Featured Interview With Neil Russell
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I was born into a theatre-owning family in the Midwest that goes back to sawdust-floor nickelodeons. In our house, it was always “theatre,” not “theater,” and my birth was announced from the stage of one by Desi Arnaz who was just a bandleader then.
From the time I was old enough to sit upright, I saw every motion picture released, whether in a conventional theatre, drive-in, screening room or someone’s home.
Looking back, I can’t believe how lucky I was. I loved everything about the movies and the dark, smoky rooms where grizzled film men ran new pictures and made sarcastic remarks far funnier than anything onscreen. Those experiences turned out to be more important to my future than my college degree.
As a kid, I met many of the original moguls: Zanuck, Zukor, Cohn, Goldwyn, two Warners and both Schencks. (Regrettably, not Mr. Mayer.) I also met some of the major producers and directors of the time: Howard Hawks, Sam Spiegel, Otto Preminger, Stanley Kramer, Hal Wallis and a slew of others.
Following college, I left theatres to join Paramount. I had helped buy The Godfather for my father’s theatres, and suddenly, I was working for the studio that produced it, chasing its boxoffice receipts. Then came Godfather II, Chinatown, Death Wish, Serpico, and dozens more.
Subsequently, I became an executive at Columbia, MGM, United Artists, and Carolco Pictures, home of the Rambo pictures, Terminator 2 and Basic Instinct.
Today, I own my own entertainment-focused intellectual property rights and production company in Beverly Hills.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing.
When I was really young, I wrote scary stories to read to my little sister at bedtime. Naturally, my plan was to scare her out of her wits, but she’d always go to sleep before I finished, and I’d end up turning on all the lights and listening to the house creak.
Then in fourth grade, I fell madly in love with Candy Wykowski—God, was she gorgeous—and I wrote so many poems to her that my mom told me to knock it off. Supposedly, it was about wasting paper, but I think there might have been a gag reflex at work there too.
From the time I was old enough to hold one of those fat crayons, I couldn’t understand why anyone bought valentines when you could write your own and say exactly the right thing, particularly if the person had an unflattering feature you could call attention to.
By the time I was twelve, I had sent so many stories to Reader’s Digest that there’s probably a separate wing in Pleasantville just to house my stuff. In those days, I spent a lot of time running to the mailbox looking for the check I knew was coming—especially the $2500 “First Person” award I was positive I won at least a dozen times.
But for some unfathomable reason, they always chose people who wrote about Albert Schweitzer or JFK or Pearl Buck. Not my Uncle Nick, the union organizer, who I had to share a bed with when I visited my grandmother, and who slept with his hand on a gun under his pillow. Let me tell you, you didn’t drink a lot of Coke at bedtime, because you sure didn’t want to be crawling across him at 4 AM.
So thanks to Albert Schweitzer, I never made any money writing until I got to college. There, I discovered people would pay you so they wouldn’t have to write. Sizing up the sports cars in the parking lot, I doubled the price my fellow ghostwriters were charging and guaranteed at least a B, or you got your money back. That year, I spent Spring Break at the Fountainbleau.
I only had to give one refund, and it was my fault all the way. Never write an A+ English paper for a football player majoring in Playground Administration without telling him Dos Passos doesn’t mean throwing twice over the middle.
When I got to Hollywood, I discovered one of the great conundrums of life. Here, people get paid a lot of money to write things that never get produced. So who cares, right? I know this is going to sound infantile if you hump vacuum cleaners door to door, but it does matter to screenwriters.
Bill Parcells once said about Lawrence Taylor, “Outside linebacker is not a position for the well-adjusted.” That goes double for Hollywood writers. Even the successful ones are only a couple of rejections away from screwing a Glock into their ear. Then along comes a studio exec who puts the guy through a living hell, and just as he begins to imagine the unimaginable—a greenlight—the exec’s life coach says he should be remaking The Sound of Music with Miley Cyrus, or he has to go into rehab because his personal chef ran out of Patagonian shrimp lips. (It’s what helped drive Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Steinbeck out of this town. That, and being so drunk they forgot which office to report to.)
