(Continued from "How My Life Became a Movie of the Week")

I went and visited this cute little thing who looked exactly like my baby pictures. He was in a home with dozens of other babies, all in cribs, all behind bars, a place I will always think of as baby prison. Even though I wasn't sure if he was mine, I made a promise to him that day that I would get him out of that place.

The next week, there was a hearing to determine whether to give the child back to the mother. They wouldn't. The judge was just about to bang her gavel and remand my son to the state when I stood up in the back of the court and said "What about me? I'll take him."

The judge was stunned, as was everyone else in the court. It was then I noticed for the first time that the court was all women, women who clearly devoted their days to chasing down fathers, and here was one just standing there. Nobody had to drag him in.

"Who are you?" said the judge.

"I'm Michael Dare, the father."

The court was pleased but suspicious. "Mr. Dare, I assume you work. Who would take care of the baby during the day?"

"I'm a writer, your honor. I do most of my work at home during the day at a computer, using a modem to send my work in. Sometimes I have to go to screenings. I'll get babysitters."

"He's got pornographic tapes in the house!" the mother called out.

I couldn't believe she was bringing this up. "I review videotapes for the L.A. Weekly," I tried to explain. "I get dozens of them in the mail every week."

The judge quickly looked through the papers and said "Wait a minute. This is a six-month-old child!" She looked at the mother in awe that this subject had been brought up. "Mr. Dare, we assume you will keep these tapes out of the hands of the toddler."

I couldn't believe it, my dream come true, a sarcastic judge. Little knowing that this issue would come up again, I said "Yes, your honor." The judge ordered a paternity test, ordered a social worker to come check me out, and ordered us all back next week. At that hearing, I was actually given custody of my son.

But that wasn't the last of the battle. The mother hired an attorney and the battle raged for years. Meanwhile, my life was turned upside down. Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll were replaced by Raffi and diapers 'n' formula. I took the tike with me to screenings where he was watched by publicists and to interviews where the joys of parenting were inevitably discussed.

Then one day in 1988 I got a call from the Sony Corporation telling me about a new product they had called a camcorder. It was a camera and recorder all in one, and they were very excited about it. Could they loan me one to try out and maybe write about it? You bet.

It was my son's first birthday, a hot summer day, and he jumped out of the bathtub without warning, ran out the front door, and started wandering about the yard. I did what any parent would have done. I grabbed my camcorder. It had autofocus and a handle on top, so I simply held it down at Buster's level and followed him around the yard. He played with the hose, chased a cat, and kept falling on his butt.

Later, I edited the footage to Randy Newman's Beware of the Naked Man, ending up with one of the most adorable videos ever made. Everybody loved it, including the mother, to whom I gave a copy. When I reluctantly gave the camcorder back to Sony, I showed them the video and they loved it. They thought it was a perfect example of how parents could make creative home movies, and they asked if they could use it in some sort of promotion. I declined. Later, I wrote an article about the camcorder and the making of the video for Movieline Magazine.

You can see where this is heading. A copy of the tape was given to Children's Services, they labeled me a child pornographer, and my son was taken from me and put in another group home. According to the department's petition to the Juvenile Court, "Minor's father sexually abused minor, including but not limited to making a sexually explicit/nude video tape of the minor." They went on to explain that my son was "at substantial risk of suffering serious emotional damage, evidenced by severe anxiety, depression, withdrawal, or untoward aggressive behavior toward self or others as a result of the conduct of the father." Of course if I was guilty of these ludicrous charges, so was every other parent on earth who took naked baby pictures.

I responded by showing the tape to my friend Charles Champlin, the senior arts editor emeritus of the Los Angeles Times, and then the president of the Los Angeles Film Critic's Association. He wrote a letter to the court in which he said "I do not pretend to know the circumstances of his present legal controversy over the custody of his son. But I have seen the videotape of his son on his first birthday that has become an issue in the controversy. And I can say without qualification that it is totally devoid of any prurient, pornographic or otherwise indecent intent, content or interest. It is on the contrary a father's charming and manifestly loving portrait of his son. It is sweet, beguiling, amusing and affecting in the most positive and humane way. It is in no way exploitive of the child's nudity or indeed of his sexual identity. At most it confirms that it is the nature of small children to do without clothes if they can get away with it."

