Wrecking Crew author John Albert

That’s when the weather is sort of conducive to surfing. I’m not a morning person but I’m sort of addicted to that.

Yeah it is. But it’s my life so it’s hard to see that sometimes.

It’s funny because I didn’t know that it was so strange, until I told somebody about it once. We were just talking and I told him about my friends on my baseball team and they were laughing and they thought it was just insane. But that’s been my life for so long.

Oh yeah. It continues. Some of the specifics are different, some people are doing better and some people are doing worse. The guy in the book, Johnny, I don’t think he’s in love with any strippers or prostitutes but he’s become this gambling fiend.

We still play baseball every week.

The team got started because Mike Coulter was in the band that he saw wasn’t going anywhere. He had struggled for decades to get a record deal and then it just fizzled out. So I think he was looking for something to take his mind off it. He had always loved baseball so he had this idea to start a team. There were a number of us that were not doing so well and we joined up with him because we figured, why not? I wasn’t particularly in love with baseball before that.

Actually I’m a big fan now. I don’t know if that’s just because I’ve learned to appreciate the game or if it’s because I’ve become an old codger or something. But I like playing and I actually like going to the games.

I was a struggling screenwriter. That’s a cliché but I would underline the struggling for so many reasons. We would get work doing rewrites and changing locations on a script or altering something. But for not much money. I could say that I was working but I was living in abject poverty.

Back then we did a lot of work for Walter Hill. My writing partner, who’s in the book, Teo was old friends with Walter but god knows how they met. Walter would employ us to do a lot of mechanical tasks on scripts. There was a movie called Last Man Standing and that might have been a bastardized version of something we had worked on.

Oh completely and he knows that. Everything he does is a bastardized version of something and he will admit that. One of the things he does is that he will literally take the script of a great movie and then just start working off of that. I have no allegiance to him because he burned us so many times.

I think he is, which is a typical sickness in the Hollywood movie industry. He’s also an egomaniac beyond belief. He would take us to his mansion and show us his collection of artwork knowing that we were on the verge of being homeless. Then he would try to negotiate us down to a paltry sum. But to be fair, he did bail Teo out of jail a couple of times.

That’s if you go through the normal routes and have an agent and all of that. I think if you’re an old friend it’s sort of a backdoor cash deal so we were not getting a lot of money at all. Also one of us had a periodic drug habit. We weren’t working very much so there was no steady paycheck. In the book there’s a incident where we work for what I call a fascist dictator of a South American tycoon. So by Hollywood standards it wasn’t even legitimate work.

It is being turned into a movie but I’m not the writer on it. It was optioned before it was released by a company called Anonymous Content, they’re the people who produced Being John Malkovich and Your Friends and Neighbors. Then after the book came out the option was bought up by Paramount.

Right, well that was such a hit [laughs]. But the screenwriter on Wrecking Crew is an old friend actually. He is successful screenwriter so I have guarded hope on this.

His name is Scott Kosar who wrote The Machinist.

The Machinist is based on his life in a way. I don’t think he ran anybody over but he claims he didn’t sleep for a year. Scott and i used to hang out in punk rock clubs back when we were young guys. He has a history with punk rock music, drugs and sordid affairs with women so he’s kind of perfect for it. I introduced him to the guys on the team once he was on the project and he fits in perfectly.

The craziest stuff was not fun, it was people overdosing. One time this guy overdosed, went into a coma and they kept trying to saw his leg off. That was pretty crazy.

He overdosed and I guess he bent it back. Then he was there for a night, and no blood got to it. So they thought he got gangrene or that the tissue was dying. But he was at the county hospital and they kept trying to saw it off and then it would just start bleeding and they would stop. Anyway, now he’s fine but it was weird. Then Mike broke his arm just throwing a ball, which was a little odd. He turned and threw a ball and we heard this sort of loud crack and his arm had just completely shattered. Then there was just tons of fun stuff like we had two guys with Tourette Syndrome so that was always very entertaining.

When I was 11, I played two years of little league and by the second year I was already smoking huge amounts of pot. They would hit balls out into the outfield and I wouldn’t even be watching the game. Which is kind of like it is now.

But now as an adult, playing baseball in our world was really different. For us, coming from where we came from to start a baseball team was as subversive as we could get because everyone in our world was doing everything ironically. Mike always talked about how at the same time we decided to form a baseball team the big rage in Silver Lake was a kickball league. All the kids in vintage clothes playing kickball which was all done with a nod and a wink. While we were grown men, racing toward middle age putting on full baseball uniforms, going out, practicing and wanting to win. It was very uncool. It’s probably in its own way more rebellious than dressing up in some retro punk outfit.

Well, we just finished up a season and we didn’t win any games. So now it’s just fun. We would like to win, don’t get me wrong, but through various circumstances it just wasn’t there for us this year.

Generally the other players have all played some sort of organized baseball, whether it’s in high school or college. But they’re just very, very normal. There were a couple teams that were made up of gang members and they were fun but generally we play against your typical square jock guys.

I think for a long time they didn’t know who we were and they just thought we didn’t wear uniforms well or that we didn’t have the right socks. But now I think they like us, because we’re not aggressively competitive. We play and we want to win but we also joke around and have a good time and in organized sports that’s rare. Usually you see people screaming at their own teams and throwing stuff. Most of us are just glad to be able to walk around and actually play baseball.

I’m coming up with another book idea that doesn’t really suck. I see the trend, which is people get a deal to write another book but they don’t have a great idea.. So I want to come up with something that will get me on Oprah’s book club. I actually asked them to send Wrecking Crew to Oprah and my editor said, “I don’t think they do exploding toes on Oprah.” I’m not sure if I agree.

I had this neighbor and I think his whole body exploded. He was this incredibly obese alcoholic that lived next door to me and at some point for some reason his toe just exploded off his foot. I think it had to do with bad circulation and maybe some sort of diabetes and the fact that he was chugging vodka all day.

Well anytime a fat man drinks vodka with his shirt off and then bench presses in the hot sun, it’s disgusting.

I’d seen the site and then I had a joint birthday party with the wife of my friend Brett Gurewitz who’s in Bad Religion. He somehow arranged for some SuicideGirls to dance at the party and my friends still thank me for that. I think it’s a great idea. I have no objection to porn at all, but I never liked the sort of normal porn girls that look like half-wit girls from the valley.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

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