After I left UCLA I was hired to write a script for United Artists about the British World War One deserter and agitator, Percy Topliss. When I delivered the screenplay it was rejected as "too English, too expensive, and too anti-war."
Shortly thereafter I met the British director, Adrian Lyne. He had directed one feature, FOXES, and he wanted his next to be about what he felt was the most important issue of the day: the imminent possibility of a nuclear war. I scouted Seattle and Vancouver as locations, and wrote him a script called THE HAPPY HOUR.
Adrian read it and went off to direct FLASHDANCE. And I ran into two old chums from UCLA - Jonathan Wacks and Peter McCarthy. They had been in the Production programme; Jon had directed a documentary, Pete a drama. Now they had a company, and even more impressive, an office in Venice, California, where they were making commercials ("Gene Kelly assures the public the MGM Grand is safe again!") and public service announcements. I suggested to them that they should also be feature film producers, and hire me as a director. They agreed to consider this, but instructed me to come up with a script.
The first one I wrote for them was called THE HOT CLUB (a comedy about nuclear blast veterans and nerve gas thieves set in the early years of the 21st century). They budgeted and Marie Canton (also ex-UCLA) budgeted it; it turned out to be rather expensive. So I went off and wrote another screenplay instead: REPO MAN.
This was based on my own personal Los Angeles horrors and the tutelage of Mark Lewis, a Los Angeles car repossessor and my neighbour in Venice, CA.. When the screenplay was published, Dick Rude and I interviewed Mark for the introduction: his take on the repo trade and the movie can be found at pscweb.com/repo/whatever.
more............
http://id.mind.net/~extang/acRepo.html