As I did research on this subject, I found interesting case histories defining child pornography. Many courts have decided that the delineation has to do with the photographer's instructions to the child. If the photographer simply catches the child in the act of doing something naturally like touching himself or bending over, that's not pornography. But as soon as the photographer instructs the child to touch himself or bend over, the line has been crossed and he may be a pornographer. Curiously enough, according to this definition, I was completely innocent of pornography, but CBS is guilty since they recreated the event for their MOW by instructing the child actor to run around naked.

Eventually, the judge decided to judge the tape for herself. She brought in a TV and a VCR, and cleared the courtroom to look at this hideous piece of child pornography. After viewing it, she not only said there was nothing wrong with it, but that she admired my work and would like to see more.

Case dismissed? Not quite. While they had my son in their grasp, they got him to admit that he had "played on the bed with me" and "taken baths with me." My overzealous social worker felt she was on the verge of some form of disclosure, so despite the fact that the only piece of evidence ever presented against me was dismissed, they still wouldn't return my son to me. I was forced to continue defending myself against charges of basically normal behavior. What parent on earth hasn't played on the bed or taken baths with their child?

I found myself trapped in some form of lost Kafka novel. All parents in dependency court are guilty until proven innocent. Innocence in such matters is virtually impossible to prove. After all, true child molesters probably do start out playing on the bed and taking baths with their child. So I had no choice but to jump through all the court ordered hoops. I went to family therapy, did random drug testing, attended meetings of "The United Fathers of America," and took an invaluable parenting course from Dr. Jayne Major & the Parent Connection. Children's' Services still refused to return my son to me.

He was in a group home in South Central where I visited him twice a week. I was there picking him up on April 29, 1992, when the verdicts in the Rodney King case came down. We stopped at a Thrifty for ice cream. When we got home, we saw the Thrifty we had just stopped at burning down on television. We had made it home one step ahead of the riots. It was obviously not safe to return my son, so I defied a court order and kept him. I've had him since that day. There was a splendid irony here since the judge in the Rodney King trials, Stanley Weisberg, was the very same judge who had given me custody of my son five years earlier.

*****

This was no way to write a movie. Most movies follow certain rules of character development. Plots have to have an arch, and generally fall into three acts. Though there are obvious exceptions, like Citizen Kane, just about every movie ever made, from Gone with the Wind to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, can fit into the following structure: Get your main character up a tree, shake a stick at him, then get him down from the tree. The first draft of Here Comes the Son had no real structure. It was shapeless, but it told the story.

Next, we had to decide whether to go the film or TV route. It's a tough decision considering the way Hollywood has dealt with current events throughout the ages.

Films used to deal with social issues. I Want to Live was about the death penalty, The Best Years of Our Lives was about soldiers returning from the war. But the speed of television production plus the invention of the Movie Of the Week has enabled the networks to co-opt social issues from the movies. Television turned the Amy Fisher fiasco into three movies of the week before the film world picked up it's paper in the morning. Television turned the Branch Davidian fiasco into a movie of the week before the government even set fire to the place. The film world made Lorenzo's Oil, a brilliant dramatization of a true story. Critics said it was like a well-acted MOW and it bombed at the box office. Even the producer of Philadelphia, Edward Saxon, admits that one of the biggest hurdles he had to overcome in getting it to the big screen was that everyone thought it was an MOW.

Billy and I heard the same thing over and over, so we gave up our feature goals and went after television. Next, guided by Harry Chandler of Dream City Films and the Los Angeles Times, we had to turn my three act film script into a seven act TV treatment, selecting the aspects of my story that would appeal most to the networks. Focus becomes everything if you want to capture interest, particularly from the first person who will actually read your script professionally - a reader.

If Steven Spielberg had to actually read everything that was submitted to him, he would never have any time to make motion pictures. So he, and everyone else in Hollywood who can do you any good, have professional readers working for them. Spare yourself the pain of believing that the person you have sent your script to will actually read it. They will read the reader's report first, then decide whether to read it or not. They might not get past the first sentence.

Professional readers sift through the flotsam and jetsam created by thousands of idiots with word processors who think they've got what it takes to please the American public and make themselves a fortune. If you think what gets made is garbage, you should see what doesn't get made. The ratio of good scripts to bad scripts is staggering. Readers have a tough job because 99% of what's out there is simply unreadable. Considering the millions of lame manuscripts circulating at any one time around Hollywood, it's amazing that anything of quality ever bubbles to the surface. Just imagine how much garbage you would have to read every day in order for the script of Encino Man to actually look good.

