Paul Marks – He pulled a gun on the LAPD 
and lived to tell about it.*



A Los Angeles native, Paul Marks loves the city that L.A. was.
Dodging bullets, he's not so sure about the city it is today.

Nothing in your technicolor dreams can match the magic and illusion that calls itself Los Angeles. Set down in the middle of the City of Angels is the City of Dreams to some, Demons to others – Hollywood. -excerpt from Destination Unknown (novel in progress)

Paul is the stealth screenwriter, making his living from optioning screenplays of his own and rewriting (script doctoring) other people's scripts or developing their ideas. He has also lectured on writing and screenwriting at UCLA, California State University, San Bernardino, Learning Tree University and at other seminars and conferences.

Concentrating on fiction lately he has had several stories up for awards. Netiquette won First Place in the Futures Short Story contest and Dem Bones was a finalist in the Southern Writers Association contest. His novel WHITE HEAT won its category  in the 2005 Southwest Writers Contest. Other stories have been submitted for  Shamus, Pushcart, Derringer and Edgar consideration by their editors.

Sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. Well, two out of three ain't bad, Jim thought staring at the blips on is computer screen. He could have sex and even rock 'n' roll with sound over the Internet or America OnLine. No drugs, unless you considered his addiction to the keyboard a drug. Everyone's addicted to something these days. And everything they're addicted to is a disease. So Jim didn't feel too bad about his addiction to chatting online. He belonged to CompuServe, America OnLine, a dedicated net provider and several private computer bulletin boards. --excerpt from Netiquette

Paul considers himself an L.A. writer, even though not everything he writes is set in L.A. But everything he writes is certainly informed by his Los Angeles experiences.

Never one to sit on his hands, Paul has several novel-irons in the fire. Mostly mysteries and one mainstream novel. Excerpts from some of these are on these pages.

Besides fiction and screen work, Paul has sold non-fiction articles to Los Angeles Daily News,  The Los Angeles Times, The Los Angeles Herald Examiner,  and American Premiere magazine. He was also a contributing editor on The Hollywood Gazette.

TRUE STORIES:

A little history montage – a very little:

When I started out as a would-be writer I thought there were certain things real writers did. They drank. I drank. But when I drank I didn't want to write I wanted to have fun. So much for drinking. But drinking or not I thought writers should hang out at bars and dives and soak up atmosphere or thrown beer. My first adventure out was to a well known sleazy eatery. I sat at the counter listening for tidbits of dialogue, insights into lives. What I got was a shirt full of beer when two guys playing pool a few feet away got into a fight. Free beer, who could ask for more? If a cop had stopped me on the way home my shirt-alcohol level would surely have been over the legal limit. Would they have arrested me or just my shirt?

I also wanted to try almost anything to get noticed, have people read my scripts. I'd send letters to everyone. The bigger they were, generally speaking, the nicer they were. Gene Kelly invited me to his house to drop off a script. And when I got there he invited me in for a chat. Burt Reynolds had his manager call and take a look at a script. It was the little ones I never heard from. I guess they were too big, true legends in their own minds.

Cary Grant called me. I had sent him a letter telling him about a script of mine. Hoping he might give up his many-yeared self-imposed exile from making movies to be in my little script. If he were to be in it, it would certainly go from a script to a movie.  

So one day the phone rang. I picked it up.

"Hello is Paul Marks there?" a familiar voice said. My God, could it be?

I confessed. 

To make a long story short, we had a nice, pleasant conversation. And though he didn't want to do my movie, Mr. Grant was as charming and debonair on the phone as his character in the movies. And nice.

I pictured him under a palm tree by his pool, sipping a daiquiri. Or maybe in his den in an Armani suit, this handsome, debonair man. And while I was talking to the most suave man in the world, I wondered if he could imagine that I was on my throne . . . the toilet. Since the phone was right outside the bathroom door and in those days I never wanted to miss a call. After all, I never knew, it could be Cary Grant calling.

Now if only Paul McCartney would call...

Paul's interests include SCUBA, reading in general & reading and watching mysteries in particular, film noir, 60s rock/Beatles and today's alt. rock, swing and cowboy music (as opposed to country music), collecting plastic (& some metal) toys from 40s-70s, Edward Hopper art and the history of Los Angeles, from the mean streets to the streets paved with gold.

* * *

Paul is or has been a member of the following among others not listed here:

Alpha Epsilon Rho, the National Honorary Broadcasting Society
American Film Institute
Aztec Dive Club (scuba diving)
Hollywood Heritage, historic preservation group
IFP West - Independent Feature Project
Los Angeles Conservancy, historic preservation group
Los Angeles Film Teachers Association
Mystery Writers of America
Private Eye Writers of America
Shakespeare Authorship Roundtable
Sisters in Crime, former board member, L.A. chapter
Writers Guild of America, West

*And yes, it is true: I pulled a gun on the LAPD and I'm here to tell about it.

