The View from the Bridge Read Online Free PDF

write that was nonfiction?
    The answer was staring me in the face. I was six months late with the idea, but it was the only nonfiction subject I knew about firsthand that might find an audience.
    I sat down and wrote about the making of Love Story, the film based on Erich Segal’s surprising bestseller, on which I’d served as the unit publicist. A shrewd updating of La Dame aux Camélias , the book—and film—relate the story of a prosperous Harvard undergrad who defies his patrician father to take up with an “ethnic” girl from the wrong side of the tracks, who gets sick and dies, reconciling the estranged father and son. Lest the La Traviata of it all be lost on you, the girl’s name was Jenny Cavalleri and she was a music major. The famous catchphrase of both book and film was “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” which I later found is not the case. I called my book What Can You Say About a 25-Year-Old Girl Who Died: The Love Story Story. I worked night and day, bashed it out, and showed it to my family.
    My father gave his opinion: “If you publish this book, you’ll never work in the movie business again.”
    I got the book to Juris Jurjevics, an editor working for Avon Paperbacks. He abbreviated the title to The Love Story Story and offered me a three-thousand-dollar advance. I took it, converted the money to traveler’s checks, and had my car (preserved all this time since college at various sidewalk parking spaces through snow and slush) tuned for a cross-country journey. I finally realized, with some encouragement from my sister Constance’s boyfriend, Michael Pressman, that the place I ought to be trying my luck was Los Angeles.
    â€œAnd don’t think you can go out there for two weeks and head home,” Michael cautioned. “You can’t do the tourist thing and accomplish anything. You’ve really got to put in the time.”
    I decided to take his advice.

GO WEST
    Driving long distances by yourself produces the illusion of thought: Time passes behind the wheel; the road unfolds before you like an endless typewriter ribbon (anyone remember them?) . . . and you think you are thinking.
    But later, lying exhausted in your motel bed, or trying on paper to recall what it was you were pondering, you are at a loss. The thoughts, like caged birds set free, are gone forever. Maybe they weren’t ever in the cage to begin with; you just thought they were.
    I had put my small stash of clothes (mainly jeans and blue cotton work shirts), my portable electric typewriter, my stereo, and my large record collection into the capacious trunk of my faithful Pontiac Tempest. I had sent my two best screenplays, The Understudy and something called The Frame-Up , to the West Coast branch of my agency, International Famous, along with a letter stating that I would be in Los Angeles by August “in search of representation” and were they interested?
    I hoped they were, for they were my only contact in a city where I had never been before and knew not a soul. If they didn’t take me on, the stark fact was that I had no alternative plan for my life. In later years, recalling this dicey approach, I wonder at my chutzpah (or incredible stupidity) when I come to recall how I had staked my entire future on one roll of the dice. I was simply terrified. Terrified, but going forward. I was out of choices.
    West of Iowa City, I was into terra incognita. I couldn’t believe how flat the road is through Nebraska, then Colorado. You can drive all day and all night (and I did) through endless fields of wheat and corn.
    And then, just as you feel sure these grains will go on forever, a wall rises up before you, abruptly ending it all. The Rockies. I had reached Denver.
    In Denver I made the discovery that my driver’s license was due to expire in two weeks. What to do? I decided to adopt a local address, betook myself to the Denver DMV, and