Professional reader's reports are different from film reviews. Journalists can blur into oblivion the distinction between opinion and reporting, but readers must maintain a strict delineation between the two. The first part of a reader's report is an objective description of the plot from beginning to end. It never strays from the story, and rarely exceeds two pages. Next is the opinion, which is generally analytical and scathing.

But at the top of the page is that all important first sentence, the crux of the matter, the item that will make you or break you. All reader's reports in Hollywood have to begin with a "LOG LINE," which has many clinical definitions, all of which boil down to "How TV Guide will describe the project." Your work of genius must be safely encapsulated into two sentences which will grab the attention of a standard TV guide peruser for the few fractions of a second of consideration that they may bestow upon it. Otherwise you're history.

Paul Mazursky once sold a movie based upon one single sentence. He had already given a studio head some scripts, but there was no interest. Finally, he said "How about a film about a Russian who defects in Bloomingdales?" At this point, there was no script, no treatment, and no actor involved. But the Studio executive recognized a great log line when he heard one, and Moscow on the Hudson was born.

This will not happen to you unless you are Paul Mazursky. Everyone else has to actually do all the work before gaining the consideration of someone who can say yes. I came up with dozens of log lines, but the one that actually ended up getting sent to the network was "The true story about a consummate bachelor who, after an ex-girlfriend shows up carrying a baby she claims is his, finds himself, to his amazement, losing everything to fight for custody of the son he never knew he had." Bad English but good TV Guide.

Once a production company became involved, I had to learn to give up my personal ideas of how my story should be told. You may think they are paying you because they want to tell your story, but you are wrong. They are paying you to stay out of the way while they make the story that they think will appeal to their audience, a story that may or may not have anything to do with you. They just want you out of the way when they do it. They're protecting themselves.

There is actually no law on the books that prevents someone from making a movie about anyone else's life. If they want to make a movie about how a fire galvanizes a seaside community, they can go ahead and make it. The cities of Malibu and Laguna Beach are not going to stop them. Producers are rarely sued by municipalities.

But nasty little civil suits can be filed for any number of reasons, so Hollywood lawyers try to ensure that nobody has any problem with the making of any movie. If they could, they would get the entire population of the planet to sign a paper protecting them against nuisance suits.

If you happen to be in the wrong place at the right time, let's say your bungalow burned down, then your signature might be the one they want when they make Blazing Bungalows. "Look," they can say. "Here's one person with a bungalow who definitely won't sue us."

The paper you sign and the money you receive are for one thing only; for you to do absolutely nothing. What they don't want are your casting ideas or suggestions for a post-production house.

All of which made my experience unique. What happened to me didn't happen to a garage mechanic or a housewife, it happened to a professional screenwriter. I was in a singular position. Because of this coincidence, I assumed everyone would want to take advantage of my writing abilities. Not so. The last person on earth that TV executives want to see in the room during a story conference is the actual subject of the story. Subjects are bound to be testy about trivial things like "the facts."

If I wanted to be a part of the development of the project of my own life, I would have to learn to let go, to be a team player, to see things from their point of view.

I submitted a list of potential actors. I wanted someone like Bobcat Goldthwait, not because I have a low self image, but because I wanted the main character to go through a major change. I figured he should start out as the last person on earth you would leave a baby with. If it's Paul Newman, you know he'll come through for the tike and there's no tension or room for growth. But if it's Goldthwait, well....who knows what he'll do.

Forget it. They told us they'd do it only if we could get Jay Thomas, a pretty funny guy who was then starring in a CBS sitcom called Love and War. Jay was fine with me. We submitted our treatment to Jay, and miraculously, he loved it. He signed on and our deal was made.

I submitted a list of potential writers. They wanted Joe Cacaci, a writer from L.A. Law. Joe Cacaci was fine with me. I discover that the job of producer of a Movie of the Week is to say "fine with me" whenever the network makes a suggestion.

I met with Jay and Joe at the Farmer's Market and we all got along great. Joe spent the next nine months developing a script specifically for Jay, and I spent the next nine months irritating all my friends with my imitation of Jay Thomas doing me.

Finally, we were all set. The script was completed to everyone's satisfaction and we were ready to go into production when the president of CBS, a strong advocate of our project, flew the coop, only to be replaced by Les Moonves, whom none of us knew. We spent two months biting our fingernails when the word came from on high. Moonves loved the project, wanted to go into production immediately, as long as it starred anybody but Jay Thomas. His sitcom had tanked and he was no longer the flavor of the month. We re-negotiated with Jay, who ended up with an executive producer credit.

