Thank you!

We hadn't written humor together for years when we decided to take another stab at an old idea we had in the drawer about a shlubby would-be writer who befriends a superhero. We had so much fun revising and completing it that we immediately jumped into a new idea, sort of a tribute to the old movies we love and the high-speed typewriter jockeys of the past we admire, about a couple of screenwriters in '40s Hollywood who are desperate to make their mark with their original ideas—and who just won't accept the fact that their ideas are way out of step with their times.

So then we had two books in the works and we didn't quite know what to do with them. We knew they were going to be hard for the publishing industry to niche: they weren't exactly "literary fiction" or "genre fiction" or "humor" as the bookstores define it; and they weren't exactly novels and they weren't exactly short story collections, but rather series of self-contained stories that interwove more and more as they went along until they came together like one big story in the end. They had more in common with the pulp series of Frank Gruber or the humorous stories of P. G. Wodehouse or, for that matter, modern sitcoms than they had with anything being printed on paper these days. But we really, really wanted to know if these stories would amuse people other than ourselves and if it was worth trying to get them out there where they could be read.

That's when we heard about this crazy new thing called "the internet."

For the last year and a half we've been uploading our books to these pages, chunk by chunk. Million Dollar Ideas first, My Pal Splendid Man soon after. Then, intoxicated with the possibilities of the internet for finding and republishing images, we created this screwy Million Dollar Ideas—The Photonovel, where we illustrated the adventures of Ed and Johnny in Hollywood with photos and ads and magazine cover art from the 1940s. And then we decided to see what people thought of the first eight chapters of our newest brainstorm, The Burly Boys, an ostensibly funny novel about America's most famous junior detectives finding themselves flung into the Summer of Love.

Now they're all done. Or, at least, three of them are done and the last is waiting to see if we come back to it. Two whole books, a third of another one, and a few hundred pictures, sitting here online for anyone who wanders by to discover. The result of all this is that we now know there are people out there who like these stories. Who sometimes even get really excited over them. We've even made a few new friends from all this. And a lot of you have heaped inspiring praise on our heads and given us great suggestions for how to improve this stuff. The drafts of Million Dollar Ideas and My Pal Splendid Man that we're now sending to publishers are better for your help.

We don't know how this is going to turn out yet—the book publishing business is still in the midst of its biggest recession since forever, and offbeat humor fiction isn't at the top of every editor's Must Have list. But we know they'll find their way. And when they do, it'll be thanks to you.

Chapter One. Ed and Johnny Pitch the Goods

"Monday? That's what, three days from now?" Zanuck growled. "Get me Ed and Johnny!"

The man's skill at saying yes, and at leaping up to do his master's bidding, had earned for him a glistening silver Buick Phaeton convertible.

The Phaeton slowed down at the Garden of Allah, that legendary retreat of Hollywood Bohemia where on any day one might find the poolside festooned with the most daring and brilliant of actors and writers.

Then it turned right and continued down the hill.

Just as he'd hoped and expected, the air was rent by a single sound: a typerwriter clattering at inhuman speed.






Ed suggested nine lines of his own, although "suggest" may be the wrong word, as his fingers never stopped pounding.

Paulie turned in at the gate to the Fox lot. "Look who I got," he said to the guard.







He accelerated abruptly and stopped even more abruptly at the Writers' Building.






"Did you see the eyeful they gave Swerling?" Johnny said.

"Did somebody say eyeful?" Betty asked.

"His name's Pedro," said Ed, "and they want him written for Cesar Romero."

"Ed! Johnny!" Joe Mankiewicz grinned. "And what makes today my lucky day?"

"Good enough," Zanuck said. "Now get those two hacks out of here."

"Picture Ty Power as the cabbie," Ed said.

"And George Sanders as the pimp."

"And that little doll from the Lassie movies as the tart," Johnny added.

Chapter Two. The Jungles of Edna

"Now that's a job with a future!" Edna said. "People will always need doughnuts, you know!"





