At-A-Glance
Latest book: Winged Creatures
Lives in: Lake Arrowhead
Used to be: A camera salesman
Favorite restaurant: Nobu Malibu
Website: www.wingedcreatures.com
I moved from graduate school at the University of Michigan to Lake Arrowhead, CA, to commune with nature and write poetry and starve. Instead, I met a struggling recording artist & began lyric writing, finally for Warner and EMI music and for artists like Aretha Franklin, Smokey Robinson, Joe Cocker, and for films like “Top Gun,” and “Donnie Brascoe.” It did become a lucrative career, but I wanted to punish myself in other, more painful ways.
I wrote several bad screenplays, a horrible first draft of a novel Winged Creatures which became a screenplay, which was universally reviled and demeaned as being too dark to attract an audience, and too ensemble to attract star cast. Through a labyrinthine path of distant acquaintances, producer Bob Salerno (21 Grams) saw it and brought it to CAA, where they felt it was good enough to sign me, using the script as a sample to get me some work at Fox and Dreamworks.
The movie took three more years, and meanwhile I went back to the novel and improved it, finding the stream-of-consciousness voices of the characters, and started submitting to NY book agents. It was a switch-up: interest in the movie really drove interest in the book. Another irony: no one who made the movie ever looked at the book, or cared to, though it would certainly have made for a better film. 2005 email to my book agent in response to rejection letters: “Key among my self-serving formulations: anyone who will not help publish this book or make this movie is the wrong person to do so.”
The film, “Winged Creatures," finally produced by Robert Salerno ("21 Grams," "Chapter 27," "Delirious"), stars 2007 Academy Award®-winner Forest Whitaker ("The Last King of Scotland," "Platoon"), 2007 Academy Award-winner Jennifer Hudson ("Dreamgirls"), 2007 Academy Award-nominee Jackie Earle Haley ("Little Children," "Bad News Bears"), Screen Actors Guild Award-nominee Guy Pearce ("Memento," "LA Confidential"), Screen Actors Guild Award-nominee Kate Beckinsale ("The Aviator," "Pearl Harbor") and Screen Actors Guild Award-nominee Dakota Fanning ("War of The Worlds," "I Am Sam").
SoCal Book Scene Exclusive (Mini) Interview:
SCBS: What did you do before you “officially” became an author?
RF: I was a student, construction worker, NY Times National Desk News Associate, poetry editor, camera salesman, songwriter, screenwriter.
SCBS: How do you spend your weekends?
RF: Mostly spent rewriting the ugly prose I wrote during the week.
SCBS: What’s your favorite restaurant in Southern California?
RF: Nobu Malibu – so expensive it qualifies as a vice, so loud it deafens, but it’s the closest place for the freshest and best quality sushi.
Available now at your favorite local Southern California independent bookstore:
