Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren

[

ALISON MACOR ]

Rewrite Man

THE LIFE AND CAREER OF SCREENWRITER WARREN SKAAREN

University of Texas Press

AUSTIN

Copyright © 2017 by Alison Macor

All rights reserved

First edition, 2017

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Macor, Alison, 1966–, author.

Title: Rewrite man : the life and career of screenwriter Warren Skaaren / Alison Macor.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016033835

ISBN 978-0-292-75945-9 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1201-8 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1202-5 (non-library e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Skaaren, Warren, 1946–1990. | Screenwriters—United States—Biography. | Motion picture authorship.

Classification: LCC PS3569.K33 Z76 2017 | DDC 813/.54 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016033835

doi:10.7560/2759459

For my parents

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER ONE. From Hallingdal to Houston

CHAPTER TWO. Hollywood on the Colorado

CHAPTER THREE. Breaking Away

CHAPTER FOUR. Highway to the Danger Zone

CHAPTER FIVE. Hollywood Gothic

CHAPTER SIX. One Hit After Another

CHAPTER SEVEN. Batmania

CHAPTER EIGHT. The Man Hollywood Trusts

CONCLUSION

Acknowledgments

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

Introduction

He is a magician and a telepath who has only to mumble and to imagine and the world turns to his desires.

ERNEST BECKER, THE DENIAL OF DEATH

The memorial service for Warren Skaaren was held at the Paramount Theatre in downtown Austin on a bleak January afternoon in 1991. The day began with temperatures in the fifties, but as the afternoon wore on the thermometer dropped, signaling the return of a polar front that had chilled the city in the final weeks of December as Skaaren lost his battle with bone cancer.

As family members, friends, and associates filed into the Paramount’s rows of velvet-covered seats, babies’ cries and the murmurs of young children could be heard throughout the theater, which seemed fitting given Skaaren’s lifelong ability to connect with children of all ages. Indeed, he and his wife, Helen, had fostered seven babies of various races in the early years of their marriage. The memorial’s master of ceremonies that day, film producer Ron Bozman, even joked that an initial plan for the service featured a stageful of babies of mixed race, just crying and googling in front of an audience. Despite Skaaren’s affinity with young people, however, he remained deeply ambivalent about having children of his own throughout his life, even into his final months.

How do you sum up a man and a man’s life? Bozman asked.¹ A longtime producer who a year later would win a Best Picture Academy Award for his work on The Silence of the Lambs, Bozman had met Skaaren in 1966, when they were both sophomores at Rice University. Words cannot begin to do it all, but they can begin, he continued, describing Skaaren as a child during the Korean War and, later, an ardent and vocal opponent of Vietnam who would not have enjoyed the events of the past week, as none of us have. Bozman was referring to the U.S. government’s decision to ramp up its military activity in the Persian Gulf. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein had ignored the United Nations’ January 15 deadline to pull his army out of Kuwait. In the hours leading up to Skaaren’s memorial, U.S. Patriot missiles began shooting down Iraqi missiles.

It’s a shame he didn’t go into politics though it was available to him, continued Bozman of Skaaren, who had first moved to Texas’s capital city in 1969 to work on then-Governor Preston Smith’s staff. Skaaren had leveraged a position in the governor’s urban development program into overseeing the state’s first film commission, which he helmed for four years before leaving state politics behind. He could have [gone into politics] and had he done it, I think, we might not be in the Middle East today. Suggesting that Skaaren could have prevented the country’s involvement in the Middle East seemed like a bold statement, particularly given Skaaren’s tremendous success in an altogether different field—as a screenwriter and script doctor, or rewrite man, on four of the top-grossing films of the 1980s. Bozman’s comment, however, was typical of how people reacted to Skaaren. With his engaging personality, commanding baritone, and 6′2″ stature, not to mention his sharp analytical and active listening skills, Skaaren gave the impression to nearly every one he met that he could do just about anything. With his myriad abilities, some friends wondered why he was spending (wasting, even) his talents rewriting other writers’ scripts when he could be running for public office, working as a metal sculptor, writing and performing music—the list went on and on and seemed to say more about Skaaren’s relationship with each person than about what Skaaren’s true calling was meant to be.