Who did Moonves want? Dennis Franz from NYPD Blue of course. Franz was fine with me, but he promptly turned us down. Who else did Moonves want? Scott Bakula from Quantum Leap of course. Bakula was fine with me. Hell, I was getting better looking all the time. Bakula promptly said yes, and we were in production within a month. But not before Jay Thomas bounced back with Mr. Holland's Opus, and got cast in another CBS movie of the week that actually aired before ours!

Obviously one of the major plot points of my story involved the L.A. riots. At the very first story conference, I was told the riots had to go, which surprised me, since I thought they had bought the story because of the L.A. riots. The riots were what made the story unique. "We might not shoot in L.A." I was told. "If we shoot in Toronto, we can't have a plot point built around the L.A. riots." So the riots were gone, a pill I swallowed with nary a squawk. But now that Scott Bakula was our star, he insisted that we shoot in L.A. This seemed to me a splendid opportunity to go back to the original ending, but forget it. Once a script is approved, no one wants to go back and change things. We ended up with a fantasy ending where everybody miraculously is on my side.

Not surprisingly, I found myself banned from the set. Unlike Jay Thomas, Scott Bakula didn't want to meet me. He wanted to invent a character with the director without my influence. On the final day of shooting, someone had a change of heart and I was invited to the set. No one knew who I was, so I just lurked about. A guard quickly asked who I was. I told him I was a producer. I was wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt. Who else could I be?

The first scene I watched them shoot wasn't just one of the most important in the script, but in my life. It was one of the few scenes that was actually verbatim. I told it to Joe and he wrote it the way it actually happened. I was visiting my son for the first time in the group home he had been taken to. The babies were all behind bars. Bakula gave the baby a bottle, just like I did. He said "Don't worry, I'm going to get you out of this place," just like I did. I wish someone had been there to take a picture of the expression on my face. Imagine your life passing before your eyes and it's exactly the way you remember it, only instead of you, it's that guy from Quantum Leap.

In Quantum Leap, Scott Bakula played Sam Beckett, a man who leapt into people's lives. He would find himself as a soldier in Vietnam or as a beauty contestant in the south in the fifties. We, the viewers, would see him as Bakula, but whenever he looked in the mirror, he would see the person he had leapt into. He would then make some decision for the person that would change their life for the better, then at the end of the episode, leap into someone else. For everyone else, The Bachelor's Baby will play like another MOW. But for me, it will always be the ultimate episode of Quantum Leap. Sam Beckett has leapt into my life, changed it for the better, then leapt out. I wonder who he is now? As I read successive drafts of somebody else's vision of my life, I became overwhelmed with gratitude for the experience, and watching the final product was simply one of the most mind-boggling experiences imaginable. Everyone should get to see a Hollywood movie about their life. See explicate bits of memory, significant moments of vast personal importance, trivialized. See casual recollections blown out of proportion. See some scenes that are verbatim, others that have no basis upon reality whatsoever. Force yourself to relive your pain through another's eyes. See what you look like as the hero.

Considering my past experiences in Hollywood, the first and greatest pleasure in reading Joe Cacaci's Here Comes the Son was to discover that I was still the central character in my own life. After spending so many years on the defensive, it was a lovely ego stroke to simply find myself portrayed as a protagonist.

Now I understood why they didn't want me to write it. I could never have created something that went down this smooth. I would have smashed a few more icons. I certainly would have never had the nerve to make myself look so good. I don't tend to flatter myself. I would have wallowed in more of my faults, creating a downbeat dose of reality with surprising moments of humor, rather than a flat-out comedy with surprising moments of reality.

This is not a complaint. I have no complaints. Cacaci managed to change only the facts that were trivial while emphasizing and augmenting all the most important emotional truths. I might really not be this guy, this lead character that Joe created, but what happened to him certainly happened to me. I feel heroic and sentimental. I will take the money and run. Watch The Bachelor's Baby (of course they changed the name) on CBS, starring Scott Bakula as a guy somewhat like me. Witness the blanding of my life.

Visit Michael Dare's site by clicking here. 

Copyright © 1999-2000 Michael Dare.  Appeared in The New Times and Daily Variety.  Reprinted with permission.

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