Part of the bonding process lay in the upside-down nature of filming all night. This required us to get our sleep during the day, so we became a strange pod of weirdos living outside the norms of conventional society. Most days, we would emerge one by one from our rooms and congregate around the Holiday Inn pool in the midafternoon. I was usually the first one there, because I was terrible at day-sleeping. Generally, I could only go from 7 to 11 A.M., which compelled me to take catnaps later in the day and night in order to keep my wits about me.
This, in turn, developed into one of my signature life skills: the ability to conk out for fifteen minutes at any given moment in any given place. It has served me well ever since in my capacity as a director-producer-executive who always has a dozen projects going at once.
As the baby of the cast, I also received an education in the ways of life and letters as they existed outside of my happy but cloistered Burbank–Toluca Lake world. Rick Dreyfuss became my intellectual mentor. He was an avid reader who was always carrying a paperback. His favorite place in the world was City Lights Books in San Francisco, where we sometimes went in our downtime.
I confided to Rick my worries about being drafted （though never about the notice in my wallet） and told him that I was leaning toward voting for President Nixon over George McGovern, because Nixon had pledged that he would get us out of the war. This was before the Watergate story broke, and I had grown up in an apolitical household where we never really identified as Democrats or Republicans.
With a wiggle of his eyebrows and a pointed “Huh-huh-hoe!” laugh, Rick said, “You have a hell of a lot to learn, Ope.” He lent me some books on politics and did his best to set me straight. At his instigation during filming, we watched some of the Democratic National Convention on a tiny, portable black-and-white TV, with Rick offering running commentary.
Some of the cast’s activities were off-limits to me because I was only eighteen and the drinking age in California was twenty-one. When the Graffiti guys went en masse to a strip bar in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco, Charlie Martin Smith and I got the boot almost immediately for being underage. He and I took to passing our time instead in a dive bar in Petaluma where the manager, a friendly lesbian biker chick, let us shoot pool and play Ping-Pong for as long as we wanted. It was the beginning of a friendship—with Charlie, not the biker chick—that still endures.
Cheryl came up for the wrap party, where George showed us all a fifteen-minute working cut of a few scenes that he had put together with music. George coedited the film with his wife at the time, Marcia Lucas, and a long-tenured legend named Verna Fields, who also introduced George to Steven Spielberg. At this screening, there was a collective gasp by the cast members, even the stoic Harrison. THIS is what we are a part of? Wow! It was riveting, seeing the vision in George’s head coming to life. We still had no clue if our movie stood a chance at the box office, but we knew we had something revolutionary.
I drove home to Toluca Lake supercharged to start at USC and make as many films as I possibly could—provided that Vietnam didn’t get in the way.
18
Cruising, Boozing, Scoring
RON
Fired up, I dusted off a story that I had written for English class my junior year, based on a true series of events. I was a reporter for my high school newspaper, and one of my fellow reporters was a bright, socially awkward guy who didn’t run with the cool kids. A popular girl in our class led him on, making him think that she was into him. She lured my friend into kissing her in public, only for a bunch of the girl’s friends to run out from a hiding place and laugh, humiliating him. It turned out that the girl was rushing a sorority, and kissing a dorky guy was her initiation rite.
I turned this sad tale of high school dynamics at their cruelest into a screenplay, entitled The Initiation. It was the first sound film I ever made in 16 mm, with the actors actually speaking dialogue. We shot it shortly before I started at USC, with the kissing scene taking place in Buena Vista Park, one of my childhood haunts. My friend and sometime writing partner Craig Hundley, who is now better known as the L.A. musician and composer Craig Huxley, was rail thin and gawky, so I cast him as the lead, an introverted piano savant. Susan Richardson, a young actress who had a small part in American Graffiti, played the popular girl who seduced him. Charlie Martin Smith made a walk-on appearance as one of the girl’s laughing friends.