The man was never what you would call predictable, Bozman said drily. Skaaren’s friends were often surprised at the twists and turns his life took, such as his decision to leave the film commission in 1974 and try his hand at writing, or the fact that prior to his death, he had been seriously ill for six months without telling the majority of those closest to him. Bozman worried aloud that the memorial itself, which the producer had organized at the request of Skaaren intimate and attorney W. Amon Burton, would be far more conventional than Skaaren might have wanted. And yet Bozman made sure to include performances and people that may have struck some in the audience as unusual, such as the excerpt presented by Heloise Gold. Skaaren had collaborated with the dancer and performer less than a year earlier on her one-woman show titled Maggs, the 10,000 Year Old Woman. Gold’s ten-minute performance at the memorial centered on what she would later claim was Skaaren’s favorite line from the show: a fart joke.²

Prior to Gold’s performance, Bozman called to the podium Tom Viola, who was Skaaren’s brother-in-law and married to Helen Skaaren’s sister, Liz. Viola spoke warmly about Skaaren, saying that they shared a family life for two decades that was active and extended. What Viola didn’t say but many in the audience knew was that Warren and Helen had been separated since August 1989. (Helen Skaaren did not respond to multiple requests to be interviewed for this book.) Skaaren’s reasons for not divorcing his wife before his death were as complicated as he was and reflected a deeply rooted ambivalence about women and the demands he felt they made on him.

Next, Bobby Bridger strode onto the Paramount stage carrying a guitar and wearing a fringed suede jacket. Bridger was a musician well known for his celebration of the West in his nationally acclaimed one-man shows. Bridger described Skaaren as his closest male friend in the 1970s. The relationship functioned, Bozman would tell another friend privately, as a way for Skaaren to act out vicariously.³ Although Skaaren never performed music publicly beyond high school, he thought seriously about pursuing songwriting as a career and took steps to do so in the spring of 1988, when the twenty-two-week writer’s strike sidelined his screenwriting projects. Accompanied by Bill Guinn on piano, Bridger performed Heal in the Wisdom, his best-known song. Let’s hear you sing it, Bridger encouraged the audience, most of whom joined in on the final lines: One day together we’ll heal in the wisdom and we’ll understand. The lyrics were eerily poignant and seemed to refer to the fact that so many of those attending the memorial service hadn’t even known that Skaaren was sick, let alone dying of terminal cancer, which had been diagnosed in July of the previous year. Rumors had begun swirling by the late fall, but together Amon Burton and Skaaren’s assistant, Linda Vance, worked overtime to honor Skaaren’s vehement request that no one outside a shrinking circle of friends and caregivers be told of his condition. Even Mike Simpson, Skaaren’s representative at the William Morris Agency, was kept in the dark until two weeks prior to his client’s death. He was told only after Burton convinced Skaaren that his secrecy could be adversely affecting Simpson’s own reputation in Hollywood.

As Bobby Bridger exited the stage, an older, balding man in a dark suit stepped to the podium. Robert Wise had known Skaaren when he still lived in Rochester, the Norwegian town in Minnesota that was home to the renowned Mayo Clinic. The Warren I first knew was really a boy, recalled a somber Wise, who had met the eighteen-year-old Skaaren in his capacity as dean of student affairs at Rochester Junior College (RJC), where Skaaren enrolled following high school graduation. Wise became Skaaren’s mentor and friend, assuming something of a paternal role in the younger man’s life. The affection that Skaaren felt for Wise could be measured in the number of times that the screenwriter returned to the college’s annual freshman camp to speak enthusiastically to the students about Wise and the school itself. The life he led here in Austin and Holly wood was not actually comprehensible to us back in Rochester, said Wise at the memorial. But it touched us nevertheless. Indeed Skaaren’s visits, often sandwiched between his writing gigs on high-profile projects like Beverly Hills Cop II and Beetlejuice, dazzled the new freshmen, many of whom probably felt as lost and alone as Skaaren had on the day that he first ran into Wise on the junior college campus. For Skaaren, these visits and the thoughts he shared with the young people there justified what to him sometimes seemed like indulgent and shallow work. In a life which is so utterly self-centered, it is rare and healthy exercise to share the energy and the memories with others, Skaaren wrote to Wise following what would be his final trip to the camp.⁴

