth was healed.

God is all good and worth waiting for

***

I was from my earliest youth a fanatic for anything that had to do with the University of Southern California. One of my memories was sitting around a radio with my dad listening to USC beat Alabama, 42-21 in 1970.

USC had marched into Birmingham with a fully integrated team, led by a powerful fullback named Sam “Bam” Cunningham. They dismantled the last all-white college football team, Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide, at Legion Field.

Even though I was young, I understood this meant dramatic change, and over the next years Southern sports teams became as integrated as their Western and Northern counterparts. The story about Cunningham’s mythic performance was told and re-told. When I became a student at USC, I heard first-hand accounts.

While at StreetZebra, I wrote a column about that game, and shortly thereafter received a call from John Papadakis, a local L.A. restaurateur who had played in it for the Trojans. He thanked me for a nice write-up about his son Petros, then a Trojan running back, and invited me to his family restaurant, Papadakis Taverna in San Pedro.

John saw in my bio I had written screenplays and asked if I would be willing to write one about the game. I said I would and Lloyd was invited to a second meeting with John. He reached out to his contacts but did not generate much interest.

When I started at the Examiner, I interviewed a writer named Jeff Prugh. He had written an excellent biography of UCLA basketball coach John Wooden. He gave me a copy of his L.A. Times game story of USC’s famed victory over Alabama in 1970.

“This is what you should write next,” he told me.

I certainly considered it, although at the San Francisco Examiner I had a front row seat watching Barry Bonds break the all-time home run record. I turned that into a successful Bonds biography.

In 2004 I re-connected with Papadakis, who essentially asked me to write a book about the 1970 USC-‘Bama game, in large part to blunt the story rights of his rival, Allan Graf, a second unit director who had written a screenplay about that game for a major producer named Gerald Molen.

John had sued Molen and Graf, and now he wanted me to write a book. No sooner had I managed to land a top notch agent and a major book deal, John fired me. The agent made a separate agreement with the publisher for me to write the book, at which time John sued us!

I landed on my feet, however. The publisher, Thomas Nelson, threw me under the bus, but Rick Rinehart, president of Rowman & Littlefield, and their imprint Taylor Trade, saved the day when he not only agreed to publish my 1970 book, paying far more than Thomas Nelson, but also to write a book about Trojan football history. They were named One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation and The USC Trojans: College Football’s All-Time Greatest Dynasty.

Travers’ masterpiece about how segregation finally ended

Within months, word spread that I was writing these books, and I became very well known on the USC campus. John ended up writing his own book with another writer, but my book, which came out in 2007, was better.

Both immediately received attention from Hollywood. Frank Wells of Warner Bros. optioned John’s book. I was approached by Ron Howard, David L. Wolper and others before Lloyd managed to secure a deal with Kerry McCluggage, a big time producer over at Universal, and his partner, Barry Kemp (Coach). To avoid a conflict he also signed John’s book.

Over the next years there were many, many deals, offers and “green lights” indicating this project was on the verge of getting made. These included most of the major studios and producers, from Disney to Legendary Pictures, and many others. Jeff Daniels wanted to play Bear Bryant. Kevin Costner wanted to play John McKay. Carl Weathers wanted to direct it. Many other big names came and went. In 2018 it was “green lit” by Warner Bros.

None of it ever came to fruition. Then John, who could not be trusted, breached his contract with Kerry and signed with Village Roadshow. Now it is tied up in litigation, John’s specialty.

Lloyd, a professional talent and literary agent since 1964, told me to his knowledge no project has ever been renewed as an option as long One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation.

“You have had the strangest career of anybody I have ever represented,” he said. “You are also the best writer I have ever had.”

The Final Insult

I do not like Hollywood and it does not like me. After 9/11 I re-enforced my Christian faith, and Hollywood has gone drastically the other way. We are not compatible. I am fine with that. After Edgar Scherick died, I happily turned away from show biz for a career as an author of 33 books and part-time adjunct at USC.

I still kept my hand in, writing Coppola’s Monster Film: The Making of Apocalypse Now (2016). In addition to my adjunct work at the USC Annenberg School For Communications, I taught a class at the USC School of Cinema-Television based on my Apocalypse Now book.

When One Night, Two Teams: Alabama vs. USC and the Game That Changed a Nation was published in 2007 I was partially drawn back when Kerry McCluggage tried to develop it, but 17 years later that appears wholly unlikely.

But in 2024 I received a phone call from “James Woods.”

“The Lost Battalion was the best screenplay I ever read,” he told me. “I’ve been obsessed with it for 25 years. I just produced Oppenheimer. I want to make it.”

To make a painful story short, when I contacted his agent, Nina Nisenholtz, she told me I had been conned. Either somebody had made a perfect imitation of his voice over a two-hour conversation, or had used Artificial Intelligence to sound exactly like Woods.

To which I ask, “Why me?” Who am I to deserve being on the end of such an elaborate con? But there is still one confusing element to this story. James Woods is active on Twitter. As part of my communication with the “real” James Woods, we exchanged DMs on Woods’s actual Twitter handle. He did not tell me he did not know what I was talking about, but rather confirmed he wanted me to send him the up-dated script, which I did.

So was somebody hacking Woods’s Twitter, or did Woods himself actually call, only to completely back out after a two-hour conversation in which he excitedly said over and over he wanted to make my movie?

If somebody out there would like to help me get to the bottom of this sad tale, I would appreciate it.

It’s a movie in and of itself.

Steven Travers is a former screenwriter who has authored over 30 books including Best Sports Writing Ever. He is a USC graduate and attorney with a Ph.D who taught at USC and attended the UCLA Writers’ Program. He played professional baseball, served in the Army JAG corps in D.C., was in investment banking on Wall Street, worked in politics, lived in Europe, and was a sports agent before finding his calling as a writer. He has written for the San Francisco Examiner, L.A. Times, StreetZebra, Gentry magazine, Newsmax and MichaelSavage.com. He lives in California and has one daughter, Elizabeth. He can be reached at USCSTEVE1@aol.com or on Twitter @STWRITES.

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