It was early morning, June 1981, when Randy Fried drove into Chicago. He’d been on the road for three days, driving east from LA: a 29-year-old graduate of the film school at the University of Southern California, his movie-making dreams shattered by a screenwriters’ strike.
At the end of his third year he entered a school-sponsored contest and was one of seven students awarded the money to make a half-hour featurette. Fried chose to make a film about the night his father was robbed outside his grocery store in a black neighborhood in Miami.
“The student Oscars are awarded by the same Academy that gives the regular Oscars,” says Fried. “The studios watch who wins because that’s an indication of talent, which you might get for a relatively less expensive price.”
The upshot of these meetings and meals was the “quintessential three-picture deal,” says Fried. Schwartzman would pay him to write one script and could hire him to write two more if he wanted. “Otherwise I was back on the street,” says Fried. “Of course, I was getting paid bubkes, and there was no guarantee that anything would get produced. But it was credibility, and in Hollywood that counts.”
After that he found work writing everything from industrial films to adaptations of short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer and John Updike for public TV. For his efforts he made little money and won few words of praise.
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After almost a year the project collapsed and Fried and Engel had a falling out. “I advocated raising the money locally, but Tom didn’t listen to me,” says Fried. “After a while I felt like Rick was the player and I was just the hired hand on the sidelines. I had brought together the primary elements–the book and Channel 11–and now a year later I was cut out of the loop. I was bitter and felt powerless, but it was my own fault. Back then I didn’t know how to negotiate to insure my involvement in the project.”