I’m told that in certain African villages, the storyteller wears a ring of white chalk around his eye, because it’s the storyteller’s fate to look and to look again. . . . Our Warren has the storyteller’s steadfast gaze, Sherry Kafka-Wagner began as she recounted the time that she and Skaaren had worked together on a documentary about the San Antonio River Walk. Finding themselves hopelessly lost while on a location scout, the pair stopped the car in the middle of an empty road, turned up the radio, and sang and danced to Marvin Gaye’s I Heard It Through the Grapevine. While Skaaren was known for his ability to connect deeply with women and men alike, women in particular responded to his unique combination of attractiveness, attentiveness, and nurturing. Skaaren, who had struggled with his weight and self-confidence since childhood, reveled in this kind of female attention, particularly in the last year of his life during his marital separation. Flush with the commercial and professional success of Batman (1989), for which he shared screenwriting credit with first writer Sam Hamm, Skaaren wrote about several flirtatious encounters during that time.

Kafka-Wagner’s remembrance was followed by Heloise Gold’s performance as Maggs and Bill Jeffers’s spoken-word piece about a snake shedding its skin. The two performances represented what some of Skaaren’s longtime friends jokingly called his woo woo side. A lifelong seeker and voracious reader, Skaaren had always been interested in a variety of subjects. He routinely passed out to friends copies of two of his favorite books, The Denial of Death and A Pattern Language. He maintained a macrobiotic diet to varying degrees throughout his marriage and embraced this aggressively as an alternative to traditional Western treatment of cancer, first in 1987 and then again when his cancer metastasized in 1990.

Mike Simpson, Skaaren’s agent of six years, was the afternoon’s final speaker. Senior vice president and co-head of the motion picture division at William Morris, Simpson already had strong Austin ties before he agreed to represent Skaaren in 1984. He had done graduate work at the University of Texas and first met Skaaren in 1975, when he interviewed the newly departed film commissioner about his behind-the-scenes role on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Notified of his client’s condition only two weeks before Skaaren’s death on December 28, Simpson seemed, like so many others at the memorial, still to be coming to terms with his friend’s absence. He also was struggling to understand the way that Skaaren had handled his illness and subsequent treatment as well as his decision to tell so few people. Later Simpson would say privately, That’s the one thing for me that’s puzzling in all this. He was such a spiritual guy, and I learned a lot from him in that area, and I would have figured him to be an expert at his own dying. A real pro at it.⁵

At the memorial, however, Simpson stuck to the script, so to speak. His job was to present his client in the best light possible and to remind those in attendance why Skaaren was highly successful and in demand in an industry that was so fickle, especially when it came to hiring writers. Simpson read from letters written by two of Skaaren’s favorite collaborators, the actors Tom Cruise and Michael Douglas. Warren was an easy person to like, warm, friendly, with a good sense of humor, wrote Cruise, who had first met the writer when producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson hired Skaaren to save a floundering Top Gun script. A skittish Cruise had thought his character, Lieutenant Pete Maverick Mitchell, was an asshole. Skaaren provided a humanizing backstory and a more challenging love interest, among other changes, that kept Cruise from bailing on the project. He was very hardworking and dedicated to his craft, something I respected in him, continued Cruise’s letter, and indeed Skaaren was the first writer Cruise trusted with his five-page treatment about a race-car driver that would become the film Days of Thunder (1990).⁶

Never in my professional life have I had a more enjoyable working experience than with Warren, Michael Douglas said of their time together on what was to be the third film in the Romancing the Stone trilogy. The project sent Skaaren around the world, from New York and San Francisco to London and Hong Kong, where he visited the stalls of the animal black market and hung out in the high-end karaoke clubs favored by the Chinese mob. Warren would always get the work done, yet still had time to share a personal experience, to learn some new facet about life and always had time for a good dry laugh. I’ll miss you, Warren, Douglas’s letter continued.⁷ Indeed, the two men had spent the better part of a year on the project, meeting in Douglas’s penthouse apartment in New York, in various hotel rooms around Los Angeles, and in Warren and Helen’s modest home in the hills overlooking downtown Austin. Douglas’s marriage to his wife Diandra was in flux at the time, and Skaaren was privy to intense conversations and highly personal details.

