"Beat" Boy

Saturday July 27, 2024

I remember when I left my occupation as a book buyer at Book Soup, and within seconds after deciding to leave that job, I thought of myself as a writer. Now, all I have to do is write the damn books. The one book that took me a long time to write is my memoir TOSH: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World. That took precisely ten years, and I wrote bits of it in Tokyo, New York City, Detroit, and mainly in Los Angeles. Much of it was put together at the Los Angeles Downtown Main Library on Fifth Street. I’m trying to get a plaque on the side of that magnificent building, but so far, it’s tough going. I want the plaque to say something simple: Author Tosh Berman (1954-?) He wrote his Memoir TOSH: Growing Up in Wallace Berman’s World here. It would be great if they could focus on the actual desk I wrote the book on, but in truth, I wrote it on every floor and various desks.

Published by City Lights Books, the book did and is still doing well. Nick Ebeling, a filmmaker and novelist, optioned the book to make it into a film, and he asked me if I would co-write the film script with him. I said yes. At the time, I didn’t really have a passion for the book to be made into a film. If it happens, great; if not, I will still have the book on my shelf. What is interesting is working on another medium with the same subject matter in the book, which is about growing up in a bohemian world of the 1950s and 1960s in America. Co-writing a script is exciting because I don’t feel I’m retelling the tale again, but I think of it in a visual format with dialogue. A book is a book, and a film is a film in different formats; each has its limits and borders.

Financially speaking, writing a book is easier than writing a film because of the expense of making a movie and finding distribution, producers, casting, and so forth. When I finished writing my book, I added the periods at the end of the sentence and worked on putting the commas in the right place, so I sent it off to City Lights. They said yes. I didn’t go through an agent or show the book to thousands of publishers, only City Lights. And they said yes. It's so simple, so right, so perfect. For whatever reason, the film world is not that simple. It is a collaboration between the screenwriter, the director, the producer, the cinematographer, and others. I participate in laying out a foundation or a map that hopefully works as a work of literature (I do see scripts as literature) and something that can be projected to an audience.

The book is a child and teenager’s point of view on the family unit of father, mother, and yours truly in the Post-War years in America. The twist is that my dad, Wallace Berman, is a noted fine artist, and my mother, Shirley Morand Berman, is a Muse not only to my father but also to the photographers Edmund Teske and Charles Brittin. We had no money, but still, I was a Prince. I was the Prince of the Beats. I was lucky enough to come upon almost every significant cult-like genius who was either a Poet, Actor, Musician or all of the above. We always had a need for currency, but in truth, we were wealthy because of the culture that Wallace produced and the works and friendships of fellow artists. The book conveys that spirit of community, but it doesn’t avoid the dark corners that are always part of that world. What makes it all unique is that it is told from the point of view of a young Tosh.

Hopefully, the film version of the book will do the same, but again, it is a different type of beast, and the fun is wrestling with that medium to make something unique or special. Nick loves New American Cinema of the late 1960s and 1970s, and I’m into Last Year in Marienbad (Alain Resnais) and Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus. There are references throughout the film script to those works, but hopefully, they are done with a light touch.

For years, while writing the memoir, I titled the book My Struggles, but a very successful author from Europe took that title and had/has a huge success. I then named it Beat Boy until some years later, my friend Mark Webber told me that people would have other reactions and think of it as a Hip-Hop subject matter. My editor, Garrett Caples, at City Lights, suggested TOSH as the title, and how could I, as the author, go against a title like that? For me, it is easy to remember. So that’s that, and we will see what the future will bring.

Here is the interview between my co-writer Nick and me.