First Draft Screenplay 124 pages. John Landis was hired to develop and direct Whereabouts. He wasn’t our first choice and I think in the end a mistake. While John was daring, he was also off putting to a lot of serious actors and in the end stunted the initial momentum of the project. This is a draft that John edited from our longer 144-page draft. I’ve included his note to me: “Jack—so?—John” and an autographed photograph, “Jack—onward and upward with the Arts, John?” The production still is from WEREWOLF IN LONDON, or is it called American werewolf. John liked to dress in a suit and tie as an homage to the directors of the 30’s and 40’s where everyone on set wore a suite and tie.

John made a few minor changes to the screenplay, and a lot of them we liked. He shortened it considerably and that was a good thing. As a side note, he went to New York on another project and scouted a few locations and called all upset. He told Jim and I that he went to the places we wrote in the screenplay and they weren’t there. We got a good laugh out of it by reminding John it’s a movie. If you need a phone booth, put it there.

The adm at the top of several drafts tell me that it was typed by John’s secretary who was a delightful German woman who was like a bit of a mother hen to John.

At the same time John was hired to direct whereabouts, he also hired us to write DICK TRACY. I wasn’t in love with the strip, but Jim was very enthusiastic, so I learned to love it as we went along. That was a great part of our relationship. If one member of the team was passionate about something, we tended to go with that passion, and eventually, the other partner would get totally on board. There were never a mine or yours with us; it was always “ours”. Jim would always say, there were three egos, Cash, Epps and Cash and Epps and it was very true. When we were together, it was like there was a third personality at work and we never really fought over creative ideas or authorship.