According to some people, if the LAPD is known for one thing it's for being trigger happy, ready to bust people up. Well, I'm happy to be able to say that I'm one of the few people to have pulled a gun on two cops and lived to tell about. * * * In a Lonely Place was on the tube. One of my favorite movies. Didn't matter how many times I saw it it was never enough. Gloria Grahame was beautiful. Seductive. Bogart was cynical. Jaded. Everything was shaded. Ambiguous. Hollywood was hell - still is. And one of the few cases where the movie's ending actually improved on the original book. So much for the book always being better than the movie. I heard a noise outside. The chopper roared in low overhead. A strafing run. I didn't think so, but I had to talk myself out of it. He was hovering. My downstairs neighbor Sally (name changed) had been attacked twice by a guy who tried to rape her. I had chased the guy down the alley. Every night I would search her apartment for her when she came home. I'd let her sleep on my couch. I wondered if the helicopter hovering overhead was there because the bad guy was back. Maybe the bad guy was back. But Sally wasn't. She had moved in with her boyfriend Tod (name changed), though she still kept her apartment. I grabbed my politically incorrect pistol, headed to my front door. It was a small apartment building in Rancho Park, half a block west of 20th Century Fox. Only four units. And only one upstairs. Me. The stairs that led from my apartment ended in front of Sally's apartment below. I opened my door slowly, - quietly, feeling as if I was in a movie - and headed out to the landing at the top of my stairs. I watched the chopper circle above. Then, two scuzballs came out of Sally's apartment. Two for the price of one. Greasy long hair. Big mustaches. Dirty clothes. The bad guy and a friend? "Hold it," I said, aiming point blank at them only a few yards below. I could have dropped them both before they had a chance to turn around. "Turn around, slowly." It was just like the movies. They did as ordered. S-l-o-w-l-y. "We're the police," the scuzzier of the two said. "Put the gun away and go inside." This was one of those situations where you don't have time to think. You have to act. I asked for ID and he badged me, cautiously. That was good enough for me. I went inside. So much for a trigger happy LAPD. "If the cops are going to stake out your place, let me know," I asked Sally. She assured me she would. So much for assurances. In a Lonely Place was still on. And then the paranoia hit. Jesus, they were cops. And I had pulled a gun on them. The movie droned in the background. It could have been anything as far as I was concerned. I was spacing out. Visions of SWAT teams surrounding my apartment took up all the space in my head. Firefight. The movie in my mind. "The building is surrounded," the disembodied voice on the loudspeaker would say. "Come out or we'll blow you to Kingdom Come." The thoughts grew larger. What should I do? I called Sally's apartment phone. I was in my bedroom, which sat directly over her living room. Probably where the two cops were. One of them answered. I introduced myself. "Are you the guy from upstairs with the gun?" he said. "Yes," I said. "Man, you really made me nervous." Not as nervous as I was when I found out you were the cops, I thought, but didn't say. He was cool. They weren't going to bust me. I had, indeed, pulled a gun on the LAPD and lived to tell about it. Sally moved out not too long after that. No word of thanks. Not even a goodbye. I never saw her again. So much for being appreciated. And, not too long after that, the Westside Rapist was caught a block and a half away.

Instead of going home, Holland headed back to Echo Park. Stared at the empty lake. Dead, he thought. Drained of its life. Like L.A. He remembered when his grandparents used to take him boating here. People still did that, but today they often had to dodge bullets. Not so back then. It was a different city. --excerpt from Angels Flight (and glad I could loan my title to Michael Connelly)

LIST OF PUBLISHED WORKS:
(Updated: 09/10/2007)
Born Under a Bad Sign – Hardluck Stories' anthology Noir Blues
51-50– Hardluck Stories' anthology Psycho Noir
Don't Sleep on it Marlowe - Crimestalker Casebook
A Sherlockian Poetry Pourri - Crimestalker Casebook
911 – Fiction on the Run Anthology
Angel's Flight – Murder by Thirteen Anthology
Cubic Zirconia of Kubla Khan, The - Futures
Good Old Days, The  – Murder Across the Map Anthology
Graceland – Crimestalker Casebook
L.A. Late @ Night – Murder on Sunset Boulevard Anthology
Netiquette - Futures
Out of Time – Dime Anthology I
Round Up the Unusual Suspects – Crimestalker Casebook
Ruby Slippers, The – Penny-A-Liner
Santa Claus Blues - Futures
Sleepy Lagoon Nocturne– LAndmarked for Murder Anthology
Trio of Sherlock Holmes poems  – Crimestalker Casebook
Trouble with Hitch, The – Crimestalker Casebook
Unfinished Business – Futures

Marx Memory - Playset Magazine (non-fiction article)

Paul also sold a short story to Dogwood Tales shortly before it went out of business. He hopes there was no connection between the two.