Major News: Straight Life The Movie
Laurie Pepper has launch a site that previews her film on Art that she has been working on.

To see some streaming video previews go to
http://homepage.mac.com/nowsthetime

To see video stills and learn more about the film go to  http://straightlife.org

To write Laurie with your comments about the film or Art mail to staightlife@adelphia.net

I was born August 18, 1940 in Los Angeles.  My maternal grandfather, Abraham Babitz was the editor of the California Jewish Voice.  My mother was a dancer with Martha Graham.  My father, Richard LaPan (born in Russia, he changed his own name in grade-school in the U.S. from Lapinski) had be a flyweightprizefighter under another name he made up, Tiger Kelly.  He was also a movie bit player when a child, a movie electrician, and a WPA writer.  My parents
split up when I was about a year old, and my mother married another Dick,Dick Fraser, and we moved to New York.  My stepfather was a Trotskyist, as was my mother, and I grew up in the Socialist Workers Party which probably accounts for my lifelong inability to work at any steady job.  "Work without love is slavery."  -Karl Marx.  And for my overwhelmingly petit bourgeouis-type worldview. 

 
I wanted to be an actress and then a singer.  I worshipped Billie Holiday and while still in high school (back in Los Angeles) I attended Westlake College of Music where I was befriended by Les McCann and heard about Art Pepper but never saw or heard him.  At Westlake we listened ONLY to East Coasters.  I secretly adored the Chico Hamilton Quintet. 

    I married, briefly, for the first time at 17.  That put an end to my
career.  After my divorce I worked in the record store at the Ash Grove and saved money for college.  I went to U.C. Berkeley, majored in cultural
anthropology and English, didn't finish but married again, hitched around
Europe, took pictures, had a child, divorced again, took more pictures for
the L.A. Free Press and various record companies, smoked dope, drank, took pills, and, in 1968,  wound up in Synanon where I met Art Pepper.

    He wasn't my type, but he was persistent and adoring and he made me laugh and he was a great lover.  And I liked the person I became with him:  the person he thought I was.  The book, Straight Life, was my idea.  And you'll have to read the Afterward to the DaCapo edition if you want to know how it was written.
   

In the years since Art's death many people, important in The
Business, wanted to make a movie of the book.  None of them had enough respect for it or for Art and I was afraid they would distort the story and/or the music and Art's memory.

    In order to forestall this, Don McGlynn (who made "Notes From A Jazz
Survivor") and I wrote our own screenplay to try to tell the story right.  It has taken me about 15 years of being flattered, chatted up, and jerked around by Hollywood to finally understand that playing with their money -- and therefore by their rules -- I'd INEVITABLY betray Art and myself.

    And so, inspired by my friend Celia Mingus Zaentz, I have, like her,
become a filmmaker.  At 60.  I couldn't have done it earlier.  The technology wasn't in place.  I did shoot a 20 minute public service documentary on Hi 8 about five years ago.  I had to pay someone to edit it, and the quality, deteriorated over several generations, was abysmal.

    "Now," as Charlie Parker said,  " 's the time."  I'm making a no-budget
mini-DVD documentary about trying to make this movie.  Within the documentary will be enacted scenes from the Straight Life screenplay.  I've got some good actors and have already shot and edited some scenes. 
    It's the most fun I've ever had in my life and it's looking very good --
but doesn't sound so great.  I need a professional sound person with a boom and sound kit.  I also need clothes and artifacts from the 1930's through the1970's.  I need stock footage of San Pedro in the '30's, England during the war, L.A. at any time.

 
    Anyone who'd like to be part of this project -- to do the sound or to act in it or supply hard drive space or anything -- I'll pay you in CD's.  And if the movie ever makes money I'll give you some of that.  e-mail me at artthemovie@aol.com