The way Skaaren handled himself in these situations, said Mike Simpson, was partly the secret to his success. The community felt this sense of honesty and discretion from Warren and fully embraced in bringing him into its inner circle. Simpson recalled the start of Skaaren’s rewrite career, which began with his work on a midbudget romantic drama for Jeffrey Katzenberg and Dawn Steel at Paramount Pictures. Steel in particular connected with Skaaren, and it was she who recommended him to Simpson and Bruckheimer for Top Gun. In the craft of high-level production rewrites, Warren had no equal. He possessed a unique ability to walk into chaotic situations where directors, producers, stars, studio executives would be at odds with each other over a troubled script of a movie that often seemed like a train barreling out of control toward a start date, said Simpson, offering a description that fit nearly all of the blockbusters that Skaaren had worked on. He described Skaaren’s ability to bring focus to these situations and clarity and fresh insights to the scripts themselves. His ability to deliver the goods practically overnight and ready to shoot was legendary, said Simpson. He neglected to mention the toll this might have taken on Skaaren. He set a precedent with Top Gun, delivering a first draft in an astonishing ten days (writers typically take three weeks), but it left him wearing an eye patch and with hands too calloused to type.⁸

Although Skaaren achieved his greatest financial and professional success with the release of Batman in 1989, it was Beetlejuice (1988), said Simpson, that gave the writer the most professional satisfaction. Both projects paired Skaaren with Tim Burton, who also was a client of Simpson’s. Burton had traveled to Austin for the memorial, in fact, but did not speak publicly. Bobby Bridger recalls taking a cigarette break in the alley behind the Paramount Theatre, where he stood alone with another somber smoker who, he realized later, was Tim Burton. After Simpson finished speaking, a montage of clips from Skaaren’s films began to play. It’s showtime! crowed Michael Keaton’s character in Beetlejuice. Excerpts both dramatic and comical followed for more than ten minutes, highlighting some of Skaaren’s best work in Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop II, Beetlejuice, and Batman. The memorial concluded with Beetlejuice’s zany dinner party sequence, in which spirits possess a group of guests and force them to dance and sing, conga-line style, to Harry Belafonte’s Day-O.

The memorial offered Tim Burton, for one, insight into aspects of Skaaren’s life and personality that the writer never revealed to him during the years that they worked together. I realized that we actually were more alike than I even thought, said Burton later. As a director you make a movie and you make it yours. ‘It’s my movie.’ It’s the process you go through. It needs to be this and this . . . I pushed a lot of that. But the feeling I got from the memorial, and seeing pictures and actually just thinking about time past and our relationship, there is a lot of him in it, and his spirit. Continued Burton, When you’re working with someone, when you can’t delineate who did what, that’s the sign of a good relationship.⁹

.   .   .

By the time of Warren Skaaren’s premature death, in December 1990, he was one of the highest-paid writers in Hollywood—although he rarely left Austin, where he had lived and worked since the late 1960s. He was an in-demand script doctor—rewriting and polishing screenplays by other writers—on some of the most successful blockbusters of the 1980s. His industry profile had risen to such an extent with Batman, in fact, that Skaaren himself became the subject of a series of articles and magazine profiles beginning in 1989. The glossy entertainment magazine Premiere had been planning to run a profile of Skaaren in early 1991. Instead, the article became a two-page obituary titled Death of a Screenwriter.¹⁰