Ed could easily see him as the subject of one of those homey Rockwell Kent covers on The Saturday Evening Post.





And because one of his novels had the word "horses" in the title, he was usually put to work writing scenarios for westerns.





Hugh remembered that the boys had been invited to a party at Betty and Harry's a couple of nights before and wondered how it had gone.





"Well now!" Hugh said. "This sounds promising!"





"And that Rhonda Fleming!" Ed said. "Mother of mercy! For a minute there I thought she was going to sit in my lap!"





"Oh, I don't know if they need to worry too much," Horace said with a little smile.





"Everybody's buzzing about this flick Goldwyn's making."





"Jungle war!" Johnny said. "But no Japs. Everybody does Japs."





"It's the western half of Indochina," Ed said. "It follows a long river, running down from deep jungles..."





"He and that bastard Errol Flynn sent a mash note to Ward Bond and signed my name to it," Horace said.





"It would be great to have Wagner blaring while the helicopters are attacking," Ed said. "I know! The Hall of the Mountain King!"





When they finally remembered Suzette's tea service it was dark, and they made a great deal of noise trying to set it gently outside her door.





Jeroboam Clapp was the leader of the Church of the Blazing Spotlight of God, which conducted its services in a car wash on Pico Boulevard that lay frozen half-completed by some city mix-up about water supplies.





"Downright apocalyptic!" Ed said. "Warners loves that doom and gloom! Remember Dead End?"




"Then his lips begin to move slowly...tortuously...and he says..."
"It's horrible...it's horrible...!"

Chapter Three. The Sound and the Cinematography

Johnny did not look forward to spending days trying to force a man to do work he didn't want to do. Not to mention keeping him, as Horace's friend Mr. Wald had put it, "sober at all costs."





Faulkner’s face went utterly expressionless. Then, from far down in those depthless eyes, a dim light appeared and gradually brightened into a gleam of understanding.





But when Faulkner suggested they get off “this hill-cradled patch of desolation” and motor into Hollywood in search of real food, they dug in their heels.




Bacall raised an eyebrow. “Oh yeah?” she said.





Then Hawks was narrowing his eyes and peering at the boys thoughtfully. “Not the Ed and Johnny?”





They wandered around the eerily moon-washed lot, calling Bill’s name, but to no avail.





The boys sprinted to their car and tore out of the lot. Or drove, at least, as fast as their thirteen-year-old Nash would allow.





Half an hour later they rumbled to a halt in front of Union Station.





The waiting room was apparently deserted, not an author in sight.





Faulkner, without further ado, started to type. He wrote without cease for exactly forty-seven minutes. Johnny timed him.




Faulkner's jauntiness evaporated before their eyes. His sentences grew longer as he waxed indignant about prostituting himself in Hollywood. Ed gave up and looked around.





At a table in the corner, Nicholas Ray and John Huston were arm wrestling.




A guy with big ears egging them on might have been John O'Hara.




Erskine Caldwell did a double take. "I say balderdash!"




Whereupon the two of them had driven out to the Glendale airfield to admire Hawks's lovely new Beech 35 Bonanza.




They sat in the plane sampling a number of bottles the director had left strewn about the floor and seats...



...and the next thing Hawks knew he was lying on his back in an avocado orchard in Pico Rivera.





"The bastard stole my plane," Hawks growled. "He stole my plane and flew his drunken bastard ass back to Mississippi!"





But as J.L. began to read this script, they saw the same facial transformation in reverse. His beet-red flesh turned to a mellow tan. His eyes unsquinched, his brow lifted...



...and by the bottom of the second page his mouth had relaxed into something between a smirk and a smile. “Okay,” he said. “It looks good enough.”





"Not one of my best books, I'm afraid," Bill said, "but a man has to keep the pot boiling."





“I still don’t get how a guy could trade in celluloid for pulp,” Johnny said. “But thanks.”
The great man called back, "Just don't you trade in celluloid for anything."



Click on "Older Posts" for Chapter 4 and beyond...