The writer still pockets a check, of course, but silly as it sounds, most would take less if they could get a guarantee the picture would be made. (This kind of thinking is why there aren’t any screenwriters on the Forbes 400.)
I couldn’t imagine taking that beating every day, so I joined the enemy. I became… bring in the shrimp lips, please… a studio executive. And later, a producer, which is the best job in show business—unless you like to eat regularly.
But the whole time I was making movies and overseeing movies and running companies and buying and selling companies, I had a secret. One too terrible to reveal. In the dark of night, when no one was looking… I was writing. Under an assumed name… just like college. And some of it was selling… but, of course, it wasn’t getting made.
Then, one day, a bunch of doctors told me I had cancer. And a year and a half later, I doubled down and got it again. Aside from somebody who can recite last year’s Golden Globe nominees, nothing is scarier than cancer.
But I survived and wrote a book about how to talk to your kids about the disease, which a lot of doctors and cancer centers still use. That turned me into the second best thing a writer can be in Hollywood—right behind best friends with Steven Spielberg, but you should see that waiting list—a published author.
Along the way, I realized I had stories to tell that were locked up in my imagination. And without setting out to become a novelist, somehow I did.
Now I have three action-thrillers: City of War, Wildcase and my newest, a very inside Hollywood story called Beverly Hills is Burning.
Paul Hornung once said his epitaph should read: “He went through life on a scholarship.” I would add that mine could be written in glitter. I’m a very lucky guy.
I do sometimes wonder, though, whatever happened to Candy Wykowski?
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
My first brush with finding magnificence on a page was The Great Gatsby, which so affected me, I stole the book from the library. I was eight.
Next up was Harold Robbins. Yes, that Harold Robbins. No books were off-limits in our home. After The Carpetbaggers, I wanted to change my name to Jonas Cord.
I read and still read everything. But if I had to choose five authors to accompany me to that apocryphal desert island, they would be John D. MacDonald, Nelson DeMille, Herman Wouk, William Manchester and Charles Dickens—who should get a posthumous Nobel for one line from Nicholas Nickleby: “He had but one eye, and the popular prejudice runs in favor of two.”
For the record, years later, conscience still plaguing me, I sent—anonymously, naturally—a hand-bound, artist-illustrated, commemorative copy of Gatsby to the library from which I had liberated theirs. I hope they didn’t put it behind glass. It needs to be read.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
BEVERLY HILLS IS BURNING—A Rail Black Novel
A NOTE TO THE READER: This novel contains sex, violence and adult themes.
“It was just after midnight when the girl in the blue diamond necklace fell out of the sky.”
In Hollywood, an ex-con movie producer, fresh out of San Quentin, is lucky if he can get a valet to take his car at The Ivy. Teddy Chessman got his own studio.
Why? Because Teddy controls the most important motion picture property to hit town since agents were invented. And attached to this expected critical and financial bonanza is the biggest female action star in the world, Valentine Jones.
But good plans die horrible deaths, and foolproof ones, worse. And now, the guy who loaned Teddy the money to buy the joint—Rail Black, a former Delta Force operator with a private fortune—is forced to take possession of Teddy’s dream. And the bad news is just beginning.
Exploding from ninety years in the past—when gangsters and movie tycoons roamed Hollywood and scratched each other’s wallets—Rail is sucked into a quicksand of unsettled scores, duplicity and death, where a couple of billion dollars in boxoffice seems like small change.
From Southern California to New York, Venice, Havana, Mexico and Cyprus, Rail must disentangle the past from the present and come to terms with his feelings for Barrie Fontaine, a long dead woman—and extraordinarily brave pilot—he has never met.
And somewhere, out there, is Matty Aspirins, a hitman on a mission all his own.
Welcome to Beverly Hills is Burning.
There will be no intermission.
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