Yet Skaaren remains largely unknown today. His anonymity is partly the result of his early death, but it also reflects the contested role of screenwriters and script doctors, especially in contemporary filmmaking. Skaaren’s struggle to claim authorship of four hit films is a struggle that for screenwriters and their union, the Writers Guild of America (WGA), has only become more intense, more litigious, and more public since the 1980s. In 1987, writer Gore Vidal sued the WGA and screenwriter Steve Shagan, who had received sole credit for The Sicilian, a film based on a script that Vidal had rewritten. Vidal took issue with the Guild’s arbitration itself, a confidential and anonymous process involving three WGA writers who volunteer as arbiters and whose job it is to read through every draft of the screenplay and supporting documents to determine authorship of the final film. Vidal’s suit alleged that the arbitration proceeding that awarded sole credit to Shagan was unfair because a fundamental document had been withheld from the arbiters.¹¹ Vidal’s suit asked that the ruling be overturned, and he eventually won his case.¹² Vidal is one of the few writers (and members of the Guild) to sue the organization (writer Larry Ferguson’s suit regarding Beverly Hills Cop II followed a few months later), but other notable arbitration cases include The Mask of Zorro (1998) and The Hulk (2003). The Hulk’s contentious arbitration involved eight writers, including James Schamus, who received a story credit (a lesser credit often awarded to those who lay out the basic plot and theme) and shared screenplay credit with John Turman and Michael France.¹³ The studio’s internal summary of my script was, substantially, the movie, said Turman, who thought his work on The Hulk warranted a story credit as well.¹⁴ Schamus was the last writer on the project; typically story credit is awarded to writers responsible for the earliest drafts. Only in Kafka-meets-Orwell Guildland could you get this result. It’s an advertisement for how screwed up the system is, said Schamus of the WGA Arbitration Committee’s 2–1 decision.¹⁵ Added Turman, I get comments like ‘Great credit!’—as if I had won the lottery. The arbitration process is seen as divorced from writing itself, and if you win everyone thinks you just got lucky.¹⁶ Battles over screenwriting credit continue to make the front page of trade publications like Variety and are frequently covered in the arts sections of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, not to mention recounted and analyzed on the hundreds of film and screenwriting websites that exist today. The arbitration concerning Jurassic World (2015), for instance, pitted two writing teams against one another and was in the news for months. Although Colin Treverrow, one of the team’s writers (and the film’s director), admitted that he and his writing partner Derek Connolly disagreed with the Guild’s final credits determination, he acknowledged that both writing teams share a disdain for the arbitration process and the ugliness it often breeds. Though I will remain a proud member of the WGA, I encourage my fellow members to work together to find alternative ways to evaluate our contributions.¹⁷

This issue of authorship, while always a tortuous subject in Hollywood, became increasingly complicated around the time Skaaren began working as a rewrite man. By the 1980s, the process of motion picture development (which includes everything from the initial idea, often expressed at a pitch meeting, to a screenplay that has been rewritten and polished by multiple writers) had grown more complex within an industry run by executives increasingly focused on making blockbuster films. One reason screenwriters are so often replaced is that the script is the element of a project that’s easiest for studios to change, explains writer Tad Friend of the development process. They would rather replace a five-hundred-thousand-dollar writer during pre-production than lose a twenty-million-dollar star who hates the script after production has begun.¹⁸ As film historian Tom Stempel writes, By the mid-eighties, the major companies combined were investing between thirty and forty million dollars a year in the development process. Most of the scripts in development were not made.¹⁹ Those that were made, however, were often scripts that had been rewritten by numerous writers with input from any number of producers and executives, in addition to the director and stars, a trend that began to dominate the industry during that decade. This trend had its precedent, of course, in earlier periods in film history, such as the 1930s and 1940s, when, notes journalist Beverly Walker, moguls put [screenwriters] in cubbyholes, demanded a precise number of pages per day, and often assigned several writers to the same project, unbeknownst to each other.²⁰ But in later decades as large corporations began to purchase the major film studios, the conglomeration of Hollywood took hold and created layers of bureaucracy that included agents, attorneys, and various levels of studio executives in addition to producers and stars. As Walker observed in 1987, "The ‘developed movie’ is the motion picture for this time, as valid as the style or genre of any previous era."²¹

As a result, disputes over the assignment of writing credit—which could make or break a screenwriter’s career—became commonplace as well. By 1980, the Writers Guild of America was being asked to arbitrate such disputes more than 150 times per year.²² Arbitration is an issue, according to screenwriter Stephen Gaghan (Traffic), that is "ultimately going to split the Writers Guild apart. The small group of name writers who fix every film is being arbitrated by—and discriminated against by—a bunch of guys who last wrote an episode of The Rockford Files, he says of the class-war dimension" of the arbitration process.²³

Arbitration in general, notes attorney Shawn K. Judge, offers a method of alternative dispute resolution, but the type of arbitration process employed to assign screenwriting credit in the film industry is a process far different from a typical arbitration, which does not require anonymity of its arbiters or conceal the process of determination regarding its decision.²⁴ Echoing the comments of many screenwriters, Judge observes that the Guild’s credit arbitration process is a potentially flawed mechanism in which the pursuit of fast resolution of disputes and preservation of anonymity may at times lessen the degree of justice achieved.²⁵ But these conditions are necessary, he argues, to ensure that films (and thus profits) are not threatened by a theatrical release delayed by lengthy litigation over credit, as well as to preserve interpersonal relationships within a relatively small industry. Preservation of the integrity of credit entails quantifying a fundamentally abstract, inherently immeasurable creative process; there is no system that could satisfactorily resolve such an analytical paradox beyond a doubt, observes Judge.²⁶

