Robb, however, never laid his hands on the offending script. If he had, he might have been disappointed. According to Bart, the script he sold within the last four years was Nobody’s Children, a drama about a gang of gypsy thieves that he wrote in the early ’80s. Bart says the transaction that kept him active in the WGA was merely the extension of a preexisting option — one that was entered into long before he came to Variety.
“Dave has this fascination, trying to prove that I am still writing and selling scripts,” Bart says, adding that these days the mere act of reading a script makes him physically ill. When it comes to screenplays, he says, his “entire oeuvre” was written before he got to Variety. “I’m not writing or selling scripts. I don’t even want to write and sell scripts. But Dave is still trying to find another script.”
For the record, Variety has a policy that prevents its reporters from being seduced by Hollywood while they are covering it. As Bart explained it to me, “You cannot shop a script while you’re writing for us. Obviously it’s different if you write a book or a novel and it sells to a movie studio. I have no problem with that, except I’m not going to write the script. I don’t think the line is that blurry.”
Things were about to get blurrier, though. One night I came home and found that a manila envelope had been forced through my mail slot. Inside was a 108-page script.
By this point I had heard many accounts of how Bart had earned people’s enmity. Even if I took them all at face value, which I didn’t, these stories never implied that Bart was a dimwit. In a town full of blowhards, where money is often a substitute for intelligence, Bart is considered supremely — if sometimes vengefully — bright. But, as I was about to discover, he was not bright enough to compensate for his Achilles’ heel: his loyalty to his friend and mentor, Robert Evans.
In 1998 Variety reported that Michelle Manning at Paramount Pictures had acquired the rights to a novel written by Bart. The novel was called Power Play, and the plan was for Evans to develop it. It was set in Las Vegas and focused on a power struggle between established casino owners and Indian tribes. Bart had used a pseudonym, the article said, “to avoid any potential conflict of interest.”
I’d read all of Bart’s novels but had never heard of Power Play. When I first asked Bart about it, he said, “It’s not a novel. It’s a novella. It needs work. I never finished it.” When I asked to read it, he told me he had no idea where it was. “I did it to try to help Bob out. And Bob never did anything with it,” he said, referring to Evans.
So no script was ever written? “Not to my knowledge,” he said. “In the old days I’d have swung into action, gotten a director assigned, gotten it off the ground. But I don’t do that for a living anymore. And it’s not what I should do.”
Then the script arrived. It was called Crossroaders, but it was the same story as Power Play. Its title page read: “By Leslie Cox” — the maiden name of Bart’s current wife — “Based on the novel by Peter Bart. September, 1996.”
I call Bart and arrange for a final interview. Over several months I had come to know many Peters, but when he welcomes me to his office I don’t know which one to expect. I tell Bart I have a copy of the 1996 script he wrote. “The script I wrote,” he repeats, neither confirming nor denying. I look into the face of the man with the incredible memory. It is blank. But one knee starts jiggling, and he fiddles idly with the band of his watch.
“Boy, you got me. Did I write a script? Now I’m facing memory loss,” he says, as I pull a copy of Crossroaders out of my bag. He looks it over. “Let’s just say this is a script that has Leslie’s name on it. What does that indicate? Therefore — therefore, what?”
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