large preview screenings in San Jose and Denver. Perhaps no one recognized it—or, if they did, they didn’t want to say.
The script was peppered with liberal-left one-liners, including references to the Russian anarchist Bakunin that couldn’t possibly have meant anything to 99.9 percent of the audience. Some of these were added immediately before shooting because Dreyfuss broke his wrist in an accident a month before the start date. We had the choice to shut down and wait until he healed or to write something that would cover his character being a private dick with his arm in a cast. We chose the latter, and I was able to turn this into a plus with some liberal wisecracks Moses makes whenever he’s asked about his fractured arm (“Bar fight with a Bircher”). The truth is revealed at the end: It was just a dopey accident from trying to learn to skateboard from his kids.
Dreyfuss, Jeremy Kagan (the film’s director, brought on pretty late in the game), and I shared the film’s politics—in retrospect, a rather sentimental vision of the Sixties as seen from the late Seventies. One scene shows Dreyfuss looking at television clips of the old days—Chicago 1968—with tears of nostalgia in his eyes. This wasn’t particularly my kind of thing—and I resisted writing it—but it played well with the audience. Much of Hollywood politics is at root sentimental. It’s about feeling good about yourself without having to do much more than sound off—or make a “touching” scene in a movie. My heart (and writing) was even then more in black comic mockery of the Sixties, as in the scene when the Abbie Hoffman-Jerry Rubin character is revealed to have turned very comfortably into a bourgeois ad man while supposedly in hiding as a dangerous underground revolutionary.
Richard, whose father was a socialist, and Jeremy, whose father was a rabbi, were more emotional about those days, although I undoubtedly participated in radical politics more directly than they did. One of the more effective scenes in The Big Fix movie, when Moses goes inside LA County jail to obtain information from the Linkers (Yiddish for “leftists”), a couple based on Bill and Emily Harris of Symbionese Liberation Army fame, came from my own experience with the Harrises only a few years before.
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