Darlene Craviotto - An Agoraphobics Guide to Hollywood: How Michael Jackson Got Me Out of the House

Im an agoraphobic.

Its taken me a lot of years to admit that. Nobody likes to confess theyre different from the rest of the world. Especially when the world they live in is Hollywood. Oh sure, we all know that stars can be a little wacko, but that comes with the job. Bad press is still press, and any kind of press is good as long as they spell your name correctly. Superstars and their eccentricities have always been good for the box office.

But Im a screenwriter, and there are different rules for those of us behind the scenes. Hollywood wants us normal because normal means no problems, and no problems means television shows and films come in on budget, and on time.

Nobody needs to know about your little issue, my agent advised me when I finally had the courage to confide in him. I kept turning down lunch meetings (free food), pitch meetings (sometimes free food), studio screenings (free food and free booze), anything that took me out of my house. I was beginning to look a little strange. I had to tell him something.

Its nobodys business but yours, he explained patiently, with a rare sensitivity seldom seen in agents.

I thanked him for being so understanding.

Hello! They might stop hiring you!!!

Now, he sounded like an agent.

We agreed never to talk about my issue again.

I continued to write. My career started to take off. I learned to work around the agoraphobia. I was always too busy writing to take lunches, dinner meetings, or studio interviews. I once met with a film producer for a 20th Century Fox project in my living room with its avocado green shag carpet and my grandmothers floral sofa. I was six months pregnant at the time, so it all seemed perfectly charming to the producer (a parent himself) who said he wished his wife had been so willing to sit on the nest.

Once I started having babies, I had the best built-in excuses for staying home.

Im still breast feeding. I cant be away from the baby, or theres leakage. Can we do a phone conference?

This worked especially well with nervous male producers. And since most producers who hired me were male, I was able to comfortably accommodate my agoraphobic needs for more years than breastfeeding is even possible. Sure, there were those occasional meetings I had to take to get the job. But since professional screenwriting assignments keep a writer busy (safely tucked away in her house) for at least six months, I could sweat my way through those occasional mandatory employment interviews. I always took a cab, made sure the meetings were brief (Ive got to get home to breastfeed), and told the cabbie to take the fastest route home as possible. Once home, I would collapse, reach for a fast glass of Chardonnay, and vow to quit show business.

Somehow all of this worked.

And then one day Walt Disney Studios called me with a project that would change my life. They called it Project M so that no one would know about the true nature of the film. Why it was kept a secret I still dont understand. Except for a press leak early in the development stage, there was no further mention of the film at the time. It was to be a co-venture between Disney Studios and Amblin Entertainment, Steven Spielbergs film company. Steven was attached to direct, and equally as exciting, Michael Jackson would be its star. It was to be the film musical of Peter Pan . A blockbuster of a project and Disney wanted me to be the screenwriter.

No one has ever heard of it.

As a mater of fact, if you do a Google search, you wont find a thing on Project M. Although there is a brief mention in a Wikipedia entry that says Steven Spielberg was considering a musical of Peter Pan with Michael Jackson in the early 1980s but then reconsidered.

Thats not exactly what happened.

This book tells the true story of Project M. Its a Hollywood tale, a behind-the-scenes look at show business: how we work, how we keep secrets, and ultimately how some of us are forced to grow up.

Peter Pan is all about growing up. It was my favorite story as a little girl; I loved Peters adventures. His freedom and escapades are what excited me much more than Wendys stay-at-home ways. True, she took flight with Peter, but she always ended up playing Mommy to the Lost Boys and cleaning up Peters house. Not much fun to my seven-year-old sensibilities. My agoraphobic life certainly had taken a turn away from those carefree, fearless days of my youth. My adventures had become limited: I was housebound and surrounded by little children, domesticity, and my writing. I had turned into Wendy as a grown-up. But was this the kind of grown-up I really wanted to be?

Certainly not the housebound part.

As much as I loved Peter Pan , Michael Jackson loved the story even more. He named his ranch Neverland after J.M. Barries mystical island, and he filled his life with symbols and memorabilia from the imaginative tale about the boy who never grew up. Michael felt destined to play Peter. I am Peter Pan, he would often say to me. And during Project M, in many ways, I became like Wendy to him.

When I first met Michael in 1990, the controversy that found him in later years was not there. But he was already being called Wacko Jacko by the gossip magazines. Bubbles the Chimp, plastic surgery, and sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber were listed as a few of his eccentricities. Okay, he had issuesbut so did I.

And now I was going to be forced to face them.

Nobody told me when I first signed on for Project M that Id have to meet privately with the biggest superstar in the world. I thought Id take that one obligatory meeting, a little different this time because Spielberg, Jackson, and the head of the studio (gulp) were all in the room with me. But then I figured Id speed back home in my cab, bolt back that one glass of medicinal Chardonnay, write the script in the safety of my home, get paid, and live happily ever after.

Life is not like the movies.

I didnt know it at the time, but this project wasnt going to be like any of the other projects Id written. Working with Michael would not only be different, but Id have to do something I hadnt been able to do for a long time.

Get out of the house.