More often than not, and as demonstrated through its screen credit determinations, the WGA defines the author of a screenplay as the first writer or team of writers on a project. As the Guild’s own manual states, Fewer names and fewer types of credit enhance the value of all credits and the dignity of all writers.²⁷ But as Skaaren’s arbitration experiences reveal, authorship of a film script is a highly complicated and multilayered issue often dictated by elements inscribed at various points throughout a film’s journey from script to screen. Exploring Skaaren’s well-documented experiences as a writer battling for shared credit on a potential blockbuster also yields a new understanding of the secretive screen credit arbitration process during the New Hollywood, a time in which the industry’s embracing of development led to a greater number of screenplays necessitating the Guild’s involvement via the arbitration process. The development and eventual arbitration of Skaaren’s screenplays for films such as Top Gun and Beverly Hills Cop II also offer some insight into the roles of various players—the producers, directors, screenwriters, stars, the studio executives, even the Guild itself—within the overall process.

For a relative newcomer like Skaaren, this trend toward development and the tendency of studios to hire multiple writers for a single project clearly worked to his advantage. The downside to this situation, as he would experience firsthand on Top Gun, was that the assigning of story and writing credit on such projects often resulted in arbitration, a process of mediation that rarely favored anyone but the first writer or team of writers. In addition, the arbiters’ decisions regarding story and writing credit frequently denied, or at least glossed over, the complicated process by which a film script gets written. Obscured are other, less tangible elements of the screenplay’s development, such as the power a top star like Tom Cruise has over the writing and rewriting process and how this affects the screenwriters’ work. Cruise’s involvement in Top Gun and what it meant to the project also reveal another important element of the filmmaking formula that flourished in the 1980s: Cruise’s star power was bankable. As Tom Stempel explains, by the 1980s this did not mean that Cruise’s involvement would translate into money from the bank to fund the production as much as it guaranteed that the film would be distributed into theaters. In turn, argues Stempel, a star such as Cruise would also function as a producer even if he did not receive screen credit as such. This further affected the development of the screenplay. The stars’ decisions influenced what scripts were written, how they were rewritten, and if they were produced at all, writes Stempel.²⁸ This was the state of American filmmaking in 1985, when Skaaren was hired to rewrite the script for Top Gun, his first major Hollywood project.

With the exception perhaps of his agent, Mike Simpson, Skaaren rarely talked to others about his arbitration experiences in Hollywood, but each one influenced how he negotiated and approached successive film projects. He often wrote about these experiences privately, where he vented about the process and each outcome. This tendency to keep things to himself seemed to be with Skaaren from childhood, when as an only child of somewhat older parents he began to seek solace in writing, drawing, and music. The memorial in January 1991 brought together all aspects of Skaaren’s complex life, one that had become increasingly compartmentalized in his final six months. Skaaren thrived on keeping separate the various parts of his world—professional and personal, friends and lovers, business and pleasure—so the concept of the memorial itself and the size of the audience it drew might have unnerved him. The event also revealed what his girlfriend Julie Jordan described as an enormously big private life. He wasn’t a public figure, but it’s almost as if his private life was the size of a public life. He was someone who met someone for every single meal, had meetings, had the phone going. He was always going somewhere or doing something with someone. All the time.²⁹

Skaaren’s story offers insight into two very different but similarly misunderstood subjects. While Skaaren’s career sheds light on the politics of writing blockbusters in 1980s Hollywood, his life also reveals one person’s experience with terminal illness and the world of alternative healthcare at that time. Skaaren’s memorial marked the end of a particularly chaotic six-month period that unfolded almost like a scene out of one of his screenplays for Tim Burton. He wrote his dying script, said his assistant, Linda Vance, of what transpired during those final six months. "His own Beetlejuice, with all these weird characters and parts and roles played out all around him in real life."³⁰ The setting was Skaaren’s beloved Tuscan villa, a home whose initial acquisition was so fraught with difficulties that an anxious Skaaren sought out a friend who consulted the I Ching before he signed the deed to the house.

In addition to Vance and longtime attorney Amon Burton, Skaaren surrounded himself with a rotating